The following article was published in the Sunday Edition of The Washington Post on November 3^rd, 1996??

BOOT CAMP AT A SHOE FACTORY: REGIMENTED WORKERS IN CHINA'S FREE LABOUR MARKET

One evening recently, I watched as two platoons of workers marched in a floodlit courtyard and shouted in unison, 'Be respectful toward my work; be loyal; be creative; be of service'. Behind them forklifts were weaving back and forth between buildings, as production continued round the clock.

The enterprise, called Yu Yuan, is not exactly a sweatshop - - the living conditions are decent and the pay adequate compared to other nearby Taiwanese-owned factories, though the hours are very long. Yu Yuan, which produces 10 brands of shoes including Nike and Reebok, is simply the on-the-ground reality of the latest phase of the Asian 'economic miracle': giant factories in places like China and Vietnam, built with off-shore Asian capital, staffed with the rural poor and managed with ruthless efficiency to gain maximum competitive advantage.

Popular wisdom has it that the success of overseas Chinese and Korean businesses can be traced to a Confucian culture in which mutual trust, flexibility and interpersonal relationships predominate. What is taking place in many of these factories in China that are run by Taiwanese and Koreans is incompatible with that image. What prompts the chairman of the Taiwanese Business Association in Dongguan to order his security guards to salute and snap to attention every time he passes through the factory gate? Not any Confucian beliefs but a hankering for modern army standards of discipline and unquestioning loyalty.

There is the normal check on IDs, education certificates, and certificates from their hometown government attesting they are unmarried. What is new at this particular factory is that the female applicants are ordered to stand at attention as if they are applying to join the army, are told to run a mile and then to do as many push-ups as they can within a minute.

The young women emerging from the gate are suspicious. The more experienced workers know that screening for strength and stamina and military-style obedience portends nights of enforced overtime in a shoe industry already notorious for its long work hours. They'd better stick to the jobs they've got, several told me. Leave this new factory to the green migrant workers.

A decade and a half ago, Dongguan City was a small sleepy rural town set amidst rice fields. But it was located less than half a day by road from Hong Kong, and Hong Kong manufacturers began pouring in to take advantage of cheap labour and cheap rents, followed within a few years by a wave of Taiwanese companies.

In the meantime, they have instituted harshly regimented labour conditions. Corporal punishment is part-and-parcel of the management style of some of them. They scoff at what they consider the local Hong Kong-owned firms' slack management practices.

A couple of years ago, the government-run newspaper in Shenzhen, the city next door, described the regimentation in one of Shenzhen's Taiwan-owned shoe factories: "The workers are not allowed to talk when they have their meals; when walking to and from the factory, the dormitory and the canteen, they are required to follow a specified line en route; if they step beyond the line, they will be punished by being forced to stand at attention for long periods, or will be fined. A huge sign that hangs over an elevated walkway reads: loitering underneath, 100 yuan penalty."

By far the largest of the Taiwanese enterprises in Dongguan City is Yu Yuan, the biggest of three factories in the region owned by the Bao Yuan company. Reputedly the largest shoe factory in the world, Yu Yuan employs some 40,000 workers, 70% of them female, who work and live at a single enclosed site. The Nike logo "Just Do It" covers the wall of one of the enterprise's cavernous buildings. A huge "ADIDAS" sign sits atop an adjoining building. Other sports shoe brands that are produced in the same plant include Puma, Reebok, LA Gear, and New Balance.

Yu Yuan is run in a decidedly military style. New recruits are given three days of 'training'. The first day, according to one of them, is largely spent marching around the compound, barked at by a drill sergeant. At 6:30 PM, commands could clearly be heard in the background: 'Left! Right! Left! Right! About turn! March!...' Three formations, each of about forty workers, were still being drilled, while thousands of other workers scurried back and forth between factory buildings and messhalls to take their meals in shifts.

The factory compound is perched along a river where the enterprise has built a pleasant promenade flanked by green lawns and dotted with flower beds. It is an unusually quiet and serene spot in a city that resembles a gigantic construction site. But each of the evenings I was there only a relatively small number of workers were taking advantage of it. They are too busy, I was told.

