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SERIES IN ASIAN LABOR AND
WELFARE POLICIES
Chinese Migrant Workers

and Employer Domination
Comparisons with
Hong Kong and Vietnam
Kaxton Siu
Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies
Series Editors
Chris Chan
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Dae-oup Chang
Sogang University, Korea (Republic of)
Khalid Nadvi
University of Manchester, UK
Asia has been the new focus of global social sciences. One of the key
features for the rise of Asia is the creation of the largest industrial work-
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more than 260 million of rural-urban migrant labours have been created
in the past three decades.
The production and the reproduction of labour in Asia have therefore
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tions, human resource management, legal studies as well as sociology,
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Kaxton Siu
Chinese Migrant
Workers and Employer
Domination
Comparisons with Hong Kong and Vietnam
Kaxton Siu
Hong Kong Polytechnic University
Kowloon, Hong Kong
Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies

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To my parents
Acknowledgements
This book would not have been possible without the help of many
people. First of all, I am greatly indebted to all the garment workers
I surveyed and interviewed in Shenzhen, Hong Kong, and Ho Chi
Minh City. I owe a special debt of gratitude to the workers living in Jade
Village and working in Pearl Factory. Without their willingness to let me
live with them, ask questions about their daily routines, and share their
joy and pain, this book would not have been possible. Though I cannot
acknowledge their contributions by name, I appreciate their kindness,
frankness, friendliness, and hospitality. I am also thankful to the factory
owners, managers, foremen, and line leaders for their assistance with my
research. The description of the people in this book might not convey
the full richness of their experiences I gathered through my observations
and interactions with them. Responsibility for the interpretations pre-
sented in this book, including any errors, lies solely with me.
Many people have helped me shape and complete this project.
Jonathan Unger, my supervisor at the Australian National University, has
patiently and consistently given his attention and advice to my research
and writing. Jon was an ever-present source of comfort during my four
years of doctoral study. Whenever I was panicked, stressed, or confused,
Jon would knock on my office door, sit on my couch, and give me his
insightful advice. Without his encouragement and guidance, my work
on the project would have been much delayed. Another equally impor-
tant person who has consistently helped me finish this project is Anita
Chan—Jon’s wife, my dearest mentor, friend, and research collaborator.
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I had known Anita before I began my Ph.D. Since then, I have collab-
orated with her on several projects. Without her support, my doctoral
study would not have been launched. During years of collaboration,
Anita and I have developed many new ways to approach labor issues in
China and Vietnam. A lot of Anita’s insights have been incorporated into
the analysis of this book; thus, I cannot claim all the credit for the out-
comes of this project. Of course, responsibility for any errors in the anal-
ysis of the book lies solely with me. The Unger family’s support even
extends beyond my academic life. That Jon and Anita allowed me to stay
in their house while they were away during my final stage of doctoral
study not only created an opportunity for me to engage in thought-
provoking discussions with Børge Bakken, Tom Cliff, and Lina Tan,
but also eased a lot of my financial difficulty. I also have to thank Ashley
Carruthers, a member of my dissertation committee. His first-hand
knowledge of Vietnamese society has helped me understand the culture
of Vietnamese workers. Other colleagues at the Contemporary China
Centre of the Australian National University, especially Andrew Kipnis,
Bob Miller, Pete Van Ness, Lior Rosenberg, Brendan Forde, and Beibei
Tang, encouraged me to finish this project. I also owe a debt to my pro-
fessors in Hong Kong who shared their experiences and knowledge with
me, particularly Professors Alvin So, Agnes Ku, and Pun Ngai. Without
Alvin’s invitation to his conference on “Class, Power and China” in
Hong Kong in 2010, I would have not met Michael Burawoy and Ching
Kwan Lee, whose work helped influence my decision to place domina-
tion as my book’s core theme.
I thank Chris Smith and Simon Clarke for their critical reviews on my
early draft of the manuscript. I would like to thank Korean anthropolo-
gist Chae Suhong for his help in my fieldwork in Vietnam. My friends,
Chris King-Chi Chan, Elaine Hui, Choy Yuk Yuk, Kevin Lin, Helen
Law, Ivan Franceschini, Xue Hong, Hongzen Wang, Stephen WK Chiu,
Eva Hung, Julian Groves, and Wai-Yip Ho provided insightful com-
ments and lasting comradeship during my project. I also thank Wong
Hon Tung, Lai Tsz Chung, Ming, Patricia Tse, Vincent Lee, Allison Ley,
Angus Tse, and Charles Fung for their research assistance to this pro-
ject. Sara Crowley-Vigneau gently chaperoned the manuscript through
the reviewed process, and the team at Palgrave Macmillan saw it success-
fully through production. The anonymous reviewers clearly spent a lot of
time looking back and forth over my draft manuscript, and the detailed
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
comments guided me through the final revisions. Special thanks go to

Franky Tang and Nelson Chow whose support was beyond mere words.
I wrote this book while based on the Department of Applied Social
Sciences, the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Funding for this pro-
ject was supported by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the
Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (PolyU 256141/16H, and
PolyU 156068/18H).
Two of the chapters in this book are based on or contain parts of
work published elsewhere. Chapter 3 builds on “Continuity and Change
in the Everyday Lives of Chinese Migrant Factory Workers,” which was
published in China Journal in July 2015. An earlier version of Chapter 5
was published in Politics and Society in June 2017. I am grateful to the
publishers.
Last but not least, I thank my family back in Hong Kong. My aunts
and cousins have shared their invaluable garment factory working expe-
riences with me. My parents, Samuel Ho-Chun Siu and Shuk-Yin Chan,
have helped and encouraged me. This project on garment workers would
not have been undertaken if I had not been born into a working-class
family with a diligent mother who stitched garments day and night while
at the same time providing me and my brother with meticulous parental
care during my childhood.
Contents
1 Introduction: Modes of Domination Over Chinese

Migrant Industrial Workers 1
2 Hong Kong Female Garment Workers and China’s

Open Door 23
3 Chinese Migrant Workers’ Everyday Lives in the Early

1990s and Late 2000s 47
4 State-Endorsed Exploitation and a Segmented Labor

Market in Shenzhen’s Garment Industry 85
5 Power and Domination in the Chinese Garment

Workplace 115
6 A Comparative Perspective: Vietnamese Migrant

Workers in Ho Chi Minh City 155
7 Conclusion 197
Index 231
xi
List of Figures
Fig. 3.1 A illustration of Jade village area (Color figure online) 69

Fig. 3.2 Private rental housing for migrant workers lined up along
the main road of Jade Village, Shenzhen 70
Fig. 3.3 Local residents’ fancy balcony house inside their gated
communities in Jade Village, Shenzhen 71
Fig. 3.4 A secondhand shop for household equipment and furniture
located inside a migrant workers’ neighborhood in Jade
Village, Shenzhen 72
Fig. 4.1 Urban residents’ average wages and migrant workers’ legal
minimum wages (adjusted by cumulative inflation) in outer
Shenzhen city, 1993–2016 (Source Shenzhen Statistical
Yearbooks [1993–2018]) 88
Fig. 4.2 Legal monthly minimum wage, basic wage, received wage,
desired wage, and legally entitled wage, minimum monthly
expenditure to support family (in US$) (N = 349) 92
Fig. 5.1 Pearl Factory 149
Fig. 5.2 Production lines inside Pearl Factory 150
Fig. 5.3 One of the entrances and exits of Pearl Factory with
an electronic iron bar gate and three security guards
to check workers’ factory passes 150
Fig. 6.1 A private kindergarten (for children aged 18 months
to 6 years old) in a Vietnamese migrant workers’ community
in an industrial park in Tan Binh District, Ho Chi Minh City,
2010 162
xiii
xiv LIST OF FIGURES
Fig. 6.2 Nhà tro (“boarding houses”) located in dark and poorly
ventilated alleys between old buildings in Binh Duong District,
Ho Chi Minh City. Each alley was lined with 10 to 15 boarding
houses, each 10–20 square meters in size 163
Fig. 6.3 Consumption amounts of main foods per capita per month
in Vietnam (third income quintile, whole country: 2002–2016)
(Source Vietnamese household living standard surveys, General
Statistics Office, Vietnam [2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2010,
2012, 2014, 2016]) 165
Fig. 6.4 Consumption amounts of main foods per capita per month
in China (third income quintile, China: 2000–2016)
(Source Chinese statistical yearbook [2000, 2005–2017]) 166
Fig. 6.5 Legal minimum wage, basic wage, received wage, desired
wage, and legally entitled wage, minimum monthly
expenditure to support family, per month (in US$)
(N = 743); Exchange rate: CNY6.7802:US$1;
VND20500:US$1 175
Fig. 7.1 Spectrum of modes of domination and factory regimes
in Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam 221
List of Tables
Table 2.1 Hong Kong female garment workers’ life cycles, work
patterns, skills, and labor–management relationships
from the 1960s to 2000s 41
Table 3.1 Male migrant workers’ monthly expenditure on various
expenditure items in summer 2010 (excluding purchases
of consumer products) 68
Table 4.1 Chinese garment workers’ overtime compensation systems 93
Table 4.2 Accuracy of Chinese garment workers’ knowledge of legal
minimum wage (N = 122) 95
Table 4.3 Chinese garment workers’ responses to knowledge of legal
maximum monthly overtime limit (N = 394) 95
Table 4.4 Accuracy of Chinese garment workers’ knowledge of legal
maximum monthly overtime limit (N = 50) 96
Table 4.5 Logistic regression of selected variables vis-à-vis migrant
garment workers’ job distribution in Shenzhen, China 100
Table 4.6 Summary of work hours and wages per month, the hourly
wage, and overtime hours per day for Chinese garment
workers; Exchange rate: CNY6.7802:US$1 101
Table 5.1 The relationship between actual and desired work hours,
Chinese workers (N = 390) 121
Table 5.2 Modes of domination, concrete mechanisms and objects
of control in Chinese garment factories 147
Table 6.1 Summary of legal maximum of regular and overtime work
hours, and overtime compensation methods in Chinese
and Vietnamese labor laws 172
xv
xvi LIST OF TABLES
Table 6.2 Chinese and Vietnamese workers’ overtime compensation

systems 176
Table 6.3 Work hours and wages per month, the hourly wage,
and overtime hours per day for Vietnamese garment workers 182
Table 6.4 Multinomial logit regression of selected variables vis-à-vis
migrant garment workers’ job distribution in Ho Chi Minh
City, Vietnam 184
Table 6.5 Payment systems used in Vietnamese and Chinese garment
factories 189
Table 6.6 The extent Vietnamese and Chinese garment workers could
resign from factories during peak and low seasons 191
Table 7.1 Expanded framework of politics of production, modes
of domination and factory regimes in Hong Kong, China,
and Vietnam 222
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Modes of Domination Over

Chinese Migrant Industrial Workers
China’s rapid ascent into the status of the “world’s factory” in the past
three decades is well known. It is also generally known that a majority
of China’s factory workforce is composed of workers who have migrated
from the countryside and who number some 150 million or more.
It is easy to view both the Chinese migrant workforce and the ways
employers dominate migrant workers as static and unchanging, and most
of the papers and books that have been published about China’s migrant
workers do precisely that. Because the authors did their research at one
point of time, they tend to assume that the domination over workers
that they viewed at the time of their research is not evolving. This book
instead examines major shifts in the modes of domination exercised over
these factory workers in the past three decades during China’s industrial-
ization, urbanization, and integration into global capitalism, in compari-
son with other countries—specifically Hong Kong and Vietnam—during
their own periods of industrialization. I have done so through fieldwork
research in China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam for the most recent periods
and by examining materials and workers’ own remembered accounts for
the earlier periods.
The bulk of the research was conducted in southern China, where I
conducted extensive fieldwork research into workers’ living and work
conditions. Indeed, I shared a tiny apartment in south China for half
a year with young migrant factory workers while engaged in research.
We lived together in a burgeoning type of urban setting in south China,
© The Author(s) 2020 1

