The Factory Philosopher Who Chose to "Lie Flat" (Part 1)

June 29th, 2024:

It was 6 PM. Waves of workers were streaming out of the big gates of Shenzhen’s Zhongtai Garment Factory, rushing to leave as quickly as they could. By 7 PM, a new wave of workers was already flowing back in. I was standing in front of the rusted, black, metallic-looking factory gate, waiting for a worker I’ve scheduled an interview with. He had to push our meeting from 6 PM to 10:30 PM because he’s been swamped with extra work and had to stay overtime. As I waited, I decided to try my luck to strike up a conversation with the security guard. Difficult task, I thought, as the guard had had his eyes glued to his phone, not even chatting with his coworker, who sat right beside him. But to my surprise, this person turned out quite talkative and immediately accepted the interview. He slid slightly open the little window of his security booth, and I leaned in, resting my arms on the window ledge. The blast of cool air from the booth’s AC hit my face, and it was a relief on my sweat-drenched back. It felt fantastic.

His surname is Chen, and he was born and raised in Jingzhou, Hubei Province. He called himself a "wandering warrior," a man whose work had took him across the length and breadth of China. Or, rather, the length and breadth of China took his mind and body across all the different jobs he had worked. While other migrant workers traveled from city to city for work, Chen worked to travel from city to city.

Chen’s mind was as vast and far-reaching as the places he had traveled. Let’s call him Chen Shen (a pseudonym) for the rest of this article. He grew up as a unique child, always a bit different from everyone else, always lost in thought, reading, daydreaming, pondering life’s big questions. He had zero interest in school work because the curriculums seemed irrelevant to his real life in a farming village. His poor grades earned him frequent scolding from teachers, and eventually, he lost his last interests in pursuing education altogether. Before he could finish middle school, he dropped out to work the fields with his parents – planting rice, weeding, harvesting crops. To Chen, it was not only hard and exhausting labor, but more importantly, what feels like meaningless labor. Stuck in ten acres of land with meager income, Chen Shen craved something more, something different from his “meaningless and joyless life.” He wanted to go out, to see the world and what it had to offer.

At 16, Chen heard from a neighbor that a clothing factory in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province, was hiring. Right away, Chen made up his mind to go. Shijiazhuang is located in northern China, where it snows heavily every winter, unlike Chen’s hometown in central Jingzhou, which rarely snows even in its coldest winter days. Having never skied before, Chen imagined himself skiing to and fro the factory gate and his rented apartment, racing with his coworkers after work ends each day. “No matter what,” he “had to go.”

But Chen’s parents were hesitant – “adamant, even.” Shijiazhuang was poor and freezing, and offered fewer job opportunities than southern cities like Wenzhou, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, or Shenzhen did. Chen ignored their protests and left for Shijiazhuang with a relative. His year there wasn’t what he imagined – not filled with the joy of skiing but with biting cold and hardship. The dry, bone-chilling winds hit Chen’s face so hard, as if determined to peel the skin off his face. His meager salary was quickly spent on food and drinks with a few shady friends with whom he gambled, and homesickness began to wear him down. After enduring a year in Shijiazhuang, where he struggled to adapt, Chen moved on to Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, to join his migrant worker sister.

He spent the next seven or eight years bouncing between various factories in Wenzhou and the surrounding areas – he learned to put together shoes, clothing, electronics, and furniture on the different assembly lines he worked at. In 2008, he moved to Shenzhen and started working at garment factories – bouncing between them once again – before switching to an electronics plant called O-Film Tech. When that factory shut down, he spent half a year in Suzhou at another electronics plant, then returned to Shenzhen, where he now works as a security guard at a clothing factory. Over the same period, he also went through marriage, fatherhood, and divorce. Through our conversation, I start to realize I’m speaking with someone who is much more than just a factory worker – a factory philosopher, if you will.

Q: What made you leave Zhejiang and move to Shenzhen?

A: I got tired of Zhejiang and wanted a change. I just felt like I hadn’t experienced enough of the world. I wanted to travel and to see what the rest of the world had to offer. Plus, wages in Shenzhen were a little higher when I moved – I think that still holds true today.

Q: What about when you moved from Shenzhen to Suzhou? Was it for the same reason?

