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Hi. So I'd like to talk a little bit about the people

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who make the things we use every day:

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our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones.

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Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt.

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Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than

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a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes,

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or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop

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after working overtime assembling your iPad.

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We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit

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these victims with every purchase we make,

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and the injustice

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feels embedded in the products themselves.

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After all, what's wrong with a world in which a worker

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on an iPhone assembly line can't even afford to buy one?

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It's taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive,

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and that it's our desire for cheap goods

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that makes them so.

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So, this simple narrative equating Western demand

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and Chinese suffering is appealing,

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especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty

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about our impact on the world,

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but it's also inaccurate and disrespectful.

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We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we

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have the power to drive tens of millions of people

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on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer

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in such terrible ways.

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In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world,

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including its own, thanks to a combination of factors:

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its low costs, its large and educated workforce,

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and a flexible manufacturing system

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that responds quickly to market demands.

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By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets,

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we have rendered the individuals on the other end

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into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable

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as the parts of a mobile phone.

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Chinese workers are not forced into factories

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because of our insatiable desire for iPods.

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They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money,

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to learn new skills, and to see the world.

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In the ongoing debate about globalization, what's

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been missing is the voices of the workers themselves.

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Here are a few.

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Bao Yongxiu: "My mother tells me to come home

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and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully

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developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker,

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so I'm not in a rush."

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Chen Ying: "When I went home for the new year,

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everyone said I had changed. They asked me,

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what did you do that you have changed so much?

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I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them

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more, they won't understand anyway."

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Wu Chunming: "Even if I make a lot of money,

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it won't satisfy me.

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Just to make money is not enough meaning in life."

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Xiao Jin: "Now, after I get off work, I study English,

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because in the future, our customers won't

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be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages."

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All of these speakers, by the way, are young women,

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18 or 19 years old.

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So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workers

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like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan.

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Certain subjects came up over and over:

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how much money they made,

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what kind of husband they hoped to marry,

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whether they should jump to another factory

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or stay where they were.

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Other subjects came up almost never, including

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living conditions that to me looked close to prison life:

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10 or 15 workers in one room,

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50 people sharing a single bathroom,

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days and nights ruled by the factory clock.

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Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances,

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and it was still better than the dormitories and homes

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of rural China.

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The workers rarely spoke about the products they made,

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and they often had great difficulty explaining

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what exactly they did.

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When I asked Lu Qingmin,

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the young woman I got to know best,

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what exactly she did on the factory floor,

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she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like

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"qiu xi."

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Only much later did I realize that she had been saying

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"QC," or quality control.

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She couldn't even tell me what she did on the factory floor.

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All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation

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in a language she didn't even understand.

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Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism,

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the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor.

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Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets,

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the worker in an industrial factory has no control,

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no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understanding

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in her own work.

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But like so many theories that Marx arrived at

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sitting in the reading room of the British Museum,

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he got this one wrong.

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Just because a person spends her time

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making a piece of something does not mean

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that she becomes that, a piece of something.

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What she does with the money she earns,

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what she learns in that place, and how it changes her,

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these are the things that matter.

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What a factory makes is never the point, and

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the workers could not care less who buys their products.

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Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories,

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on the other hand, plays up this relationship

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between the workers and the products they make.

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Many articles calculate: How long would it take

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for this worker to work in order to earn enough money

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to buy what he's making?

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For example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker

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in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out

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two and a half months' wages for an iPhone.

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But how meaningful is this calculation, really?

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For example, I recently wrote an article

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in The New Yorker magazine,

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but I can't afford to buy an ad in it.

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But, who cares? I don't want an ad in The New Yorker,

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and most of these workers don't really want iPhones.

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Their calculations are different.

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How long should I stay in this factory?

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How much money can I save?

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How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car,

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to get married, or to put my child through school?

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The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract

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relationship with the product of their labor.

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About a year after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min,

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she invited me home to her family village

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for the Chinese New Year.

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On the train home, she gave me a present:

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a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim.

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I thanked her, assuming it was fake,

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like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan.

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After we got home, Min gave her mother another present:

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a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag,

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and a few nights later, her sister was showing off

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a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag.

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Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags

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were made by their factory,

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and every single one of them was authentic.

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Min's sister said to her parents,

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"In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars."

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Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless.

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"And that's not all -- Coach is coming out with a new line,

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2191," she said. "One bag will sell for 6,000."

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She paused and said, "I don't know if that's 6,000 yuan or

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6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it's 6,000." (Laughter)

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Min's sister's boyfriend, who had traveled home with her

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for the new year, said,

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"It doesn't look like it's worth that much."

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Min's sister turned to him and said, "Some people actually

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understand these things. You don't understand shit."

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(Laughter) (Applause)

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In Min's world, the Coach bags had a curious currency.

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They weren't exactly worthless, but they were nothing

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close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew

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wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth.

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Once, when Min's older sister's friend got married,

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she brought a handbag along as a wedding present.