K. Siu, Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer
Domination, Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_1
2 K. SIU
commonly known as the migrant worker village (mingong cun), where

factories are located, migrant workers live, and power is wielded over
workers’ everyday lives. To update my findings, I have returned to my
field sites in China and Vietnam to do renewed interviewing up into
2018. The evolving character of the domination of workers and the
changing power configurations will form the essence of my discussion.
I have used ethnographic, comparative, historical, and survey research
methods to identify the features of this domination.
This book engages in a discussion of class and citizenship; of life/
work cycles and everyday life practices; of power, domination, tactics,
and strategies; and of global and local production politics. Domination
over Chinese migrant workers has two faces. On the one side, a config-
uration of state, capital, and local power, alongside the contestations of
traditional norms and modern urban values defines an individual’s class
identity, status attainment, citizenship rights, and everyday life experi-
ences. Multifaceted state domination has varying impacts on individuals
who have different positions in terms of gender, the work/life cycle, the
labor market, and relations in and of production on shop floors. Global
capitalism and its interactions with local production processes condition
this domination.
The second face of the domination of Chinese migrant workers has
to do with how they exercise their daily life tactics and strategies in tacit
indirect power struggles. It is a process within which a delimited space
of resistance exists. In the short run, the structure of domination is
reproduced, but in the long run the status quo in the power relations is
reshaped. It is, last but not least, a process in which a new working class
is emerging.
As noted, to provide a comparative context, I will focus not only on
the Chinese migrant working class and the power configurations which
dominate these workers’ lives but also the circumstances of Hong Kong
and Vietnamese workers. I spent considerable time during this past
decade talking with former Hong Kong garment workers about their
livelihoods and working conditions in the 1960s and 1970s, and with
Vietnamese workers about their own conditions and the direct and indi-
rect controls they experienced.
Certainly, I am not the first to investigate Chinese migrant fac-
tory workers. Given China’s role as the world’s factory, the past three
decades have seen an enormous proliferation of research on these
1 INTRODUCTION: MODES OF DOMINATION OVER CHINESE … 3
workers from the perspectives of gender (Choi & Peng, 2016; Li, 2018),1
citizenship (Chan, 2012; Jakimów, 2017; Smart & Smart, 2001; Solinger,
1999),2 culture (Chan, 2002; Chu, Liu, & Shi, 2015; Pun & Lu, 2010),
work conditions (Chan, 2001, 2013; Yang & Gallagher, 2017), living
conditions (Chan, 2002), representation (Dooling, 2017; Pun, 1999),
social networks (Zhao, 2003), agency (Chan, 2010; Friedman, 2014),
technology (Qiu, 2016; Peng & Choi, 2013), labor organizations (Chan,
2013; Xu & Chan, 2018; Franceschini, 2014), migration (Chan, 1998;
Zhang, 2001), the labor law system (Hui, 2018; Gallagher, Giles, Park, &
Wang, 2015), cross-generation differences (Pun & Lu, 2010),3 class for-
mation (Chan & Hui, 2017; Chan & Siu, 2012; Pringle, 2017; Sargeson,
1999), and comparative labor regimes (Siu, 2015). The conventional
approach to study Chinese migrant workers is the “subjugation model.”
This perceives the migrant workers’ subjugation to various structural and
institutional forces, manifested in China’s household registration policy,
work permit system, factory sweatshops, and gender and locality/kinship
discrimination. These structural and institutional forces in turn provide
conditions for incubation of exploitative and suppressive shop-floor cul-
tures in workplaces. According to this approach, the plight of Chinese
migrant workers is the direct consequence of China’s reintegration into
the global economy and the Chinese state’s modernization strategies to
attract foreign capital investment.4
To date, Ching Kwan Lee’s book Gender and the South China Miracle
remains the most influential work on the subject (Lee, 1998), in which
she adopts Michael Burawoy’s production politics (Burawoy, 1985),
framework to study Chinese female migrant workers in the early 1990s.
She shows that in China’s post-socialist economy, where local state reg-
ulation of labor relations was minimal and the factory workforce in the
export sector was organized to incorporate localistic networks into the
shop floor, a predominantly female workforce was influenced to think
of themselves as docile “maiden workers” (dagongmei) so that despotic
management could subjugate them via this self-identity and coercive
and punitive discipline. Equally important is Pun Ngai’s groundbreaking
1 See Gaetano and Jacka (2004).

2 See also K. W. Chan (1996).
3 See also Chan and Pun (2010).
4 See Cheng and Selden (1994), Pun and Smith (2007), Pun (2005).
4 K. SIU
ethnography on Chinese female migrant workers in a Hong Kong-

owned electronics factory in Shenzhen, China (Pun, 2005). Using
Foucault’s notion of “disciplinary power” (Foucault, 1979), Pun con-
vincingly shows how female workers in the 1990s were disciplined into
becoming docile and efficient working subjects not only by harsh work-
ing and dormitory rules and disciplining, but also by strategies of class,
wage, and ethnic differentiation as well as by sexualizing the social bod-
ies of dagongmei.
While Lee and Pun’s works can be classified as variants of the sub-
jugation model,5 both of them do not subscribe totally to the passive
imagery of Chinese migrant workers. Lee and Pun similarly note the
possibilities of workers’ agency and resistance from a feminist perspec-
tive. Since the 1990s, other feminist scholars have also unpacked the
migrating and work experience of Chinese female workers from a gender
perspective and shed new light on migrant women’s subjectivity, iden-
tity, agency, and home/work dilemma in post-socialist China. Several of
them have also argued that female workers are not the passive victims of
exploitation that is a dominant conception in the public media and in the
subjugation model. They suggest that female workers’ migrating expe-
rience provides important avenues of escape for rural women suffering
gender oppression and violence from the patriarchal authority of parents
or in-laws.6 Although the feminist studies focus on the life experiences,
subjectivity, and agency of female workers, none of them poses similar
questions about male workers and how the state, capital, and patriarchal
power dominate male workers. Most feminist scholars accept mascu-
line domination as given without critically examining the changes in the
gendered hierarchy within and outside workplaces in a rapidly changing
Chinese society.
5 Recently, some studies have examined the modes of domination of various types of
Chinese migrant workers, including migrants who engage in service industries as temporary
and casual laborers. Such research focuses on the precariousness of employment relations
of rural migrants in cities. However, for migrant factory workers laboring in factories, I
maintain that the factory regime approach still provides the most powerful explanation for
the subjugation of migrant workers today. For these recent studies, see Standing (2017),
Swider (2015).
6 For example, Arianne Gaetano and Tamara Jacka suggest that migrant women make
more independent and informed decisions on who to marry and how to spend money. See
Gaetano and Jacka (2004).
Many studies of Chinese migrant workers from the past three dec-
ades continue to take institutions and the labor market for granted.
For example, most of the studies assume a local, homogeneous, and
female-dominated migrant labor market in urban areas without attending
to the consequences of the changing compositions of these labor mar-
kets. Many studies take the Chinese state’s clientelist relationship with
foreign investors for granted without placing the post-socialist Chinese
state in a competitive global production context to analyze the Chinese
state’s shifting strategies to appropriate the pool of migrant labor.
On another front of scholarly inquiry, researchers employ the subju-
gation model to explain the record-breaking economic performance in
many coastal cities in south China. Some scholars argue that the eco-
nomic growth generated over the past three decades in these cities has
been founded on a peculiar local urbanization and development pattern
which segregates migrants from local residents, excludes migrants from
local welfare, imposes a strict surveillance system on migrants, and dis-
criminates against migrants as second-class citizens who only have tem-
porary household resident status.7 Without “rights in the city” (Harvey,
2012; Mitchell, 2003), Chinese migrant workers’ subjugation to global
capital becomes not only a “class” issue but also a “citizenship” issue
(Chan, 2010). Not only migrant workers’ citizenship rights, social status,
social identity, urban integration, and everyday lives outside workplaces,
but also the role of the Chinese state as a collaborator to subjugate
migrant workers to global capital in the reproduction sphere has to be
critically examined.
In this connection, Chris Smith’s and Pun Ngai’s work on the dormi-
tory labor regime is particularly noteworthy. They argue that in order to
extend migrant workers’ working hours to meet demand in the global
production cycle, the management of foreign-funded factories in south
China built industrial dormitories close to production facilities, which
enabled employers to exercise power not only over employment but also
over employees’ after-hours activities. The notion of a dormitory labor
regime effectively captures the state and factory management’s involve-
ment in workers’ reproduction spheres and everyday life practices and
7 The literature on migrant workers’ various exclusions in cities is vast. See Jakimów
(2017), Chan (2010, pp. 308–327), Smart and Smart (2001, pp. 1853–1869), Chan, K. W.
(2010), Siu (2007), Chan, Madsen, and Unger (2009).
6 K. SIU
manipulation of workers’ material needs in order to subjugate them to

global capital exploitation (Pun & Smith, 2006; Smith, 2003).
In short, despite a few attempts to modify the subjugation model,
most existing studies on Chinese labor place a heavy emphasis on the
subjugation of the Chinese migrant workers in reform-era China, par-
ticularly the combination of the post-socialist state, global capital, and
Chinese patriarchal power in dominating the workers’ lives in industrial
dormitory settings. Accordingly, it is the domination of workers’ lives
within a factory complex that attracts the most scholarly attention, while
workers’ lives outside the factory complex by and large are overlooked,
even though many migrant factory workers today rent rooms in nearby
neighborhoods (Chan & Pun, 2013). Thus far, we know more about the
domination of workers’ lives inside the workplace and dormitory than we
know about changes in social relations and workers’ everyday life prac-
tices in industrial village settings.
However, I must stress that the subjugation model is indeed a power-
ful framework for analyzing the domination of Chinese migrant workers’
lives, that many of its analyses remain valid for current migrant work-
ers’ situations, and that my own research was inspired and at the outset
guided by the same theoretical framework. However, during my field-
work for this book, residing with Chinese migrant workers outside a fac-
tory and within a local industrial village in Shenzhen in 2010, I gradually
realized that the subjugation model, while casting light on many issues,
was about the situation in the 1990s and cannot be extended as a whole
to their social and material lives in the late 2000s and the 2010s. As
some recent studies suggest, Chinese migrant workers increasingly have
begun to resist factory managements (Chan, 2010; Friedman, 2014).
Thus, a new framework beyond the subjugation model is necessary.
Everyday Life: Beyond a Dormitory Labor Regime

While my ethnographic fieldwork in Jade Village, an industrialized for-
mer village in the Shenzhen region, taught me the limitations of the
subjugation model, I was also inspired by Henri Lefebvre’s Critique of
Everyday Life to search for a new way of studying Chinese migrant work-
ers. Insights from Lefebvre alert me to avoid splitting Chinese workers’
work-time and leisure lives and activities into unrelated and separate
entities. As Lefebvre (1991) states:
Every day, at the same time, the worker leaves the factory, the office worker
leaves the office. Every week Saturdays and Sundays are given over to leisure
as regularly as day-to-day work. We must therefore imagine a ‘work-leisure’
unity, for this unity exists, and everyone tries to program the amount of time
at his disposal according to what his work is – and what it is not. (pp. 29–42)
Henri Lefebvre’s work makes two contributions: First, he shows a dia-

lectic approach to everyday life which can reveal the extent of alienation
and commodification. Second, in his final work, he pursued the theme
of everyday life by approaching it as a time-space that could be open to
“rhythmanalysis.” By registering various rhythms in different aspects of
everyday life, Lefebvre (2004) perceived the everyday as the critical total-
ity of social life.
The greatest benefit to me from reading Lefebvre’s works was acquir-
ing a dialectic and integral understanding of the transformation of life
rhythms of the migrant workers among whom I lived. The new space
and time acquired by Chinese workers outside workplaces resulted in
new everyday life rhythms, exemplified in their new time scheduling and
leisure activities, which had impacts on the length of a working day and
factory management’s production schedules, workers’ work practices,
and hence production politics. Moreover, Lefebvre’s rhythm analysis
bears close comparison to Foucault’s work on disciplining and training
of the body in the military in Discipline and Punish, and the mechanical
repetition of the cycles of capitalist production imposed over our circa-
dian rhythms should remind us of Marx’s discussion of the working day
in Capital. Time and work discipline in industrial capitalism is a topic
that interests many historians of new social history like E. P. Thompson
(1967) and Eric Hobsbawm (1996, pp. 208–229). Particularly, E. P.
Thompson’s (1966) masterpiece, The Making of the English Working
Class, stresses a struggle between old rural ways of life and the new
industrial setting that engendered new disciplinary practices inside facto-
ries (pp. 405–408). Many researchers studying Chinese migrant workers
in the 1990s also emphasize strongly how factory management used time
and bodily discipline to force migrant workers to be accustomed to capi-
talist work rhythms.
After years of research in Shenzhen and my intensive fieldwork in Jade
Village, I was convinced that although coercive and disciplinary strate-
gies are still in use inside Chinese workplaces, today management’s usage
of coercive and disciplinary strategies is no longer as intense as in the
8 K. SIU
1990s. As will be shown in this book, the transformation of life rhythms

of Chinese migrant workers affected management’s strategies to control
them inside workplaces. This will be observed in the following chapters.
The China Difference and the Arc of Capitalist

