China: Great Dragon Rising - Dragons and Tigers: A Geography of South, East and Southeast Asia - page 323

interactions within the household, but external repre-
sentations of family business to the outside world falls
to males.
China expert Tamara Jacka (1997) found that al-
though male-female work patterns have changed with re-
cent reforms, “expectations embodied in the traditional
saying 'Men rule outside, women rule inside' . . . contin-
ued to exert an important influence on work patterns.” It
is true that modernization has given women opportuni-
ties to work outside the home. Still, a woman is entirely
responsible for household affairs and so carries a double
burden of responsibility . Women are still expected to be
mothers and keepers of social stability in the home. Al-
though the content of male and female work is changing,
the conceptual divisions remain.
Extra assembly or piece-work done in the household
courtyard is also included in the inferior “inside” do-
main. Commodity production in the household realm
has become important, yet women are poorly paid for
this work. When “courtyard economy” expands into a
larger enterprise, management is typically seized by men.
The government mandates equal opportunity , but
things are different in practice. At present, large numbers
of women work in township and village enterprises yet
they are poorly paid, do the most menial tasks, and are
the first fired. Very few are involved in management over
male workers. As much as 70 percent of laid-off workers
are women. Further, women are forced to retire at age 50,
five years earlier than men.
The number of women working in state or govern-
ment enterprises has fallen 24 percent since 1994. While
job training centers teach men to become chefs' mechan-
ics and carpenters, women are taught to be hairdressers
and manicurists.
In any industrial city in China, women dominate
low-end jobs. Some are sidewalk vendors who peddle
cheap calculators or “Hello Kitty” notebooks. Others
take up such tasks as cleaning tables in restaurants or
sweeping streets. Many are reduced to rag-picking or
hauling oil drums full of garbage.
In the SEZs, female workers are desirable because
they will work longer hours for lower pay . Many women
are working in deplorable conditions, locked in their un-
safe factories at night. Hundreds have died in fires, un-
able to escape the barricaded structures. Managers find
that women, who make up nearly half of the floating
population streaming into the coastal regions, especially
Guangdong, are subservient, docile, and easy to replace.
There is a new social body in modern China: the
dagongmei. T Transience is the dominant feature of the

lives of these female workers. Their stay in factories is
typically only four to five years. Women are constrained
by both the hukou system and patriarchal attitudes to-
ward their leaving home to work in a town or city . More-
over, short wage-earning terms are expected to occur
only in the premarital stage of a young woman' s life.
Many factories have codes of conduct for women.
For example, going to the bathroom requires a written
permit. Anyone who leaves the premises without permis-
sion is subject to firing or at least a hefty fine. Arriving
five minutes late results in a deduction of two hours
wages. No talking is allowed on the shop floor. Anyone
receiving a phone call will be dismissed immediately .
Permission must be obtained to miss work because of ill-
ness, and so on.
Newfound affluence has also revived the notion of
women as property . This has led to an upsurge in sexual
harassment, prostitution, concubinage, and the abduc-
tion of women into forced marriages. Garment, shoe, toy ,
and electronics factories, staffed primarily by women, are
often referred to as “peach orchards” where women are
“ripe to be picked.”

The Global Sweater Factory

Shanxi Shuofang Flax T Textile Company is a Chi-
nese state-owned enterprise. The beginning of its
supply is flax (linen fiber) from France—softer
than Chinese-grown flax. The fiber is processed by
men in multiple stages on secondhand, French-
manufactured machines. Other machines turn the
combed flax onto spools that are dipped 144 at a
time into vats of bleach for six hours. The bleach-
ing room equipment is from Russia. Next, a set of
machines made in Germany transforms the thick
strands of flax into thin, color-dyed thread and
winds it onto six-inch spools—2,000 a day . Flax
dust coats the machinery and fills the air, but few
workers wear masks.
The spools of thread are delivered to the fac-
tory' s Everbright plant, the knitting and sewing ma-
chine building where women piece together the
sweaters, taking turns for three 8-hour shifts a day ,
seven days a week. Here too, dust and the smell of
dye permeate the air. The sweaters are washed and
dried and laid out for inspection. Every 15 seconds a
woman attaches an Eileen Fisher label to each gar-
ment. Others attach U.S. price tags. Also, there are