The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

2014-04-26 09:19

By Cai Muyuan (China Daily Europe)

The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

Li Guizhen (right) overseas mold production inside Foxconn factory. Zou Zhongpin / China Daily

In another part of the compound, somewhere on the factory line, 21-year-old Jiang Caixia dutifully checks the backs of iPhones for scratches. "I check about 260 per hour, she says. "I check more than 2,000 phones per day." The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

Sometimes when Jiang has finished an eight or 10-hour shift and is watching TV, the young migrant worker from Jiangxi province sees the things she has made, in countries she has never been, used by people she has never met, who know nothing about how her life intersected briefly with pieces of their everyday world.

"When I look at other people using iPhones, I think to myself, I probably made that one."

Jiang is an avid fan of South Korean TV dramas. She loves reading. She misses her aging parents, but says her life was "going nowhere" back home. The best she could have hoped for was a job in a supermarket.

Turn the clock forward a decade or so, and Jiang might be Sun Xiaoji, the woman sitting next to her outside the "Foxconn Cafe".

The daughter of humble farmers, Sun finished high school about 16 years ago and left her hometown in Hubei province to work on the Foxconn production line.

"At that time, there wasn't much opportunity in my hometown," Sun says. "I was a worker like Jiang Caixia."

In many ways, 36-year-old Sun represents the changing face of the Chinese worker.

"I never went to college before I came here. But they had a program here at Foxconn. I got a technology degree (vocational qualification) by going to class after work."