第13页 | Factory Girls-Leslie T. Chang

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7 Square and Round

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No one in the factories of Dongguan had been properly educated for the task at hand. In the past, education in China had always been focused, and paths were clear. During the Qing Dynasty, a male heir read the Four Books and the Five Classics in order to qualify for the imperial civil service. In Taiwan, my father and his brothers had studied science so they could go to America. During the Cultural Revolution, students in mainland China memorized their Little Red Books in order to survive Mao’s political campaigns. But there was no curriculum for Dongguan. The factory world was a place without tradition or pedigree, and people had to learn how to redefine themselves. Most young men and women had cut short their schooling to go out to work; the college graduates I knew had majored in subjects laughably remote from their current jobs. A schoolteacher who had studied political education trained factory managers, while a reporter at the local paper had studied accounting and worked in forestry management. Viewed from Dongguan, the needs of the Chinese economy were changing so fast that the education system was not even trying to keep up anymore.

But if the national curriculum was irrelevant, commercial schools thrived in the city. On nights and weekends, their dimly lit classrooms were crowded with teenagers in factory shirts, all of them cramming the skills they had never learned in school. English and computers were the most popular subjects, but there were also lessons peculiar to the city’s manufacturing economy. Some lectures focused on how to make plastic parts; seminars were conducted on the topic of injection molding. Such classes did not impart a comprehensive body of knowledge—usually they taught students just enough to talk their way into jobs for which they had no real qualifications. That was the key to Dongguan education: Whatever else you needed could be picked up later.

You don’t know everything you need to know, the teachers reminded their students over and over. But through doing you will learn it.

One young migrant woman told me she was studying at a school run by the Suren Enterprise Management Consulting Company. The name, Suren, stuck in my mind: It meant “molding people.” Classes taught assembly-line workers how to behave in an office setting; graduates sought jobs as secretaries, clerks, and sales assistants. “In four months, we raise their quality,” Huang Anguo, an executive at the school, told me when I met him for an interview. “We are the only school doing this kind of training.” The 680-yuan tuition—about a month’s salary for an ordinary worker—included four softcover textbooks that Huang handed to me with what seemed like reluctance:

ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT
BUSINESS SECRETARIAL SKILLS
ETIQUETTE AND QUALITY
SOCIAL INTERACTION AND ELOQUENCE

The curriculum was so groundbreaking, Huang told me, that his teachers had not been able to find suitable textbooks, so they wrote these up themselves. He invited me to sit in on a class. I told him I was interested.

You must grab the opportunity or you will always be a step behind.

The next day I visited another school, run by the Dongguan Zhitong Talent Intelligence Development Company. Its White-Collar Secretarial Skills Special Training Class also targeted factory girls who wanted to move up into the office world. “We developed our own educational materials to teach this group of people,” Liu Lijun, the manager of the training department, told me. Then he presented me with a set of textbooks:

ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT
BUSINESS SECRETARIAL SKILLS
ETIQUETTE AND QUALITY
SOCIAL INTERACTION AND ELOQUENCE

I did not tell Liu Lijun that I had just visited a rival school with an identical business plan. I did not suggest that one school might have stolen the other’s curriculum; in any case, it was more likely that both had copied it from somewhere else. I simply thanked Liu Lijun for the books and accepted his invitation to sit in on a semester of the White-Collar Secretarial Skills Special Training Class.

Respect the opinions of other people and do not casually point out their mistakes.

* * *

I went out when I was fifteen. First I worked in sales in a city near home. Then I came to Dongguan, where I was an ordinary worker and then an assistant at the Shijie Yaxin Television Factory.

In a factory with one thousand or ten thousand people, to have the boss discover you is very hard. You must discover yourself. You must develop yourself. To jump out of the factory, you must study.

You are here because you don’t want to be an ordinary worker with a dull life. If you are waiting for your company to lift you up, you will grow old waiting.

The speaker’s name was Tian Peiyan. She was seventeen years old, and she wore a blue blazer and a red-striped tie, as if she had just stepped out of a catalog for a New England boarding school. When she spoke, her thin cheeks flushed and she breathed audibly in cadence with her sentences, like someone running a race. If it seemed strange for a teenager to warn an audience about growing old, Tian Peiyan was persuasive: A former Zhitong student, she now worked as an educational consultant to the school.

Another speaker, Chen Ying, worked on the assembly line of a company called VTech, which made cordless telephones. She had a broad face and full lips; already twenty years old, she was in a great hurry to improve herself. People in the factory sometimes said to her: “You are so old and still an ordinary worker.”

I am the same as you. I graduated from middle school. I worked on the assembly line until I became numb. I didn’t even know what I was thinking about.

One day, I asked a friend: “What is life all about? Why are we working so hard?” My friend could not answer.

I went to look in books. They had no answers. I thought, “If you work on the assembly line, is there meaning in life? No.”

So I started to take this class. In one month I learned a lot. I could not even say a single word in front of other people before. I was shy and afraid. What do you think of my eloquence now?

I think you all want to learn what I learned. Leave the assembly line. Don’t let people look down on you any longer. Don’t let people say, “You are the lowly workers.” We must lift up our heads and say, “We can also be successful.”

On warm spring evenings in 2005 after workers had returned to the city from the new year holiday, the Zhitong school recruited students for its White-Collar class. Teachers held free information sessions at sites around the city where the classes would be held. Sessions stretched over several nights; they were invariably packed. Some potential students attended again and again, agonizing over whether to enroll.

Recent graduates stood up and talked about how they had left the factory floor behind, relating their stories of transformation like born-again converts at a revival meeting. Time on the assembly line had left them ignorant and numb—mamu, a word that was chilling when spoken by a young woman still in her teens. They discovered the White-Collar class, and the class let them discover themselves. I once was lost but now am found. I now make 1,200 yuan a month as a clerk. What do you think of my eloquence now? But every triumphant testimonial had an undercurrent of warning: Change soon or it will be too late.

