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The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

2014-04-26 09:19

By Cai Muyuan (China Daily Europe)

The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

Foxconn workers on the sports field inside the factory complex. Zou Zhongpin / China Daily

Five years after Time magazine named the Chinese worker runner-up in its annual Person of the Year award, China Daily reporters takes readers inside Foxconn and behind closed doors of businesses across the nation, for a glimpse into the lives of the ordinary people driving the world's second-largest economy.

And the latest figures from China's National Bureau of Statistics show those lives are changing dramatically.

Nothing gleams in building E5, an open hangar-like space with concrete floors. This is not one of the massive production lines where workers assemble shiny finished products for Apple, HP, Nokia, IBM, Samsung, Amazon, Sony and Dell.

Much of the work here is done with tools, by hand. Suggested in the shapes of casts and molds is the secretive anatomy of the world's smart phones and tablets.

The dream and reality for young Chinese workers

Li Guizhen, 32, watches over a row of silent women in pink jackets. They delicately pick at components with tiny implements.

Like the vast majority of Foxconn employees, Li is a migrant worker, one of almost 269 million men and women in China who have left their hometown temporarily or permanently to work in the nation's cities and manufacturing centers.

A devout Muslim and father of two, Li is about 3,000 kilometers from the farm in Xinjiang where he grew up. Beyond geography, the distance can be measured in years and money and lifestyle, a journey from poverty to the doorstep of China's burgeoning middle class.

"When I was a little kid my father was a farmer and we were very poor," Li says. Now, as a manager in the mold-making production area, he earns more in two months than his father made in an entire year as a farmer.

The dream and reality for young Chinese workers The dream and reality for young Chinese workers The dream and reality for young Chinese workers
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