A: Yeah, I wanted to check out Suzhou. You know, S uzhou with its “little bridges and flowing streams” – Venice in China, they say. I wanted to soak in the atmosphere of those old southern garden cities (Jiangnan’s gardens), haha. I mean, you’re not going to get rich working, and that holds true no matter where you are. So why not travel a bit, mix work and leisure or at least a bit of fun? You can earn a bit while seeing new places. Every city has its own culture, vibe, customs, you know? I always say, it’s important to get out there and experience different places. Travel as far as you can. The more you see, the more your mindset changes, the broader your perspective becomes. If I had the money, I’d travel as far as I could.

Q: You’ve lived and worked in both Zhejiang and Guangdong for quite a while. What’s the biggest difference between the two places?

A: The environment, the vibe, the customs, the people – it’s all different. Folks in Zhejiang are sharp, business-minded, always boasting and showing off. They’re also a bit xenophobic, excluding outsiders from their circles. 

Most factories I worked at back in Zhejiang didn’t provide meals or housing, and the employers didn’t pay the workers’ social security plans. Workers had to rent old-style, rundown apartments on their own. Usually, you have to pay a whole year’s rent upfront. If you’re lucky the landlord might only ask for six months’ rent at a time, but that was rare. So, if you paid for a year, you were stuck there for that year – tied to your job and apartment and life there. You can’t afford changing jobs because you’d lose a ton of money that you paid as rent – you lose so much that it feels like you’re working for free, never saving a dime, for a few months. That’s Zhejiang people being sharp. That’s how sharp they are.

Then you have the local, small-time bosses who love to show off, always sporting big gold chains around their necks and arms, getting their hair done every week, trying to look all trendy and stylish, driving high-end luxury cars like BMWs, Mercedes, that kind of thing.

But they can be brutal. The biggest issue with Zhejiang people is that they exclude outsiders from their circle. Their local culture is so strong that they reject outsiders. In Zhejiang, if you negotiate a price – and the seller agrees with the price you proposed – and then decide not to buy, you could get beaten up. They’ll come at you like a gang of brothers, and they have a lot of siblings. If they fight, they don’t hold back. They’ll beat you to death. They’re brutal.

Now, in Guangdong, people are a lot more practical, um, pragmatic. They don’t care much about appearances. You’ll see them walking the streets in just a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. Especially in Shenzhen, an immigrant city – everyone comes from all over China – so it’s open, diverse, inclusive, and people’s minds are more active. They’re more open-minded, that is.

As for factory benefits and conditions, in Guangdong, here they usually provide meals and housing, and they pay for your social security plan. But the pay is around four to five thousand yuan a month. In Zhejiang, it’s more like six or seven thousand you’d get, so benefits and wages – when you add it all up – it’s about the same in the two places. The other thing is, I worked at Zhejiang before I went to Shenzhen, and that was over a decade ago. So I’m not exactly sure how Zhejiang had changed, if it did. Perhaps Zhejiang employers have started paying for their workers’ social security plans nowadays, now that it’s required by law. It’s also possible that before I came to Guangdong, when that law didn’t exist, employers here didn’t pay their workers’ social security either. Either way, generally speaking, the more they pay for your social security, the less they pay you in wages. So it all evens out in the end.

Shenzhen’s infrastructure and public transport are much better than Zhejiang, but people in Zhejiang have a stronger awareness of their rights. They’re more willing to fight for them.

Q: Can you explain what you mean by "awareness of rights"? Have you ever “fight for them” – involved in a workers' protest or strike?

A: Yes, you’ve asked the right person. I’ve been part of three strikes in Zhejiang around 2004 – one at Xingfu Shoe Factory, another at Rising Sun Shoe Factory, the other at Xuyang Shoe Factory. Back then at Xingfu, I was a molding technician, and we were paid by the piece. The rates were so low, we could barely make a living out of it. It started with one or two workers refusing to work, and soon everyone followed suit and walked out. Everyone just went home. After two or three days, the factory owner called us back, and they raised the rates, so we went back to work.

Q: Why didn’t the boss just hire new workers?

A: He couldn’t find any! Back then, it wasn’t easy to find new people like it is now; there weren’t as many migrant workers. And even if he did find someone, the original workers knew the job, and new ones couldn’t pick it up as quickly. They wouldn’t know what they were doing, messing up the production. No deliveries, missed deadlines, more losses for the factory. Most of the strikers were skilled workers, and the owner knew it. So after a couple of days where no one was working, the boss had no choice but to pay up. Otherwise, who would do the job?

