张彤禾：工人的声音TED演讲词(英文完整版)

1、Hi.So I d 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 girlwho makes less than a dollar an hour stitchingyour runningsh

2、oes, or theyoung 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 productsthemselves. After all, what s wrong with a world in whi

3、chona workeraniPhoneassembly line can t even afford to buy one? It s taken for granted that Chinesefactories areoppressive, and that it s our desirecheapforgoods that makesthem so. So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of

4、 us already feel guiltyabout our impact on the world, but itinaccuratesalsoand disrespectful. Wemust 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, China makes good fo

5、r 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, wehave rendered the individualson the o

6、therend into invisibility,as tiny andinterchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. Chinese workers are not forcedinto factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leavetheir homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. Inthe ongoing debate about

7、globalization, what s been missing is the voices of theworkers themselves. Here are a few. BaoYongxiu:” My mother tells me to comehome and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself,I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I m not in a rush.” Chen Ying:” when Iwent home for

8、 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 andworkedhard.Ifyou tell themmore, theywon tunderstandanyway. ”WuChunming:” Even if I make a lot of money, it won t satisfy me. Just to makemoney is not enough meanin

9、g in life.Xiao Jin:” Now, after I get off work, Istudy English, because in the future, our customers wonbe only Chinese, sotwe must learn more languages.” All of these speakers, by the way, are youngwomen, 18 or 19 years old. So I spent two years getting to know assembly lineworkers like these in th

10、e south China factorycity called Dongguan.Certainsubjects came up over and over: how much money they made, what kind ofhusband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another factory orstay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never, including livingconditions that to me looked cl

11、ose 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 thanthe dormitories and homes of rural China. The workers rarely spoke about theproducts they made

12、, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactlythey did. When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, whatexactly she did on the factory floor. She said something to me in Chinese thatsounds like “ qiu xi Only”. much later did I realizethat shehad been saying“ QC” ,or q

13、uality control. She couldn t even tell me what she did on the factoryfloor. All she could dowas parrota garbledabbreviation ina languageshedidn t even understand. Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, thealienation of the worker from the product of his labor. Unlike, say, a traditionalmak

14、er 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 likeso many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the BritishMuseum, he got this one wrong. Just because a person spends her

15、time makinga piece of somethingdoes notmean thatshebecomesthat, a pieceofsomething. What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in thatplace, and how it changes her , these are the things that matter. What a factorymakes is never the point, and the workers could not care less who buys th

16、eirproducts. Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, playsup this relationship between the workers and the products they make. Manyarticles calculate: How long would it take for this worker in order to earnenough money to buy whathe making?sFor example,anentry-levellineassembl

17、y line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out twoand 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 magazine,but I can t afford to buy an ad in it. But, who cares? I don t want an adNew

18、Yorker, and most of these workersdon treally wantiPhones.Theircaculations are different. How long should I stay inthis factory?How muchmoney can I save? How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car, to getmarried, or to put my child through school? The workers I got to know had acuriously abst

19、ract relationship with the product of their labor. About a year Imet Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me to her family village for the ChineseNew Year. On the train home, sha gave me a present: a Coach brand changepurse with brown leather trim. I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almosteverythi

20、ng else for sale in Dongguan. After we got home, Min gave her motheranother present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later,her sister was showing offamaroon LeSportsacshoulderbag. Slowly itdowning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and everysingle one of them

21、was authentic.Min s sister aid to her parents,“ In America ,this bag sells for 320 dollars.” Her parents, who are both farmers,edon,lookspeechless.“ And that s notCoachall is coming out with a new line, 2191,”she said.” One bag will sell for 6,000.She paus ed and” said,” I don t know ifthat6,000syua

22、n or 6,000American dollars, but anyway, it6,000s.”Min ssister s boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year , said.“ Itdoesn lookt like itworths thatmuch. ”Min sisterturnedtohim andsaid, ”some people actuallyunderstand there things. You don t understandIn shit.”Min word,sthe Coach bag

23、shad a curious currency. Theywon texactlyworthless, but they were nothing close to the value, because almost no onethey knew wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth. Once, whenMin olders sisterfriendsgotmarried, she broughta hand bag along as awedding present. Another time, after Min had al

24、ready left the handbag factory,her younger sister came to visit,bringing two Coach Signature handbags asgifts. I looked inthe zipperedpocket of one, and Ifound a printed card inEnglish, which read,“ An American classic. In 1941, the burnished patinaofanall-Americanbaseball glove inspired the founder

25、of Coach to create a newcollection of handbag from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. Sixskilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportionsand atimeless flair. They were fresh, functional,and women everywhereadoredthem. A new American classic was born.I wonder

26、what Karl Marxwould have made of Min and her sisters. Their relationship with the product oftheir labor was more complicated, surprising andfunny than he couldhaveimagined. And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know wh

27、at theyre really thinking. The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first jobon the assembly line 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

28、. Later , she married a fellowmigrant worker , moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved 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 cr

29、anes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village. In a recent email to me, she explained, 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 wor

30、kers like her , one third of them women, who have lefttheir villages to work in the factories, the hotels, 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 farmingvilla

31、ge and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has changed 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 woul

32、d be depressing to spend so much time with workers. I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them, 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 factorie

33、s and about China and about how to live in the world. This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the train home to visit her family. I keep it with meto 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 i

34、n memories. This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine,sitting in your office or in the library,are not howyou find themwhen youactually go out into the world.Thank you. (Applause)(Applause)Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haventhad before.

35、But Im curious. If you had aminute, say, with Apples head ofmanufacturing, what would you say?Leslie Chang: One minute?CA: One minute. (Laughter)LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much theyre self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me,what the

36、y want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very poor 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, theyll take a computer cla

37、ss, theyll take an English class, and learn really, really rudimentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple thingsin English. So, if you really want to help these workers, start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes in these schools, and what

38、s going to happen is, all your workers are going to move on, but hopefully theyll move on into higher jobs within Apple, and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement. When you talk to workers, thats what they want. They do not say, I want better hot water in the showers. I want a nicer room. I want aTV set. I mean, it