Accumulation: Comparisons and Connections Across
Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam
Besides unraveling the static and unchanging image of the subjugation
model, another equally important question that demands further investi-
gation is whether China’s past three decades of export-led industrializa-
tion comprises a unique pattern of economic development and capitalist
accumulation. Have other Asian societies undergone similar export-led
industrialization, with similar effects on workers’ circumstances? This
question obviously cannot be answered by studying the situation of
China alone. We have to compare China with other somewhat similar
societies undergoing export-led industrialization. For this book, when
I personally conducted extensive research in Hong Kong and Vietnam
as well as China, I have found a diversity of modes of domination and
factory regimes between these regions. And the reasons for this diversity
relate in part to the workers’ everyday life patterns and responsibilities to
families. As will be shown in this book, contrary to Marx’s argument that
workers’ everyday lives and social reproduction are largely determined by
their production lives inside factories, I found the reverse: In all three
societies—China, Hong Kong, and Vietnam—garment workers’ social
reproduction and everyday lives have had a noticeable impact on changes
in factory regimes and modes of domination.
Methodologically, my comparative research strategy utilizes the
strengths of various research methods—including collecting life histories,
doing ethnography, and conducting surveys—to unpack and compare
the labor processes, lived experiences, and modes of factory discipline
and control in Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam. The chapters are
organized in a sequence that follows the expansion of global capitalism in
East and Southeast Asia over the past five decades, as the sites of export
garment production developed in Hong Kong, then shifted to China,
and then expanded to Vietnam.
A few other scholars have also tried to compare the factory regimes
and management styles in mainland China and Hong Kong, but this
literature did not attempt to compare Hong Kong and China on the
same footing—to compare both places during their export-led industrial-
ization periods.8 Industrial sociologists have studied Hong Kong’s domi-
nant type of factory regime during its rapid industrialization between the
1960s and the 1980s and argued how flexible specialization, small- and
medium-sized factories, and a unique shop-floor culture contributed to
Hong Kong’s economic miracle (Chiu & Lui, 1994; Chiu, So, & Tam,
2008; Lee, 1997). But their studies have not been utilized to examine
the origin of and (dis)similarities with China’s export-industry factory
regimes, even for the China-based factories that are under the manage-
ment of Hong Kong capital.
My comparisons will show Hong Kong and Chinese garment factories
resembled each other in a few respects but also differed sharply in the
development pathways of their changing modes of domination. Readers
will also discover interesting differences when Hong Kong investors
managed Vietnamese workers. The dissimilarities of factory regimes in
these Asian societies enable us to understand the developmental arc of
capitalism when capital of the same locality—Hong Kong—flowed from
one society to another. Hence, through collecting life histories of Hong
Kong garment workers and examining changing labor-management rela-
tionships in Hong Kong’s garment factories between the heyday of the
1960s and the local industry’s declining years of the 1980s–1990s, Hong
Kong not only serves as a historical case to understand the interactions
among workers’ life cycles, factory regimes and the changing global pro-
duction chain; it is also a baseline for comparisons and helps us locate
necessary contexts for the later chapters about China and Vietnam.
To establish this baseline historical case, I collected Hong Kong
women garment workers’ life histories through extensive interviewing.
The former women garment workers reflected upon the types of dom-
ination they had experienced and the situation of the factory regime in
the past. Their voices provide us with a longer-term perspective on how
the changing factory regimes in Hong Kong shaped women workers’
8 Ching Kwan Lee’s book is an example of these “unequal” comparisons. Her compar-
ative ethnography compares Hong Kong’s electronic shopfloor during its post- and de-
industrialization period with China’s industrialization period in the early 1990s. See Lee
(1998).
10 K. SIU
daily life constraints and decisions in different stages of their life cycles.9
Their former circumstances and changing situations enable us to com-
pare (or even portend) the situations of Chinese and Vietnamese gar-
ment workers.
To this, I have carried out in-depth interviewing with twenty
rank-and-file Hong Kong female garment workers who had engaged in
garment production in two garment factories in Hong Kong between
the 1960s and the 1990s, coupled with two Hong Kong garment factory
owners, and three female foremen who had supervised the rank-and-file
workers I interviewed and who, later in the 1990s, subcontracted work
to them. In fact, my mother and relatives were Hong Kong garment
workers. As will be seen, I spent time in a garment factory as a child, so
I have a personal knowledge of what the women’s work life entailed and
of the changes that the industry underwent during that period.
At the everyday life level, the best ways of studying workers’ lived
experience are to do a fine-grained participatory ethnography, because it
is “an engagement with others that brings the ethnographers into the
ordinary, everyday space of moral process in a local world” (Kleinman,
1999, p. 413). But because modes of power contestations differ at var-
ious levels of analysis, it soon became clear to me that other research
methods such as survey research and collecting life histories were also
necessary.
For example, I used survey data collected outside garment factory
gates in Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City in 2010 to explore how state
legislation and policies, as well as labor market conditions, channel dif-
ferent types of workers into different workplace regimes. As will be seen,
the survey in China and the government’s statistical data provided evi-
dence that helped me to unravel how exploitation took place in China’s
segmented migrant labor market with the Chinese state’s tacit endorse-
ment—an argument different from some labor studies scholars who
suggested that the subjugation of Chinese workers has been due to the
“absence” of the Chinese state (Lu & Pun, 2010). In short, through a
diversity of research techniques I was able to explore the links between
the institutional and everyday life levels and how institutional mecha-
nisms condition workplace and everyday life cultures.
9 For a detailed discussion about the methodology and agenda of oral histories, see
Thompson (2000), Perks and Thomson (2016).

In China and Vietnam, I chose Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City as

my field sites, for the two cities share important similarities: Both cit-
ies are major clusters of export-industry factories; the two cities’ gov-
ernments actively intervened in the cities’ economies through their
respective labor policies; both cities contain numerous migrant workers’
communities, are major destinations of rural migrants, and their migra-
tion patterns are changing rapidly. To control for the effects of manage-
ment style and industry on workplace relations, my survey focused on
Chinese and Vietnamese migrant workers in Hongkong-funded garment
factories. To enhance the degree of representativeness, I sampled differ-
ent sizes of garment factories in the two cities (small, medium-sized, and
large) and then calibrated the samples from different factories in propor-
tion to the size of their workforce. In the end, I collected 738 question-
naires from the survey, with 389 from Shenzhen and 349 from Ho Chi
Minh City.
Using statistical models to single out different state and market mech-
anisms entails dividing workers into different groups according to rigid
categories such as age, gender, educational levels, place of origins, and
so on. This categorization process has the effect of blurring differences
within each category and objectifying workers into static groups without
taking workers’ life experience and everyday life politics into account.
In order to limit these effects, I obtained oral histories from workers
at some of the surveyed factories and also engaged in extensive ethno-
graphic on-site research, observing their everyday lives.
Although this juxtaposition of survey data, life histories, and eth-
nography can enhance data analysis, a different type of distortion
can derive from the very fact that an ethnographer intervenes into his
research subjects’ lives. I was aware of this possible danger. For exam-
ple, when I interviewed female workers about their personal life stories,
it was particularly difficult when my informants’ private lives, such as
their romances and affairs, were the subjects of my questions. In a rap-
idly changing society like China, in which the influence of traditional
social values such as familism become less salient as guiding values for
young workers’ actions, many young workers have affairs or engage in
premarital or casual sex in the region where they work. In encounter-
ing these “private stories,” instead of quickly judging these actions as
non-legitimate, I explored why the workers came to make these decisions
and the wider social and political context in which new and difficult deci-
sions get made.
12 K. SIU
The differences between my interpretations and my informants were

also potentially troublesome. No doubt, my interpretations of particu-
lar social phenomena and worldviews owe much to my own life history,
experience, and theoretical training, which must be different from my
informants. As readers will soon read in the next chapter, my perspec-
tive is shaped in part by my childhood when I accompanied my mother
to her work at a garment factory. In this sense, this research project has
incubated over three decades. In addition, my theoretical training as a
sociologist and my private intellectual and political inclinations, which
have led to immersion in Marx’s Capital and other Marxist literature,
alongside my engagement in labor movements in Hong Kong, also have
shaped my perspective.
When I brought my various perspectives and assumptions into the
field, they were challenged. Here, an episode about the piece-rate sys-
tem is instructive. My theoretical training and prior research had led me
to believe that the piece-rate system used in the garment industry was
nothing but a means of exploitation that manipulates garment workers
to work as fast as they can for inadequate remuneration, so that a fac-
tory boss can capture a greater profit at the expense of workers’ inter-
ests. However, when this perspective was brought into discussion with
my worker apartment mate, Zhangxiong, one night in our rented apart-
ment in Jade Village, he argued not only against my interpretation, but
also insisted that the piece-rate system actually benefits them the most.
Zhangxiong strongly believed that the system promoted the idea that
“the more you work, the more your reward” (duolou duode). He further
argued that without the system, he could only earn the minimum legal
wage level, which was too low to subsist considering the cost of living in
Shenzhen. The system enabled him to earn double the minimum wage.
The only trade-off was that he had to work three hours overtime daily
apart from the eight-hour normal working day. His interpretation was
based on his work and life experience.
Where does Zhangxiong’s perspective fit into my research? According
to Pierre Bourdieu, what I encountered was the conflict between
the twofold nature of truth of labor between the researcher and the
researched—the “objective” vs. “subjective” truth. This is the poli-
tics of (mis-)recognition. To Bourdieu (2000), this politics has no way
out and the only thing the researcher can do is to engage in a Pascalian
meditation to recognize both types of truth, despite the unresolvable
epistemological differences (pp. 202–206).10 Although Bourdieu’s

Pascalian meditation is not a solution to the great divide between subjec-
tivism and objectivism, I found it useful to achieve intersubjectivity and
to encourage a reflexive dialogue with the workers among whom I lived.
Thus, in reading this book, other than my effort to provide an objective
account of workers’ everyday life domination, I also encourage readers to
appreciate workers’ rationales that drive them to make different decisions
in everyday life contexts than we ourselves might consider appropriate.
In fact, engaging in a reflexive dialogue with workers’ views is not merely
a matter of methodological concern. In the course of understanding
workers’ reasons behind their decisions, we can go beyond the patterns
of domination and explore the micro-foundations of domination in con-
temporary Chinese society.
Michael Burawoy’s extended case method encourages researchers to
engage in generalization and revise existing theories by comparing addi-
tional empirical and historical cases. In this book, not only do I extend
Burawoy’s politics of production framework, I also adopt the compar-
ative-historical approach to analyze how the same type of factory own-
ership has led to different outcomes of domination over workers. With
contemporary China as my major case, I have employed Burawoy’s
framework (with my revisions) to compare China’s factory regimes,
family/work relations, everyday life practices, and interactions between
global and local production at different periods of time in the post-
Mao era, and also, as mentioned, in the cases of colonial Hong Kong
in a past period and post-socialist Vietnam today. For this book, I con-
ducted interview research in both these territories in order to make these
comparisons. Additionally, after comparing China with Hong Kong and
Vietnam, in the concluding chapter I will briefly use Engels’ observa-
tions in his The Condition of the Working Class in England and other his-
torical materials to explore similar subject matter in the so-called Great
Towns of nineteenth-century England. The purpose of doing compar-
isons across countries and across time periods is to explore how the
domination of working classes has developed historically and geograph-
ically under different contexts and different political regimes as global
capitalism has developed. In making comparisons between modes of
10 See also Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), Bourdieu (1977).

14 K. SIU
domination in China and those in other places and times, I will speculate
on the reasons for parallels and contrasts.
In the book’s Conclusion, I will build upon this comparative empiri-
cal work to theorize about the complex nature of workplace domination
in my country studies. I will describe the differing conceptualizations of
the three most influential modern thinkers on power and domination at
work and in society—Marx, Weber, and Foucault—and will weigh the
relevance in present-day post-socialist workplaces and societies of their
approaches to the study of domination and of what Burawoy calls the
politics of production.
The Argument in a Nutshell and the Organization

of the Book
In this book, my overarching theoretical agenda is to understand how

changing production politics (e.g., types of government intervention,
labor market conditions, work/family dynamics, and workers’ social net-
works in cities) interact with changing modes of domination over factory
workers in the labor process, resulting in shifts within factory regimes
over time. As a guiding theoretical framework, I consider two generic
modes of domination over factory workers crucial, namely coercive
and non-coercive domination. From my cross-national comparison of
Hong Kong, China, and Vietnam over time, far from being static cat-
egories, the factory regime of one place can shift from being coercive
to non-coercive. Thus, these two generic modes of domination actu-
ally form a spectrum of modes of domination that evolve. A particular
type of factory regime in a place is very much the product of the inter-
action between elements of production politics and workplace culture.
Specifically, one of the main arguments repeatedly emphasized in this
book is that the work/family relationship as one of the elements in pro-
duction politics is a key lever in limiting the degree of coercion of a fac-
tory regime. Because the work/family relationship changes as a factory
worker ages, a factory regime in a newly industrializing region also shifts
as its workforce ages. As will be observed, the changing dynamics per-
mits a degree of space for workers’ power and agency to maneuver and
to bargain with the factory management.
On the other hand, factory regimes also have path-dependent char-
acteristics—factory management is habituated to, and clings to, aspects
of coercive its control strategies to manage factory workers in the labor

process even when management faces forms of resistance from workers
or it changes its production sites from one country to another. Sets of
rules and punishments still exist even when relaxed and even when more
soft control measures get introduced.
Chapter 2 provides a comparative context for the broad economic pro-
cesses underway on the south China coast, by examining Hong Kong’s
earlier rapid industrialization and the rise and then decline of the garment
industry there, with a focus on Hong Kong’s changing position in global
garment production. I will 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. As will be
observed, this transition witnessed a proliferation of subcontracting prac-
tices in the garment industry and the rise of patron–client and labor-man-
agement relationships up until the mid-1990s. By the end of the 1990s,
Hong Kong factory management had abandoned their Hong Kong work-
force, resulting in “deskilling” as many garment workers left the industry
and entered the low-pay service sector. Descriptions in Chapter 2 of the
various circumstances faced by Hong Kong garment workers during the
course of these several decades become a prelude to the book’s empirical
chapters on Chinese migrant workers (Chapters 3, 4, and 5).
Chapter 3 focuses on the work conditions and the perspectives of
Chinese migrant industrial workers in the early 1990s through a careful
examination of 76 private letters and shows how state, capital, and patri-
archal powers dominated workers’ everyday lives. Two decades later, by
the early years of the 2010s, Chinese migrant workers’ lives had changed
significantly compared to the early 1990s. Workers’ social and material
lives as well as their social values had altered, shifting toward increased
urbanism, individualism, and consumerism. All these changes are cap-
tured in my ethnography in Chapter 3 of workers’ everyday life practices
in the heavily industrialized town called Jade Village.
Chapter 4 is concerned with the structural changes of factory regimes
in Shenzhen by way of capturing the up-to-date situation of state regu-
lations and labor market conditions. A close look at Chinese labor law
reveals that although new labor legislation has been introduced in China,
many of the new statutes either are not enforced or contain loopholes,
resulting in what I refer to as “state-endorsed exploitation by non-
enforcement of laws.” Because of this non-enforcement and loopholes,
factory management has enjoyed great managerial autonomy inside
16 K. SIU
factories. Yet as will be seen, workers’ increasing legal knowledge grad-