Q: How did the factory owners decide how much to raise the pay? Did they negotiate with you?

A: No, the owner figures it out. He knows how much he can push.It’s not like anyone wanted much; we’re happy as long as the new rate was enough for us to get by. That’s the thing about Chinese workers – Chinese people are so kindhearted; we don’t ask for much. As long as there’s food on the table, no one’s thinking about staging a revolution. That’s why Chinese people are easily exploited – because we’re too kind, too easy to push around. But as soon as you take away our food, we’ll fight. Right? Chinese people ask for so little because we’ve been conditioned to live like pigs, and that’s why we get treated like pigs.

Q: Do you think that this poor standard is due to kindness?

A: Kindness, yes. Kindness combined with ignorance. It’s a mix of kindness, ignorance, and fear because if you don’t obey, they’ll come after you.

Q: Have you ever been part of a strike here in Shenzhen?

A: No, I haven’t, though I’ve seen a few small ones, but not many. I guess it has a lot to do with the times we live in. Life is tough for everyone now, so no one really dares to do something like that. Now that there are so many migrant workers scrambling for so little wages and jobs, strikers will just get replaced, as you said.

Q: This difficult time we’re in – do you think it's more or less due to external factors? Like, the Russia-Ukraine war and tensions in international relations?

A: Yeah, for sure. Just look at the way our country is headed, always going against the US and with this whole trade war nonstop. A lot of foreign investment has pulled out too. It’s like the path we’re taking has gone off track. Instead of learning from the good, now we’re learning from the bad. We’re regressing, aren’t we? Give it a few more years, and we’ll end up in big rural collectives again, chewing on tree bark for survival, hahaha – back to the 1960s. So, it all depends on whether the people wake up and unite. If we don’t unite, we’ll end up like North Korea, living like prisoners, with the state controlling everything, giving out food rations. Whatever they give you, that’s what you get. Every household would get food based on the number of people – working for points, and the police watching over us all. Isn’t that just prison life? We’d be living like prisoners. The only difference is that we’d have slightly better living conditions than they do. So I saw we’re already halfway there, just living in a nicer prison.

Q: Can you describe what the strikes you’ve witnessed in Shenzhen were like?

A: Usually, it’s because the factory bosses run off, leaving the factory shut down, without compensating the workers. Sometimes, the workers will cause a scene, block the roads – that kind of thing. It’s what they call “road-blocking.” I saw all-out strikes back in Zhejiang, but I’ve never seen anything like that here. Once, I got off the bus and saw some construction workers protesting on a construction site nearby. They were holding up banners demanding unpaid wages, and there was a circle of riot police surrounding them. If it’s a big strike, they won’t know how to handle it, but if it’s a small one, they’ll send in the cops to shut it down right away. For society to change, people have to stand up and speak out and say “no.” You’ve got to have the right to say “no” for there to be social progress. The more you fear, the quicker they’ll come after you. In the end, you’re just delaying the inevitable – you might die a little later than others, but you still die; you’re still going to be crushed anyway.

Q: You've worked in many factories – where do you think workers are braver to say “no”? Or, which factories were the best in your experience?

A: The type of boss determines the type of factory. Foreign-owned factories are better than joint ventures, and joint ventures are better than purely Chinese-owned ones. Foreign-owned factories are more humane, more organized – they have their rules and follow their rules, but they also follow the rules set out by China’s laws. Labor laws, for example. I worked at Zhongtai Garments, a Hong Kong-owned factory. I only look for large enterprises with hundreds of employees, preferably foreign-invested ones, to seek a job from. Chinese bosses are the worst. The smaller the company, the worse they treat you – they don't follow the rules and exploit their workers in collusion with the government. After thousands of years of Confucian indoctrination, people here are brainwashed. It’s a slave mentality. We’ve been conditioned to obey. People have become so submissive that exploitation from the top down has become a habit, normalized. We’re all slaves. The higher-ups control every aspect of our lives – our food, clothing, shelter, and even our basic freedom. If you don’t obey, they’ll cut off your water or electricity supply, and you’re left helpless. That’s the scariest part. This top-down system of oppression weighs heaviest on the people at the bottom.

