ABSTRACT
Although both Lee Lai-wah and Chan Yuk-ling were Chinese women working for the same enterprise, their shop-floor comments captured two different worlds of labor found in south China. It was common to see Lai-wah and her coworkers sobbing and being scolded at work, while Yuk-ling exchanged jokes with other workers and the foremen. Based on ethnographic data I gathered while working alongside workers such as Lai-wah and Yuk-ling in both Shenzhen and Hong Kong, this chapter examines how and why Chinese women workers find themselves in vastly different forms of factory politics. The emergence of south China since the late 1980s as one of the most dynamic manufacturing regions of the world has been brought about by the confluence of Hong Kong Chinese capital moving northward into the mainland and massive Chinese labor migrating southward into Guangdong. To churn out the low-cost toys, sport shoes, watches, and clothes that flood consumer markets worldwide, transnational Chinese capitalists have to establish production systems that span space and labor diversities. The central feature of south China’s economic growth is the effectiveness of these labor-intensive production systems, particularly their strategies of labor control. Ethnographic data in this essay will show how the same team of managers operating two factories on both sides of the Hong Kong-China border have developed
different modes of labor regulation that deploy various local, family, and gender identities and interests of the predominantly female labor force. By highlighting the different institutional underpinnings of the two regimes and the respective construction of labor identities in these two factories, I argue that cultural patterns of transnational Chinese capitalism are not fixed endowments that Chinese carry with them anywhere they happen to engage in economic activities. Instead, these cultural patterns are formed under specific historical institutional conditions and with the active participation of Chinese managers and workers as they interact in everyday cooperation and conflict.
