None of the award-winning films reviewed in this article has a blissful tone. In these films, we watch young girls in assembly lines producing all sorts of commodities in China as well as four hundred Chinese workers disassembling a coking plant in Germany. We are immersed in people's personal stories, such as a peasant woman forced to leave her farm and her lone hut, located in the area due to be submerged by the Three Gorges Dam project, and a sixteen-year-old girl learning to labor on a cruise ship along the Yangtze River. In most of the films we also meet managers, Chinese or foreign, who are concerned with nothing but maximizing profit through intense exploitation of labor. These films document how the massive force of modernization in a globalized world affects lives of common people in China. Their struggles with poverty, corrupt officials, and greedy business owners are displayed in sharp contrast to both shining metropolitan glory and rural banality. In this regard, the Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky's photographs of China, as shown in the film Manufactured Landscapes, seem emblematic enough: Modernization in China has altered the trajectory of people's lives as well as the landscapes of their nation. This article discusses the issues embedded in the stories the seven documentaries present: the impact of global capitalism; the relations between national development and globalization; the conflicts between corporate social responsibility and profit-making; and the predicament of migrant workers and their human agency.

Manufactured Landscapes is about Mr. Burtynsky's travels in China. For over twenty-five years Mr. Burtynsky has been interested in landscapes transformed by industrial incursion. His postmodern perspective has naturally shifted his focus to China, a country that in the last thirty years has been determined to catch up with the advanced West and dash to modernization. The crew members followed him to big factories, electronic waste sites, and the Three Gorges Dam and finally landed in the fastest growing metropolis, Shanghai.

The photos Mr. Burtynsky took in China differ from his previous works. Mr. Burtynsky said of his previous works that his intention to photograph those industrial sites was not to be argumentative and indoctrinatory about environmental damages as a result of industrialization and urbanization, but only to make people aware of these environmental damages. His intention obviously deserves admiration, but he is such a great photographer that his photos, supposedly records of environmental damage, look more like appreciations of natural beauty. For instance, his photo of a gasoline stream, a site of chemical contamination, resembles a photo of a winding river aglow with shimmering rays of the setting sun. One wonders how people could take these photos as a warning sign of environmental disaster, which is exactly the intention of the photo.

Mr. Burtynsky's photos of China carry his signature grandiosity in a massive scale, but one can find more than just “natural beauty.” There is a sense of gravity and hidden depredation in these photos. For instance, the expressionless workers and their repetitive and monotonous movement reduce humans to the very whirring machines they operate; the phalanxes of workers in yellow uniforms stretching as far as one can see symbolize a seemingly inexhaustible labor supply for capital growth; metal cubes and piles of computer chips, reminiscent of the scenes of electronic trash in the film Wall-E, seem to emit their unpleasant toxic odor right out of the pictures. Compared with his earlier works, Burtynsky's China photos are certainly less ambiguous about the price mankind has paid or will pay for modernization.

Jennifer Baichwal, director of Manufactured Landscapes, tried very hard to keep her focus on Mr. Burtynsky and his work but could not completely refrain from documenting people's lives that fascinated her in China. Indeed, her camera provides an indispensible context to Burtynsky's works, as if making the scenes in the motionless photos flow and move in a more comprehensive and emotional way. The film informs us that fifty percent of used computers from the United States were dumped in the so-called e-waste towns in Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. As a consequence, Burtynsky's beautifully shot metal cubes and computer components no longer look that beautiful. Rather, they compel us to more serious thinking about industrialization and post-industrialization than what the photos could possibly offer as objects of art.

The film is, however, more than a context for Mr. Burtynsky's photos. Ms. Baichwal was attracted to the colorful lives of the people, and she instinctively sensed the layers and complexity beyond Mr. Burtynsky's frames. If people are no more than ornaments or stage settings for Mr. Burtynsky's camera, then Ms. Baichwal and her cinematographer, Peter Mettler, treat people as the center of the landscapes. In the Three Gorges Dam area, for example, they interviewed people paid to dismantle their own homes or hired to build the largest dam in the world—a dam that would force people out of their hometowns. They also interviewed those who are responsible for the dam but do not care about how the relocated people will fare in their lives afterward. These interviews are interesting and powerful, artistically and intellectually, for scholars as well as for film audiences. But what is incomprehensible, to me at least, is that these intriguing interviews are not translated into English, and thus the rich ethnographic inquiries embedded in the interviews are wasted. My guess is that Ms. Baichwal was afraid that too many interesting characters would distract the audience from Mr. Burtynsky, who is supposedly the focal point of the film. Probably out of the same concern, the poignant comparison of a rich businesswoman's luxurious villa with common people's old houses in dilapidated back alleys in the old city of Shanghai has to be left to the deleted scenes in the DVD version of the film. Despite the fact that these interviews and scenes are scattered, they show Ms. Baichwal's keen eye, insight, and concerns for ordinary people's lives, and it is this quality that makes us hope she will make another documentary on China as a sequel to Manufactured Landscapes.