Even in families, this slave mentality is the same. One generation oppresses the next. Parents raise their children by controlling them, crushing their freedom of thought, denying them the right to choose their own paths, and constantly pressuring them to study while tearing them down emotionally. Schoolwork, criticisms, they just pile everything up and throw them on their children’s shoulder to pressure them.

Even in the factories, it’s the same. They provide dorms and canteens, housing and meals, but in a way, they’re also controlling the workers’ food, shelter, and daily lives. It’s almost like a form of monopoly. But hey, at least we can still rent our own place outside, hahaha.

Q: How is the exploitation and oppression of workers most clearly expressed?

A: Endless overtime in the factories, and they’ll find any excuse to dock your pay. Maybe you didn’t meet the production target, so they deduct your wages. Or if the product fails quality checks, they fine you. The government’s no different – they’ll find ways to fine you too. It’s like in “Rickshaw Boy” during the late Qing dynasty, where the protagonist’s rickshaw was seized and confiscated every day by the imperial officials, and the rickshaw boy himself was fined. Isn’t that exactly what’s happening now? They’ve confiscated three of my electrical bikes already – and with each, they fined 2,000 yuan. That’s 6,000 yuan in total, even if you don’t count the price I paid to buy the electric bikes in the first place! When all the money you saved goes to paying the fine, it feels like you’ve basically worked for free, for nothing, for these past few months! They fine you for everything – riding without a helmet, wearing flip-flops, driving an electric bike in a car lane or sidewalk, or carrying a passenger. They’ll find any reason to issue a fine. This riding of electrical bikes happens abroad too, in places like Taiwan, but they don’t hand out fines like this. After 20 years of scraping by at the bottom of the society, you begin to see just how dark society really is. The root of the darkness is the system. The more educated you are, the deeper the brainwashing, the less you realize how broken things are. Take my cousin, for example – she's been thoroughly brainwashed, a huge believer in Marxism. She even supports Russia in the Russia-Ukraine war. If you can’t even uphold the basic value of justice, how can anything improve? And there are so many people like my cousin.

Q: So, do you think the major source of conflict in society isn’t the factories, but rather the system?

A: Exactly. It’s not really the factory’s fault – it’s the overall system. The factories have no choice but to obey the government all the time. The government is always checking something – fire safety, for example – and if you don’t comply, they’ll keep coming back to mess with you. You have to play by their rules. Sometimes the factories feel helpless too. Like with taxes – they might audit the factory’s taxes and finances for the past three decades, and force you to pay so-called “evaded taxes” that you supposedly should’ve paid, say, 20 years ago. When the national treasury is empty, they demand money from the factories. It’s the same thing with the traffic police confiscating my electric bike. When they need money, they’ll find ways to squeeze it out of you. Whatever they say goes, and you have to listen.

Q: Do most workers believe that it's the system, not just the factory, that’s exploiting them?

A: Most workers, when they feel exploited, blame the factory, right? They don’t think beyond that. They’ll usually point to the capitalists, thinking they’re the ones squeezing them. But the boss is himself being squeezed by the power behind him. The real issue isn’t the capitalists themselves – it’s the power behind the capitalists. That’s the root cause. In fact, monopolistic capitalists can actually drive societal progress, right? To be honest, if you don’t have capital, how are you going to get anything done? How can you build anything – a factory, say? How are you going to fund projects and make money? And without money, nothing moves – you can’t even feed yourself without money. Capital is necessary. Blaming capital itself is wrong.

Q: So when it comes to the system and the exploitation at the bottom, what changes do you think could make things better?

A: Well, that depends on everyone’s mindset – whether people wake up and realize what’s happening. What good is it if only I have these ideas? If I call for a strike today, but my brothers [coworkers] all oppose me, what’s the point? There’s no use! People need to form a consensus, right? Just like during the late Qing and early Republican eras, there had to be a common goal for any change and progress to happen. If I’m the only one to speak up and four out of five people disagree, what’s the use? We have to unite and say “no” to exploitation together, like Gandhi did in India. When there’s consensus, collective awakening, you can push society forward.

Q: What do you think an ideal society looks like? Where do you think we should be headed for better?

