A path to modernization: A review of documentaries on migration and migrant labor in China

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 77, Issue 1, 2010, Pages 174-189

  Zhang, Xiaodan ^a  

^a CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951613877     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0147547909990317     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (17)

1. The author would like to thank book review editor Kate Brown, two anonymous reviewers, and Professors Renqui Yu and Fang Dai for their invaluable comments and suggestions. Many thanks also go to Andrea Estepa for finding the copies or Web links of the reviewed films.
2. The full operation of the dam is now expected in 2011.
3. Stephen Holden, "AVisit to Old China, Before It Drowns," New York Times, April 25, 2008.
4. Michael Cieply, "At Toronto Film Festival, Cautions on Documentaries," New York Times, September 14, 2009.
5. For more on Still Life, see Manohla Dargis, "Those Days of Doom on the Yangtze," New York Times, January 18, 2009.
6. Thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for suggesting the comparison.
7. See Ching Kwan Lee, Gender and the South China Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women (Berkeley, 1998);
8. Anita Chan, China's Workers Under Assault (Armonk, NY, 2001);
9. Ngai Pan, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC, 2005);
10. and Hairong Yan, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (Durham, NC, 2008).
11. Lee convincingly elucidates the complex calculations and motivations for these factory girls in Gender and the South China Miracle, 73.
12. See Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls (New York, 2008).
13. Also see Chang, Factory Girls.
14. Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 (Stanford, CA, 1986).
15. As Pan puts it, industrial capitalism manipulates the dream of the Chinese peasantry to be both industrial producers and modern consumers. Made in China, 13-14.
16. Yan, New Masters, New Servants, viii.
17. This does not mean there are very few Chinese directors and producers making documentaries. Instead, many interesting titles can be found in the Internet. According to the synopses, a few of them are about the living conditions of migrant labor and laid-off workers from bankrupted state-owned enterprises. I did some investigation and was told that most of them lack formal distribution channels and thus are not available for the public in both China and the West.