Thanks to contributions from Dan Hassan, Ned Rossiter and Brett Neilson
The event Rethinking Regionalism from the View of Social Mobilities was organised as an occasion to re-imagine and discuss the configuration of regional formations and borders, particularly Asia and China, through the lens of social and cultural movements and transmutations. This required a shift away from discourses oriented around the nation-state, in order to evoke the constitutive interplay of subjectivities, governance and geopolitical assemblages through which regions and border zones are produced and enforced. The event facilitated three interlocking segments: two visits to labour sites in which these interplays are being articulated, and a final symposium at which these considerations could be reflected upon in light of the participant’s own contexts and research. What follows are some of our thoughts and impressions of those site visits.
The first component of the event took place on the 24th June, at the Shanghai Meadville Electronics Co., Ltd. (SME), located in Songjiang Industrial Zone of Shanghai. This is a production site for rigid flex, HDI-1 and HDI-2 PCBs (printed circuit boards) required by high-end communications equipment and consumer electronics. We were met on arrival by the general manager and customer service representatives, who introduced us to the site with a portfolio presentation including company history, product design and construction, supply chains, profit margins, as well as environmental standards of measurement and production.
Of interest were the logistical and geographical interstices the company was engaged in, both in terms of technology and labour. The PCBs manufactured at SME are fed into from, and feed into, an assembly and supply chain articulated through multiple locations predominantly across mainland China, Hong Kong and Japan, but also Europe with respect to machinery used in the plant (notably Italy and Germany, though also Japan). SME service OEMs (original equipment manufacture) including Pioneer, Ericsson, NEC, Fujitsu, Apple, Alcatel, Sanjo, Canon, Foxconn and others for the production of mobile phones, PDAs, notebooks and digital cameras.
The presentation included copies of certificates that indicated the company’s adherence to both industry and client determined environmental protocols in the production process. These included general standards such as ISO14001, a grouping of international standards for environment management systems with the objective to 'promote more effective and efficient environmental management in organizations and to provide useful and usable tools - ones that are cost effective, system-based, flexible and reflect the best organizations and the best organizational practices available for gathering, interpreting and communicating environmentally relevant information'; the RoHS (Restriction of Hazardous Substances Directive), which aims to limit the use of six hazardous materials in electronic and electrical equipment production; and the related WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive), which legislatively seeks to counter the production of toxic e-waste through the implementation of targets for electronic collection, recycling and recovery. The representative also explained that specific client standards are introduced into the contractual agreement of production. Apart from indicating a multiplicity of industry and individual regulatory mechanisms, these standards seemed to be an important mechanism for creating value up the supply chain.
SME recently merged with the North American TTM Technologies ‘a leading independent supplier of time-critical, technologically advanced printed circuit boards and backplane assemblies’. Around 1850 workers are employed, who are primarily engaged in quality control and machine operation. Each operator is trained for 3 months, and is allowed to operate machinery after 1 month. This training is specific to each job and over 300 employees have been doing the same work process task since the company’s inception in 1997. The employees also live on-site and officially work 40 hours a week, although they often do paid overtime.
During lunch at the company canteen we were allowed to speak to several white-collar employees, handpicked by the company for the event. We were told prior to the visit that we were not allowed to ask about wages as workers had signed privacy agreements. A higher education degree was common to many, and most workers at lunch were also relatively young. Of the three that the group I was in spoke to, one woman and two men (from neighbouring provinces Anhui and Jiangsu), two did not express any immediate interest in moving away from the company, while one said that this was not the work he hoped to be doing long term. All three expressed a lack of criticism. When asked of their opinions on the recent suicides at Foxconn, one of the males confessed that while they did not discuss it during working hours, it was a topic of conversation in the dormitories. We were also interested in the social permutations of their labour, and discovered that workers had organised a union, which, though, was more geared to social networking than labour disputes. When asked if they were at all concerned by workplace issues, the workers responded that they could not recall any instance of collective dissatisfaction, but also expressed a reluctance to discuss controversial issues.
We were later escorted on a select viewing of the plant around some of the manufacturing stages and zones, in which employees were housed behind massive glass windows; the pathway we were led on was contained and relatively brief. What struck us most was the dense air quality pungent with chemical odours and the persistent noise floor emitted by the machinery. Photographs were prohibited and there was no real way to document the processes of controlling, printing, cutting, laminating, drilling, stacking, washing, etching, deburring the sheets of PCB. When we asked the manager why one of the rooms had plants in it, he responded that the colour of the plants allowed the eyes to rest so as to encourage more productivity. This somehow triggered a recollection of the employee merit system pasted to the canteen wall, from which employee faces smiled out in dated and named rows. Such imagery was further reproduced in the corridors of the factory floors, where cardboard posters hung from the ceiling with pictures of workers and their statements as a way to commemorate their ten years of service.
