Abstract
This chapter provides a comparative context for the broad economic processes underway on the south China coast, by focusing on Hong Kong’s changing positions in global garment production. To compare the circumstances of Chinese workers in the 1990s and today, I relate the stories of two Hong Kong female garment workers and review their life cycles and work histories during Hong Kong’s transition from manufacturing boom to bust. This transition witnessed a proliferation of subcontracting practices in the garment industry and the rise of patron–client and labor–management relationships up until the mid-1990s. By the end of the 1990s, Hong Kong factory management had abandoned their Hong Kong workforce, resulting in “deskilling” as many garment workers left the industry and entered the low-pay service sector.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For an ethnographic description of Hong Kong’s factory districts in the 1970s, see Salaff (1995, pp. 46–47).
- 2.
There is a great deal of literature on women’s productive and reproductive labor. Participation by female workers in formal employment sectors is discussed, e.g., in Chapkis and Enloe (1983), and Nash and Fernandez-Kelly (1983). For women’s participation in informal employment sectors, see Beneria and Roldan (1987), Mies (1986). For women’s economic participation in destinations of global capital relocation, see Ong (2010).
- 3.
Research has shown that women as salaried employees, self-employed workers, homeworkers, and unpaid workers in family enterprises have divergent differences in terms of wage, work hours, and work scheduling. See Ngo (1992).
- 4.
See also Roos (1981, pp. 195–224).
- 5.
See Siu (2011).
- 6.
Siu-kai Lau (1982) argued that Hong Kong’s economic development contributed to the maintenance of familism, the nature of which is coined “utilitarian familism” (pp. 67–87). Agreeing with Lau, Janet Salaff (1995) suggested that the particular form of Chinese familism was adapted to Hong Kong’s colonial condition, which provided opportunities for young female workers to enter into the public sphere of work, for many of them were forced by the obligation to help earn a living for their families or pay education expenses of their brothers (p. 258).
- 7.
Lee (1993) conceptualized these lenient policies in the workplaces as “familial hegemony” and argued that, through these lenient policies, employers could make matron workers’ interests align with theirs, and thus a workplace hegemony was established (pp. 137–159).
References
Battat, J. (1991). Foreign investment in China in the 90s: Developing trends. East Asian Executive Reports, 13(8), 11–17.
Beneria, L., & Roldan, M. (1987). The crossroads of class and gender: Industrial homework, subcontracting, and household dynamics in Mexico City. University of Chicago Press.
Brinton, M. C. (1993). Women and the economic miracle: Gender and work in postwar Japan. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Castells, M., Goh, L., & Kwok, R. Y. W. (1990). The Shek Kip Mei syndrome: Economic development and public housing in Hong Kong and Singapore. London: Pion.
Chapkis, W., & Enloe, C. H. (Eds.). (1983). Of common cloth: Women in the global textile industry. Washington, DC: Transnational Institute.
Chiu, S. W. K., & So, A. Y. (2004). Flexible production and industrial restructuring in Hong Kong: From boom to bust? In R. A. Fernandez, G. G. Gonzalez, V. Price, D. Smith, & L. T. Vo (Eds.), Labor versus empire: Race, gender, migration (pp. 197–213). New York: Routledge.
Lau, S. K. (1982). Society and politics in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press.
Lee, C. K. (1993). Familial hegemony: Gender and production politics on Hong Kong’s electronics shopfloor. Gender & Society, 7(4), 529–547.
Lee, C. K. (1998). Gender and the South China miracle: Two worlds of factory women. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Lui, T. L. (1994). Waged work at home: The social organization of industrial outwork in Hong Kong. Aldershot, England: Avebury.
Ma, E. K. W. (1999). Culture, politics and television in Hong Kong. London: Routledge.
Marx, K. (1976). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1, B. Fowkes, Trans.). London: Penguin in association with New Left Review.
Mies, M. (1986). Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale. London: Zed Books.
Nash, J. C., & Fernández-Kelly, M. P. (Eds.). (1983). Women, men, and the international division of labor. Suny Press.
Ngo, H. Y. (1990). Married women’s participation in Hong Kong economy. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Sociology, University of Chicago.
Ngo, H. Y. (1992). Employment status of married women in Hong Kong. Sociological Perspectives, 35(3), 475–488.
Ong, A. (2010). Spirits of resistance and capitalist discipline: Factory women in Malaysia. Albany: State University of New York Press (Original work published 1987).
Roos, P. A. (1981). Sex stratification in the workplace: Male-female differences in economic returns to occupation. Social Science Research, 10, 195–224.
Salaff, J. W. (1986). Women, the family and the state: Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore—Newly-industrialized countries in Asia. In L. B. Iglitzin & R. Ross (Eds.), Women in the world: 1975–1985, The women’s decade (pp. 352–357). Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio.
Salaff, J. W. (1995). Working daughters of Hong Kong: Filial piety or power in the family? New York: Columbia University Press.
Siu, K. (2006). New labor protest movements in Hong Kong: The experience of the student-worker mutual aid campaign. In S. Dasgupta & R. Kiely (Eds.), Globalization and after (pp. 392–409). London: Sage.
Siu, K. (2011). A brief history of the struggle for standard work hours legislation in Hong Kong (in Chinese). Hong Kong Journal of Social Sciences, 41, 17–40.
So, A. Y. (1990). Social change and development: Modernization, dependency, and world-systems theories. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.
So, A. Y. & Chiu, S. W. K. (1995). East Asia and the world economy. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
Wong, S. L. (1988). Emigrant entrepreneurs: Shanghai industrialists in Hong Kong. Hong Kong and New York: Oxford University Press.
Yeung, Y. M. (1997). Planning for pearl city: Hong Kong’s future, 1997 and beyond. Cities, 14(5), 249–256.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Siu, K. (2020). Hong Kong Female Garment Workers and China’s Open Door. In: Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer Domination. Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-32-9122-5
Online ISBN: 978-981-32-9123-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)