ually became a check on management’s autonomy. Another focus is the
changing labor market in Shenzhen’s garment industry. In the past dec-
ade, the local migrant labor market has been increasingly segregated by
age. Consequently, after they enter their 30s migrant workers are trapped
in the plight of “low wages, long work hours, and low job turnover”
in subcontracted garment factories in Shenzhen, very different from the
changes underway that affect younger migrants in their 20s.
In Chapter 5, I turn to the modes of domination inside a Chinese
garment factory, focusing on factory management’s changing work-
place strategies. An increasingly heterogeneous garment workforce
containing more and more young male workers drove changes in man-
agement strategies. As will be observed, management began to use an
array of new mechanisms to control various aspects of workers’ labor
power. It becomes clear by the end of my inquiry of workplace domina-
tion that Chinese management is resorting to softer, personalized, and
non-coercive workplace strategies, which I call “conciliatory despotism.”
Chapter 6 focuses on my research in Ho Chi Minh City into
Vietnamese migrant workers’ living and working conditions, and these
are compared to their Chinese counterparts. By comparing Vietnamese
labor law, the household registration system, workers’ patterns of migra-
tion, housing, transportation, food consumption, and labor market con-
ditions, I show that the Vietnamese state advocates a different strategy to
attract foreign investment, by setting a lower labor standard, or as I call
it, “state-endorsed exploitation by sub-standard legislation.” At the same
time, I explain why in the Vietnamese garment workplace, less coercive
power is exercised than in today’s China, despite the fact that Hong
Kong factory owners in Vietnam employ a similar level of technology,
shop-floor organization and payment system as do Hong Kong factory
owners in south China. I also focus on the labor market in Ho Chi Minh
City and show how Ho Chi Minh City’s migrant labor market is less seg-
mented than Shenzhen’s. Examining the Vietnamese workers’ everyday
lives, I explain why Vietnamese migrant workers are able to have a better
family/work balance than Chinese workers and better access to educa-
tional and community facilities than their Chinese counterparts.
In the concluding chapter, I examine my findings and show how these
relate to Weberian, Marxian, and Foucauldian analyses of domination.
I extend my comparison to include the conditions of the working classes
in England, Japan, and Russia during their industrial revolution of the
nineteenth century. This historical comparison sheds light on the devel-

opment of modes of domination in global capitalism in general and in
China in particular. I argue that what has occurred in China over the past
two decades represents the transformation of modes of domination from
using coercion to the promotion of self-control and non-coercive means
in a parallel to what Foucault observed about the nineteenth century. The
essence of this modern transformation in China lies in the simultaneous
shifts in workers’ everyday life practices, the state’s and capital’s strate-
gies to appropriate workers’ labor power, and interactions between global
and local production systems. As will be seen, the post-socialist state still
plays a key role in transforming Chinese migrant workers’ lives and in
the formation of a new generation of working-class migrants whose life
courses, experiences, social values, and work experience are different from
the previous generation. All these comparisons and observations in the
end allow me to re-examine the concepts of power and domination crit-
ically, re-theorize Marx’s crucial concept of labor power in light of the
new capitalist and post-socialist societies today, and suggest a new power
analytic approach—a “strategic-relational approach”—to study the modes
of domination over contemporary industrial workers in China.11
It will be argued that the modes of domination that have been prac-
ticed in China are linked to, and a response to, the earlier political and
economic transformations and global capital flows that existed before
China opened its doors to foreign companies. Thus, this study begins
with a careful survey of global capital’s once frequently visited destina-
tion, Hong Kong, where female garment workers had to balance work
and family lives.
11 The phrase “strategic-relational approach” that I coined uses the same words as Bob
Jessop’s. However, my “strategic-relational approach” to power is different from Jessop’s in

two aspects: (1) While Jessop’s focus is more on the state and on state power, my focus is
on the “power configuration” in the ebbs and flows of patriarchal, state and capital power
in a given place—factory shop floors—accompanied by the changes in workers’ agency. (2)
While Jessop’s approach is basically drawn from the Marxian tradition, especially from the
writings of Marx, Gramsci, and Poulantzas, my approach draws on Weber’s probabilistic
conception of power and uses it to redefine Marx’s notion of “labour power” in order to
capture both the relational and strategic aspects within and outside the production pro-
cess. Armed with this new notion of labour power, not only am I able to identify different
control mechanisms inside and outside the production process; I can also connect to the
theoretical debate in recent labour process theories about different dimensions of labour
power (mobility power and effort power) and I use my empirical cases to demonstrate how
workers exercised these forms of power in workplaces. See Jessop (2002; 2016, pp. 3–90).
18 K. SIU
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CHAPTER 2
Hong Kong Female Garment Workers

and China’s Open Door
When I was six, I had an unforgettable summer holiday. Every morning

in the summer of 1986 my mother would take me with her to her work
in a factory district in Hong Kong. I stayed in the garment factory until
she clocked out at night. I was not the only child there. Another three
or four children, as young as I was, were also there. While our mothers
were busy stitching pieces of clothes at sewing machines, the shop floor
became our “playground.” Sometimes we played hide-and-seek; some-
times we helped our mothers cut loose threads from finished garments.
At that time, whenever the summer holidays approached and schools
were closed, many working mothers faced a headache. Some of them
were lucky enough to have relatives and elder members of the family to
babysit their children. But some, like my mother, who lacked familial
support, would have to take their children with them to the factories.
In 1996, when I was sixteen, everything changed. The factory build-
ing where I had spent my summer holidays was renovated and became
a shopping mall. Kwun Tong, an industrial district that used to contain
many garment factories, was no longer crowded with female workers.
The steady stream of women getting off company buses and flowing
through the gates of factory buildings vanished.1 The most dramatic
change for me was that my mother was no longer a garment worker.
1 For an ethnographic description of Hong Kong’s factory districts in the 1970s, see
Salaff (1995, pp. 46–47).
© The Author(s) 2020 23

K. Siu, Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer
Domination, Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-32-9123-2_2
24 K. SIU
Instead, she became a janitor. When I asked her, “Why don’t you go
and find garment work?” she replied, “No one will employ me anymore.
Most of the work is now done in China.”
These two anecdotes relate to two different periods and two aspects of
my family’s experience of globalized garment production. The first epi-
sode, during the heyday of Hong Kong garment production, concerns
how the production environment had to adjust to women’s conflicting
roles as a mother and a worker. Finding no other way to accommodate
these two roles, my mother and her co-workers had to take their children
to work. Why did factories allow working mothers to bring their children
with them? What were labor–management relationships like in those days?
The second episode, a decade later during the demise of Hong Kong’s
manufacturing industry and the rise of China as a manufacturing pow-
erhouse, concerned my mother’s job change from a garment worker to
a janitor. How should we contextualize a worker’s transition from man-
ufacturing to service work from the perspective of life cycles and labor
history? Overall, in what ways did the changes in global production
impact on Hong Kong manufacturing workers? How can the experiences
of Hong Kong manufacturing workers provide insights into China’s gar-
ment workers?
Female economic participation is one of the salient changes occurring
in industrial societies. A great deal of research has examined the causes
and consequences of the growth of female economic participation.2
Within the Asian context, studies have focused on women’s employment
status3 and life-cycle stages (Brinton, 1993).4 Hong Kong has been used
as a case study to demonstrate how family constraints restricted wom-
en’s paid work (Lui, 1994; Ngo, 1990; Salaff, 1986). It has been argued
that to best accommodate their household obligations, such as childcare
and domestic labor, married women place greater value on flexibility
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, home-
workers, 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).
2 HONG KONG FEMALE GARMENT WORKERS AND CHINA’S OPEN DOOR 25
in workplaces than on monetary rewards, and some women even con-

sider homework (i.e., performing industrial tasks at home on a piece-rate
basis) as their best strategy (Ngo, 1992, pp. 475–488). However, these
studies lack a framework to integrate macro-political economic con-
ditions with micro-workplace relations. Ching Kwan Lee has extended
Michael Burawoy’s theory of the politics of production to her examina-
tion of shop-floor culture in a Hong Kong electronics factory in the early
1990s. She suggests an integrated framework to locate gender and famil-
ialism in Hong Kong’s colonial era politics of production and introduces
a useful notion of “familial hegemony” to depict the gendered factory
regime in Hong Kong (Lee, 1998). Using an electronics shop floor as a
case study, Lee did not explore the situations of casual and homework-
ers. Nor did she focus on the importance of these casual or homework
practices as conditions of changed production politics. I will incorporate
Lee’s insights into my discussion of the Hong Kong garment industry,
while extending my focus to include casual and homeworkers and trace
shifts in labor–management relationships from the industry’s surge in
Hong Kong to its decline.
This chapter provides a larger context for the book’s empirical chap-
ters about Chinese migrant workers. The broad economic processes
underway today on the south China coast will later be analyzed by way
of comparison to the life cycles and work histories of Hong Kong female
garment workers. The chapter begins by tracing Hong Kong’s rapid
labor-intensive industrialization and the rise of the garment industry. It
then tells the stories of two female garment workers, Pei-Chu and Soo-
Yin. It will be seen how the relocation of Hong Kong’s manufacturing
industry to south China has fundamentally changed work practices in
Hong Kong. The transition from manufacturing boom to bust witnessed
a proliferation of subcontracting practices in the garment industry along-
side shifts in labor–management relationships until the mid-1990s.
The Hong Kong Story: 1949–1985

Before World War II, Hong Kong, a British colony, already occupied a
crucial geopolitical position in the Far East. The colony enabled Britain
to engage in entrepot trade with China and Southeast Asia. During
the Japanese occupation, Hong Kong’s economy was disrupted, but
it swiftly recovered its entrepot trade activities within a year of World
War II. Hong Kong was one of the beneficiaries of the new postwar
26 K. SIU
economic and geopolitical dynamic, and in less than thirty years, Hong
Kong’s per capita GDP grew from less than US$400 in the 1950s to
US$5690 in 1980.
In 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party defeated the
Kuomintang government and “liberated” the mainland, a massive wave
of refugees flooded into Hong Kong. Hong Kong’s population jumped
from 1.6 million in 1941 to over 2.3 million in 1950. The population
boom provided the colony with sufficient labor to industrialize. At the
same time, the Chinese Communist revolution helped Hong Kong
gain enough capital to spur industrialization. Fearing the Communist
regime, numerous Shanghai textile capitalists relocated their produc-
tion from Shanghai to Hong Kong (Wong, 1988). Many other refugees
had industrial employment experience and were potential entrepreneurs.
A number of them took risks to establish small- and medium-sized man-
ufacturing firms in Hong Kong in the 1950s.
During the 1950s, the Cold War climate helped Hong Kong pursue
export-led industrialization. To prevent East Asian states from leaning
toward the Chinese Communist regime, the USA opened up its markets,
which was particularly crucial to Hong Kong’s export-led industrializa-
tion. As a result of an abundant labor supply, sufficient capital invest-
ment, and a huge foreign market, manufacturing firms mushroomed in
Hong Kong between the 1950s and 1960s. The number of registered
factories increased from 3000 in the 1950s to 10,000 in the 1960s
(Ma, 1999, pp. 26–27). These firms, once started, could tap into the
extensive commercial network established in Hong Kong’s entrepot his-
tory (So & Chiu, 1995).
Hong Kong’s rise in the postwar period was assisted by the colo-
ny’s internal political and ideological conditions. First, the colonial
state adopted a non-interventionist policy toward the economy. Except
for providing basic infrastructure, maintaining a low tax environment,
and building massive public housing for the working classes (subsi-
dizing local capitalists indirectly by driving down pressure for wage
increases), the colonial state left investment decisions to the private sec-
tor (Castells, Goh, & Kwok, 1990). More importantly, the colonial state
sided with local capitalists at the expense of the working classes’ inter-
ests: Labor protection legislation to regulate standard work hours and
minimum wage laws were largely absent in the colonial era (Siu, 2011).
Only since the late 1970s had any labor law reforms been put in place.
These reforms included introducing severance pay, maternity leave, rest
days, and holidays. Second, Hong Kong’s trade union movement was
weak and divided due to political and ideological differences between
pro-Beijing trade unions and pro-Taiwan trade unions. In line with
this divide, trade unions were more concerned with politics than Hong
Kong workers’ economic livelihoods (Chiu & So, 2004; Siu, 2006).
This allowed local manufacturers to enjoy low labor costs without being
challenged.
Since the 1960s, Hong Kong’s textile manufacturers had imported
sophisticated machinery from overseas to upgrade their production
technology. Many fashion buyers from Europe and the USA began to
come to Hong Kong to purchase fabrics and to place orders for finished
garments, thus helping the subsequent boom in Hong Kong’s garment
industry. However, the global market soon felt under threat. Quota sys-
tems were introduced by many overseas countries to restrict garment
imports from Hong Kong. Restricted by quotas on cotton garments,
Hong Kong garment manufacturers then turned to produce garments
made with artificial fibers like nylon and mixed yarns.
Entering the 1970s, Hong Kong’s garment industry continued to
thrive. It produced mid-market ready-to-wear products from denim to
woven cotton tops, shirts, and trousers. During this period, Hong Kong
was mainly engaged in garment production. In the mid-1970s, one-third
of the ready-to-wear products on the European market were produced
in Hong Kong. At the same time, Hong Kong garment manufacturers
began to recognize the importance of fashion design. The turn from
producing mid-market ready-to-wear garments to up-market fashions
coincided with the great demand from not only the European and the
US markets but also local ones. Years of economic growth gave rise to
a local middle class with strong purchasing power. Not only did depart-
ment stores and fashion boutiques sprout up, fashion design schools also
mushroomed.
The 1980s was a decade of contradictions for Hong Kong’s garment
industry. On the one hand, Hong Kong’s garment industry reached its
apex in 1984 and 1985, becoming the world’s top garment exporter.
On the other hand, many Hong Kong garment manufacturers began to
move north to take advantage of the cheap and abundant labor availa-
ble in south China after China opened up to foreign investment. This
resulted in processes like design, quality control, marketing, and sam-
ple making only being conducted in Hong Kong and paved the path for
Hong Kong’s garment industry’s decline in the second half of the 1980s.
28 K. SIU
Two Hong Kong Women Working

in the Garment Industry
What was it like being a female garment worker during Hong Kong’s
manufacturing boom and bust periods? In what ways did the mac-
roeconomic changes shape female workers’ lives? What kind of
labor–management relationships were experienced by a woman worker
engaged in a garment workplace? The different stages of Hong Kong
female garment workers’ life cycles and their work histories were closely
connected to the ups and downs of the Hong Kong garment industry.
At each juncture, they had to accommodate constraints and difficulties
while trying to fulfill conflicting roles in the family and in the factory.
Pei-Chu and Soo-Yin’s stories are selected to show these connections.
Pei-Chu: From a Young Apprentice to a Sewing Master

