While Chang is trying to animate the “present” status of working women in China, Koo is interested in addressing the “changing” condition of female laborers that has given rise to the formation of sisterhood, religious affiliation, and collective action in protests and reforms in 1970s and 80s Korea. Koo abandons any theoretical analysis or framework, instead choosing to reinterpret first-hand sources and interviews in easy-to-understand class terms. In contrast with a journalist’s individual-focused perspective, sociologist Hagen Koo adopts a social-class approach. Dongguan, though a chaotic and cruel city, has afforded numerous channels to change the life prospects of a new striver. Some were ambitious enough to take classes to learn computer skills and English in order to find better paying jobs. Factory life has enabled an alternative for living: girls doubled and even tripled their income by assembling Nike shoes and Coach handbags. Chang forsakes the typical Marxist critique of capitalist exploitation of laborers instead, using powerful first-person narratives, she captures the promising opportunities presented to these factory girls, facilitated by urbanization and capitalization of economy, to eschew the stifling predictability and impoverished living conditions of village life. However, these harsh facts are not the primary focus in Factory Girls. Existing reports reveal the grueling conditions: low hourly wages, constant overtime, cramped and prison-like dormitory space, and scandals of workers suicide. As the most significant driving force of China’s urbanization and economic development, migrant workers have been chronicled in voluminous articles and scholarly research. Over 100 million village dwellers left their hometowns to work in cities, finding urban jobs from cleaning street public restrooms to sitting at office desks in private corporations. Since the reform and opening up policies enacted in 1978, China has gone through the largest labor migration in history. As Chang noted in an interview, she wanted to tell “individual stories and depict the experience of migration from the workers’ points of view.” Through extensive interviews with these girls about their work lives, family backgrounds, and life goals, Chang produced her award-winning book Factory Girls in 2008.įactory Girls catches one’s attention through the carefully chosen perspective in this book: using the individuals’ viewpoints. She spent her time living with and interviewing the local girls who made their livings as factory workers. After Chang joined the Wall Street Journal, she travelled to Dongguan in 2004, a city known for its booming manufacturing industry in Guangdong Province. Leslie Chang, the wife of famous China correspondent Peter Hessler, has been a China Watcher since the late 1990s. Īn inquiry has been occupying my mind for a long time: are journalists or scholars the better story tellers of a society? Contrasting the two books in this review helps us understand their differences in approach and effect.
Team = FactoryGirl.create(:team, :completed)Īlas, this can't find my factories.rb: rake aborted!Įverywhere else a project root-relative require path works fine.ZHEYAN NI reviews Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China and Korean Workers: The Culture and Politics of Class Formation.
# Make a consistent set of related records. Say the factories are in spec/factories.rb. I'm sure this is a common task but cannot find a useful reference. I'd now like to use the same definitions with a script (Ruby, Rake, whatever.) to populate the Rails development database with a large collection of valid, correctly associated records. I have already built some elaborate FactoryGirl factory definitions for testing a Rails project, and for this purpose they are working well.
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