But for the same reasons, toymaking and similar kinds of “light industry” will always be vulnerable to competition from less-developed, less-expensive countries, which is why the toy industry has been at the vanguard of globalization. Henry Tong is convinced that he and other Chinese toy exporters are now losing business to factories in Cambodia and Vietnam. To compete, he and his compatriots will need to start making products with greater “added value,” products like electronic toys and video games.
Listening to him, I picture blow-molding machines and plastic ducks carried by a wave of outsourcing across the surface of the planet, from Massachusetts, where Ron Sidman’s parents started turning out playthings a half century ago, to Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, then flooding the banks of the Pearl River Delta, before rippling northward to Shanghai and Beijing and southward toward Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam, leaving behind it both greater prosperity and greater economic disparity, higher crime rates but also, perhaps, if recent developments in China are any indication, stronger labor and environmental laws. In June of 2007, sensing that the proletariat was growing restless, Beijing enacted the most sweeping labor reforms in the history of China’s thirty-year experiment with capitalism, expanding legal protections for temporary workers and giving all workers the right to collective bargaining. In response, foreign companies threatened to take their business elsewhere, to more pliable labor markets.
Chan adheres strictly to China’s laws, he assures me, as well as to the divergent product-safety codes of America and Europe. But with American importers refusing to pay more for Chinese toys, even as production costs rise, he is not surprised that some of his misguided competitors have given in to the temptation to cheat. “It takes a lot to meet all the safety standards,” he says. “People complain about safety, but I don’t think we kill anyone”—he hesitates a moment, studying his shoes, measuring the wisdom of his words—“not like the Americans with their bombs.”
Given the openness with which he has welcomed me into his factory, I’m inclined to take Chan at his word. He seems like a sympathetic soul, trying to earn an honest living from his family’s small business so that he can give his kids an education at least as good as the one he received in New York three decades ago. There are no obvious signs of malfeasance on display in his factory. No child laborers. No suspicious fumes. No lead paint. No paint at all, in fact, since Chan outsources any surface painting he needs done. But the truth is, I really have no way of knowing what goes on in Po Sing when strangers with notebooks aren’t poking around.
Even if I could interview Chan’s workers in private, I wouldn’t know what to believe. In 2006, auditors from Wal-Mart visited a factory in Shenzhen that manufactures Bratz fashion dolls, the wildly popular, multiethnic, big-eyed, swag-loving contenders for Barbie’s throne. In anticipation of the inspection, management at the plant gave workers a cheat sheet, later obtained by the National Labor Committee, that listed exemplary answers to fifty-four hypothetical questions of the sort the auditors might pose, questions and answers likeQ: Does management pay attention to problems that are raised?
A: Yes. For example, if it’s too hot, the factory provides cold tea for the workers.
Q: Have you received or seen anyone receive unfair treatment? (Like fines, getting yelled at or hit?) How did it happen? Why was it unfair?
A: No.
Q: Is there anything else you would like to say?
A: No.24
Such documents alone do not incriminate China’s toymakers, the great majority of whom may well be law-abiding businessmen. But they do reveal one of the least appreciated resources that the Pearl River Delta has for the past thirty years offered Western companies looking to outsource production: secrecy—secrecy amplified by oceanic distances, protected by multinational corporations and Chinese factory owners alike, fortified by a language barrier higher than most Westerners can surmount.
The little I know about Po Sing is still far more than I know about the shop to which Tony Chan subcontracts paint jobs, or the plant that mixes his resin dyes. Not even corporate auditors or labor-group investigators or Chinese regulators always succeed in unraveling the Delta’s supply chain, a tangle of subcontractual relationships that can vanish into the warrenlike underground economy.
My tourist’s visa permitted two border crossings, and two days after visiting Dongguan, I would return to China unchaperoned, taking a high-speed ferry through Hong Kong’s seemingly endless port and then on, up the Pearl River.25 On the