Pei-Chu was 15 in 1974 when she started working in Hong Kong’s gar-
ment industry. She was dutiful, confident, hardworking but impulsive.
When I interviewed her in January 2010, she was already the grand-
mother of a two-year-old girl. She had worked on garments for over
30 years. She had become a skillful worker in her 20s, then a “master” in
the industry in her 30s.
Pei-Chu was born into a Hakka family in Danshui, a city on the
Guangdong coast across from Hong Kong. She was the third daughter
of eight children in a big family. In 1974, she came to Hong Kong as a
refugee.
I swam for two days and nights from Danshui with my friend. We brought
with us two basketballs. We held onto them when tired. We could have been
drowned. We finally arrived at an outer island in Hong Kong. I was
exhausted. I couldn’t move and lay on the beach for a day until a police-
man discovered me. He escorted me to an American-funded charity group in
Kowloon, where I waited for my elder brother to pick me up.
Pei-Chu initially lived in a ramshackle squatter’s shack on a hillside

in Kowloon, where impoverished refugees clustered. The two-story
shack was purchased by her brother from a petty entrepreneur. Pei-Chu
occupied a small room on the second floor for five years until she got
married.
Pei-Chu’s settling experience was not unique. Many illegal immigrants

like her did not encounter much difficulties establishing themselves in
Hong Kong. Most of them acquired assistance from family members or
relatives who had immigrated earlier to Hong Kong.
Two months after swimming to Hong Kong, Pei-Chu’s elder sis-
ter, who was a garment worker, introduced her to work in a factory.
According to Pei-Chu, young girls like her were introduced into the gar-
ment industry through peers and relatives. Only after working several
years in the industry would girls hunt for jobs by reading job advertise-
ments outside factories.
At first, Pei-Chu was underpaid because she was only 15, not eligi-
ble to work, and so technically she was in an apprenticeship. After three
years, she had mastered the necessary skills to produce a whole garment,
and she frequently changed jobs from one factory to another. As she
recalled, she could work at up to five factories a year. A dutiful daughter
to her family in China, every month in the late 1970s, after she received
her salary of about HKD 1000, she remitted at least HKD 300–400
back to China. She told me,
In the late 1970s, I earned about HKD 35 a day. It was good pay. A bus ride
only cost only 20 to 30 Hong Kong cents. Usually, I worked 10 hours a day.
It was a golden period.
Pei-Chu and her friends did not need to worry about unemployment.
Hong Kong industry was booming. The piece-rate system was common
and workers were paid every fortnight. There was no hourly wage. The
more you worked, the more you earned. Before Pei-Chu married, she
worked seven days a week peak seasons. She told me that it was illegal,
but almost all garment workers were willing to work such long hours.
What worried workers and employers were factory inspections by the
Labor Department. In the late 1970s, the colonial government passed
a bill later dubbed the “3-shift, 8-hour system,” which restricted female
garment workers to labor at most eight hours a day. Pei-Chu recollected,
Whenever factory inspectors came to our factories, all of us rushed to the back-
door to escape. If we got caught, our bosses would be fined heavily. But usually
bosses and foremen instructed us that if we get caught and are interrogated,
we only have to say ‘I only work 8 hours here!’
30 K. SIU
According to Pei-Chu, they could earn double pay especially dur-

ing peak seasons when there were rush orders from American buyers.
Workers were willing to toil around the clock to help factory bosses to
rush the orders.
Factory bosses would tell you when the batch of products had to be finished.
After knowing this, you had to work days and nights to finish them. Most of
the time, they could be finished on time, and the piece-price was very attrac-
tive, usually twenty or thirty per cent more than normal. Very often, when
orders were too rushed to finish, factory bosses would pay us double. Under
those circumstances, we would work even twenty-four hours a day to finish the
orders.
The “3-shift, 8-hour system” was soon stalled because of strong resist-
ance from employers and female garment workers. On the one hand,
employers feared that the bill would restrict their ability to receive for-
eign orders; on the other hand, seeing their steady increase in salaries,
a large amount of which came from their overtime work, female gar-
ment workers also feared that the bill would reduce their wages. In the
end, a very lax work-hour discretion issue from the colonial government
stalled the bill.5 This meant no standard work hour and minimum wage
legislation existed in colonial Hong Kong. Consequently, there was no
overtime legislation to regulate pay and hours in the city. Most of the
time, garment workers were paid on piece-rate. The piece price of each
order was separately and individually negotiated between factory bosses/
foremen and garment workers depending upon technicality and com-
plexity of products. Because garment workers’ monthly salaries gradually
improved between the 1970s and the mid-1980s, like Pei-Chu, many
were happy with the piece-rate arrangement, though they sacrificed their
rest time and health.
The bosses sought to create a paternalistic image. Pei-Chu recalled,
“Whenever there was a rush order and we had to work beyond ten at
night, the bosses would buy us lunch boxes. Every year at the spring din-
ner, there were lucky draws in factories. Every worker could get a prize,
be it small or big.”
5 See Siu (2011).

The workers’ relationship with the foremen (who were normally

women) was often personal. This persisted when the industry changed
and the foremen became subcontractors to the workers. Pei-Chu
described,
We became friends. Usually when a foreman or labor contractor had any cele-
bration, for example when his or her son got married or when a new child was
born, we, the workers, attended the banquet. Every Lunar New Year, we also
gathered together to pay them a visit. In return, they did the same for us.
The relationships were extended to the sons and daughters of garment

