CDT Bookshelf: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
From BookBrowse:
An eye-opening and previously untold story, Factory Girls is the first look into the everyday lives of the migrant factory population in China.
China has 130 million migrant workers—the largest migration in human history. In Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang, a former correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Beijing, tells the story of these workers primarily through the lives of two young women, whom she follows over the course of three years as they attempt to rise from the assembly lines of Dongguan, an industrial city in China’s Pearl River Delta.
A book of global significance that provides new insight into China, Factory Girls demonstrates how the mass movement from rural villages to cities is remaking individual lives and transforming Chinese society, much as immigration to America’s shores remade our own country a century ago.
Danwei.org has posted an excerpt of the book. From their introduction:
Former China Wall Street Journal correspondent Leslie T. Chang has written a book about migrant workers called Factory Girls. With a wonderfully light touch, Chang describes the social and economic factors behind the largest mass movement of people in history—the urbanization of China’s rural population.
As the name suggests, Factory Girls focuses on female migrant workers who make up the majority of the work force in most of southern China’s factories. In particular the book tells the stories of two migrant women who became friends of the author
See also Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s review of the book in Newsweek, as well as reviews in the Financial Times and the Christian Science Monitor. On China Beat, Leslie Chang wrote an essay called “Writing Factory Girls.”
Available on Amazon.com