A lot of our students jump to new jobs even before the three-month course is up. Some of them are making 1,200 yuan a month. The investment return is one to five hundred.

If you do not work hard these two or three years, you will spend your whole life at the lowest level of society. When you are twenty-four or twenty-five and are starting a family, your mate may also be an ordinary worker. Together you may make one thousand yuan a month. But if you move up, the person you marry may be a manager. Your whole world will be different.

The chief organizer of the class was named Deng Shunzhang. He was forty years old, and he had come to the Pearl River Delta after a zigzag career back home in Hunan Province that included teaching high school, working in local government, selling newspaper ads, and running a store that sold music cassettes. In Dongguan he had managed factories—toys, shoe soles, fake Christmas trees, and plastic Santa Claus figurines—but he did not look like a typical factory boss. He had dark kind eyes in a trim face the color of a walnut; he spoke deliberately, with the precise gestures of a Peking opera performer, and he never raised his voice. No matter what the weather, he always wore a suit, a sweater vest, and a tie.

Teacher Deng was the first kind adult many of the migrants had met in Dongguan, and during information sessions they asked him questions they had long harbored in secret. How do you deal with sexual harassment from your boss? Is China a capitalist or a socialist country? If someone yells at you and you cry, does this mean you are a weak person? Teacher Deng answered each one patiently. He left the hard sell to the former factory girls under his charge.

You will grow old waiting.

Leave the assembly line.

You must discover yourself.

I am the same as you.

More than two hundred young women signed up for the spring session of the White-Collar Secretarial Skills Special Training Class. Each student paid 780 yuan in tuition up front—more than a month’s salary for many of them. They would attend class three nights a week over the next three months. That was plenty of time to become someone else.

* * *

Classes met on the sixth floor of an office building across from the VTech cordless-phone factory; the school’s ground floor was a store selling mobile phones. VTech and a nearby Pioneer plant that made DVD players together employed sixteen thousand workers, a huge pool of potential students with stable working hours. Like everything else in Dongguan, education revolved around the demands of production. Classes ran from 8:30 to 10:30 at night so they would not interfere with overtime. If one factory’s workday ran later, teachers would hold a makeup session for those who missed class.

In the evenings after ten-hour days on the line, the factory girls would head to school. The streets around the plant teemed with stalls selling fried snacks, fruit juice, hair accessories, and padded bras with cups the size of grapefruits. The stalls were strung with bare lightbulbs, and against the humid night they gave off a hard bright glitter like a carnival midway after the sun had gone down. The girls fought their way through the mobile-phone store, which was garishly lit and always crowded, and past a giant advertisement of three women in bikinis on a beach. Each woman wore a tiara and cradled a mobile phone, taunting the girls with pleasures deferred: sex, glamour, the newest Nokia.

The classroom had low metal stools and child-size desks that the students sat in two by two. An ad for the White-Collar class dominated the back wall, with a secretary in a revealing miniskirt under the slogan TRAINING RAISES COMPETITIVENESS. Even the bathroom, with its single squat toilet and a water spigot that emptied onto the floor, came with etiquette instruction: IN ORDER TO AVOID EMBARRASSMENT, PLEASE LOCK THE DOOR BEHIND YOU.

Each class began with a pep talk from Liu Jieyuan, the principal of the school, who spoke with the forced cheer of a person selling cookware in a late-night television infomercial. On the first day of the semester, he surveyed the class of twenty-five young women and said, “I would like to ask you not to wear your uniforms to class.”

“But we come straight from the factory,” one student objected.

“I want you to try your best and not make excuses. Okay?”

That day’s lesson was “Raising Etiquette Attainments and Displaying the Charm of Character.” Teacher Fu was an earnest-looking young man in a white dress shirt, black pants, and a tie; all the teachers were required to wear ties to class. There were many other rules that the students would need to master over the next three months, but Teacher Fu began class with a story.

“What is your dream? The middle person in the last row.”

A girl stood up. “From the time I went out . . .” She slumped, looking this way and that, frozen with fear at being singled out.

“Stand up properly,” Teacher Fu told her. “Have confidence.”

She stood straighter, slumped again, started, stopped, and finally said in one breath, “From the time I went out, I wanted to be a sales department assistant.”

The class applauded. The girl sat down.

“Okay,” the teacher said, “I’ll tell you what my dream was.”

When I was a child, I liked history very much. I wanted to be in the history books. I wanted to make a great contribution to the motherland.

When I became older, I realized this was not practical. Then I decided I wanted to stand in Tiananmen and salute the three armies. But I decided maybe I will not achieve my dream. Being in Tiananmen saluting the soldiers is not realistic for someone from the countryside. I will leave that to future generations.

Later I decided I would bring my family from the countryside to the city: to raise my children in the city and to let them develop further. When you raise yourself up, you will lift up your family one level.

I believe that you have come to Dongguan for the same reason. We bear the same burden on our backs. We all want to move our families from the countryside to the city, to make this contribution to our families. Isn’t this right?

If you walk out of the countryside, you will lift up your whole family. Your parents will be different because of your achievement.

Since I have come to Dongguan, I have experienced many setbacks. Many times I have felt like going home. But you must persevere. If you go back, it will be like you never came out at all.

He turned to the blackboard behind him and wrote: How to mold a good etiquette image: Clothing.

“The color of your clothing is very important. Now I will tell you what kind of character people will think you have when you wear different colors. Please write it down.”

Red represents enthusiasm.
Orange represents excitement.
Yellow represents brightness.
Purple represents mystery.
Green represents freshness.
Black represents calm.
White represents purity.
Blue represents propriety.

Teacher Fu covered a lot of ground that first day. He gave tips on how to build confidence. Practice boldly expressing yourself. Walk into a room like you own it. For inspiration, he turned to history. My idol is Mao Zedong. Chiang Kai-shek breached the dikes of the Yellow River to slow the Japanese army: That is daring to be decisive. The flood that stopped the Japanese also killed several hundred thousand Chinese farmers, a fact that Teacher Fu did not mention. This was Etiquette, not History.

