張彤禾：中國工人的聲音TED演講詞(英文完整版)

1、Hi.So Id like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones. Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt. Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running

2、shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves. After all, whats wrong with a world in

3、which a worker on an iPhone assembly line cant even afford to buy one? Its taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that its our desire for cheap goods that makes them so. So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time w

4、hen many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but its also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. In fact, Chi

5、na makes good for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the in

6、dividuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In t

7、he ongoing debate about globalization, whats been missing is the voices of the workers themselves. Here are a few. Bao Yongxiu:” My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so Im not in a rush.” Chen

8、Ying:” when I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much? I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more, they wont understand anyway.” Wu Chunming:”Even if I make a lot of money, it wont satisfy me. Just t

9、o make money is not enough meaning in life.” Xiao Jin:” Now, after I get off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers wont be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages.” All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old. So I spent two years getting to kno

10、w assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan. Certain subjects came up over and over: how much money they made, what kind of husband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never, in

11、cluding living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10or 15 workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and night ruled by the factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China. The

12、 workers rarely spoke about the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did. When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, what exactly she did on the factory floor. She said something to me in Chinese that sounds like “qiu xi”. Only much l

13、ater did I realize that she had been saying “QC”,or quality control. She couldnt even tell me what she did on the factory floor. All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she didnt even understand. Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker f

14、rom the product of his labor. Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets, the worker in an industrial factory has no control, no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work. But like so many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the British M

15、useum, he got this one wrong. Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that, a piece of something. What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things that matter. What a factory m

16、akes is never the point, and the workers could not care less who buys their products. Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make. Many articles calculate: How long would it take for this worker in order to

17、earn enough money to buy what hes making? For example, an entry-level line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months wages for an iPhone. But how meaningful is this calculation, really? For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker ma

18、gazine, but I cant afford to buy an ad in it. But, who cares? I dont want an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers dont really want iPhones. Their caculations are different. How long should I stay in this factory? How much money can I save? How much will it take to buy an apartment or a ca

19、r, to get married, or to put my child through school? The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor. About a year I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me to her family village for the Chinese New Year. On the train home, sha gave me a present: a Coa

20、ch brand change purse with brown leather trim. I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan. After we got home, Min gave her mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac

21、 shoulder bag. Slowly it downing on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic. Mins sister aid to her parents, “ In America , this bag sells for 320 dollars.” Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless. “And thats not all Coach is com

22、ing out with a new line, 2191,” she said.” One bag will sell for 6,000.” She paused and said,” I dont know if thats 6,000 yuan or 6,000 American dollars, but anyway, its 6,000.” Mins sisters boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year, said. “It doesnt look like its worth that much.”

23、Mins sister turned to him and said,” some people actually understand there things. You dont understand shit.” In Mins word, the Coach bags had a curious currency. They wont exactly worthless, but they were nothing close to the value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one, or knew how muc

24、h it was worth. Once, when Mins older sisters friend got married, she brought a hand bag along as a wedding present. Another time, after Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit, bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts. I looked in the zippered pocket of one,

25、 and I found a printed card in English, which read, “An American classic. In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbag from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Sign

26、ature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born." I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Min and her sisters. Their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated,

27、 surprising and funny than he could have imagined. And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they're really thinking. The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly li

28、ne of an electronics factory. Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times, eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory. Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved

29、enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. She recently returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village. In a recent email to me, she explained, "

30、;A person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose." Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels

31、, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities. Together, they make up the largest migration in history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has cha

32、nged the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be. When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers. I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them

33、, or that they would have nothing to say to me. Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous. By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about factories and about China and about how to live in the world. This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the tr

34、ain home to visit her family. I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women I wrote about, ties that are not economic but personal in nature, measured not in money but in memories. This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine, sitting in your office or i

35、n the library, are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world.Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haven't had before. But I'm curious. If you had a minute, say, with Apple's head of manufacturing, what

36、 would you say?Leslie Chang: One minute?CA: One minute. (Laughter)LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much they're self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me, what they want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very p

37、oor backgrounds. They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade. Their parents are often illiterate, and then they come to the city, and they, on their own, at night, during the weekends, they'll take a computer class, they'll take an English class, and learn really, really rudi

38、mentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple things in English. So, if you really want to help these workers, start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes in these schools, and what's going to happen is, all your workers are going to move

39、on, but hopefully they'll move on into higher jobs within Apple, and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement. When you talk to workers, that's what they want. They do not say, "I want better hot water in the showers. I want a nicer room. I want a TV set." I mean, it would be nice to have those things, b