Four years ago, when Financial Times reporter Alexandra Harney was writing a story about the mainland's labour shortage, she met a young migrant worker who had left her rural Sichuan home to sew sweaters at a Zhuhai garment factory for export. The meeting left a big impression on Harney because she was so struck by how the young woman sent home almost all she earned, leaving barely enough for her own needs. She knew then she would go on to write more about the country's migrant workers.
'I found her fascinating and I knew that she was just one of millions of women in the same situation across southern China,' Harney, 32, says in a Beijing cafe. 'They were a bridge between the old China and the new - the real people living in the middle of China's industrial revolution.'
The journalist, a native of Washington, DC, said that the woman represented a link to ordinary Americans and the global economy because, in a month or two, an American would be buying the sweater this young migrant worker was sewing.
Two years later, out of a 'desire to hear from their perspectives', Harney, a resident of Hong Kong, decided to write a book about migrant workers, their bosses and the eco-system they live in.
Based on a year's research in a swathe of mostly southern mainland cities, The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage brings us face to face with the varied lives inside these factories. Meet Li Gang, a low-ranking employee in a plastic bag factory who worked 18 hours a day, seven days a week, for a meagre salary until he lost a limb to a machine; Tang Manzhen, the widow of a jewellery factory worker who died from silicosis, an incurable lung disease contracted from grinding semi-precious stones; and Li Luyuan, a worker at a cashmere-goods factory who sleeps in a crowded room with 11 other girls while nursing a dream of a more civilised life.
In one way or another they all pay a big personal price to sharpen the mainland's competitive edge, paving the way for it to sell inexpensive consumer goods to the US and beyond.
The trade conflicts between Beijing and the west result in a 'total disconnection' between the two worlds, Harney says. Through her portraits, she has sought to give a human face to the mainland's industrial machine and demonstrate how 'our shopping habits in the west have real impact on lives in other parts of the world'. Harney, who until 2005 was the Financial Times' south China correspondent, left the paper to become a research fellow at the University of Hong Kong so she could focus on writing the book. Being a tall Caucasian foreign correspondent with long brown hair and blue eyes has been a mixed blessing for her when trying to report unobtrusively.