At 9:15, he interrupted his lecture to sing a few bars of a popular song. The lesson: As long as you enjoy something, you must express yourself. At 9:30, a student raised her hand to answer a question, the first time anyone had dared to volunteer. At 10:15, class ended a few minutes early, and Principal Liu returned for one last motivational harangue. “Tell yourself you are integrated with the White-Collar class,” he told the students. “You are not like all those other people on the street.”

It was the strangest jumble of ideas I had ever encountered, combining the primacy of the individual with rules that were at once New Age and rigid: Purple represents mystery. The message was modern—express yourself, be confident—but it came with traditional assumptions: You will lift up your whole family. And history was not so much missing from the Dongguan classroom as wildly irrelevant. How was a seventeen-year-old factory girl supposed to learn from Chiang Kai-shek, who flooded the Japanese army and drowned several hundred thousand of his own countrymen?

In the weeks to come, other rules would pile up fast. When pouring tea, the cup should be 70 percent full. Purple eye shadow suits all Asian women. In pursuing success, knowledge contributes 30 percent and interpersonal relations 70 percent. Hold the receiver in your left hand and dial the number with your right. When smiling, the mouth should be opened so that teeth don’t show, the lips flattened with the corners of the mouth slightly upturned. During the noon rest hour, do not lie horizontally on the chair or desk. No action was so elementary that it didn’t require instructions; the class sometimes felt like a crash course for Martians trying to pass as human beings. The heroes from history never varied. Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong led the pack, with Hitler a distant third. He was valued for his eloquence; the Nazi leader was a wonderful speaker. Etiquette, not History.

But I noticed something: The students did not fall asleep. They did not look bored. No one ever left to use the bathroom during the two-hour class; they were afraid they might miss something. All their lives, these young women had been taught by teachers and textbooks that struggled to make sense of the modern world. They knew by heart the incoherent mush of rules, self-help, and Confucian exhortation. They took only what they needed, grasping the principal lesson long before I did: If you look and act like someone of a higher class, you will become that person.

After the first day, I never saw any girl wear her factory shirt to school again.

ON MY INITIAL VISIT, I shared a taxi back to the city with Teacher Fu. This was only the second class he had ever taught—the first one had been that morning. Most of his teaching materials came from the Internet. Teacher Fu was the embodiment of the Dongguan education ethos: Through doing something, you will learn it. He was still a senior in college, but he had finished his classes early and come out to work; like almost everyone in the city, he was living life on fast-forward. His major was human resources management and his idol a Taiwanese management guru who charged 1,200 yuan per lecture. I wondered how all that squared with his other idol, Mao Zedong.

I asked Teacher Fu how long he had been in Dongguan.

“What day is today?”

“March 29.”

“I’ve been here twenty-two days,” he said.

As the taxi sped along the dark highway, he told me of something he had seen soon after he came to the city. At an intersection, a car ran a red light; down the road, Teacher Fu saw a motorcyclist lying in a pool of blood. He thought these two things must be connected and that he should report this information to someone, but he didn’t know whom. “Maybe, like me, the person did not have any family here,” he speculated of the dead motorcyclist. “It may take a long time before his family learns what happened to him.”

We arrived at the building where Teacher Fu shared an apartment with four other teachers. People from the countryside rarely say hello or goodbye, and living in the city does not seem to have changed this habit. Instead he said what people in Dongguan often said to each other upon parting: “Be careful while you are outside.”

* * *

Dongguan learning took place in humble settings. Classrooms were bare and dim and plagued by power cuts, and computers so grimy and ancient they looked like archaeological finds. The students were poor and spottily educated, and even their teachers apologized for their heavy rural accents. Almost none of the instructors had a proper degree; many, like Teacher Deng, trailed a string of failed businesses behind them. But for all that, they were revolutionary.

In the regular Chinese school system, students did not speak in class; often they did not even take notes until the teacher told them to. They studied a set curriculum determined by a government committee. Teachers pitted students against one another to make them study harder, and the entire system revolved around tests—a test to get into a good middle school, then a good high school, and finally a good college, or any college at all. Like the imperial civil service exam, the educational system was designed to reward the few: Every year, the equivalent of only 11 percent of the freshman-age population entered college. Students who fell off that track were channeled into vocational schools to learn employable skills like machine tool operation and auto repair, but the curriculum was generally so outdated that the schools functioned more like holding pens for the students until they went out to work.

China is trying to reform its education system. Some teachers have embraced “quality education,” which emphasizes student creativity and initiative over rote learning. To that end, richer and more progressive schools have introduced electives such as art and music. Making higher education more accessible is another goal: In recent years, the government has sharply expanded college enrollment. But education remains one of the most conservative areas of Chinese society, burdened by hidebound teachers and administrators, political constraints, and a historical obsession with test scores.

The commercial schools in Dongguan belonged to another world. Unburdened by history, they were free to teach what they wanted. They focused unabashedly on practical skills; teachers used material from the Internet or from their own experiences working in factories or companies. They did not pit students against one another and they didn’t give out grades. Since every student was there to improve her own job prospects, class rank was irrelevant. They ignored writing—the cornerstone of traditional scholarship—in favor of public speaking. Knowing how to speak would help the students win a better job, obtain a lower price quote, or sell more of whatever they ended up selling. “We are all in the sales business,” the White-Collar teachers reminded their students again and again. “What are we selling? We are selling ourselves.”

The teachers came from the middle and lower reaches of industry. Teacher Deng had worked for a decade in the Dongguan factories. Teacher Duan Mu, who taught eloquence, had been a salesman for an electronics company, while a young woman who had worked at a law firm now taught etiquette and makeup application. Most teachers were in their twenties, and like their students they had come to Dongguan from somewhere else to make their way; unlike most educated Chinese, the teachers did not look down on migrant workers. “These girls are a lot more able than I am,” Teacher Duan Mu said to me after his first class. “To come out and work in the factory requires a lot of self-confidence.”