A comment was made that it felt like the forms of control we were exposed to were soft –- if you give people sporting facilities, they work harder, if you give them company dances and a social culture, they work harder, if you practice peer to peer review, they work harder, if you let people determine their own toilet breaks, they work harder. If you give them conditional pay raises, they work harder. ‘Why should we get paid more if we aren’t working more?’, asked the young woman at lunch. No one we spoke to or peered at through the windows of the factory looked fraught, they didn’t look happy, but they didn’t look extinguished. Whether this was a reflection of the wider labour conditions of the specific site, or more of the particular routes we taken on and the narratives we were privy to, was not clear.
The fieldtrip on the 25th June was to two second hand and shanzhai (Chinese faked, pirated and amalgamated brands and goods - often electronics) markets, the Baoshan Lu. Electronics Market and Modern Electronic City at Fuxing Lu. Our inclusion of these sites stemmed from an inquiry into the differential trajectories of e-waste and logistics in the production, reuse, recycling and decay of electronic commodities. From PCBs to what Ned describes as ‘the lovely smooth surfaces coated in buffed plastics or complex metal composites’, second hand markets like Baoshan and Modern Electronic index the social life of decommisioned objects that reside outside typical commodity value. Here, informal economies trade rogue mimicries and shanzhai Frankensteins, excess electric consumerables, and the detritus of office over-accumulation.
These markets illustrate a diverse and proliferating formation of regions, not only through the goods being circulated, but the patterns of migration and mobility underpinning the, often informal, labour force. This was apparent even between the two sites themselves. On a previous visit a notable variation in the providence of the market sellers was ascertained. The workers collected at Baoshan followed more heterodox migratory routes from Suzhou, Nanjing, Henan, Jiangxi and Anhui. At Modern Electronic City, however, many came from Guangdong. The presence of these different regions also worked on the micro level of the stall spaces, the sharing of which was not necessarily predicated on kinship, social, geopolitical or geocultural networks; we could only speculate that this sharing was conditioned by other economic and social factors.
The visit undertaken in the frame of the Rethinking Regionalism event yielded a contrasting set of circumstances. Because of the weather, the composition of the Baoshan Market was considerably different to previous visits; the outside conglomeration of stalls, auctions and copper strippers had disassembled and become invisible, moving indoors or offsite. Being a weekday rather than weekend meant that both sites were considerably empty. The presence of Western academic tourists accompanied by local translators did not go unnoticed, and over the course of a few hours it became considerably difficult to engage sellers in conversation (Ned: no matter that many purchased techno-junk at gullible prices). A marked clandestine air also surrounded the location of the electronic waste strippers, and when asked as to their whereabouts we were met with a suitably tetchy resistance.
We were told by local Shanghainese that Baoshan Market is perceived to be populated by ‘lower class people’, which contrasted with the Modern Electronic City, located in the former French Concession district. Set up over three floors, the Modern Electronic site offers much of the same in the way of commodities and perhaps ambiance, but with what we saw as a divergent logistical ecology; from the less immediate stacks of products, to the hidden construction and management of hybridised electronics and e-waste, to the marble floors, it was clear that Modern Electronic City expected to cater to another category of consumer. The presence of POS terminals to introduce credit and debit based modes of transaction at some of the stalls, along with more first-hand globally branded hi-tech commodities such as iPads (which were also at Baoshan, though harder to find), signalled the prevalence of this consumer demographic. These minor signifiers, that were at first glance neither obvious nor distinctive, may have done little to express these divergences. As one participant noted on entry to the site, Modern Electronic City ‘looks the same as Baoshan’. The regions that are formed through the constellations of sellers suggest far more complex passages, as do the electronic goods and components they sell, transform and buy.
In reflection and discussion on the two field visits, a participant remarked that he saw the flow of circuitry from factory, through consumer hands and differential trade and border mobilities, as underlying an industry of creative innovations and re-imaginings of trash to treasure and treasure to trash. He suggested that where consumer demand upon the OEMs has resulted in increased certification, lending an affective ethical security to the purchase of the commodity, consumer demand at the level of the electronics markets manifests forms of creative and technical labour in the work of repairs, innovative assemblage and recombination.
During the final symposium another participant questioned whether looking at e-waste and IT factories should be recognised as primary production in this context, as opposed to identifying them with immaterial labour. Rather than reducing the modes of production seen at these sites into dyadic systems, what seems more interesting are explorations of the intersections and concatenations of material and immaterial production processes in such industries. This does not negate the possibilities for an analytic separation but at the same time concentrates on the porosities between differential regimes. These are sites where bodies and brains interfuse in the transformation of commodity culture. When considering the kinds of social and labour mobilities found at the two sites visited through Rethinking Regionalism, such an analogy can be extended even further to include not only the processes of manufacture and exchange, but also the social and cultural networks and formations involved, and how they transverse over and constitute macro- and micro- geopolitical terrains and regions.
Here is an excerpt from Brett Neilson's presentation opening the seminar:
