Labor Exploitation and the Environment in China Blue

Labor Exploitation and the Environment in China Blue

Micha X. Peled’s China Blue (2006) highlights what happens when the UN principles go awry as it most powerfully updates the Norma Rae narrative and documents the consequences 130 million peasants, mostly women, face when they leave their rural homes to make and produce clothing in Chinese urban industrial centers. The film contrasts the nearly pristine farmlands these peasants leave to the polluted and densely populated cities they go to find jobs that will help offset rural poverty faced by their family members. It also presents characters with whom we are expected to sympathize after its opening photograph of working women and their managers: Mr. Lam, the factory owner, tells his story of a rise to the middle class from a low-paying job as a farmer and a police chief, and individual female workers in his factory give a face to the masses of clothing industry laborers. Jasmine is a thread cutter, Orchid, a zipper installer in Mr. Lam’s Lifeng Factory in Shanxi.  Jenny provides public relations for this jean plant where Mr. Lam plays music to inspire these women to be the hard working and courageous Chinese citizens the lyrics describe. Working from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. when overtime begins and may run until 2:00 in the morning or later, the women struggle to maintain their quotas, so they earn the highest paycheck possible to send home to their struggling farm families.

According to Dennis Harvey’s Variety review, this individualized approach strengthens it case against such exploitation. In the opening of his review, he declares, “While sweatshop scandals have rocked the increasingly international garment industry for years, Micha Peled’s documentary China Blue makes a stronger case against worker exploitation than any news item could, simply by showing the everyday lives of some Mainland China factory girls.” These individual stories also illuminate the girls’ struggles. For example, Jasmine tells us about her family farm with ducks, goats and chickens, where they work from dawn to dusk growing soybeans and winter wheat. When she went out to work for her family, she had to travel by train two days and nights away from her home in the Sichuan region through Canton in Southern China to the Pearl River Delta.

Jasmine’s entrance into Mr. Lam’s factory highlights the conflict between her rural home and the modern industrialized city she has entered. Outside the factory, a sign reads, “China’s Famous Clothing Town—Shanxi,” introducing the town and factory’s goal to build on China’s economic reform to achieve a capitalist dream of profits. Mr. Lam, for example, moved from farm labor to police work before becoming a factory owner. He rode his bike before he could afford to buy the car he now drives. Now as an owner, Mr. Lam watches his laborers on monitors. Security cameras help maintain productivity, he explains, but it also reminds us of the boss doing the same thing in Modern Times (1936). He hires more women than men because they are “docile and obedient,” yet conditions are better at his factory than others, he claims, and Peled and his crew had unprecedented access, even though Chinese authorities did try to stop the filming several times, according to the film’s closing inter-titles.

Jasmine lives in a dormitory with other women and learns how to cope from more experienced workers including Jade and Orchid, but Jasmine’s story serves as the everywoman tale in this documentary. She serves as a conglomeration of the best and most prevalent characteristics shared by the teen girls working in the plant. The film introduces her as the second child in a culture where special requests must be made to have more than one offspring.  She disappointed her family because she too was a girl, so she is working to support them, Jasmine explains, so she accepts her situation in the factory, even when the bulletin board tells them they must work overtime and must prepare for a long night since, as a sign declares, the customer is number one. Mr. Lan believes his workers are so uneducated they cannot learn, but Jasmine, a threadcutter, keeps a diary, writing down her story and dreams, and works to repay the 100 Yuan her father gave her.

Mr. Lam so controls his workers, however, that when American and European business representatives tour the factory, they believe the laborers are happy, even though they work seven days a week with no overtime pay, and inspectors are sent to jeans factories because of public outcries. They, like the business representatives, find only hard-working laborers because factory owners get advance notice and teach the women workers what to say when they are questioned. Conditions do not improve, and in this factory, where conditions are supposedly more humane, according to the narrator and the factory’s labor, workers cannot go to the restroom during their shifts; pay decreases from 900 to 300 Yuan for quotas of 3000 pieces per day; laborers sleep only four hours or less, and the factory decides how many hours they have worked, not the punch clock. Labor organizers are in peril in this dictatorial atmosphere. With rush orders all workers work overtime to make jeans for Wal-Mart. Yet the film also tries to sympathize with Lam’s situation, as a factory owner in a developing economy. As Variety’s Harvey explains, “buyers for Western brands and store chains negotiate manufacturers like Lam down to the half-penny. The real profits are made, and kept, in first-world countries.”

Jasmine’s story personalizes these horrific conditions, revealing her reactions through the diary she continues to keep. Over the course of the fifteen weeks documented in powerful images, Jasmine faces multiple obstacles. She is fined two days’ worth of pay for sneaking out to purchase energy medicine. She and other workers go without sleep for days. She gets sick and cannot eat. She and her fellow workers must endure cold temperatures with little heat in the dormitory and sleep in their clothes. And workers only receive their paychecks after they revolt, refusing to go back to work after a meal when the order due date has nearly been reached. The film ends at week fifteen, when Jasmine, a fictional character who contains elements of several teen workers, has money in her pocket and a lighter workload because the orders are completed. To connect with the Western world she helps support, she writes a letter to the next owner of a pair of jeans she helps create and places it in a back pocket hoping they will read her message and applaud her efforts.  Even if the letter does not literally connect East with West, Jasmine’s and the other girl’s poignant personal stories evoke strong emotions from viewers. As Harvey explains, perhaps because they are “disarmingly natural on camera, their welfare becomes a real concern to the viewer as the exhaustion and ill-health wrought by brutal work stints grow apparent.”

           

Their struggles in the south China factory conflict with the images of rural farm life provided when Orchid goes home during the New Year’s celebrations. Here an extended family celebrates around a table bursting with an opulence of local delicacies. The farm provides plenty to eat, the footage tells us, and opportunities to discuss the benefits of either capitalism or communism from an open-air family feast. Instead, because of lack of funds, Jasmine remains at the factory alone with only a gold fish, except during a scant dinner hosted by Mr. Lam where a few workers win prizes while the rest sit at dark tables afraid to debate any issues whatsoever. With this powerful concentration on individual stories, China Blue “examines the plight of the world’s largest pool of cheap labor and traces its exploitation to a retail outlet near you” (Catsoulis). It also highlights the lack of economic, social, and environmental justice in a fast fashion world.