The classrooms of Dongguan were heavily female; a survey of four thousand workers in nearby Shenzhen showed that one-third had enrolled in commercial classes, with a higher proportion of women attending than men. Young women had less formal education to begin with, reflecting a traditional parental bias against daughters. They felt more urgency to move up: Families pressured daughters to return home and marry, but a better job could silence parents and improve one’s marriage prospects. The gender imbalance of Dongguan was probably also a factor—on a factory floor that was mostly women, studying was a way to keep from getting lost. In a factory with one thousand or ten thousand people, to have the boss discover you is very hard. You must discover yourself.

As I sat through a semester of White-Collar classes, I realized I was witnessing a secret revolution in Chinese education. The rejects of the traditional school system were given a second chance. The factory floor of the world was also in the business of molding people. These classes had no grades and no tests, and that was as it should be. The test was the world outside the classroom; the test was life.

* * *

From clothing colors, the girls in the White-Collar class proceeded to learn how to make hand gestures and how to stand, sit, cross their legs, walk, carry documents, and squat to pick something off the office floor. A woman should sit on one-third to one-half of her chair. Use gestures in a natural, not forced, manner. In early May, Teacher Fu devoted a class to the etiquette of eating, drinking, and going to banquets. On the blackboard, he wrote down the rules for attending a buffet dinner.

1. Line up to get food.

2. Get food in order.

3. Make multiple trips but take little each trip.

4. Get only a few foods so they don’t all mix together.

5. Do not take home leftovers from a buffet.

Drinking was a big part of workplace socializing in China, though the relentless bullying turned pleasure into grim duty. Teacher Fu’s instructions for alcohol consumption were detailed and unforgiving. As far as he was concerned, drinking was work.

The order in which you touch glasses should be the same as the order in which you shake hands. You must start with the most important or the oldest person and go down from there.

You must avoid getting drunk.

In order to socialize in China, you must learn how to drink, as men must smoke cigarettes.

Before you attend a party, you should eat or take medication if you are allergic to alcohol.

Teacher Fu then turned to the etiquette of Western meals. He wrote on the blackboard:

Appetizer→Bread→Soup→Main Course→Dessert→Fruit→Hot Drink

“I got this information on the Internet,” he said, “but I’ve never had a Western meal myself. But today we are fortunate to have Reporter Zhang, who grew up in America.” He motioned to me. I stood up and walked to the front of the room. Walk into a room like you own it.

I told the class at which point in the sequence you might order a glass of wine. I explained that sometimes you might not have both an appetizer and soup. I said that this might look like a lot of food, and it was, which is why many Americans are overweight. The students wrote everything down.

“Are there any questions?”

Teacher Fu raised his hand. “I have always wondered: What sorts of things are appetizers?”

I explained about different kinds of salad and seafood.

Teacher Fu raised his hand again and asked me to clarify the rules for using utensils. On the board, I drew a diagram of a place setting. I explained the soup spoon and the dessert spoon, the fork for salad and the fork for the main course. I described how to cut a steak, how you must hold the knife in your right hand and the fork in your left and then switch the fork to the other hand at the last moment. “Does it sound complicated?” I asked the class.

“Yes!”

“If you don’t know what to do,” I said, “just look at the people near you and copy what they are doing.”

“And if you do something wrong,” I was about to say, “it doesn’t matter.” But I caught myself in time. The key to success was correct behavior—that was the whole point of the class. Spontaneity was for Americans. Class that day ended with drinking-game drills. “If your manager is a little drunk, you may have to take over for him,” Teacher Fu said, with the solemnity of someone talking about the need to land a 747 in case of emergency. He went over the rules for the finger-guessing game and the hand-slapping game—popular drinking pastimes in China—and then he divided the students into small groups to practice.

TWO WEEKS INTO THE SEMESTER, a young woman came up to where I sat in the back of the room. I hadn’t seen her speak in class, and she blushed when she introduced herself. I had the feeling I had just become part of someone’s self-improvement plan.

Her name was Jiang Haiyan. She had a wide pretty face with a dreamy expression, soft blurred features, and dyed auburn hair pulled into a ponytail. At sixteen, she was working on the VTech assembly line because her parents could not pay for both her and her older brother’s education. “I figured between the two of us, it would be easier for me to survive in the working world, because his eyesight is very bad,” she told me over dinner soon after we met. “So I lied to my parents and told them I didn’t want to go to school anymore.” Her brother was studying design in college now.

That act of Confucian self-sacrifice concealed a ferocious will to get ahead. Through a cousin working at VTech, Jiang Haiyan found a job assembling the tiny electronic parts that compose a cordless phone. On the third day of training, the boss asked for a volunteer to work in the production department. Jiang Haiyan had no idea what the production department was but she boldly raised her hand, figuring anything was better than the tedium of assembly. In the production department, she lied and told her new boss she had been a clerk at a factory elsewhere in Dongguan.

“How long were you a clerk?” the boss asked.

“One year,” Jiang Haiyan said.

“So what are you doing joining this factory as an ordinary worker?” the boss demanded.

Under pressure, she found eloquence. “I wanted to develop myself in this area,” Jiang Haiyan answered. Her boss assigned her to a job checking finished phones for flaws; after a month, she was transferred to the warehouse to keep computer records of factory materials. Her story was like all the migrant stories I had heard: Through speaking up and telling lies, she had risen.

Because she was only sixteen, Jiang Haiyan had borrowed a cousin’s ID card to join the factory. “Everyone in the factory knows me as Chen Hua,” she said. “Only my cousin and a couple of good friends know me as Jiang Haiyan.”

“Isn’t it strange to be called by someone else’s name?” I asked her.

“No, it feels like my name now,” she said. “In the factory, I am Chen Hua. When people call me Jiang Haiyan, I have to think for a second before I realize, ‘That’s me.’ ”

She was full of initiative. She had already taken a computer course, and she exercised in the hallway of her dorm to stay in shape. She carried a pocket-size book of English phrases to study in her spare time—It’s nice to meet you. It’s been donkey’s years. When we parted after dinner, she returned to her dorm to read a book about sales promotion on loan from the factory library. Her dream was to be a secretary in an office.