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Another time, after Min had already left

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the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit,

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bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts.

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I looked in the zippered pocket of one,

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and I found a printed card in English, which read,

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"An American classic.

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In 1941, the burnished patina

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of an all-American baseball glove

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inspired the founder of Coach to create

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a new collection of handbags from the same

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luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather.

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Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags

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with perfect proportions and a timeless flair.

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They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere

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adored them. A new American classic was born."

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I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Min

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and her sisters.

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Their relationship with the product of their labor

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was more complicated, surprising and funny

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than he could have imagined.

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And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency

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to see the workers as faceless masses,

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to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking.

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The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18

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and quit her first job on the assembly line

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of an electronics factory.

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Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs

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five times, eventually landing a lucrative post

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in the purchasing department of a hardware factory.

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Later, she married a fellow migrant worker,

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moved with him to his village,

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gave birth to two daughters,

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and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick

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for herself and an apartment for her parents.

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She recently returned to Dongguan on her own

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to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes,

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temporarily leaving her husband and children

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back in the village.

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In a recent email to me, she explained,

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"A person should have some ambition while she is young

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so that in old age she can look back on her life

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and feel that it was not lived to no purpose."

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Across China, there are 150 million workers like her,

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one third of them women, who have left their villages

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to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants

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and the construction sites of the big cities.

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Together, they make up the largest migration in history,

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and it is globalization, this chain that begins

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in a Chinese farming village

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and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet

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and Coach handbags on our arms

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that has changed the way these millions of people

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work and marry and live and think.

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Very few of them would want to go back

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to the way things used to be.

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When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that

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it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers.

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I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them,

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or that they would have nothing to say to me.

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Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny

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and brave and generous.

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By opening up their lives to me,

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they taught me so much about factories

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and about China and about how to live in the world.

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This is the Coach purse that Min gave me

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on the train home to visit her family.

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I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me

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to the young women I wrote about,

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ties that are not economic but personal in nature,

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measured not in money but in memories.

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This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine,

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sitting in your office or in the library,

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are not how you find them when you actually go out

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into the world.

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Thank you. (Applause)

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(Applause)

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Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight

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that a lot of us haven't had before.

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But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say,

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with Apple's head of manufacturing,

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what would you say?

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Leslie Chang: One minute?

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CA: One minute. (Laughter)

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LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers

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is how much they're self-motivated, self-driven,

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resourceful, and the thing that struck me,

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what they want most is education, to learn,

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because most of them come from very poor backgrounds.

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They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade.

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Their parents are often illiterate,

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and then they come to the city, and they, on their own,

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at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class,

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they'll take an English class, and learn

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really, really rudimentary things, you know,

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like how to type a document in Word,

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or how to say really simple things in English.

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So, if you really want to help these workers,

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start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes

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in these schools, and what's going to happen is,

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all your workers are going to move on,

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but hopefully they'll move on into higher jobs within Apple,

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and you can help their social mobility

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and their self-improvement.

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When you talk to workers, that's what they want.

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They do not say, "I want better hot water in the showers.

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I want a nicer room. I want a TV set."

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I mean, it would be nice to have those things,

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but that's not why they're in the city,

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and that's not what they care about.

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CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative that

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things were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrative

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of some kind of level of growth, that things over time

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were getting better?

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LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know,

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it was interesting, because I spent basically two years

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hanging out in this city, Dongguan,

00:13:21.658 --> 00:13:23.769
and over that time, you could see immense change

00:13:23.769 --> 00:13:26.564
in every person's life: upward, downward, sideways,

00:13:26.564 --> 00:13:28.385
but generally upward.

00:13:28.385 --> 00:13:30.172
If you spend enough time, it's upward, and I met people

00:13:30.172 --> 00:13:32.467
who had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are now

00:13:32.467 --> 00:13:34.574
basically urban middle class people,

00:13:34.574 --> 00:13:36.595
so the trajectory is definitely upward.

00:13:36.595 --> 00:13:38.530
It's just hard to see when you're suddenly

00:13:38.530 --> 00:13:40.651
sucked into the city. It looks like everyone's poor and

00:13:40.651 --> 00:13:42.389
desperate, but that's not really how it is.

00:13:42.389 --> 00:13:44.543
Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough,

00:13:44.543 --> 00:13:46.860
and it's nothing you or I would want to do,

00:13:46.860 --> 00:13:50.005
but from their perspective, where they're coming from

00:13:50.005 --> 00:13:52.002
is much worse, and where they're going

00:13:52.002 --> 00:13:54.010
is hopefully much better, and I just wanted to give

00:13:54.010 --> 00:13:56.371
that context of what's going on in their minds,

00:13:56.371 --> 00:13:58.734
not what necessarily is going on in yours.

NOTE Paragraph

00:13:58.734 --> 00:14:00.230
CA: Thanks so much for your talk.

00:14:00.230 --> 00:14:04.599
Thank you very much. (Applause)