Behind a long panel of glass windows, row on row of young Chinese women sit at the Nam Tai Electronics factory, their bodies and faces covered by blue smocks, matching gauze caps and surgical masks.
The building hums with the whir of machinery, the women's eyes lit up by a flood of fluorescent light.
The soft but steady noise lies at the heart of an industry powering China into the 21st century, as the Asian nation supplies much of the world with billions of dollars' worth of electronics, from toys to televisions to cellular phones.
But the buzz also hides serious social problems, ranging from sexual harassment to stress, as thousands of often poor, young girls move from the countryside to Pearl River Delta boomtowns like Shenzhen to seek their fortunes.
Called "dagong mei", or little-sister labourers, the new generation of young women powering China's factories often stay for about three years in the city before returning to faraway places like Sichuan and Hunan to marry in their home villages.
The trend is typical of developing societies in Asia, and mirrors Taiwan and Hong Kong in the 1960s and 1970s, said Pun Ngai, a professor at Hong Kong's University of Science and Technology.
"They imagine young Chinese girls are more hard-working, more obedient and easier to control," said Pun, who spent six months at one such factory as part of her research.
Factory managers say women are more patient and attentive to detail than many men.
The women, meanwhile, say they are just looking for a chance to make some money and have a little fun.
"The character of women is to do things very carefully, from assembly to checking monitors," said Bonnie Yu, a spokeswoman at a Nokia joint venture factory making mobile phones in Dongguan.
At a factory run by VTech Holdings, the largest supplier of cordless phones to the US, about 80 percent of the production line workers are women, said Simon Lau, manager of operations.
The average worker earns about 700 yuan (US$84.50) per month, and the number of workers at the factory ranges from 11,000 at low season to 20,000 at the peak, Lau said.
"We provide them with free dorms, free meals as well as entertainment, karaoke and a disco in the factory," said Lau, leading a group of reporters on a recent tour of the factory.
On a Friday afternoon at the VTech plant, rows of women in yellow smocks stood before chest-high work stations, each taking printed circuit boards as they passed by on a conveyor belt, soldering a few points and then putting them back.
One slight woman, Xu Jin, was from the town of Wudanshan in Hubei Province. She said she would earn about 500 yuan a month in her hometown, or about half of what she makes in the Dongguan plant.
"I came here with friends," she said, adding that she planned to stay three to four years. "The pace of life here is much faster than in Hubei.
But factory work in the big city also creates a number of physical and social problems for young women not used to the fast pace of urban life and rigorous working conditions, said Pun from the University of Science and Technology.
Long working hours and absence from home can produce a lot of stress.
"I like working here, but I sometimes miss my family," said 21-year-old Wei Weiyan.
She said she had come to the factory with some friends three years ago, and would like to stay on if possible.
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