ONE SUBJECT THAT NEVER CAME UP in class was ethics. Students learned how the office world functioned and they used that knowledge to lie their way into jobs for which they were unqualified. If this ruse worked—and it often did—what inevitably followed was a panicked phone call to a former teacher: What do I do now? One Sunday morning on the way to visit some schools, I was in a taxi with Teacher Deng when his mobile phone rang.

“How are you?” he said. “Production capability coordination? Okay. Let’s say a factory has three production areas, with each one able to produce ten thousand TV sets a month. That is production capability. If one of the production areas is already at capacity, but it still needs to rush out an order, it may coordinate with another production area to borrow some of its capacity. What’s your next question?”

After he hung up, he told me a former student had just landed a job and didn’t understand the work but did not want to reveal her ignorance to her new colleagues. “I have students who are still calling me one or two years later for advice,” he said. The teachers did not explicitly tell the students to be dishonest; that was an accepted fact of life. After I got to know Teacher Deng better, I asked him about it.

“In job interviews,” I said, “the girls are often asked if they have experience. They say yes, but actually they don’t.”

I was trying to approach the topic carefully, but Teacher Deng pounced. “Yes, and the next question is: ‘What did you do in your old job?’ We teach them the details of the factory so they can answer in a convincing way.”

“But they’re telling lies,” I said.

“Yes.”

“What if they don’t want to?”

“It’s up to them,” Teacher Deng said. “But people who are too honest in this society will lose out.” I later learned, not from Teacher Deng but from his students, that the Zhitong school sold fake diplomas. Each one was a small book with a shrink-wrapped plastic cover, like the cheap photo albums some of the girls carried around with them. A counterfeit degree from a vocational college cost sixty yuan—around $7.50—while one from a vocational high school was half that. Formal education was not valued in Dongguan, but until then I had not realized how little it was worth.

* * *

One evening in early June, Chen Ying came to class wearing a long yellow skirt and matching top. She was the young woman who had spoken at the first information session; until now she had worn jeans and sneakers like the other girls. The outfit was an announcement that she was someone different now. She had quit her factory job and was visiting the talent market three days a week, hoping to be hired as a clerk or a sales department assistant. “It is like Teacher Deng says: There is no need to be nervous,” she told me. “Actually, I quite enjoy doing interviews.” Next class, Chen Ying was even more elaborately dressed: diaphanous lime-green skirt with lace trim, white stockings, heels. Before the lesson began, I watched as a visiting young woman from another class came up to Chen Ying and introduced herself. Chen Ying stood up and shook the young woman’s hand and the two of them talked for a while.

I had never seen a migrant do that before, shake hands and speak with a stranger. Even urban Chinese did not perform that simple act comfortably. Chinese people are bad at dealing with strangers; if someone doesn’t fit into their known universe of family, classmates, or colleagues, the usual response is to ignore him. My Chinese friends in Beijing were hopeless at parties—they stuck with whatever group they came with, locked into position like a squadron of fighter planes flying into combat in the one formation they knew.

The White-Collar class forced students to break free of the group. In the course of the semester, every student had to give a speech introducing herself. These always started the same way: I am the same as you. It was a funny way for a person to begin her own story, and it wasn’t even true. But perhaps it was only by establishing that she was part of the group that a young woman gained the courage to stand apart from it. When Chen Ying stood up that day and shook hands with a stranger, she reminded me, more than anything else, of an American.

THE STUDENTS HAD LOST their fear of public speaking and now competed to answer questions. They took the initiative to greet their teachers; they greeted me. They were boisterous and chatty, and they were all friends now. But already the time was coming when they must leave this community behind. Now when the girls met each other, the first question was: “Have you been to the talent market?” The ones who had told stories of their experiences there, like travelers returned from a faraway land where the natives were ruthlessly inquisitive and cruel:

She asked me, “If you try to sell to a client and the person refuses, what do you do?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I said, “It’s normal to run into this.”

In the interview they asked me, “What if three phones ring at the same time? What will you do?”

I said, “I will answer each one, figure out which is most important, and deal with it first.”

A slim young woman with a boyish haircut described her interview at a telecommunications company called Huawei Technologies.

I always wanted to work at Huawei, so I went to their recruiting event. A bunch of people were sitting in a room, and the recruiting executive would point to one person and ask a question. Then she would say, “Okay, you can leave now.”

Finally there were just three men and me. The executive looked at me and said, “You are not suitable. You can leave.”

I thought: “What a loss of face this is for me! But this executive doesn’t even know me. How can she know if I’m suitable or not?” So I kept sitting there and did not leave.

Then the executive asked one of the men, “Tell me about your proudest moment.”

He was very nervous. He said he was still looking for work and did not have any achievements he was proud of yet.

I said to him quietly, “You can think about something you did in school that you were proud of.” The executive heard me and looked at me.

Finally all three of the men had been eliminated. Only I was left. The executive looked at me and said, “Those three were all your competitive rivals, yet you tried to help them. Why?”

I said, “I don’t think of them as my rivals. If we are chosen, in the future we will be colleagues and we will have to help each other.”

The executive said, “I told you that you were not suitable, yet you didn’t leave. Why?”

I said, “You don’t know anything about me. You don’t know if I’m suitable or not. I’ve always had a very good impression of Huawei, but I must say I am very dissatisfied with your attitude toward job-seekers today. Whether or not I will be a Huawei employee, as a Huawei customer I am very dissatisfied.”

The woman smiled. She was very satisfied with my answer. So I was hired.

On June 2, class began with an electrifying announcement from Teacher Duan Mu, who taught eloquence. “I have heard good news. A student has already found work.” The room buzzed. A young woman named Ma Xiaonan had found a job as a receptionist. She was the first person in the class to get a new job, and it reminded everyone that it was time to get moving. That day’s class, and all the sessions from then on, focused on the job search. Teacher Duan Mu spoke about how to introduce oneself to a recruiter, and how to do as many interviews as possible, and how to spot and avoid pyramid schemes. At the end of class, each girl stood up and recited her personal motto:

The saddest person in the world is one without goals or dreams.