workers. For example, after Pei-Chu’s son graduated from high school,
he was introduced to a medium-sized garment factory by a foreman for
whom Pei-Chu worked.
These paternalistic relationships between workers, bosses, and fore-
men did not mean there were no conflicts. As Pei-Chu recalled, several
times she was cheated by some small- or medium-sized factory bosses.
The bosses ran away and closed the factories without paying their wages.
In the end, she and her co-workers went to the Labor Department to
sue them.
In 1979, Pei-Chu married a cook who was a fellow villager. They lived
in a squatter hut between 1979 and 1984 until the government demol-
ished it and moved them into an apartment in a public housing estate
in Kwun Tong. Until 1991, Pei-Chu and her husband had to work full
time and had no time to take care of their two children. Luckily she
continued receiving familial support from her elder brother. Pei-Chu
requested her brother let her son and daughter live at her brother’s
apartment in a public housing estate. Her brother’s wife took care of
their children and was paid for the service. Her son and daughter lived
in her brother’s apartment for seven and four years, respectively, until the
mid-1990s. During this period, every night after Pei-Chu and her hus-
band finished work, they went to Pei-Chu’s brother’s home to eat dinner
and visit their children.
Hong Kong’s garment industry went downhill in the mid-
1980s, and Pei-Chu’s work pattern changed. Instead of working
for a garment factory, she increasingly worked for labor contractors
(baogongtau). Her relationship with factory bosses became less pater-
nalistic and more patron–client like. The labor contractors did not own
factories. After these contractors received orders from big garment
32 K. SIU
factories, factories would reserve sewing machines for workers like Pei-
Chu. Several instances illustrate how female labor contractors developed
a relationship of mutual loyalty between themselves and the female work-
ers under them. As Pei-Chu admitted, sometimes for the sake of keeping
good relationship with the labor contractors, Pei-Chu and her colleagues
would follow particular labor contractors shifting from one large factory
to another. They knew that labor contractors’ profits lay in the price dif-
ference between that offered from large garment factories and their sala-
ries, but Pei-Chu and her colleagues still considered it “mutual consent”
between labor contractors and workers, and continued to work for them.
Particularly, in off-peak seasons labor contractors found it very difficult
to get enough orders, workers like Pei-Chu would accept a lower level
of salary or piece price from contractors. In exchange, these contractors
would promise female workers that whenever they received new orders,
they would put them on the top of their recruitment lists. Pei-Chu told
me that between the mid-1980s and early 1990s, subcontracting work
usually paid better than working directly for a factory, but they had no
welfare, insurance, and other benefits that regular workers in the factories
were entitled to.
The workers’ situation worsened in the mid-1990s. Pei-Chu noted,
“Everything had moved to China, there was no way you could get sub-
contracting work, and the pay was getting lower and lower!” Some
garment workers, like Pei-Chu, occasionally got casual factory work by
helping Hong Kong garment factories to make sample products before
these were mass produced in China. When Pei-Chu engaged in casual
work, she was considered a “skilled worker,” and was paid about HKD
300 for an 8-hour day. Some contractors called upon her to work for one
to two weeks irregularly. Most were “correction jobs” when the products
made in China did not pass quality control. As time passed, even these
causal jobs evaporated. In the late 1990s, Pei-Chu left the garment sec-
tor altogether.
She became a cleaner working in restaurants, hospitals, and public
housing estates. Her income was lower and less stable. When she found
a full-time cleaning job, work hours were 10–11 hours a day, six days a
week. In 2009, after a cleaning company laid her off, she worked as a
gas-pump attendant at a petrol station. After three months, she began to
suffer from headaches and had to quit the job several days before I inter-
viewed her.
Another random document with
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« A supposer qu’il ait raison, en serai-je, comme il dit, plus
heureuse ? »
Au contraire, la seule perspective de ne plus pouvoir espérer lui
apparut intolérable ; et Julien n’était pas la cause exclusive de cette
angoisse. Elle aperçut clairement en cette minute que le désir de
croire s’étendait aux fibres profondes de sa substance, qu’elle en
avait besoin pour vivre. L’ébranlement du choc reçu révélait jusqu’où
il avait porté.
Après un instant elle reprit :
— Ce que pensera l’humanité dans un siècle, dans vingt, je
l’ignore. Je veux du bonheur, le mien, un bonheur infini, oui, infini.
Qui me le donnera ? Tu as beau dire, ils sont plus heureux que nous,
ceux qui ont la foi. Ils croient savoir d’où ils viennent, où ils vont ;
pour eux la mort ne compte plus ; ils ont eu Dieu dès cette vie, ils
entrent dans l’autre avec la confiance de l’avoir éternellement.
— Ou d’être éternellement damnés ! ricana M. Ardel.
Et, s’échauffant d’une sorte d’enthousiasme ascétique :
— Le Paradis vrai, le seul, c’est celui qu’on se fait soi-même, le
Paradis du labeur et de la pensée. Quand je suis abattu, je me mets
au travail, et, peu à peu, ma tristesse se dissipe, je sens une
effusion de lumière descendre en moi et d’abondantes délices y
fleurir. Mais, toi, je me rends fort bien compte de ton état : notre
intérieur ne te suffit plus, tu aspires à autre chose ; il faut que je te
cherche un mari…
— Ne prends pas cette peine, répliqua-t-elle d’une voix
frémissante : le mari, d’avance, est refusé.
— Ah ! fit-il avec une colère incoercible et appuyant ses phrases
par des coups de tête doctoraux comme toutes les fois qu’il voulait
implanter une affirmation, je ne me suis donc point trompé ! C’est
Julien que tu veux, et, pour l’avoir, tu passeras sous les Fourches
Caudines des prêtres. Mais dis-le-toi bien : le jour où tu iras à
confesse, ce sera fini entre nous ; et, je serai franc jusqu’au bout,
j’aimerais mieux te voir morte que bigote !
Exaspérée, elle lui cria :
— Puisque tu le prends sur ce ton, je ne mettrai plus les pieds
chez les Rude ; tu comprendras alors qu’ils n’étaient pour rien dans
mes idées.
— C’est tout ce que je te demande, répondit-il, soudain apaisé.
Plus tard, quand tu seras majeure, si cela te plaît et si ton père est
devenu inexistant pour toi, tu croiras à Lourdes, à la Salette, à saint
Expédit, au Sacré Cœur, et à leurs grotesques boniments. Je m’en
lave les doigts ; mais j’espère encore en ton intelligence. Bon sang
ne doit pas mentir…
Leur querelle tomba sur ce mot ; cependant Pauline se
désespérait d’avoir, de ses propres mains, étranglé son unique joie ;
quelle folle bravade de s’engager à ne plus voir Julien ! D’autre part,
les négations que l’ironie paternelle essayait de lui inculquer la
tenaillaient d’un doute : si Victorien disait vrai, pourquoi vivre ? A
quoi bon se traîner jusqu’au néant ? Oui, mais où trouver le Dieu
qu’elle attendait ? L’effort d’une conversion lui semblait au-dessus de
ses forces ; mais, si elle ne le tentait, la lumière possible ne se
retirerait-elle point ? La veille, elle avait rouvert, au hasard, les
Évangiles : ce verset brusquement s’était offert :
Je m’en irai, et vous me chercherez, et vous mourrez dans votre
péché.
A présent, l’épouvante d’être délaissée sans retour et l’anxiété
d’aller à un Dieu qui ne serait pas un Dieu faisaient en sa
conscience une dure agonie. Une sueur froide lui venait aux
tempes ; elle aurait voulu s’étendre sur les pierres de la route, fermer
les yeux, ne plus rien sentir.
Ils arrivaient, près de la gare, au passage à niveau ; devant la
barrière close, une grosse charrette à foin attendait. Un rapide était
annoncé. M. Ardel entra en conversation avec le garde-barrière ;
celui-ci se plaignait d’avoir du travail la nuit comme le jour, sans une
heure de répit : « Autant vaudrait accrocher une ficelle au poteau, et
moi après. » Il se mit à conter succinctement un terrible suicide dont
son fils, employé à Laroche, avait été, quelques jours avant, le
spectateur :
La femme d’un homme d’équipe était devenue la maîtresse d’un
mécanicien ; ce dernier, un beau jour, lui signifia qu’il en avait assez ;
pour le punir et lui donner du remords, elle se jeta, un dimanche soir,
sous la machine qu’il conduisait. On la ramassa décapitée, en
quartiers, on la porta dans un hangar, on mit une bâche sur elle, et
on alla prévenir son mari. Il était ivre et ne voulait pas se déranger :
« Ça lui apprendra à vivre », déclara-t-il en guise de lamentation
funèbre. Il vint enfin, deux camarades posèrent le cadavre sur une
brouette, l’emmenèrent chez lui. Pour leur peine, il déboucha une
bouteille, se remit à boire avec eux. Ensuite, à côté de la brouette
toujours chargée, il se jeta sur le lit et s’endormit.
« Cette femme, pensa Pauline, eut-elle tort ? Elle quittait un
monde de brutes. Ce serait simple d’en faire autant… Mon père
conclut qu’il aimerait mieux me voir morte. Que dirait-il, si je le
prenais au mot ?… Oui, quand le train passera, un mouvement, et
ce serait fini. Dans une minute, je saurais, je verrais face à face
l’Absolu, ou bien, plus rien, le sommeil à jamais, dont personne ne
pourrait plus m’arracher. Et Julien ? Il se consolerait, il prierait pour
moi… »
Un des chevaux de la charrette secoua ses grelots, hennit.
Pauline regarda autour d’elle : les poteaux du télégraphe se
penchaient confusément, sous les étoiles rares que noyait le clair de
lune. Une courbe infléchissait les voies ; elles s’en allaient, au delà
des signaux, vers l’infini des routes nocturnes, et la terre les
emportait, comme une ceinture d’acier, sur ses flancs, en roulant
dans le vide noir illimité.
L’orage s’éloignait, une vibration assourdie de tonnerre expira ;
mais un autre bruit croissait, d’abord mêlé au ronflement du barrage,
puis furieux comme le fracas d’un torrent qui s’approchait. Du
martellement des roues se détacha le branle précipité de la bielle ; et
soudain, au tournant, les deux lampes éclatèrent, leur clarté s’étira
sur les rails polis. Pauline ne voyait qu’elles et la crinière de feu se
tordant avec des étincelles en arrière de la machine sombre. La
tentation de mourir l’étreignit, comme si toute volonté succombait en
son être. La frénésie d’une délivrance abolissait l’horreur de la mort.
Elle s’était écartée de son père à quelques pas ; il parlait au garde.
Elle le considéra une suprême fois, éleva ses yeux vers les étoiles,
et elle allait s’élancer. En cette seconde, elle eut la sensation précise
que quelqu’un lui empoignait la main, l’immobilisait…
Le vent du rapide souleva sa robe, les marchepieds la frôlèrent,
le sol tressauta ; la trombe de fer roula contre son visage, triturant
les rails, écrasant les cailloux qu’elle faisait rebondir, et le dernier
wagon s’enfuit d’un élan rigide, comme un obus lancé dans la nuit.
Ensuite, ce fut un grand calme.
— Tu viens ? dit à sa fille M. Ardel qui ne s’était douté de rien.
Ils reprirent en silence le chemin du logis. Pauline, maintenant
lucide, recomposait les instants de son désespoir. Il lui restait de
cette crise la stupeur de l’avoir subie et une courbature indicible.
Comment avait-elle pu perdre tout empire sur ses impulsions, au
point d’être conduite à un acte qu’elle aurait, une heure avant,
réprouvé et cru impossible ? Et qui donc l’avait sauvée de sa
démence ? Car une main réelle avait pris la sienne, une main
d’homme, maigre et brûlante comme celle de Julien, et ses papilles
sentaient encore la pression des doigts impérieux. Elle s’humilia
devant les Puissances invisibles qui prenaient en pitié sa personne
chétive ; Dieu, parmi le frémissement de l’univers, voulait entendre
battre son cœur de vivante, comme elle se souvenait d’avoir, à
Paris, dans le tumulte d’une rue, mis près de son oreille sa petite
montre, pour en écouter les pulsations.
Elle respira délicieusement l’air lumineux de cette nuit, la
fraîcheur de l’eau, l’arome des foins coupés et des tilleuls.
« O Dieu, murmura-t-elle tous bas, soyez béni d’avoir fait le
monde si beau. Puisque c’est votre volonté que j’y sois, je
m’abandonne à Vous, menez-moi où je dois aller. »
Rassérénée dans sa tristesse, elle se coucha et dormit d’un
somme jusqu’au soleil levant. Ce matin-là, elle reprit avec une
douceur neuve le fil de ses jours terrestres. En s’habillant elle se plut
à manier son linge, ses robes, tout ce qui lui rendait palpable la
possession de la vie. Elle descendit revoir son « jardin » ; les pinsons
pépiaient sur les branches du frêne ; le ciel ardent se mirait dans la
rosée de l’herbe.
L’oncle Hippolyte, quand il vint déjeuner, lui remit deux louis d’or
pour payer d’avance des chemises dont il voulait enrichir sa garde-
robe.
— Mais pourquoi, mon oncle, vous pressez-vous tant ?
— Parce que, dit-il en se grattant la tête, c’est ennuyeux de
payer, et une fois que c’est fait, on n’y pense plus.
Il y avait, dans cette saillie d’avare, une telle ingénuité qu’elle en
rit.
Victorien partit à l’heure de son cours ; sa fille et lui échangèrent
leur bonjour habituel sans allusion à ce qui s’était passé. Pauline,
avant d’envoyer Armance au marché, la chargea de commissions
minutieuses ; elle aimait à commander et y trouvait en ce moment
une joie singulière, comme un exercice de sa puissance de vivre.
Elle entra au salon, s’assit à son piano et chanta. Les volutes de
ses vocalises s’unissaient aux reflets liquides que les vrilles de la
treille ensoleillée remuaient dans les rideaux. Mais, bientôt, elle
s’arrêta, reprise d’une pensée anxieuse :
« Pendant que je chante, mon père fait peut-être à M. Rude une
scène irréparable. »
Un pas résonna sur le trottoir, on sonna ; étant seule, elle alla
ouvrir ; c’était Julien ! Il rapportait à M. Ardel un livre que le
professeur lui avait prêté, sur les Corporations au moyen âge.
— Je me sauve, fit-il, je ne veux pas entrer.
— Si, dit-elle, entrez un instant, il faut que je vous dise deux
mots.
Il pénétra dans le vestibule : elle avait rougi, confuse de sa
hardiesse ; mais il la mit à l’aise en parlant le premier :
— Moi aussi, j’aurais, non deux mots, mais un million à vous
dire… Avez-vous souffert cette nuit ? J’ai rêvé de vous ; je vous
suivais marchant dans une campagne, près d’un puits à ru, un de
ces puits au fond desquels on entend bruire une rivière souterraine.
La margelle du puits était basse ; vous regardiez au fond ; tout d’un
coup, vous m’avez dit, d’un air triste et bizarre : Voulez-vous voir
comme c’est simple d’y sauter ?… Vous preniez votre élan, j’ai crié,
je vous ai saisi la main…
— Oh ! s’exclama-t-elle, votre main, je l’ai reconnue ; sans elle, je
ne serais plus au monde.
Elle le mit au fait de l’explication acerbe avec son père, du
désespoir qui l’avait étourdie et du secours tangible, mystérieux,
dont la commotion lui demeurait présente. Il en parut frappé, plus
encore qu’elle ne s’y attendait :
— Êtes-vous bien sûre que, vraiment, une main vous ait
touchée ? Non, ce n’était pas la mienne. Ce ne pouvait pas être moi.
Et pourtant, cette concordance, ce rêve… J’en ai fait un autre, moins
étrange ; se vérifiera-t-il aussi ?
— Lequel ? Dites-le-moi.
— Plus tard… Toute parole est une pierre qu’on jette dans
l’éternité et qu’on ne reprend plus.
— Racontez-moi votre rêve ; si vous avez des secrets pour moi,
c’est que votre amitié tient à bien peu.
— Dans huit jours, je vous le promets ; la première fois que nous
nous reverrons…
Il s’était avancé vers la porte et posait son doigt sur la serrure ; il
se retourna vers Pauline, la contempla d’un regard fou : son peignoir
dégageait la fermeté de son cou marmoréen, une langueur affinait
son teint pourpré ; les secousses de la veille avaient imprimé un
cercle bleuâtre autour de ses yeux battus ; une larme se mêlait à
l’eau vive de ses prunelles ; et toute sa beauté, franche,
harmonieuse, s’offrait telle qu’un fruit plein de suc, prêt à mûrir.
Elle sentit obscurément de quel émoi vibrait Julien ; mais aussitôt
il se dompta ; une limpidité fraternelle reparut en ses yeux.
— Soyez forte désormais, prononça-t-il avec gravité. Je veux
qu’une femme soit une force dans ma vie. Et, Celui qui a passé près
de vous, hier, pour vous sauver, ne le faites pas trop attendre.
Il lui prit la main dans les deux siennes, où le sang battait, et
sortit d’un pas rapide.
Lorsque M. Ardel rentra, Pauline essaya d’interpréter sa
contenance ; si M. Rude et lui s’étaient quittés sur des propos
hargneux, sa figure aurait gardé les vestiges d’une agitation, son œil
eût pris cette dureté absente, cette noirceur morne de basalte qu’elle
connaissait trop. Au contraire il se montra détendu, presque affable ;
il avait dû réfléchir qu’en malmenant sa fille il la rebuterait de lui et
de ses idées. Jusque-là, il avait cru choyer en elle un miroir docile ;
pouvait-il admettre qu’elle lui échappât ? Son mouvement
d’indépendance l’avait indigné d’abord ; mais, n’étant pas sûr de le
comprimer, il pensait en venir mieux à bout par la logique et la
persuasion. De même, à l’égard des Rude, il jugeait sage de ne pas
brusquer une rupture où il confesserait que leur influence lui faisait
peur.
Après le dîner, il tira de sa poche un livre mince cartonné en
brun :
— Tiens, dit-il à Pauline, tu m’as demandé un Manuel de l’histoire
des religions. En voici un ; tu y trouveras, sous une forme concise,
les données les plus scientifiques.
Pauline en lut les premières pages ; mais l’auteur trahissait un
parti pris si lourd de tourner à une négation du christianisme l’exposé
de tous les systèmes religieux, qu’elle s’en méfia sur-le-champ, et
l’effet de ce Manuel fut exactement opposé à celui qu’espérait
Victorien. Elle revint aux Évangiles en partant de ce principe que,
pour comprendre un livre où le miracle est à toutes les lignes, il
fallait raisonner comme si le miracle était possible. Elle se proposait
aussi de chercher une histoire de l’Église écrite dans un esprit
d’équité. Julien pourrait lui indiquer un titre ; toutefois, quand le
reverrait-elle ? Car, son engagement de ne plus aller chez les Rude,
elle était résolue à le tenir, jusqu’à ce que son père, de lui-même,
l’en déliât.
A l’improviste, elle rencontra sur le Mail Edmée avec sa bonne,
Antoinette. Edmée venait d’avertir le médecin : Julien, depuis deux
jours, avait dû se coucher, pris de vomissements et d’une fièvre
intermittente ; les vomissements s’étaient arrêtés ; cependant il ne
pouvait dormir, il souffrait d’une soif horrible accompagnée d’un petit
hoquet et de douleurs abdominales ; on commençait à se demander
si quelque maladie grave ne couvait pas dans ses organes.
Le lendemain, Pauline fit prendre par Armance de ses nouvelles ;
il se croyait mieux et parlait de se mettre en route pour passer à
Paris un examen. Mais, le vendredi soir, au milieu du souper, M.
Ardel annonça :
— On est venu chercher Rude avant la fin de sa classe ; Julien,
paraît-il, est très mal…
Il ne put dire cette nouvelle sans une tristesse dans la voix ; mais
il dévisagea Pauline pour mesurer l’impression produite. Elle ne
songea point à cacher son bouleversement ; ses lèvres devinrent
blanches ; ses pupilles si caressantes se durcirent autant que celles
de Victorien lui-même ; elle le fixa d’une manière qui exprimait :
« Qu’attendais-tu pour me l’apprendre ? Ne sens-tu donc rien ? » Et
elle garda un silence méprisant, comme devant quelqu’un qui ne
comprenait pas sa souffrance.
— Nous irons tout à l’heure, reprit-il au bout d’un instant, voir
comment il va.
Pendant le court trajet, avec le ton froid d’un médecin établissant
un diagnostic, il articula des considérations sur la maladie probable
de Julien : ce garçon vivait trop par les nerfs, pas assez par les
muscles ; son mysticisme, s’ajoutant à son activité cérébrale, le
consumait ; la croissance, les fortes chaleurs, tout aidait, « sur un tel
terrain », les virulences infectieuses.
— Julien est vigoureux, répliqua Pauline, farouche dans son
espoir ; si Dieu veut le guérir, les médecins ne l’en empêcheront pas.
Ils sonnèrent doucement ; sur la mine d’Antoinette, où
s’épanouissait d’ordinaire une quiétude monastique, ils lurent
l’angoisse de la maison. Edmée vint au-devant d’eux dans
l’antichambre : vers trois heures, des suffocations l’avaient saisi, le
hoquet avait redoublé, les douleurs étaient devenues intolérables ; le
médecin, maintenant, y voyait clair et il craignait une inflammation du
péritoine. Une vessie pleine de glace, appliquée sur le ventre du
malade, avait calmé ses tortures ; mais la période critique se
prolongerait deux ou trois jours.
M. Rude arriva et dit simplement de son fils :
— Il ne va pas bien.
Avec l’optimisme des gens robustes qui ne peuvent croire aux
catastrophes, Rude ne concevait pas encore l’imminence du péril.
— Voulez-vous entrer un instant ? Votre visite lui fera du bien.
On avait transporté le lit de Julien dans la chambre de sa mère,
en face de la fenêtre qui renvoyait sur lui la flamme de l’occident
jaune comme le cœur d’un lis. Mme Rude, assise à son chevet,
nerveuse et enfiévrée, le regardait en épiant les moindres
mouvements de son visage. Quand il entendit annoncer les Ardel, il
tourna la tête à demi. Pauline dut faire un effort pour répondre à son
sourire : une sorte de masque funèbre s’était collé sur sa face ; une
mèche de ses cheveux pendait contre sa joue ; ses narines, en se
pinçant, allongeaient la courbure de son nez.
— Merci d’être venus, proféra-t-il ; voyez quel beau soir ! Depuis
notre retour de Paris il n’y en a pas eu un pareil. On dirait, au bord
de ces nuées, des enfants qui balancent des palmes…
Un hoquet sec l’interrompait ; sa voix résonnait chantante et
calme, en dépit d’un essoufflement, mais autre que la sienne, et
comme faite d’un cristal qui allait se briser. Il paraissait oublieux de
son mal, en détourna la conversation, et s’enquit de Victorien si le
traducteur du Saint-Simon aurait achevé bientôt ce travail.
Pauline, en l’entendant, voulait se rassurer, ne pas admettre que
ce fût possible de mourir à vingt ans, quand on portait, comme lui,
dans son avenir, tout un monde. Mais M. Ardel, après l’avoir quitté,
énonça dehors entre haut et bas, cette opinion :
— J’ai bien peur qu’il ne soit perdu.
— Au moins, ne me le dis pas, supplia Pauline ; tu te plais donc à
me désespérer !
Et elle poursuivit intérieurement :
« Si je n’étais pas indigne de savoir prier, quel cri je pousserais
vers le Tout-Puissant ! Non, je ne veux pas qu’il meure ; est-ce que la
terre serait habitable sans lui ?… Mais ma prière ne vaudrait rien : sa
vie, c’est pour moi que je la désire, pour moi plus encore que pour lui
et les siens. »
Elle monta dans sa chambre, se déshabilla, mais tarda à se
coucher, certaine de ne pouvoir dormir ; elle s’unissait à l’insomnie
de Julien, le voyait, sous une veilleuse, haletant avec son hoquet :
« De tous ceux qui l’aiment, personne ne peut l’aimer comme
moi ; et, sur les deux jours peut-être qu’il vivra, j’aurai un quart
d’heure à le revoir !… »
Cette idée affreuse lui arrachait les entrailles. Elle alluma sa
lampe, et, cherchant un secours contre son tourment, elle reprit ses
Évangiles. Le livre s’ouvrit de lui-même, au chapitre XIV de saint
Marc, au récit de la Passion.
Dès les premières lignes, l’image de la femme qui verse sur la
tête de Jésus le nard précieux atteignit son âme comme une allusion
miséricordieuse à sa propre indignité : « Ce qu’elle a pu faire, elle l’a
fait ; elle a prévenu l’onction des parfums dont on oindra mon corps
enseveli… »
Ces mots infondaient dans la pensée de la mort une douceur
d’espérance prophétique et divine. Elle ne s’étonna plus que le
Maître sût d’avance la trahison de Judas, ni qu’en rompant le pain, il
eût dit : « Ceci est mon Corps. » Si Jésus croyait pouvoir se donner
lui-même en se multipliant par un holocauste sans fin, elle
comprenait cette volonté d’immolation perpétuelle. La douleur
excitait chez elle, comme eût dit Julien, « le sens de l’amour ».
Certaines réflexions de lui, le jour d’hiver où ils marchaient dans la
neige, s’éclaircissaient en sa mémoire ; et d’autres phrases lourdes
de pressentiments, sa réponse à M. Ardel : « Il prépare le cercueil de
Julien » ; et ce rêve qu’il n’avait pas voulu lui raconter, succédant à la
vision de l’angoisse qu’elle endurait ! La certitude de ses intuitions
aggravait celle de sa fin prochaine. Pauline lisait précisément le
passage :
« Mon âme est triste jusqu’à la mort… Mon Père, emportez loin
de moi ce calice… Mais faites, non ce que je veux, mais ce que vous
voulez. »
Les mots de cette oraison lui semblèrent sortir de son cœur
transpercé ; un sanglot secoua sa poitrine, comme s’ils venaient du
fond d’elle-même. Pourtant, la résignation où ils s’achèvent excédait
ses forces :
« Il fallait être plus qu’un homme pour accepter le calice ; moi, je
ne peux pas… »
Elle laissa tomber sa tête dans ses mains, puis continua sa
lecture jusqu’au verset :
« Une seconde fois il les trouva dormants. »
« Aurais-je dormi comme eux ? Non. Est-ce que je pourrais
dormir pendant que Julien agonise ?… O les lâches qui se sont tous
enfuis ! »
Elle arrivait à l’interrogatoire devant le grand-prêtre : « Es-tu le
Christ, le fils du Dieu béni ? — Je le suis. »
Ailleurs déjà elle avait lu : « Le Père et moi, nous ne sommes
qu’un. Avant qu’Abraham fût, je suis. » Comment l’homme, qui, seul
d’entre les hommes, a osé parler ainsi, voulut-il les crachats des
Juifs, les verges et les coups de bâton sur sa tête coiffée d’épines ?
Si tout cela est vrai, se peut-il qu’on pense à autre chose, qu’on vive
d’autre chose ? Et ils durent prendre un passant de force pour lui
porter sa croix ! Personne de bonne volonté. O mystère
d’inconcevable détresse !…
« Je ne sais pas si vous êtes Dieu, prononça-t-elle à mi-voix.
Mais j’ai compassion de vous, comme si vous étiez mort d’hier, et
mort à cause de moi. Et vous, si vous guérissiez vraiment les
malades, ayez pitié de nous, guérissez votre serviteur Julien, et je
croirai en vous. »
Cependant, elle l’avait suivi, loin derrière les saintes femmes,
derrière la populace, jusqu’à sa crucifixion ; elle s’arrêta sur ce
verset : « Qu’il descende maintenant de la croix, pour que nous le
voyions et que nous croyions. Et ceux qui étaient crucifiés avec lui
l’insultaient. »
« Ce que faisait cette canaille, réfléchit-elle, je l’ai fait. Il est cloué
injustement sur ce bois. — Qu’il y reste, ai-je dit en passant avec
indifférence. Le péché de ma vie, le voilà ! »
Et, découvrant soudain la vérité de sa misère, elle pleura. Elle
pleurait sur elle-même sans pouvoir, comme le centurion, s’écrier
aussitôt : « Cet homme était vraiment le Fils de Dieu, » mais abîmée
devant son cadavre dans une humiliation réparatrice.
« J’aurai donc vécu dix-neuf ans, ignorante de vous, insouciante,
comme si vous n’aviez pas souffert ! Maintenant, je puis crier avec
Vous : Mon Dieu, pourquoi m’avez-vous abandonnée ? Le grand cri
où vous avez expiré arrive à moi, et je ne cesserai plus de
l’entendre… »
L’agonie de Jésus pourtant la ramenait à cette possibilité
déchirante : Julien va mourir, et toute sa violence d’espoir y résistait.
Avant l’aube, vers l’heure où roucoulent les tourterelles, vaincue
par la lassitude et le chagrin, elle s’assoupit.
Le lendemain, dans la matinée, elle courut s’informer si la nuit
avait été moins mauvaise.
— Il ne va pas plus mal, mais guère mieux ! répondit Edmée, plus
triste que la veille. Ah ! si je pouvais vous dire : Priez avec nous !
— Vous pouvez le dire… murmura Pauline.
Un éclair d’allégresse illumina les yeux d’Edmée, elle sauta au
cou de son amie, et elles s’embrassèrent en sanglotant.
A cinq heures du soir, elle y retourna ; sur le pas de la porte, le
médecin, visiblement soucieux, causait avec M. Rude, dont le visage
dévasté, mais ferme, ne permettait plus d’illusion.
— L’enflure monte, dit-il d’un ton bas à Pauline ; le ventre est
distendu, tiré en haut comme celui d’un crucifié. Le cœur, chaviré,
peine atrocement…
— Est-ce qu’il voit son état ?
— Oui. Il m’a interrogé : « Je veux savoir où j’en suis ; parle ; je
n’ai pas peur de mourir. » Je lui ai répondu sans le tromper…
Demain matin, il recevra le Viatique.
Elle n’eut pas la force d’émettre une parole de réconfort, serra la
main du père affligé, et partit, ivre de désolation. Une vieille femme,
un peu plus haut que la maison des Rude, tournait la manivelle d’un
orgue de Barbarie ; l’aigreur implorante et chétive des fredons
exaspéra la détresse de Pauline.
« Je ne veux pas qu’il souffre de cette musique, » se dit-elle, et
elle tira de son porte-monnaie une pièce de cinq francs qu’elle tendit
à la mendiante en l’adjurant de s’éloigner.
— Dieu vous le rende, remercia la vieille, éblouie de cette
aumône.
— Vous croyez en Dieu ? repartit Pauline, la gorge pleine de
larmes ; priez-le pour la guérison d’un mourant.
A table, elle fit semblant de toucher aux plats, par convenance,
mais les bouchées ne passaient point. Victorien s’en aperçut ; il ne
se permit aucune réflexion, respectant sa douleur, et consterné lui-
même à la nouvelle que Julien, selon ses prévisions, était bien
perdu.
Ils revinrent, à la nuit tombante, pour offrir à leurs amis l’aide dont
on peut avoir besoin dans des moments désespérés. M. Rude avait
averti Pauline de ne pas sonner et d’entrer en bas, par la porte du
jardin. Elle en souleva discrètement le loquet. Une seule lumière et
faible se distinguait dans la chambre du malade. Les fenêtres
demeuraient ouvertes, car le soir était étouffant. Une voix, celle
d’Edmée, récitait tout haut le chapelet ; Marthe et les femmes avec
M. Rude répondaient.
M. Ardel, à ce bruit de prière, fut tenté de rebrousser chemin.
Pauline écoutait profondément les Ave Maria s’éteindre et se
ranimer sous le ciel embrasé d’étoiles. Edmée les reprenait avec un
accent d’insistance qui s’enflait chaque fois plus éperdu. C’étaient
comme des vagues d’extase et de supplication qui s’en allaient sans
se lasser dans le sein de la Mère miséricordieuse. Pauline elle-
même réitérait en même temps qu’Edmée les seuls mots qu’elle
savait de la Salutation angélique : Je vous salue, pleine de grâce ; le
Seigneur est avec vous. L’hymne, recueilli des lèvres d’un Séraphin
et que les hommes n’eussent jamais connu si Marie ne l’eût répété
elle-même de sa bouche immaculée, faisait descendre une rosée
suave en son cœur meurtri.
Les voix s’interrompirent ; Julien, sans doute, réclamait quelque
soin. Des chiens, dans une cour, se mirent à hurler.
Pauline et son père gravirent sur la pointe des pieds l’escalier de
la terrasse ; en s’approchant, ils entendirent Julien disant à sa mère :
— Continuez le chapelet ; je souffre moins quand vous priez…
Le timbre de cette parole eut une tranquillité impérative, comme
si Julien fût déjà presque étranger et supérieur aux vivants qui
l’entouraient ; M. Rude, ayant aperçu les visiteurs, vint à eux sans
bruit : aucun changement depuis tout à l’heure ; le malade était
cependant plus calme. Victorien et Pauline, après une minute
d’entretien à voix basse, se retirèrent comme deux fantômes :
« S’il mourait cette nuit, songeait Pauline, il ne saurait pas que je
suis venue lui dire adieu. »
Elle s’attendait, le dimanche matin, à le retrouver moribond. O
ravissement ! Un mieux palpable s’indiquait ; à l’instant où il avait
communié, une transfiguration s’était opérée sur ses traits, le hoquet
avait cessé, il ne suffoquait plus ; l’enflure paraissait décroître. Les
médecins — ils étaient revenus deux — auguraient maintenant huit
chances de guérison contre vingt. M. Rude, prompt à l’espérance, vit
aussitôt son fils hors de danger ; et Edmée, en action de grâces,
alluma un cierge devant le petit crucifix de bois qu’on avait posé sur
une nappe pour y recevoir le Viatique.
— Venez jusqu’à sa porte, ma chère Pauline, dit M. Rude. Vous
ne lui parlerez pas, mais vous verrez comment il est.
Avec précaution elle s’avança vers le seuil, d’où elle aperçut,
réfléchie dans une glace, la tête de Julien sur l’oreiller blanc. Sa
figure, bien qu’étirée, avait repris sa coloration vermeille ; à peine
l’aurait-elle cru malade. Javotte, le museau appuyé au bord de la
courtepointe, se faisait caresser par lui. L’odeur languide d’un matin
d’été glissait avec un rai de soleil entre les lames des contrevents.
Marthe, assise au pied du lit, feuilletait sagement des images ; elle
redressa le front à la vue de Pauline ; Julien suivit son mouvement.
— Qui est là ? demanda sa voix faible, mais tranquille.
Mme Rude, occupée à lire sa Messe, quitta son livre et fit signe à
Pauline qu’elle pouvait entrer.
— Bonjour, Pauline, proféra Julien, rouge d’émotion. Vous voyez,
je n’ai pas l’air d’être encore mûr pour partir.
Elle vint jusqu’au lit, et il releva, en la lui tendant, sa longue main
qui pendait.
— Vous êtes bonne, reprit-il ; je sais que vous avez prié en
pensant à moi.
— Oh ! oui, répondit-elle avec une décision exaltée, si vous
guérissez, je me convertis.
— Et même si je ne guérissais pas ?
— Taisez-vous ; j’ai foi que vous guérirez.
De toute son affection véhémente elle le considéra, comme pour
lui insuffler la santé dont elle regorgeait ; puis elle regarda Mme
Rude, et celle-ci s’efforça de sourire ; mais, seule, la mère semblait
douter.
Cependant, Pauline, en sortant, se répétait : « Il vivra, il doit
vivre, ce serait fou de mourir, gonflé de force, comme il l’est. »
La tête lui tournait de joie, dans cette confiance de le revoir
sauvé. Par crainte de se montrer indiscrète, elle attendit la fin du jour
avant d’aller s’assurer que le mieux persistait.
Vers sept heures et demie du soir, au moment où Armance
servait le potage, Edmée, l’air hagard, apparut à la fenêtre de la
salle à manger.
— Il est au plus mal ; je cours chercher l’Extrême-Onction.
Pauline, pâle et résolue, se leva de table.
— Nous partons ? dit-elle à son père presque impérieusement.
— Patience ! répliqua-t-il avec humeur ; quand on l’aura
administré.
— Et s’il meurt dans l’intervalle ? Tu ne veux pas lui dire adieu ?
Elle bondit dans sa chambre passer une robe, mettre un
chapeau. Pendant ce temps, Victorien se hâtait d’avaler sa soupe ;
l’élan de sa fille et son amitié pour Julien l’emportaient sur ses
répugnances.
— Qu’est-ce qu’a donc Pauline ? gronda l’oncle Hippolyte. Elle
est toquée ! Alors on me laisse seul ? Ce jeune homme mourra-t-il
un quart d’heure plus tôt ou plus tard, parce que vous n’aurez pas
dîné ?
Elle redescendit, ils partirent ; les passants se retournaient
surpris de leur allure. Où vont-ils ? s’interrogeaient les gens du
quartier, attablés en famille, dans cette soirée paisible d’un
dimanche de juillet. Pauline allait devant elle sans penser, comme si
le monde fût prêt à s’abolir par un cataclysme. L’excès même de son
désespoir en suspendait le sentiment ; une énergie instinctive,
semblable à celle qui enlève le soldat au milieu d’une alerte, tendait
sa volonté. Ils entrèrent tout droit auprès de Julien, et Pauline fut
terrifiée du changement que sa figure avait subi depuis le matin.
Une couleur terreuse cernait le bas de ses joues, des cercles
noirâtres, sous les sourcils remontés, faisaient le tour de ses orbites,
des taches se formaient au creux de ses narines. Le hoquet
convulsif lui secouait la tête, et, du bord de ses lèvres, Mme Rude
essuyait une écume brune et fétide. Il ne gémissait pas, mais
soupirait : « J’étouffe ! J’éclate ! » Dans l’horreur d’un spasme il avait
déchiré sa chemise sur sa poitrine ; et le cœur, visible sous la peau,
palpitait à grands coups. M. Rude ouvrait toutes les fenêtres et les
portes ; le vent bouscula les rideaux ; de lourdes ombres, comme
des ailes funèbres, souffletaient la face du moribond.
Victorien s’approcha de lui, prit ses doigts que glaçait la moiteur
de l’agonie.
— J’ai froid, se plaignit Julien.
Pauline s’élança au-devant d’Antoinette qui rapportait de la
cuisine des linges brûlants. Puis, elle s’empara, sur la cheminée,
d’un éventail, et, l’agitant contre la bouche de Julien, elle atténuait
ses suffocations. Quand il la vit à son chevet, ses cils battirent ; il
articula un : « Merci », coupé par un râle.
Edmée revint, des voisins entraient, et presque aussitôt, le curé
de la paroisse arriva, portant les saintes huiles ; un autre prêtre
l’accompagnait. Victorien reconnut son frère, mais ne se demanda
même pas pourquoi il venait aussi ; ils se serrèrent la main en
silence.
Julien, à la vue des prêtres, sembla respirer plus librement. Dès
que le curé commença les prières rituelles, il se tint en repos ; ses
souffrances s’assoupirent ; seul, le bruit sec du hoquet rompait les
oraisons. Tous s’étaient mis à genoux ; Victorien, isolé dans le
vestibule, s’inclina, respectueux de la mort et repris à son insu par
l’ascendant des liturgies immémoriales. Pauline s’était reculée dans
un coin obscur et, comme les autres, agenouillée. Pendant que le
curé faisait au mourant les onctions, elle regardait Mme Rude tenant
pour l’éclairer un flambeau, et le flambeau ne tremblait pas. Elle
admirait la force d’âme de cette mère debout et douloureuse ; et, en
ce moment, elle ne songeait plus que Julien allait mourir ; l’huile dont
on touchait ses mains et ses pieds apportait une vertu résurrectrice ;
la paix de l’Esprit-Saint était entrée dans la demeure avec le chrême
plein de ses dons.
Les onctions accomplies, le prêtre releva sa large figure pâle,
d’une douceur mortifiée et grave, il fixa une seconde Julien toujours
immobile, puis l’exhorta d’une voix fervente à redire après lui cette
invocation : « Mon Dieu, pardonnez-moi mes fautes ! Mon Dieu, je
vous aime. » Et Julien redit : « Mon Dieu, je vous aime ! » avec une
tendresse candide, enfantine ; les femmes y répondirent par un
sanglot étouffé. Pauline sentit alors la transfixion d’un glaive : Julien
naissait à une seconde vie ; il n’était plus qu’en apparence du monde
de ténèbres où il l’abandonnait.
Cependant, le curé sortit et laissa l’abbé Jacques prier auprès de
l’agonisant. Bientôt les angoisses recommencèrent ; Julien étendait
ses grands bras et s’enlaçait au cou de son père, implorait :
— Transportez-moi sur un autre lit ; j’étouffe… Portez-moi dehors,
je veux voir encore une fois les étoiles… Le cœur n’a plus de
boussole ; c’est fini, je vais passer… Donnez-moi du champagne,
pour que je dure jusqu’au soleil levant. J’étouffe, ô mon Dieu !
Son corps le ramenait sous sa loi par un suprême raidissement,
et pourtant n’arrachait à sa volonté aucun murmure de révolte. M.
Rude, aidé de Victorien, le mit sur un lit bas, contre la fenêtre.
— Calme-toi, mon pauvre enfant, suppliait Mme Rude, brisée,
haletante.
L’abbé lui présenta le crucifix de bois où se colla sa bouche
avide ; puis, avec un rameau trempé dans de l’eau bénite, il traça sur
son front le signe de la Croix. Il lut d’un ton pénétrant les prières de
l’agonie et les litanies des Saints ; tout le temps que dura cette
recommandation de l’âme aux Anges de la douce mort, Julien, les
mains jointes, les paupières closes, remuait les lèvres sourdement,
absorbé dans l’attente de l’éternité prochaine. Quand l’abbé eut fini,
il y eut quelques instants d’un silence accablé. On n’entendait que
les râles des suffocations et une grosse mouche, au plafond, qui
bourdonnait. Mme Rude et Edmée, à genoux contre le lit,
réchauffaient, chacune entre ses mains, les doigts transis. M. Rude,
en face de son fils, incrustait dans sa mémoire avec une attention
poignante ce masque de mourant dont le nez sinistre s’allongeait.
Victorien, debout en arrière, se demandait combien de minutes la vie
se défendrait encore ; et Pauline s’était assise pour prendre sur ses
genoux Marthe que le sommeil gagnait.
Tout d’un coup, Julien rouvrit les yeux ; à travers ses
étouffements, il proféra :
— Priez pour moi, priez tous… Faites prier les prêtres, faites prier
les moines… J’ai trop peu souffert… Il fallait être un saint…
Et, comme sa mère se détournait, fondant en larmes :
— Ne pleure pas, maman, regarde-moi, je t’aime… Père, ne
pleure pas, travaille pour le Christ, vis avec les vivants… Edmée,
Marthe, vous les consolerez. Je serai toujours parmi vous.
Il les embrassa tous, comme un voyageur qui s’en va. L’effort
qu’il venait d’accomplir l’exténuait ; il referma les paupières et parut
sommeiller un instant ; mais il se recueillait, ayant à dire autre chose,
et, brusquement, il se souleva :
— Ardel, promettez-moi… jurez-moi… Pauline veut être
chrétienne, vous ne l’empêcherez pas…
— Mon ami, je le jure, répondit Victorien sans hésiter.
— Songez à votre âme, put reprendre Julien ; aimez votre frère…
il est bon… Pauline, donnez-moi votre main… Je suis avec vous. Au
revoir…
Il parlait de loin et de haut, déjà libéré de ses liens corporels, et il
ne souffrait plus : des bras compatissants l’enlevaient au-dessus des
ombres de la terre. Il balbutia des mots qu’on pouvait à peine saisir,
un dernier acte de foi et de repentance.
— Julien, nous vois-tu ? lui demanda encore M. Rude.
Les globes de ses prunelles devinrent vitreux ; sa bouche restait
entr’ouverte, sa langue claquait entre ses dents brillantes, les
phalanges de ses doigts, tricotant dans le vide et se rétractant,
semblaient chercher à tâtons une porte invisible ; et il se tourna sur
le côté droit, laissant aller sa tête, pour s’endormir, comme un
enfant, dans le baiser du Seigneur…
VIII
Pauline revenait du cimetière où elle avait laissé Julien ; elle ne

