6. Your descriptions of child labor and exploitative working conditions in Chinese factories seem almost outweighed by your excitement for China’s new opportunities for upward mobility. Have sweatshops been good for China?
Well, I wouldn’t call them sweatshops because that’s a loaded term. I would call them factories or workshops. Those jobs have given people a lot more mobility. When I drive through villages, I tend to feel a lot of nostalgia for these places, but, as I acknowledge in the book, these were very poor communities, and young people often felt trapped and didn’t have many options. I describe these young girls who are working in these factories—and in some ways, it’s awful—they’re 15 years old and doing very basic assembly line work, but you see them really gaining in confidence. After following them for a couple of years, they really are different people in a way they wouldn’t have been if they if they were still in school, which makes you reevaluate your assumptions. That’s not to downplay all the terrible things that happen, and all of the exploitation that’s definitely a part of it—it’s a pretty unregulated system. There are a lot of laws, but they are often not enforced. It’s not what we would consider to be a fair system, but it’s highly functional. What that means is that everybody knows what’s going on. They know the rules. They know what it takes to advance and they can see opportunities for advancement.
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