Because of youth, have confidence.

The most important person in the world: yourself.

Ma Xiaonan never came to class again. That was the only sign of her success: that she had disappeared.

JIANG HAIYAN WANTED to leave too. She started visiting the talent market for practice interviews, but her boss at VTech objected. He was short of people, he said, and he needed her help. Jiang Haiyan resorted automatically to another lie—her cousin in Shenzhen knew of a receptionist job at her factory—but her boss pleaded with her to stay.

“I want to quit,” she told me. “But it’s not so easy to say these things.”

“Is your boss a bad person?” I asked. “He doesn’t sound like a bad person.”

“No, he’s a good person,” she said. “But several others have left, so he’s really short of people.”

“If you’ve made up your mind,” I said, “you must tell him that you want to go, and he’ll have to let you.” Her dilemma seemed to me distinctly Chinese. She had lied her way into her job, and then lied herself up the work ladder; she had no qualms about the truth. But now her boss was making her feel guilty about abandoning the group, and she seemed powerless to cope with that. In traditional Chinese society, maintaining harmony with others was the key to living in the world. The moral compass was not necessarily right or wrong; it was your relationship with the people around you. And it took all your strength to break free from that.

One day after class Jiang Haiyan sought the advice of Wu Chen, who taught etiquette and makeup. Teacher Wu immediately took charge. “Where do you work?” she asked.

“In the warehouse.”

“Have you been to the talent market?”

“Yes.”

“To leave is your right,” Teacher Wu said.

“But they’ve kept a month of my salary,” Jiang Haiyan said.

“I know many people who are in this situation,” Teacher Wu said briskly. “But if you’ve really made your decision, then you should go. If you have to, leave the month’s pay behind. To pursue one’s goals will involve hardship.”

It was bold advice, exactly what the White-Collar class sought to instill in its students. But still Jiang Haiyan was unable to act. June turned into July; the semester would be ending soon, and the class was shrinking with every session as students jumped to new jobs. Jiang Haiyan bought a fake vocational high school degree but she was afraid to use it in interviews. Her talks with her boss dragged on without resolution; she considered enrolling in yet another class, this time to learn English. “It’s so hard to know how to conduct myself!” she said.

You could say Jiang Haiyan was afraid, and surely part of her was. But the situation seemed more complicated than that. She wanted to know how to treat other people—essentially, how the rules of traditional Chinese behavior fit into the modern working world. But that went beyond the curriculum of the White-Collar class.

* * *

The Pearl River Delta attracted motivational speakers and management gurus of every stripe. At its high end, the market was dominated by corporate experts from Taiwan; some executive seminars were so exclusive they were by invitation only. The language of self-improvement suffused ordinary commercial life as well: Direct-sales companies, headhunters, and matchmakers all made their sales pitches in the vocabulary of aspiration. The bookstores of Dongguan were wall-to-wall self-improvement volumes. Some stores had no other sections. Dale Carnegie was a perennial favorite, though some careless cutting and pasting was in evidence. How to Win Friends and Influence Others and How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. The Quick and Easy to Effective Speaking. The entrepreneurial secrets of the Chinese sold well—Wenzhou People’s Thirty-six Stratagems to Make Money—and there was a mystical faith in the power of the numbered list. Seven Secrets of a Self-Made Leader. Fifty-nine Details to Decide Success or Failure in Selling. A few books offered relationship advice—Why Men Love Bitches—but business titles outnumbered personal themes ten to one. Self-help might be an American invention, but the Chinese had refined and renamed the genre to reflect their own narrower preoccupations: chenggong xue, success studies.

One humid evening in May of 2005, I walked past a bookstore in the pedestrian zone near my apartment. On a makeshift stage in front of the store, a man was speaking to a crowd of several hundred people, mostly migrant men in mismatched suit jackets and pants. “I wanted to write a book,” the man said. “Did I wait until I learned everything before I wrote it? No. I learned as I wrote, and I wrote as I learned. The computer software can pick out all the words I wrote incorrectly. And that’s what editors are for.”

Laughter rippled through the audience. The man was of medium height, with a receding hairline and a face as plump, white, and shiny as a boiled dumpling. He was as unlikely a spokesman for success studies as you could imagine.

“So you want to be an entrepreneur,” he continued. “You are waiting for the situation to be ideal. But will it ever be ideal? No. By acting now, you will make it ideal. Do you know all that you need to know? No. But through doing you will learn it, and this learning is very worthwhile.”

Then the speech took a surprising turn. “Now I will talk about copying. I think copying is very important. Everyone always talks about how innovation is important. But you need to invest a lot of time to innovate and the risk is high. Why not take things that have already been proven to work in other places? That is copying.”

The man’s name was Ding Yuanzhi, and not long ago he had taught high school physics. His book, Square and Round, was said to have sold six million copies. Now Ding Yuanzhi toured the country teaching people how to manipulate their way to success as he had done.

______

Every day you will feel an intangible pressure that does not let you stop your struggle. We are all people, but other people go to expensive restaurants and shows while you go only to low-quality ones . . . Why can other people enjoy luxuries while you enjoy only low-quality things? When you think of these things, do you not feel humiliated? . . .

On the road every day pass countless Mercedes-Benzes. We don’t have one now; that is not a tragedy. The tragedy is that we don’t dare to long for one.

Square and Round was a perversion of an American self-help book. It did not urge people to discover themselves, to look beyond material success, or to be honest about their failings and in their relationships. It did not try to change its readers. Instead it taught them how to do better what they already knew so well: pettiness, materialism, envy, competition, flattery, and subterfuge. Square and Round was the literary equivalent of standing on a Dongguan street corner and preaching the merits of copyright violation. The crowd already belonged to you.

