Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013. xii, 290 pp. (Tables, figures.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8047-8454-2.
In recent years there has been steady growth in the literature on global supply chains and labour in China. In Chinese Labor in a Korean Factory, Jaesok Kim adds to this scholarship with an ethnography that is sensitive to managerial strategy, ethnicity, and local embeddedness. Focusing on a Korean-owned garment manufacturer in Qingdao, the author explores the ways in which the organization of production is shaped by the interaction of both global and highly localized forces. With excellent access both on the shop floor and among management, the result is a nuanced account of how one company responds to social and economic vicissitudes spanning from the mid-1990s up until the recent past.
The first two chapters of the book describe the spatial and ethnic organization of the firm. Indeed, the spatial organization of housing serves to reinforce ethnic difference and hierarchy. While all employees live on factory premises, the Korean expatriate managers live in secluded and spacious private houses with their families. The Korean-Chinese and Han-Chinese employees live in dormitories. But the former enjoy more space (fewer roommates) and the relative luxuries of access to hot water, heat, and electricity.
One consequence of these ethnically stratified working and living arrangements is that the Han-Chinese workers frequently suffered from body odor. Kim explains the reason for this, namely that the workers toiled in an environment without air conditioning, and did not have access to hot water for showering. Nonetheless, this olfactory marker came to be a key point of ethnic distinction, as both the Korean-Chinese and Korean managers in the firm attributed it to the cultural deficiency of unhygienic practices among Chinese peasant workers.
Kim argues that the company’s use of Korean-Chinese employees as interpreters and mid-level managers “overturned the dominant ethnic power relationship of China” (70). Indeed, Korean-Chinese employees found that their ethnicity came to be an important asset. Since the Korean expatriate managers had come to depend on them for much of the business operations, the Korean-Chinese enjoyed not only better living conditions and higher wages, but also higher social status within the firm. One consequence of this was a newfound sense of ethnic pride for people that had grown up as part of a minority in a Han-dominated society.
One of the most interesting parts of the book is the company’s evolving strategy of “localization.” When the plant first opened in the mid-1990s, nearly all managerial positions were held by Korean nationals, as locals were seen as untrustworthy or lacking in skills. But over time, the company sought to increase the number of both Korean-Chinese and Han-Chinese managers. The first reason was simply economic: wages for expatriates were much higher. But they also used new hiring practices to accumulate political capital, as they hired relatives of the village head. For a time, this localization strategy worked well, and the company received favourable treatment.
But Kim also shows how this approach was a double-edged sword. When it became apparent that local employees were assisting organized crime groups in stealing materials from the factory, management was in a bind. It was widely known that the gangsters had close ties to the government. The Korean management felt that there was little they could do to stop the pilfering without endangering their company’s cozy relationship with local officials. This is a wonderful illustration of the complexity of social embeddedness for global capital: both enabling accumulation and yet imposing new and unforeseen limits.
There is much to recommend Chinese Labor in a Korean Factory. First, it takes the issue of ethnicity seriously. Some research on work has looked at the hierarchy between overseas and Mainland Chinese. But given that there are tens of millions of ethnic minority workers in China, the question of ethnicity/race and work should be higher on the scholarly agenda. Kim’s study is an important first foray into this field, and provides insights on the relationship between ethnicity and identity in globalizing China.
Second, the study takes management’s views seriously. Much existing research assumes capital’s imperative of expanded reproduction, without seriously assessing the complex decision making of managers on the ground. With important ethnographic, interview, and administrative data from Nawon, Kim has a nuanced account of the contingency of the organization of work. With a longitudinal perspective, he is able to demonstrate how managerial agency interacts with global structural shifts—as well as worker activism—to produce particular organizations of work at particular times. His ability to integrate capital’s perspective into the heart of the analysis is a welcome corrective.
That being said, there is some ambiguity in Kim’s argument about the relationship between the local and the global. At some points, he seems to suggest that local realities impose major constraints on global capital: “the images of free-flowing transnational capital and multinational corporations are clearly wrong” (227). This is something of a straw-man argument, as it is not clear who specifically believes that transnational capital can ignore local conditions. And yet, later in the book we see that with increased operating expenses in China, the company begins outsourcing production to Vietnam. While Nawon will inevitably be forced to accommodate local conditions in new sites of production, Kim’s own evidence suggests that capital’s advantage in spatial mobility over and against labour and the state remains huge—even if such a move involves frictions and incurs various costs. Kim does not take a strong position here, implying that the relationship between global capital and local states changes, depending on a variety of conditions. While this is certainly true empirically, one is not entirely sure what the analytical takeaway is.
While Chinese Labor in a Korean Factory sticks to relatively safe terrain theoretically and analytically, the empirical work is impressive. With its contributions to our understanding of managerial strategy and ethnicity, the book should be of interest to a variety of China and Korea scholars.
Eli Friedman
Cornell University, Ithaca, USA