For many, as for Mr. Burtynsky and the filmmakers of Manufactured Landscapes, the Three Gorges Dam project is a symbol of human interruption of nature on the path of fast and massive development that radically changes people's lives. The dam project amounts to the largest relocation ever in modern China. At least two million homes need to move by 2009, when the dam is supposed to be finished.Footnote ²Bing Ai and Up the Yangtze reflect from different angles on this unique experience of the people slated for relocation. Bing Ai is the least-known documentary of the seven films reviewed here. The film is named after the protagonist Zhang Bing'ai, one of millions of ordinary country women in China. Her village in Hubei province is in the area to be submerged. Director Feng Yan first filmed Bing'ai's daily life in 1996, when the relocation had just started. About 310 villagers moved, willingly or unwillingly, but Bing'ai was one of those who openly refused to move to a government-designated place. Six years later, in 2002, Ms. Yan visited her the second time. Bing'ai belonged to the ten percent of the residents who remained in the same area while the other ninety percent had accepted the government compensation and moved away. Bing'ai carefully studied the migration policies and continued her negotiation with town officials about land rights above the submerging line.

As Bing'ai's life story unfolds, however, we know that the film is not about her resistance to migration, not even about her resistance to her own “fate.” Bing and Ai are the two Chinese characters in the protagonist's given name, which literally means “carrying love.” Without fancy voiceover, Ms. Yan lets Bing'ai present herself: her trust in her farm as the only assurance of her livelihood; her love for her “little [fruit] trees,” a source of additional family income; her arranged marriage that worked out in a “marry-first-and-love-second” fashion; her physical and psychological torment because of her abortions; her determination to hold her family together even if that means begging for a living. The film starts with migration, but the rich and vivid details allow us to share her tears and laughter as well as understand what is behind her determination and what gives her strength. The film successfully depicts an ordinary woman who, despite poverty and hardship, asserts her humanity in her admirable persistence and perseverance. Ms. Yan's migration story makes us think more about the relations between modernization and the price humans have to pay for it, and the conflicts between state power and individual interests.

Up the Yangtze is a different story. Director Yung Chang intrudes into the film with a voiceover that interprets the documentary footage. Like the tourists in his film who come from the West to see the disappearing “old China” before the giant dam alters the spectacular landscape of the Three Gorges, Mr. Chang was also looking for his grandfather's old China. In the film, the Three Gorges Dam project symbolizes the process of modernization that China is going through and how people adapt to the rapid changes that take place around them. Although Mr. Chang wisely avoided talking about what “old China” was in his mind, his nostalgic tone at best reinforces a simplistic Western view of China's recent development. At worst, it might mislead the audience. For instance, the renowned New York Times film critic Stephen Holden mistakenly thinks of the film as “an astonishing documentary of culture clash and the erasure of history amid China's economic miracle.”Footnote ³ To a degree, Chang's personal comments in the film distract his audience from the richness of the individual stories in which a multilayered contemporary China has emerged. His comments also defy the complexity of the issues shown in the stories regarding development and modernization.

The individual stories, on which Mr. Chang focused his lens, are much more interesting and richer than his thoughts on them. The film follows two story lines: the Yu family facing relocation on the Yangtze in Sichuan province, and a cruise ship full of tourists from the West trying to catch the last glimpse of the splendor of the Three Gorges. The connection between the two lines is the daughter of the Yu family, sixteen years of age, who had to give up school in order to earn money as a dishwasher on a cruise ship.

The Yu family had a small hut without running water and electricity in the submerging area. Despite their hard work, the family barely eked out a living and did not earn enough to support the three children through their compulsory education. Like many Chinese, the Yus believed that education could provide a better future for their children. However, when the dam-triggered tourism boom brought job opportunities to the young people, they did what their fellow villagers all did and sent their oldest daughter Yu Shui to work on one of the cruise ships along the Yangtze. Her employment on the cruise ship not only changed the course of her own life but also possibly led Mr. Chang and his camera to this forgotten corner of the planet.

What astonishes us should not be China's sprint to modernization but the naked poverty that the Yus and other villagers have to endure every day amid the drive for ever bigger machinery, greater output, and higher skyscrapers. The poverty, displayed in both Up the Yangtze and Bing Ai, is now hidden behind a dazzling Shanghai (captured in Manufactured Landscapes) or Chongqing in Sichuan (shown in Up the Yangtze), a metropolis undergoing an explosive, glitzy expansion. In this context, building the dam is development that might improve the Yu family's living standard and perhaps put them on a par with those living in neon-lit cities of the developed world. The question here is whether China, as a late developer, has a choice other than to embrace development together with its inseparable global capitalism, commercialization, and mass consumer culture. An obvious response is not “whether,” but “how” to develop. Lamentation of the disappearing “old China” seems to be a “whether” answer.

The second issue Mr. Chang's story tackles is the impact of China's modernization on its young generation. As soon as she boarded the cruise ship, Yu Shui was given the English name Cindy. All of her young coworkers also had English names. Some chose their own names, like Jerry, nineteen years old, from one of many stops along the cruise line. Jerry had an unusual pride in his hometown, the tiny city of Fengdu, not because it boasts a thousand-year history and was built according to popular religious beliefs, but because when the old one is submerged, the new Fengdu, built on the opposite bank of the river, now bears some resemblance at night to a brightly lit metropolis. Yu Shui, the sixteen-year-old girl, was Jerry's coworker. Her first time away from home and “transformed” into Cindy, she also became a first-time wage earner and started to “learn to labor.” She was taught some rudimentary English sentences and tourist workers' etiquette, such as how to give every customer on board a smile that has to convey a sense of genuine happiness in her servitude, but not to the point that it comes across as fake. She also learned how to obey her bosses and follow the rules, to endure the monotony and fatigue from endless dirty dishes, and to get used to being treated as completely ignorant, since she was the most recent employee and from a poor family in a remote village—a tall order for an obstinate, forever-pouting, teenage country girl. It seems staged, but in the film, Jerry and Cindy arrived on the same ship the same day and went through the same orientation. Because of his good looks, his serviceable English, and experience as a city boy, Jerry had a chance to directly deal with customers, sometimes as a porter or sometimes a bartender, although in these scenes Jerry looked very much like he was performing for Mr. Chang's camera.

Making money is obviously the shared goal for Jerry, Cindy, and the other young workers. Jerry's dream is simple and practical compared with Cindy's. While Cindy said that she once dreamed of going to a university and becoming a scientist, Jerry claimed he just wanted to make pots of money. Soon enough, he found that the tips he received from tourists already gave him an income surpassing his parents'. He could not believe it when a lady gave him thirty dollars just for carrying her luggage. He bragged to Mr. Chang about how quickly he figured out who would be better tippers. “I do not help elderly even if they ask me to because they are poor (and therefore cheap tippers).” He called it his “discovery of how to handle the rich.” Jerry's self-congratulatory mood did not last long. After a three-month probation, during which he was reported by his customers for soliciting tips (which he denied), he was let go as “his performance is not up to the company standard.” The manager explained to Mr. Chang that Jerry belonged to the one-child-per-family generation and thus was spoiled and self-centered.

Cindy, however, survived. In the managers' eyes, she seemed more malleable and obedient than Jerry. Interestingly enough, though, Jerry thought he, not Cindy, was the one who was ready with the value, skills, and aggressiveness a capitalist labor market needs. Toward the end of the film when Cindy and her peasant parents took pictures together with tourists, she was not the country girl anymore: Her makeup, hairstyle, dress, posture, and even her smile were much more polished. Her goal was to leap from dishwashing to the front desk and, metaphorically, from peasant to cosmopolitan China, a process that could be a trap to girls like her. (We will discuss this topic later.)

Maybe Jerry's behavior somewhat proves Mr. Chang's point about the disappearance of “old China”: Under Mao's reign, no one would claim that making a lot of money was his dream; furthermore, under the even older Confucian tradition, respecting and helping the elderly were a categorical imperative for the young. But overall, the overarching dichotomy of the “old” and “new” China is a misfit. There is no doubt that Jerry's cruise experience further demonstrated to him the power of money. He probably also learned that the rich are not as easily handled as he thought. Inevitably, Jerry divided people into “rich” and “poor” and that division influenced his judgment (or, perhaps, misjudgment) about his own social status in relations with Western tourists and his fellow workers. In my view, the sharp class differences are much more poignant than the so-called culture clash in these stories, or at least the culture clash takes its roots deep within class divisions. The life stories that Mr. Chang's film tells us certainly exceed his conceptualization of them, which is very often counterproductive. Most disappointingly, he ends the film with a close-up of a rock mostly submerged in the muddy water; the portion of the rock that is above water is the shape of a shoe, and on it, a swarm of ants mills about a piece of a green string bean. In my view, the director makes an analogy between human life and ants' activities. This attempt at symbolism is, however, self-defeating: It unfortunately reduces all his previous humanizing efforts to a simplistic cynicism about mankind.