Square and Round painted a bleak world of complicated relationships, intense workplace politics, two-faced friendships, corrupt dealings, and status-conscious bosses with absolute power over one’s fate. Colleagues undermined one another in front of their superiors. Bosses exploited their authority in order to belittle others and obtain bribes. Cynical men got the most attractive women. Money and status were the measure of happiness. Honesty was never the best policy. If the government had been paying attention, it would surely have banned this book—never had I seen such a dark vision of Chinese society so calmly acknowledged as fact. Ostensibly Square and Round was about how to get along in society while also being a good person. It advocated the traditional ideal of neifang waiyuan—internally square, outwardly round—a person who combined integrity with skillful interpersonal relations. But the book dispensed with integrity in seventy pages, while social skills took up almost two hundred, so anyone could see where its priorities lay.

I had always felt that social interactions among the Chinese were needlessly complicated. Confucian tradition, which emphasized not the individual but his role in a complex hierarchical order, placed great value on status, self-restraint, and the proper display of respect. The Chinese had been living in densely populated communities for several thousand years, and they had developed subtle skills of delivering and detecting slights, exerting power through indirect means, and manipulating situations to their own benefit, all beneath a surface of elaborate courtesy. Even Chinese themselves often complained that living in their society was lei, tiring. I had not appreciated just how tiring until I read this book, which devoted eight pages to how to smile and forty-five pages to lulling others into letting down their guard.

Shaking hands: A handshake that releases immediately on contact shows your indifference to the other person.

Paying bribes: Try not to get into the habit of giving someone something every time he helps you.

Seeking favors: If you have a small request, first make some large requests and let the other person refuse. When he feels apologetic, wait for your opportunity to make your small request.

Toadying: Remember the birthdays and important anniversaries of department heads and long-term clients and of their wives, parents, and children.

More toadying: If someone is wearing a two-hundred-yuan outfit, you say, “This outfit must have cost three hundred-something?”

Bargaining: Ask the price of expensive clothes first if you want to buy cheap ones. Ask the price of cheap clothes first if you want to buy expensive ones.

Helping others: Do not accept thank-you gifts and thank-you dinners . . . I would rather people remember my favors to them and the debt they owe me.

Yet more toadying: Letting people feel important is an effective way to arouse their enthusiasm.

A good way to destroy a person’s confidence was to look away when he spoke to you. Letting subordinates handle things while limiting your own appearance enhanced your importance. Staging fake customer phone calls during meetings could obtain better terms with suppliers. Sharing a company’s financial secrets with underlings was a good way to win their loyalty. And visiting someone who was sick in the hospital was the best way to build relations. If a man wants to make advances on a certain young lady, he should take advantage of when she is sick to ingratiate himself. That will surely be effective, because at this time she is weak and most in need of comfort.

SQUARE AND ROUND was essentially a point-by-point rejection of the virtues Chinese tradition had preached for two thousand years.

Scholarship: The ones with the best grades work for others; the ones with second-rate grades are the bosses.

Modesty: If other people don’t understand you yet, your modesty would be seen not as a sign of virtue but of incompetence.

Family: [A friend] was temporarily hired by Shenzhen University, but his wife . . . urged him to go home, saying “If you don’t come home, we will divorce.” He thought his wife was more important than work, so he gave up his position and returned home. But she divorced him anyway.

Loyalty: If you and your best friend get along very well, then you are true friends for now. But if there is one million dollars’ worth of business to be done, if you don’t kick him aside or he doesn’t kick you aside, then you have mental problems.

Honesty: A “white lie” is sometimes necessary. For example, for a patient with an incurable disease, honesty may destroy his spirits. A lie can help prolong his life and let him live his remaining days happily.

The bleakest parts of the book concerned relationships. Invariably the rules of business combat could be applied to personal affairs. First suggest goals your adversary can accept was relevant to either a tough negotiation or a first date. A good way to break up with a girlfriend was “Being Courteous”: He suddenly becomes extremely polite to his girlfriend. If she helps him, he says thank you. If people leave, he says goodbye. This type of excessive courtesy makes a person cold and unapproachable. This tactic was also useful in turning down friends seeking favors.

When all else failed, the author suggested his personal foolproof method to break down the defenses of others:

To awaken and move the conscience of others and provoke their noble intentions, an important technique is to cry . . . Bite your lower lip with your teeth and let the tears glisten in the rims of your eyes while you look steadily forward. Next time you are wronged, assume this position, and I believe no one can remain unmoved.

______

THE AUTHOR of this manual of unscrupulous psychological manipulation answered the door of his Shenzhen apartment in a short-sleeve shirt, khaki pants, and bare feet. Up close, he looked older and sadder, with deep lines tracing his nose and mouth. He ushered me into a stylish bachelor pad—dark wood floors, white shag carpet, a curvy sectional couch in sage green—and poured me a Pepsi, setting it carefully on a glass coffee table.

Originally a high school physics teacher in Hubei Province, Ding Yuanzhi had come to Shenzhen in 1987 and landed a teaching job—through subterfuge, naturally. He had learned that the principal of the school where he wanted to work was a passionate lover of The Dream of the Red Chamber, an eighteenth-century novel. One evening, Ding Yuanzhi visited the principal at home. He did not state his purpose; instead, as he described in the pages of Square and Round, he drew the man into a lengthy discussion about the novel.

The more we spoke, the better we got along, and without our realizing it several hours had passed. The principal suddenly looked up and realized it was already past ten o’clock. As if just waking up, he asked me, “Ai, what were you coming to see me about?”

In our conversation of the past few hours, I had already fully won the principal’s favor, so when I spoke of my own aspiration to come to Shenzhen to work, the principal naturally could not find a way to refuse me and agreed that I could teach . . .

I vanquished many adversaries in getting transferred to Shenzhen. And I didn’t have to spend a cent.