pleurait point, ayant trop pleuré ; mais l’oppression de sa douleur,
maintenant que tout était fini, retombait sur son âme et sur son
corps, comme si elle eût été, elle aussi, retranchée de ceux qui
respirent et marchent sous le soleil. Le monde lui apparaissait
insipide, décoloré ; entre les jours de sa jeunesse et l’avenir qu’elle
entrevoyait, la fosse de Julien creusait un intervalle aussi profond
qu’une mer.
Elle n’avait plus de goût qu’à revivre ses derniers moments. Elle
pensait même sans horreur à son cadavre allongé entre des cierges
sur le grand lit ; on l’avait revêtu, pour l’ensevelir, d’un costume bleu
qu’il portait le matin où il était venu la voir ; sa face, parsemée de
marbrures noires, exprimait une lassitude triste, le désir d’un éternel
sommeil ; mais ses mains croisées serraient un chapelet, tenaces
dans l’espérance de la résurrection. Et il semblait impossible à
Pauline que cette espérance fût trompée. Jamais elle ne l’avait senti
plus vivant qu’à l’heure de mourir ; sa forme charnelle pourrait se
dissoudre ; de sa conscience qui était lui rien ne se concevait
périssable. La pérennité de son être, pas une seconde elle ne l’avait
mise en doute. Seulement, elle s’en faisait une idée presque
païenne ; elle s’imaginait l’esprit du mort mêlé aux lieux et aux
humains qu’il avait fréquentés, percevant des impressions terrestres.
A l’église, tandis que l’ophicléide poussif cherchait ses notes,