Among the seven documentaries reviewed in this article, Up the Yangtze is the one that mostly manipulates “individual facts, sequences and meanings of images,” as a recent study cautions us about the trend of making documentaries that may let the desire for social justice take precedence over the need to be accurate and fair.Footnote ⁴ I suggest that viewers pay attention to the interesting characters in the rich life stories more than to the drama Mr. Chang creates to fit his ideas. While Up the Yangtze makes a documentary look like a feature film, director Jia Zhangke makes his feature film, Still Life (not reviewed here), appear as a documentary in which the ideas are expressed more through images than dialogue and narrative.Footnote ⁵ Similar to the other three films on the Three Gorges Dam previously discussed, Still Life uses the dam project as a symbol of China's macro-scale development in the recent years. But through Jia's postmodern lens and his slow-paced plots against the rapid social changes, people in the movie (except the two fictitious protagonists) are also portrayed as “ants” for which the meaning of life is diminished to striving for basic survival. Unlike Bing Ai, neither Up the Yangtze nor Still Life reaches the depth of the inner world of its characters and depicts them as human agents, deserving of respect and understanding more than condescending sympathies.Footnote ⁶

In Losers and Winners, a German engineer from a coking plant also described Chinese workers as “ants”—suddenly found everywhere and “more and more keeping coming.” But this description, with no philosophical overtone, is merely the film's bitter start. The “ants” were four hundred Chinese engineers and workers dispatched to Dortmund, Germany, by a Chinese company that bought the coking plant and wanted to move it, piece by piece, to China. The German engineers and workers had thus lost their jobs in the plant. This seems a typical story of globalization: Operation and labor cost are behind job losses for workers in the West. But the film has also recorded a very recent phenomenon: Along with capital and jobs flowing to the Third World, a giant modern plant, along with its technology, was purchased and shipped from the West to China. This very telling example of globalization strives to raise concern in many Westerners that the West is on the verge of losing its centuries-long advanced position in the world. The concern is not totally unfounded. It is because this kind of purchase, very different from the way technologies were transported to developing countries in the past, brings China the most advanced technologies and accelerates its technological development at a remarkable speed.

The title of the film suggests a sense of crisis since we, the audience, thought we already knew who the losers and winners were. The directors, Ulrike Franke and Michael Loeken, did not let our presumption last long. Early in the film we no longer feel that confident about our answers, and, moreover, we can no longer think of globalization only in terms of winning and losing.

In the film, there were conflicts from the start that might be conveniently defined as “culture clashes.” A few German managers and engineers helping the transition resented almost everything the Chinese did: If they asked for help, they were too “pushy”; if they did it on their own, they violated rules and regulations; and if they worked at a fast pace, they neglected safety and quality. Understandably, the Germans felt invaded, if not violated, and considered it their responsibility to teach the intruders to do things the right way and to supervise them as they did so. The Chinese did not seem to resist the demands of their German counterparts, but they dismissed the necessity of German precision and clung to their own ways of doing things. The directors did not film intense confrontations, if there were any. Only one Chinese engineer who spoke fluent German was recorded saying to another German engineer that they were “fed up” with the German arrogance: “We're not stupid,” he said. Actually, the audience could sense through their interactions that the bitterness, pride, resentment, and condescension in the German colleagues' attitudes were more astutely noted by the Chinese than the spirit of the German rule-abiding culture, and the resentment on both sides was magnified because of the language barriers between the two groups.

Nevertheless, these anticipated culture clashes apparently are not the film's focus; rather, after a dramatic start, the focus shifts to the Chinese workers. These workers' daily lives were documented in minute detail for the rest of the film: the hardship and pressure they endured at work, the food they ate, the dorms they shared, the long-distance calls to their families, the gaiety of their New Year party, and the exciting moment when they finally got paid at the conclusion of the project. The film also explores what motivated them to work so hard and what they thought of Germany. Apparently, not even one interviewee considered himself or his country a winner. Working twelve hours a day and making only 400 euros a month, they were fully aware of the better working conditions their German colleagues enjoyed and why they found themselves treated as children of a lesser god. One worker admitted in the film that working in Germany gave him a chance to see the outside world. He did not think that China would catch up with Germany soon: “In a hundred years or more, it would be great if China reaches the level that Germany has now.” On the other hand, he was proud of the progress his country had made in the last few decades: “We now dare admitting that we are Chinese. Ten or twenty years ago, we didn't. We pretended we were Japanese.” Although he only speaks for himself, he shows how much Chinese self-perception has changed. What deserves special note is the way he connected his own fate to his nation's status in the world, especially when given a chance to directly interact with people from different countries. Personally, he did not think he would be ever able to reach the standard of living that a German worker had but only hoped that his child, with the money he made, would have a better education and brighter future.