Some work 12-hour shifts called 'long day shifts'; others are on 'long night shifts'. Often these exceed 12 hours. As one of the workers explained, 'You work longer if you can't finish the day's allocated quota. Another unpaid extra hour or so is spent in preparation before the shift begins. In addition, because there are long queues, you need to arrive early at the gate so as to punch your card on time, do the drills, and then line up to get to your shopfloor. You can't afford to be late because there's a penalty equal to half a day's wages.'

A large number of other workers are on eight-hour shifts, but they are required to do considerable overtime work. I was there during a slack period and a worker noted that he was working only one or two hours overtime a day, seven days a week, and got one day off work every second week. But during a busy period, he said, he had to work his day shift from early morning till 11 PM or midnight. The slow workers stay even later.

Workers get a bit over 2 yuan an hour (about 33 Australian cents), which is just above the minimum legal wage. With about 80 hours of overtime work a month, their monthly wages hover around 600-700 yuan (Aus. $100-115 a month).

The amount of enforced overtime is in violation of China's labour laws, which stipulate a maximum of 36 hours of overtime work each month. Yet, all things considered, conditions at this city-sized factory are above average for the district. The meals are subsidized, and there is medical care and relatively 'low' density housing of 10 to a room. Signs screaming out slogans like 'Love your factory as your home' and 'Be loyal, be obedient, feel honoured to work here' are mounted everywhere.

Notwithstanding the signs, the factory's turn-over rate is a high 7% a month, according to one manager I spoke with. Other factories in Dongguan that offer poorer conditions resort to increasingly extreme measures to keep workers from quitting. In violation of China's labour laws, many of them demand a 'deposit' of a few hundred yuan (from two weeks' to a month's wages) to ensure workers cannot leave before their contract expires. They also lock up the migrant workers' ID cards, without which they cannot job-hop or even remain in the city. Anyone found without the right papers can be rounded up by the police and sent back to the countryside.

Yu Yuan does not demand a deposit or hold its workers' ID cards, but those who quit before their contract ends will not receive their last two weeks' pay. This is easy to enforce because there is a two week time lag in wage payments. New recruits who quit during the six month probation period will also cause a month's loss of pay to the fellow worker who introduced them to the factory and served as their guarantor, often a relative or friend from their hometown.

The worst factories in south China do not even allow workers to leave the factory compound after work. In extreme cases the isolation and iron discipline are prison-like. The official press has reported cases of unpaid workers enslaved in heavily guarded compounds who have staged escapes. In the worst example that has come to light in this region, a Taiwan-managed joint-venture factory employs more than a hundred guards for 2,700 workers, one of whom recently died in an escape attempt.

Some of the Korean-run factories in north China, which is where almost all of Korea's investments are concentrated, reportedly are even harsher and more unscrupulous in their treatment of workers. During many months of interviewing in China about factory conditions, officials and business people repeatedly confided to me about Korean employers who resort to beatings, tight military control, and public humiliation to cow workers. In one case a woman worker was locked inside a dog cage with a large dog and placed on public display in the factory compound. So bad are the conditions that, according to a Chinese newspaper, 9 out of 10 of the spontaneous strikes that broke out in the large northern city of Tianjin in 1993 occurred in Korean-managed enterprises.

The abuses have persisted because of extensive collusion between such factories and the local governments. Many of the Chinese partners of joint-venture firms are actually local government organs and departments, which reap considerable profits from these factories. They are as eager to make money by overworking and underpaying the migrant workers as are the outside investors, and look aside when cases of imprisonment and other serious violations of law occur. Those who should be acting as impartial overseers and law enforcement agencies are, instead, management's accomplices.

Local officials in south China seem sympathetic toward these factories' militaristic approach. Not so long ago under Mao Zedong, the loyal discipline of the People's Liberation Army was upheld for the entire nation to emulate. To a surprising extent, conversations with various government officials and trade union officials in China reveal that many of these 40-to-50-year-olds had once been junior army officers, assigned to coveted positions as junior officials when they were demobilized. They, too, see military-like control as a quick fix to the problem of a migrant labour force. The common underlying beliefs that they and the Taiwanese and Korean managers share is not in Confucianism but militarism and authoritarianism.

Some Western commentators suggest that China's industrialization and modernization, spurred by flows of foreign investment and by contacts with the rest of East Asia, will gradually pull China in a more democratic direction. The experience of Dongguan suggests otherwise.

THE END

Anita Chan, a sociologist at the Australian National University, has published four books on China. For the past several years she has been conducting research for a book on Chinese labour issues.