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Chinese Migrant Workers and Employer

Domination: Comparisons with Hong

Chinese Migrant Workers

More information about this series at

Series in Asian Labor and Welfare Policies

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020

Cover illustration: TAO Images Limited/Alamy Stock Photo

comments guided me through the final revisions. Special thanks go to

1 Introduction: Modes of Domination Over Chinese

2 Hong Kong Female Garment Workers and China’s

3 Chinese Migrant Workers’ Everyday Lives in the Early

4 State-Endorsed Exploitation and a Segmented Labor

5 Power and Domination in the Chinese Garment

6 A Comparative Perspective: Vietnamese Migrant

Fig. 3.1 A illustration of Jade village area (Color figure online) 69

Table 6.2 Chinese and Vietnamese workers’ overtime compensation

Introduction: Modes of Domination Over

© The Author(s) 2020 1

commonly known as the migrant worker village (mingong cun), where

1 See Gaetano and Jacka (2004).

ethnography on Chinese female migrant workers in a Hong Kong-

manipulation of workers’ material needs in order to subjugate them to

Everyday Life: Beyond a Dormitory Labor Regime

Henri Lefebvre’s work makes two contributions: First, he shows a dia-

1990s. As will be shown in this book, the transformation of life rhythms

The China Difference and the Arc of Capitalist

Thompson (2000), Perks and Thomson (2016).

In China and Vietnam, I chose Shenzhen and Ho Chi Minh City as

The differences between my interpretations and my informants were

epistemological differences (pp. 202–206).10 Although Bourdieu’s

10 See also Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992), Bourdieu (1977).

The Argument in a Nutshell and the Organization

In this book, my overarching theoretical agenda is to understand how

of coercive its control strategies to manage factory workers in the labor

factories. Yet as will be seen, workers’ increasing legal knowledge grad-

nineteenth century. This historical comparison sheds light on the devel-

Jessop’s. However, my “strategic-relational approach” to power is different from Jessop’s in

Chan, K. W. (1996). Post-Mao China: A two-class urban society in the making.

Qiu, J. L. (2016). Goodbye iSlave: A manifesto for digital abolition. Urbana:

Hong Kong Female Garment Workers

When I was six, I had an unforgettable summer holiday. Every morning

Salaff (1995, pp. 46–47).

© The Author(s) 2020 23

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

in workplaces than on monetary rewards, and some women even con-

The Hong Kong Story: 1949–1985

Two Hong Kong Women Working

Pei-Chu: From a Young Apprentice to a Sewing Master

Pei-Chu initially lived in a ramshackle squatter’s shack on a hillside

Pei-Chu’s settling experience was not unique. Many illegal immigrants

According to Pei-Chu, they could earn double pay especially dur-

5 See Siu (2011).

The workers’ relationship with the foremen (who were normally

The relationships were extended to the sons and daughters of garment

Pauline revenait du cimetière où elle avait laissé Julien ; elle ne

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