Without giving any conclusion to these stories, the film offers new ways to view globalization. Globalization, no matter how controversial, has an impact on the lives of billions of people all over the world. People move across borders and move things with them. Transporting a gigantic industrial behemoth from Germany to China, like moving e-waste from America to China, puts globalization on display. To me, this is more about the causes than the results of globalization in the last thirty years.

As a latecomer, China spares no efforts in catching up with the West in economic and social development. Its hunger for technology and job opportunities facilitates the opening and expansion of its gargantuan market of cheap labor and voracious consumers and speeds up the exchanges between West and East on an unprecedented scale. These interactions, much more frequent than before, on the one hand, enable nations to know one another much better and, on the other hand, make more acute the distance between developed and underdeveloped countries. National identity and pride could be more stimulated by the sense that one nation is inferior to the other, generated under globalization. By making an effort to understand Chinese workers dismantling a German plant, Losers and Winners contributes to the possibility of dismantling cultural and language barriers that separate peoples, a task that might be the biggest legacy of globalization of our era.

China Blue and Mardi Gras share the same goal. They tell stories of Chinese migrant workers, mostly young girls, making products for Western consumers in two different factories. One factory makes blue jeans and the other churns out beads (specifically used for Mardi Gras in New Orleans). The films reflect upon a new wave of rural labor migration that has swept China since the economic reform started in the 1980s. Of the two hundred million or more migrants, many are young country girls who take the least-skilled jobs, mostly in assembly lines in cities. It is not necessarily that the females outnumber the male migrant workers, but the owners and managers of labor-intensive production, assembly lines, and service sectors all favor young girls as employees for their anticipated gendered qualities: pliability, vulnerability, dexterity, and meticulousness. In addition, these young girls often receive the lowest wages among migrant workers. One European manager in A Decent Factory, reviewed below, referred to them as “irreplaceable” and “low maintenance.” Their experience thus represents the most exploitative and oppressive labor conditions that Chinese migrant workers can possibly encounter and makes them the focus of scholars, activists, and documentary makers.

Like Cindy in Up the Yangtze, these first-time wage earners were also “learning to labor” in an “alien” environment. The very first lesson of learning to labor for them is about obeying business owners, supervisors, and factory rules. The harsh labor conditions, recounted in many academic studies and visualized in both films, are quite stunning.Footnote ⁷ Their low wages are already notorious, but even worse is the temporal, physical, and mental confinement in which these novice industrial workers find themselves. It stands in contrast to the “freedom” they often claimed to seek in the interviews in the films.

They are locked in factory compounds, stuck at assembly lines or various machines for over ten hours a day, called up for overtime to beat deadlines, limited by time in their use of the restroom, watched under surveillance cameras, and crammed into small cells while not working. On her first day at the factory, Jasmine, a sixteen-year-old girl in China Blue, was told that she must follow the company rules and obey her supervisors. If one violated stipulations, even the least serious ones such as forgetting one's ID card, he or she would be severely fined. In the Tai Kuen Bead Factory, for instance, workers would be fined one day's pay from their meager wages for talking during shifts. Firing is another control method. The owner of Lifeng, the jeans manufacturer, said that “we fire those if we think they are useless.” Jasmine understood the meaning of being useless: “You will be fired if you are slow.” A poster was seen on the wall in Lifeng: “If you do not work hard on the job today, you will look hard for a job tomorrow.” An oversupplied labor market is obviously a blissful situation for business owners. Having no skills and no well-connected family members, factory girls are the most vulnerable workers and the most easily controlled (at least in the minds of business owners). Although “irreplaceable” as a labor category, they individually are as replaceable as a screwdriver. For workers, learning to labor is always more than learning a skill—it is learning to have their bodies and minds conditioned in particular ways.