Soon afterward, Ding Yuanzhi and a friend decided to start a public relations company. That, too, was a calculated move. “We thought it would be easy to say, ‘We are China’s first public relations company,’ ” Ding Yuanzhi told me. “We figured the commercial bureau did not know what it was, so it would be easier to get approval.” The problem was that Ding Yuanzhi and his friend didn’t know much about public relations either. They held a single publicity event but couldn’t drum up any new business. Then they started running public relations training for executives, and Ding Yuanzhi discovered he had a knack for it. He began reading the books of Dale Carnegie and making television appearances.

The publication of Square and Round in 1996 was similarly unorthodox. Ding Yuanzhi did not sign a legitimate publishing contract; he simply bought a serial number from a publisher and printed and marketed the book on his own. On weekends he traveled to bookstores around Shenzhen, set up a banner and a table outside the front door, and signed books. Square and Round was written at a middle-school level so even factory workers could understand it. “Migrant workers need consolation in their hearts,” Ding Yuanzhi said. “They need to know that success is possible. These books are a solace to them.”

I asked him what he thought about the other success studies books sold in China. He hadn’t read a single one. “All the books in China just take their ideas from the outside,” he said. “China really has no original ideas.”

When I asked about his next project, Ding Yuanzhi left the room and returned with a Chinese edition of Competitive Advantage by Michael Porter. His next book, he said blandly, would recycle these ideas, again at a middle-school level. “My book will basically boil down Porter’s concepts into comprehensible fashion,” he said. “Shenzhen has a lot of bosses with only an elementary school education, but they are very hungry to learn.” That is copying.

Meeting Ding Yuanzhi was a letdown. Nothing qualified him to be a teacher of success studies. He was not an impressive speaker and he did not have compelling ideas; his public relations business had never gone anywhere. And no one who had met him would ever take seriously his advice on seducing young ladies. But Ding Yuanzhi had dared to do what others did not. He had set up a company. He gave talks. And he wrote the book on how to succeed. Action was the only thing that set successful people apart. The difference between successful people and failures is not in the quality of their ideas or in the measure of their abilities, he had written, but in whether they trust their own judgment and dare to take action. Chen Ying risked jumping to a new job, while Jiang Haiyan did not. In the end, that was the only difference between them that mattered.

* * *

On a Sunday night in July 2005, the students from the second session of the White-Collar Secretarial Skills Special Training Class graduated. For the ceremony, the classroom desks were pushed into a square formation with an open space in the middle for speeches and performances. At each setting was scattered a festive handful of peanuts, jelly candies, cookies, and disposable plastic cups of warm water. The teachers wore dress shirts, dark pants, and ties. Around fifty students attended, including new graduates, graduates from earlier classes, and students from the new semester that was about to begin. Principal Liu, the master of ceremonies, formally introduced the teachers one by one, to applause. Teacher Yang sang a song called “We’ll Meet Again in Twenty Years.”

Let us meet again in twenty years,
How beautiful our great motherland will be then!
The heavens will be new, the earth new, the sights of spring more splendid,
The cities and the villages all in greater glory.

“I think if we meet again in twenty years,” Principal Liu said, “you will all be millionaires and big bosses.” He read out the names of all the graduates—about half the class—who had landed new jobs and could not attend tonight. Chen Ying was on the list; she had found work as a clerk in a hardware factory. “We hope that their work goes smoothly.” Several of the graduates gave speeches.

In ten years, this is my proudest moment, because I have never taken part in a graduation ceremony before. Now I’m doing sales at a company. It is very tiring and I’m outside all day. I am learning a lot.

My name is Ye Fangfang. I hope you will remember me. You changed me from a timid person into a self-confident one. I have learned how to conduct myself. That is the integration of the square and the round. I will always remember you.

Halfway through the ceremony, the power went out, and a few students went around the room lighting candles. Jiang Haiyan, wearing a skirt, sheer stockings, and high heels, surprised me by performing a song and holding the whole room with her poise. During a song called “The Sound of Applause,” the graduates circled the candlelit room and shook hands with their teachers, solemnly thanking each one in turn. Principal Liu announced that the third White-Collar session would begin in a week.

Only four of the graduates who had found work made it back for the ceremony. That was the true measure of the school’s achievement: the absence of so many young women, scattered up and down the Pearl River Delta, who could not be here tonight because they had already moved on. The teachers were on the move too. Teacher Fu had graduated from college, quit the school, and moved to Shanghai to join his girlfriend. Teacher Duan Mu had been promoted and was taking on more management responsibilities.

In the coming year, everyone I knew at the Zhitong school would go through a major life change, or several. Chen Ying would jump to a sales job at an adhesive tape factory and then to a plant that made air conditioners, where she would be put in charge of purchasing and production with responsibility for twenty workers. When I met her for dinner a year later, she was transformed. She spoke in measured tones, carried a stylish baguette handbag, and confidently ordered dinner in a restaurant with antique-wood tables. She was making 1,600 yuan a month—two hundred dollars—and was being wooed by three men, all of them managers. She had a bet with a friend over who would buy a car first. “If you wanted me to go back to the way I used to be,” she told me, “I don’t think I would have the courage to go on living.”

Jiang Haiyan would go home, come out again briefly to find a job, then return home again to help her family run a shop selling food and stationery. Her parents did not want her living in Dongguan because they felt it was unsafe. Caught in a net of family obligation, Jiang Haiyan was unwilling to challenge her parents directly. “I don’t want to let my family feel I must do this, or it will be very hard on everyone,” she told me when I called her at home.

Teacher Deng would cut his ties to the Zhitong school to pursue more lucrative work teaching management to executives, at five thousand yuan per session. “I’m forty-two years old,” he told me. “I need to think about taking care of myself in my old age.” One night after class, he would leave a suitcase with his mobile phone in the trunk of a taxi, and all of his former students would lose touch with him.

As the ceremony drew to a close, the lights in the room came back on, and the students sang one last song, “Friends.” The music swelled and filled the room as Teacher Deng handed out his business card to the graduates and Principal Liu presented their diplomas, small books whose covers were wrapped in red silk. Inside was printed the name and logo of the Dongguan Zhitong Talent Intelligence Development Company in the blank where the name of the school would ordinarily be.