The 19-year-old female just off the farm--driver of industrialization everywhere

BOOKS OF THE TIMES: "Dynamic Young Engines Driving China's Epic Boom: Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China, by Leslie T. Chang," by Howard W. French, New York Times, 22 October 2008.

The respectable treatment of an otherwise obscure book alerts me to the fact that Chang has got to be a fellow newspaper journalist. Sure enough, she used to write for the WSJ.

Obscure or not, it's a very cool topic, historically speaking. As I've long argued in the brief, there is no more welcome sign of industrialization-leading-to-the-globalization of an economy than a surfeit of 19-year-old females just off the farm and streaming into the city looking for factory jobs. Go back to New England after our Civil War, and this wave signals the rise of the textile industry in Fall River and other places. I did plenty of city-planning strategic consulting for Fall River's city fathers a few years back, so I know this history well, especially since all the old textile mill buildings still stand just off the interstate that passes through the city (toward Providence going north and toward the Mall coastline peninsula (my God, the name escapes me somehow, but you know, Martha's Vineyard, the Kennedy compound and all that).

Accurately described by Chang as the "largest migration in human history," this flow continues in aggregate even as the supply of 19-year-old females willing to work for damn-near nothing along the coast is thinning dramatically, by some accounts.

The coolest reference in the review:

China is locked in a Dale Carnegie era, with bookstore shelves dominated by titles purporting to explain how to gain a leg up. In Dongguan the self-improvement business that caters to the female factory worker has achieved industrial dimensions, with night schools on every street corner.

Girl is moving up all right--part of the promise and peril of what comes next for China.

Comments

[Louis Heberlein]

My biggest anxiety about China is a possible huge social conflict between those that are locked into old rural agriculture and social culture, and those that grasp and exploit modernity, but ignore the others as irrelevant. The rapid pace of change can increase risk of conflict.