These factory girls come to make money despite the hardship. Interestingly, they like to claim that they have no choice but to work under such harsh conditions for extremely low pay.Footnote ⁸ Both films have generously used these girls' own narratives to explain how they thought of their own lives and future. Jasmine spoke for most of them when she said, “I think I should come here to work.” Indeed, many said that they were excited about “leaving home” for employment in cities. A common motivation is “I do not want to live my life like my mom.” Where Cindy dreamed of becoming a scientist, Jasmine hoped to be a writer and kept a diary of her experiences. Becoming an actress, a doctor, or a small-business owner was the desire for other girls interviewed in the films. No one envisioned a future of returning to a peasant life even though most of these young girls actually did not learn about or physically engage in farming before they became migrant workers in cities.Footnote ⁹ Instead, by leaving home for cities and finding wage-earning jobs, many of them, consciously or unconsciously, view the trip as the starting point of changing the trajectory of their fate.Footnote ¹⁰ Jasmine believed what she was told: “We will have a lot of opportunities in the new era.” This conviction marks a difference from migrant workers in the beginning of the twentieth century, when China embarked on its early attempt at industrialization, which has been insightfully studied by Emily Honig.Footnote ¹¹

The difference is that the peasant girls today have more or less some education, which their counterparts three or four generations ago lacked completely. This difference is shown in the different actions and reactions they may take toward their factory life from their counterparts in the early twentieth century. To insert their agency, the factory girls from all the generations stage shop-floor skirmishes and work stoppages, which are often difficult to document due to the obstruction from both the government and factory management (though China Blue has preciously recorded one collective protest leading to wage raises). But the younger generation seems more aware of despotism and dares to voice their resentment to the cameras of China Blue and Mardi Gras. In Jasmine's dairy, she created a wonderland for herself in which she fought the bad people with magic power. On the other hand, their schooling (even though brief) and literacy make them more influenced by mainstream discourse and more likely to embrace the mainstream values that mold their desires and give them hope.

Do the girls see themselves as trapped in a dull, dead-end job? Either forced to halt their education because of poverty or stymied by the murderous college entrance exam, the girls are rendered powerless in fulfilling their dreams. Choosing to come to cities is not really a choice of free will. Rather, they have no choice but to take the least skilled, physically demanding jobs, and still have to constantly worry about losing them. The only positive thing about their jobs is that they are able to make some money to repay their parents and to save a little for their own dowries. But the trap is not just their jobs; consumer culture preys on them in a more ruthless way, especially considering their very limited purchasing power.Footnote ¹²

The girls' narratives in the two films revealed the cruel reality they encounter and their complex feelings about it. They want to escape their fate as country girls, but they cannot sever the emotional attachment to their parents and hometowns. They suffer unbearable loneliness in cities, but they do not want to face rural poverty and futureless idleness. They are attracted to urban glamour but are nostalgic for the tranquil beauty of life in the country, at least in their recollection. They might have changed their appearance by following the fashion through a variety of channels as Cindy had in Up the Yangtze, but the prosperity and freedom—which stand for modernity in their minds—reject them, although in reality modernity has incorporated them as cannon fodder, with no share of the glory of victory in the end.

Hairong Yan discusses how consumption and production form a particular pair of contradictions in the process of women's migration.Footnote ¹³ Her excellent ethnography and incisive analysis point us to the “pedagogical” nature of migration; that is, employers believe it is their duty to “teach” young workers how to be adequate human beings in the modern era. For Mr. Lam, the ex-police chief and owner of Lifeng Company (China Blue), Mr. Roger Wong, the owner of Tai Kuen Beads Factory (Mardi Gras), and the personnel manager on the cruise (Up the Yangtze), “adequate human beings” are really perfect slaves of our era, smart, skillful, obedient, never demanding a raise. In this context, managers consider punishment a good, necessary learning experience for the girls. In Tai Kuen, if one argued with his or her boss, a fine as high as 300 RMB (about $40) could be handed down, and considering that the monthly salary for many of them was between 300 and 400 RMB, the punishment would really drive home whatever lesson it was intended to teach. Many companies drill workers like soldiers and expect absolute, and willing, obedience in return. Only in the sense of training the girls (and boys) to become “capable” labor for the modern era could managers ever include young workers in the modernity discourse.

This hegemony is even more outrageous when extended to speaking about how workers feel. Mr. Wong insisted that his factory girls “were very happy” and “never bored” because they were making money, having fun, and leading a better life than the one they left behind. Mr. Wong was not camera-shy about how much he profited from his workers. He showed off his luxurious family house to the audience with such pride that one almost felt he believed the film crew must have shared his values: After all, he was doing in China what the crew's capitalist motherland promoted and celebrated worldwide, the glory of capitalism and the individual right to pursue happiness at the expense of the masses. Since most of the managers were very much wary of the camera, we may conclude that Mr. Wong, unlike some other business owners and managers, indeed did not see anything wrong with squeezing all the juices from his workers' surplus labor. Mr. Wong's American client said, “If I do not make money from this business, others will.” Mardi Gras also tries to stir consumers' conscience. The director interviewed several individual buyers in New Orleans and told them that a chain of beads could equal three days' pay of the Chinese girls, who made them by exposing themselves to styrene, a cancer-causing chemical. One of the buyers said he did not care because he worked hard to earn money at his own job to pay for his vacation.

