Posted Oct 9, 2019, 2:00 AM
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Selfie-stick vendor
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Join Date: Oct 2005
Location: New York Suburbs
Posts: 10,999
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Capsicum
Isn't the area around Guangzhou (Canton) and the Pearl River delta the region where historically the Chinese immigrants that settled Chinatowns came from? Well, the western part of the Pearl River delta, I think. Which is why Taishanese, Cantonese etc. used to be the lingua franca of the Chinese diaspora up to the late 20th century in some places.
It's interesting to see how the ancestral "homeland" of much of the Chinese diaspora in the US has become such a huge sprawling region in these photos, when back in the days of the emigration away into the Gold Rushes of California, and the Chinatowns of the western world, from the late 1800s until a couple generations ago, the Pearl River delta would have been such an agrarian area and rural, losing people to emigration, compared to the bustling metropolises of NYC, Chicago, LA and San Francisco where some Chinatowns would be founded in.
Times must have changed a lot since then...
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read this article: seems that the impoverished peasantry is still there, but has moved to places like Shenzhen to work in factories for global supply chains Instead of moving to San Francisco to start laundromats and work in gold mines
Quote:
Workers in Shenzhen, China, toil day and night sewing clothes, building iPhones and iPads, constructing skyscrapers and new subway lines, and cleaning hotel rooms for global capitalists negotiating business deals. During a recent visit to Hong Kong and mainland China, I explored labor relations in this city of 13 million that has been at the heart of the nation’s industrialization miracle. A booming factory town, Shenzhen feels in some ways as I imagined New York City or Chicago one hundred years ago: their neighborhoods overflowing with working people and families, the streets jammed with traffic, peddlers of various kinds shouting out their deals and tempting you to buy. In each blossoming industrial cityscape, migrants, often from peasant backgrounds, mingle and bustle across the crowded sidewalks and streets. But whereas New York City’s industrial working class in the early twentieth century was composed of immigrants from across Europe, Asia, and the Caribbean, Shenzhen workers are mostly internal migrants from China’s countryside—they are China’s famed “peasant-workers,” as they are commonly known. Forming a class of nearly 290 million people, according to China Labour Bulletin, the peasant-workers constitute 35 per cent of China’s total working population (810 million) and have become central to the success story of Chinese capitalism.
What challenges do these peasant-workers face as they build a life for themselves in Shenzhen—particularly at this historical moment when President Xi Jinping has steered his country sharply toward authoritarianism? While gleaming shopping malls dot the urban landscapes of China, selling Nikes, Coach bags, and Prada shoes, a more authoritarian regime is making it harder for workers to organize or protest their low wages and poor working conditions. Consumer capitalism is king. “We have one freedom only,” a labor activist explained to me, “the freedom to consume.” With consumerism as the only panacea, harsh working conditions, low wages, virtually no union protections, and a legal system that denies full rights to peasant-workers in cities like Shenzhen, Chinese communism has created the most brilliant system on earth for capitalist exploitation of its working class.
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https://www.dissentmagazine.org/arti...an-consumerism
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By the doo-doo room with the reek replete
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