The China Price, Alexandra Harney, Penguin, $15
Till Chinese manufacturing gets its Upton Sinclair, this book will do wonderfully as an eye-opener

Some american capitalists and their politician friends called Upton Sinclair, whose journalistic investigation of conditions in Chicago meatpacking plants in the turn of the 20th century deserves to be read even now and forever, a muckraker. Doubtless, some Chinese capitalists and their communist party friends are equally unprepared to say anything flattering about books like The China Price and authors like Alexandra Harney. But Harney, whose journalism is excellent — of course, you get only one Sinclair every century or so — is a foreign muckraker. On reading her and agreeing with her premise, that Chinese manufacturing in many ways is a scare story wrapped in success, you wonder when China can produce its own muckrakers, for they are the necessary condition for reform. This book, therefore, is another occasion to ask the great question of our time: whither Chinese capitalism minus Chinese political change?

Harney’s reportage, a fine combination of life stories and economic facts, is probably the most readily accessible source for the following truths about China’s manufacturing revolution. One, low price is China’s trump card. Two, to maintain that low price, China’s factory owners are prepared to sacrifice both quality and minimally acceptable working conditions. Three, terrible working conditions can’t always deter China’s rural migrants whose industrial employment in places like Guangdong makes them more money than they can earn in villages. Four, when you see a nice Chinese factory, assume that it is a front for gullible visitors and a cover for dreadful sweatshops.
But, of course, China is not unique as far as factory horrors are concerned. All countries that have transformed themselves into industrial societies have similar dark chapters. Think England, the Industrial Revolution and pre-teen chimneysweepers and factory hands. Think the America Sinclair was investigating. Think the current India and its carpet factories and its construction workers who do not even have basic safety equipment like hard hats and harnesses. The scale of China’s manufacturing is so gargantuan and its primacy as the world’s cheap goods provider so astounding that it attracts extra critical attention. India would have too if its manufactured goods dominated retail shelves.
But the big and crucial difference is that India, like England and America but unlike China, is not a one-party autocracy. There are, in this country of uneven regulation and almost institutionalised corruption, journalists, NGOs, the courts, the odd politician or the bureaucrat and the weight of public opinion — all potential muckrakers working in a free country, who can shift rules and laws. Remember, to quote an example that’s slightly different but wholly appropriate, when SARS hit China and the world panicked, Beijing was tightlipped but in India the then health minister Sushma Swaraj was grilled by the media for every visitor coming in from “affected” regions.

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