All these justifications tell us that individual conscience, although necessary, is no match for unbridled capitalism. A final documentary, A Decent Factory, proves the same point. The film begins with three naked men, all top Nokia executives, diving into a river at a beautiful resort during the company's summer seminar to assess supplier ethics. This unusual beginning could make any cynical watchers suspicious that the film was a commercial promotion for Nokia, a world leader of the mobile phone industry, as well as a showcase for its egocentric managers. The scene is quickly followed by a management meeting of about twenty Nokia decision makers who then sent two women to one of its suppliers, a German factory making Nokia's phone chargers in China, to examine whether the factory abides by the law and other ethical codes. The French director, Mr. Thomas Balmès, traveled to the site in Shenzhen with the two women, Ms. Hanna Kaskinen, a Finnish consultant of the company, and Ms. Louise Jamison, hired from a British watchdog firm specializing in corporate ethics. This team itself shows that a healthier capitalism is now an international concern.

It is indeed a film about Nokia. Both a European broadcasting company and Nokia wanted to document Nokia's effort to balance profit making and social responsibility, and Mr. Balmès was chosen to make a film about it. Mr. Balmès wasted no time for this precious opportunity that allowed him access inside a factory. While filming the whole auditing process, he captured some vivid production details on assembly lines, which demonstrated what “labor intensive” really means, despite the good working conditions that the German owner took pains to create.

More interesting to me are the subtle interactions between the Nokia team and the factory managers. From the beginning, this is obviously a cat-and-mouse game, and there is nothing really subtle about it. The team was inspecting labor conditions to find out if the factory had observed labor laws, such as minimum wages, working hours, underage workers, and regulations regarding health hazards. The management had raised the wages for workers on the Nokia production line two weeks before the team's arrival. When asked about minimum wages, the Chinese managers in the company, like students cramming for exams, played the card of “overtime pay” to meet the criteria. When asked about working hours per week, the managers again deliberately gave vague answers. When asked to arrange interviews with workers, the managers arranged them in the management office instead of in a neutral place such as the canteen and wanted to attend the meeting.

Knowing that there were always two different records in Chinese companies, for internal use and external examination, the two women in the auditing team played detectives to expose the truth behind the tricks. It also looked like a gender battle: While all the members of the auditing team were women as were most of the workers in the factory, the managers, European and Chinese, were men. Two parties often sat across from each other at the conference table, representing two seemingly incompatible interests—moral obligations and profit-making.

Nevertheless, the way that Mr. Balmès put the materials together does not give us a story in which moral obligations triumph over economic ambitions, even though the auditing team accomplished the task. The subtleties embedded in the exchanges between the two sides reveal the true power relations in this cat-and-mouse game. Two European managers in the film were from the German company's high echelon. One was very wary of the film and repeatedly said that he hoped the documentary was only for Nokia's internal record. The other did accompany the team to the shop floor. On their way, he did a brief introduction on production processes for the inspectors. He wore a disparaging smile, however, and could hardly conceal his contempt for concepts such as a company's social obligations. Obviously, if the team was not sent by Nokia, one of his important buyers, he would not have allowed the inspection since his primary concern was profits by employing as cheaply as possible young women who were, in his own words, “irreplaceable” and “low maintenance.”

The auditing women seemed to sense the unspoken and navigated carefully with amazing tactics, using the managers' own profit-making rationale. When one of the two European managers doubted whether the Nokia executives truly cared about ethics, Ms. Kaskinen tried to persuade him in the same way she did with her Nokia management that, even though the cost of observing labor laws and ethics codes might be higher, the total price would be lower than the possible losses due to a media war and customer protests against Nokia. Ms. Kaskinen and Ms. Jamison also generously praised the manager as being “honest” for his confession that the company did not sign a single labor contract with its employees. The nationalities and race of the two female leaders also play some role in the power relations. The Chinese managers were dispatched to cover up any possible violations. Although these Chinese male managers did not buy the importance of corporate social responsibility—just the same as their German bosses—they went out of their way to accommodate the two female team leaders but did not assume the same attitude to the two Chinese female assistants in the team.

The whole globalizing world seems to revolve around a get-rich-quick dream, even, or especially, at the expense of others. However, Ms. Kaskinen, Ms. Jamison, and many others have challenged the reigning free-market ideology and made incredible progress in raising our consciousness of the cruel exploitation of the weak and poor worldwide. Media exposure and public outcries do place pressure on business decisions and curb sprawling, ruthless capitalism globally.

