Made In China

Made in China tells one of the millions of stories of migrants from rural China who comprised the backbone of the country's economic transformation. It provides a human face behind the ubiquitous label "Made in China." This massive dislocation of people may well represent one of the largest, most rapid migrations in human history. The documentary illustrates how an entire generation experienced the culture shock of an industrial revolution compressed into decades, rather than the centuries it took in the West. It serves as both an elegy for a disappearing rural way of life and an on-the-ground look at China's rise as a global economic powerhouse.

Made in China follows the lives of a typical migrant couple, Heqing and Heping Fan, including their first trip home after two years in the city. They both worked in the Cixi Industrial Zone, a manufacturing center with over 1,000,000 workers, mostly former peasants, south of Shanghai, in a plant making bathroom products for export. They work seven days a week, twelve hours a day for approximately $.45 an hour or about $250 a month. Each month they save about $150 dollars to send back to their village. The factory owner feels he is doing his workers a service; rural China is overpopulated and industrialization is the only answer for surplus peasants.

The Fans left the country, reluctantly, because of the depression facing Chinese agriculture. They once made $3,000 a year from their orchards, but falling commodity prices, exacerbated by an overvalued yuan, forced the Fans to try new ventures to make a living. All attempts failed, leaving them deeply in debt to their neighbors, feeling overwhelming shame. Given the fact that the money economy has become more expensive, a single hospitalization cost Heqing $1,500 dollars, or half a years salary. Even more prosperous peasants are leaving the village because factory work provides a low but reliable wage.

The documentary captures the Fans during a four-day visit home for the Chinese New Year. Having left their two young children with grandparents for over two years, the strain of separation is heartbreakingly evident. Made in China highlights one of the most poignant costs of rapid industrialization: an entire generation of "left-behind" children living as virtual orphans. The family reunion is bittersweet and emotional; their young daughter refuses to sleep or let her mother out of her sight, terrified that she will vanish again. Soon after, the Fans depart once more, expecting it will be another three years before they can return.

Eventually the force stage behind this unprecedented industrial revolution emerges: the Chinese Communist Party. In the village, Heqing and a group of friends and local Party officials sing a drunken version of the "Internationale" and toast the Party and its recent reforms for China's growing prosperity. Back at the factory, we watch the Fans participating in a study group where they learn the 8 Virtues and Vices of a worker, in essence, to place the interest of the community before your own and to see the interest of the boss as the same as your own. Yet the motivation for everyone is personal survival and private advancement. The Fans’ greatest hope for their children is that they receive an education so they will not succumb to the fate of factory workers or peasantry, but can instead join China's new, prosperous, professional elite. The cognitive dissonance between official socialist ideology and the harsh but dynamic realities of capitalist growth is not the least part of the Chinese economic miracle. As the film ends, the owner of the Fan's plant proudly surveys the site for his new next expansion: farm lands requisitioned by the state, whose displaced peasants apprehensively face an uncertain future like the Fans.