Word: migrant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...result, Lau says he expects that 20% of China's Hong Kong-owned factories, which employ 10 million people, could be shut down by early next year. That's a big concern to government officials, who will be hard-pressed to cope with a growing army of newly unemployed migrant workers. When Hong Kong toymaker Smart Union abruptly closed its doors in mid-October, hundreds of angry ex-employees crowded outside its shuttered factory in Guangdong province demanding unpaid wages. Says Lau: "I worry that the situation can't be improved...
...years was too expensive and snooty. So Nicola's joining Julia at a school that will give her a good education, but, if we're not careful, a narrow view of the world. The students are whiter and more English than at the local state schools, which draw many migrant kids, and at Julia's first school - populated as it is by the children of the international élite. In choosing affordable academic excellence, we've had to sacrifice diversity...
...residents of London may come from all walks of life, but early childhood is one of the few times when the classes mix. The free neighborhood baby-massage courses I attended saw migrant mothers and American corporate types bonding over lavender oil and breast-feeding. At our local northwest London playground, my kids share the swing set with Kosovar refugees and the children of hedge-fund millionaires. Government vouchers for day care broke down class stratifications during Nicola's toddler years. Her classmates were the children of cash-strapped single mothers, middle-class professionals and the rich - a few arriving...
...GistThere are 60 million of them, and they make everything from the sneakers on our feet to the mobile phones we carry. But to most of the world, China's legions of migrant factory workers are faceless, the interchangeable gears whose revolutions drive the global economy. Chang, a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, spent two years reporting in the gritty southern boomtown of Dongguuan trying to put human faces on these workers, and the ones she finds are extraordinary: overwhelmingly female, jarringly young and driven as much by the desire to see the world beyond their village...
...while the morbid pull of China's brutal twentieth century history is ever present, it's the portraits of the migrant workers and their lives - at once exciting and mind-numbingly boring, crowded and starkly isolated - that are at the book's heart. The painstaking work Chang put into befriending these girls and drawing out their stories is evident, as is the genuine affection she has for them and their spirit...