Mr. Balmès's film also tells us that there is a long way to go. At the end of the film, we are told that Ms. Kaskinen felt tired of fighting windmills all by herself like Don Quixote and had decided to embark on a new career as a nurse in developing countries. The defeated Kaskinen once again shows the limitation of individual efforts when confronting a well-structured system. Despite Nokia executives' best intentions to make the world a better place, social responsibility can be easily compromised if a cost increase poses a threat to a company's profit making. More importantly, the power structure of the world remains the same. Mostly, those who are associated with large corporations, regardless of their nationality or gender, are the powerful players in the arena. In A Decent Factory, the fact that the two team leaders are white and from Europe adds weight to the two women's commanding positions while interacting with the Chinese managers. Nevertheless, if they had not been sent by Nokia, they would not have been effective in the observation of codes of ethics in the factory and might not even have been permitted to enter the factory.

However, transnational corporations' support for ethics is not guaranteed. The dilemma is that corporations and their executives operate in the marketplace where cutthroat competition, not social responsibility, decides who will survive. Even the owner of a small factory, Mr. Lam (China Blue), admitted that in order to compete against many jeans makers in the area, the only way he could beat delivery deadlines was to push his workers to work long hours in total disregard of their physical well-being. What we have to ask is why he believes that the survival of his business is more important than his workers' health. His possible answers would be 1) the same as the American retailer of the beads in Mardi Gras: If I don't do it, somebody else will, 2) What is at stake is not just his profits but also workers' jobs, or 3) I too work hard to pay for my vacation.

The second answer seems a better defense, but either way the workers are sacrificed. In conclusion, capitalism travels over the world today with the ideas that individuals are responsible only for their own survival. The privilege and comfort money brings to the rich drag many into competition and teach them to perceive the reality as a new kind of Darwinian zero-sum game—survival or extinction, this is not a question. The mass production and consumer culture, the products of capitalism, also create an illusion for people to believe that the privilege and comfort belong to anyone as long as he or she works hard enough.

All seven documentaries focus on the influence of global capitalism in China. The filmmakers take the audience to many workplaces, from Bing'ai's farm to a Yangtze River cruise ship, from assembly lines in Chinese coast cities to a plant-disassembly site in Germany. They all give the viewers some sort of visual shock, whether in sweatshops, “a decent factory,” or an e-waste dump. Of course, no visual shock is more symbolic than the disappearance of a giant coking plant moving to China. As they appropriate the entire plant, they have also swallowed whole Western capitalism in its most Dickensian form. In the process, the films tell us about the lingering poverty, social injustice, and unbalanced power relations between classes that are too lethal and volatile to ignore. The films also help us understand people and their struggles against an overwhelming force that produces and reproduces money and power from them, through them, and often at their expense.

If modernization is the only path for Chinese people to survive, is it possible for them to learn the lessons from the West and find a better way to reduce the human cost to a minimum? Of course it is possible theoretically, but the reality is both the government and people are not fully equipped, in terms of knowledge, training, and political structure, to do as well as some in the West would hope, even if they were completely free to do it. Should they wait until all ideal conditions are met before embarking on development, or should they try to build the conditions while developing? Even if this were a real question, the answer would be too obvious to even bother enunciating.

Among the directors of the seven documentaries, only the director of Bing Ai is a native Chinese.Footnote ¹⁴ Although knowing the Chinese language and culture indeed gives Ms. Feng Yan many advantages, the films made by non-Chinese directors prove that not knowing the language and culture does not prevent directors with insights from catching complexity and nuance in the reality. On the contrary, a fresh pair of eyes may allow the possibility for a director with a different cultural and social background to grasp meanings from ordinary events that are often taken for granted by the natives. The caveat, equally for both Chinese and non-Chinese directors, is to avoid a condescending gaze since, after all, most people they film are in disadvantaged positions in society. Otherwise, even if a director is a native Chinese, such as Mr. Jia Zhangke, who knows both the language and culture but basically shoots his films with particular types of Western audiences in mind, he or she could not really enter the world of their subjects and understand them with depth.

In order to remain as objective as they can, one of the efforts that most of the directors have made is not to have a narrator or even let their audience hear the interview questions in the films. Instead they let the people's own words and actions dictate the narratives to avoid being either condescending to their subjects or romanticizing the people's lives that are so different from their own. The relationship between the directors from the West and the Chinese they film can be a test for the effectiveness of dismantling cultural barriers. Although making no explicit comments or conclusions, the filmmakers' sympathy, criticism, and humane concerns are apparent. Their efforts also testify to the extent and intensity of the moral battles that many intellectuals and activists are fighting around the world. Many interesting debates can be engendered from the films' stories. Together the films provide an ample educational resource for students of globalization, modernization, migrant labor, gender, and other related issues in classrooms or elsewhere.