A: It’s gotta be a move toward democracy. That’s essential. We need to adopt a system of separation of powers, like the democratic systems in Taiwan or Japan, or like in Europe and the U.S. We should learn from Western countries. But instead, we’re looking up to North Korea now – isn’t that just terrifying? That’s like joining a cult, or a massive pyramid scheme, the world’s largest social pyramid structure. It's all ruled by fear, brainwashing, and violence. It’s all about control – control through fear, guns, tanks. If you try to speak up, they’ll shut you down. There’s no reasoning with them. What’s the point of even trying? You say too much, and they'll come for you. It’s a terrifying system, and you’re forced to submit to it. That’s why people are afraid, why they kneel to the force of the gun. What can you do? The scariest part is how they control you with fear. You see it in the big cities, in the villages, even down to the village chiefs – even the chief of a small village holds such enormous power. That’s just how society is here, and there’s nothing we can do about it. It all depends on whether the people wake up, whether they have the guts to do something about it.

Q: When did you start to formulate all those thoughts on society and progress?

A: That’s a good question. Let me think…when did it start? Ah, I’d say it was around 2012, back when we had Tencent Weibo. There was this article by Han Han, it was one of his famous “three essays” – if you search "Han's three essays," you’ll find them online. He talked about democracy and freedom. That article really shook me. What he said was spot-on. I don’t know if he wrote it himself or if it was his dad or someone else, but that piece made waves. It opened my eyes. At the time, I had already been out in the real world for over a decade, and everything he said rang true in light of my experience. It really hit home. That was when my understanding began to shift.

You really should search for those essays again – they were banned across the web because they were so powerful. But they spoke truths that hit you hard, like waking up from hibernation, or seeing like in the middle of a fog. Tencent Weibo was way better than Sina Weibo back then. You could speak more freely, post anything on Tencent. Sina was more heavily regulated, more controlled. But on Tencent, people were sharing all these amazing, thought-provoking ideas. It really woke me up. I realized I didn’t have to live in ignorance, being brainwashed and oppressed. What he said was logical and grounded in reality. It all made so much sense when you looked at the world through that lens.

Q: Your thoughts are so deep. Do you read a lot?

A: Yeah, I do sometimes. I buy books online and read when I get bored. But when I was in school, I realized that education was full of political agendas, just brainwashing us with propaganda. It’s toxic for students. They don’t show us the real world. They’re just pulling the wool over our eyes. History? Take history – so much of it is fake. History is all about the narrative of those in power, the victors of wars and other things. It’s their version of history, so of course it’s twisted. The truth is, a lot of it is harmful. They teach this stuff all through school, from elementary up to high school, so by the time you graduate, you're still clueless about the world. You’re almost 30 and you still can’t tell right from wrong. Isn’t that just tragic?

Q: Your thoughts are really different from most people. Do you ever feel lost or in pain because of that?

A: Yeah, there’s definitely a difference between me and most people. I do feel different, but I wouldn’t say I feel lost. Feeling lost doesn’t help. You know how things are in this society. It’s not like I can change it. As for pain? Not really, but there’s definitely a sense of powerlessness.

Q: What are your plans for the next few years?

A: I’ll just keep working as a security guard. To be honest, you asking me this makes me think you’re someone who has some huge plans for your future hahaha. But when I was 16 – at your age – I didn’t know anything. Let me tell you, you should consider becoming a journalist! Hahaha. You’ve gone around so many factories, talked to so many people there, seen how the lives of those at the bottom are just...dark. They work from 8 in the morning to 10 at night, and even after you factor in meal breaks, that’s 12 solid hours of production. By the time they get home, settle in, and clean up, it’s time to go to bed. Where’s the life in that? There’s no life outside of work. How is this country, this society, supposed to function if it continues like this? If things keep going this way, we’ll end up like Imperial China, the Qing dynasty under the rule of Empress Dowager Cixi – on the verge of collapse.

I took this job as a security guard because I’ve given up, “laid flat.” I’m not trying anymore; there’s no point in that. A lot of people have “laid flat” already. It’s like a dead pond with no water coming in upstream or going out downstream, everything’s become stagnant. No matter how hard you work, you can’t change your fate. I make a bit over 3,000 yuan a month. It’s not much different from the people on the assembly lines, working themselves to death for 4,000 or 5,000 yuan.

Q: Is this your silent protest? Passive resistance like Ghandi? (A coworker nearby jokes: "He’s planning to emigrate to the U.S. and become an American citizen!")

A: Hahaha, let’s just say that I agree with the system in the U.S.

We all glanced up at the security camera overhead, and the interview ended in laughter, but I couldn’t shake the heavy feeling in my heart...