The standard response is that people don't have to do this work if they don't want to, and that when the company is hiring (normally immediately after Lunar New Year) security guards are needed to control the crowds of applicants. Even so, advanced countries have minimum wages, specifically in order to prevent this kind of exploitation.
But increase pay levels and the masters of capital will go elsewhere, critics will say. Of course this is true. So what is the answer? Worker power, with decent levels of pay everywhere, is the only solution. Perhaps one day it will come, but China is supposed to be the country of the people already. This problematic interface between socialist state power and international capital lies at the heart of the author's more strenuous analytical passages.
The factory Pun Ngai studied made navigational aids for car drivers, but the reality is that every pair of jeans or CD player we buy is likely to have been made under comparable conditions.
Shenzhen is an emblem for Pun Ngai of the whole of China. Selected areas of the country have undergone a transformation over the last 15 years, but in Shenzen the changes have been more thorough than anywhere else. It's a lurid, hyper-real fantasy town that stands for China as a whole.
This book could have the influence of Charles Dickens's Hard Times or Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. It's moving and shocking, and presents a world that won't easily be changed. But perhaps a more popular edition ought to be prepared containing only the author's personal experiences, though extensive interviews and media coverage will probably bring the fruits of her embedded fly-on-the-wall reportage to a wider public than just the academy.
There is one final point. The author is under no illusions as to her own motivation, or the minimal effect her book is likely to have. "The search for identification with the female workers helps to prop up my intellectual and `radical' fantasy of `resisting the irresistible' rise of global capitalism," she writes.
The inverted commas round "radical," and "resisting the irresistible" show how clear-sighted this author is. The fact that she went ahead with this book nevertheless is perhaps the main reason why anyone who cares about East Asia today, and tomorrow, should read it.
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