China

I was poking around the web and I came across these pictures of workers in Chinese factories. I had always imagined more of the utter chaos model of production: people working their fingers to the bone putting little do-ma-flatchers together, bosses running around screaming di-di-mao, boxes piled higgeldy-piggeldy up to the ceilings, frayed wires dangling, dim lights, etc. Instead we have these orderly, clean, well lighted, enormous rooms filled with people and modern equipment. Of course, it could still be hell-on-earth for the workers, but it certainly upset my imaginary Chinese factory.



Most of the photos are from Work in China - photographs by Edward Burtynsky

Being as we (the US) are China's biggest customer, they have also been affected by our economic crisis. We aren't buying like we used to, so many of their factories have been shutting down, putting Chinese people out of work.

For some time the PRC (People's Republic of China) has been holding the value of the yuan artificially low, which means the goods they produce are really cheap, so we buy from them instead of making them ourselves. China's fearless leaders can get away with this as long as their workers are willing to work for a pittance, and apparently they are, being as China is still mostly a subsistence agrarian economy. At least I think it is. True, they have a large middle class now, and they buy more Buicks than we do, but they have almost three times as many people. So if they had a middle class as big as our entire country, and the rest of the country was still peasants, it would still be a mostly agrarian economy.

I am not sure what advantage the PRC gets from holding the down the value of the Yuan. They get fewer dollars for what they sell, but possibly they are able to continue making and selling stuff even when other people try to compete. By selling it cheaper than everyone else, they drive everyone else out of business, and when the rest of the world's production capacity is destroyed, China will rule the world! Bwah ha ha ha! That sounds like something their evil Communist overlords would like. On the other hand it sounds a little too obvious for inscrutable orientals.