OWNED BY PARROT01

Hi. So I’d like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones. Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt. Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves. After all, what’s wrong with a world in which a worker on an iPhone assembly line can’t even afford to buy one? It’s taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it’s our desire for cheap goods that makes them so.

嗨。今天我想来探讨一下 这些为我们制造日常用品的人们： 例如我们的鞋子，手提包，电脑，还有手机。 这个话题时常让我们觉得很内疚。 想象一下，一个年轻的农村女孩给你缝制跑步鞋 可每个小时还赚不到一美金， 又或者是那个加班为你组装iPad的中国小伙子 在加班之后从楼上跳了下来。 我们，是全球化的受益者， 可每笔交易却似乎都是在剥削那些受害者， 而这种不公平 似乎也深深烙印在这些产品之中。 总而言之，这个世界到底怎么了？ 一个在组装iphone生产线上的员工却买不起一台iphone？ 人们理所当然地认为，中国的工厂就是应该被压榨的， 因为我们渴求便宜的产品 造成了这样的局面。

So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but it’s also inaccurate and disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions of people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. In fact, China makes goods for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone.

很显然，西方社会的需求 和中国人对他们遭遇的申诉被连接在一起， 尤其是当我们中的很多人已经因为我们对世界影响 而感到了内疚， 然而，这是不正确的，也是不尊重他人的。 我们极其自恋地去想象着 我们有力量去操控地球另一边 千万的人民，让他们以如此可怕的方式 去遭受痛苦或者迁移。 事实上，中国制造的产品遍布全球， 也包括他们自己的市场，这要归结于许多因素的综合： 低成本，大量受过教育的劳动力， 还有有弹性的工作制度 这些都快速地迎合了市场的需求。 我们因为太专注于我们自身和产品上， 所以忽视了产业链另一端的个体的存在 将他们看成是可以随时被替换的，微小的 像手机零件那样。

Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In the ongoing debate about globalization, what’s been missing is the voices of the workers themselves.

中国工人并不是因为我们对于iPods的无限渴求 而被迫进入工厂的。 他们选择离乡背井，是为了赚钱， 为了学习新的技能，以及为了看看这个世界。 在对全球化发展趋势的辩论中 我们缺失的，是聆听工人们自己的声音。

Here are a few.

以下就是一些例子。

Bao Yongxiu: "My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry now, before I have fully developed myself, I can only marry an ordinary worker, so I’m not in a rush."

包永秀（音译）说：“我妈妈让我回家结婚 但是如果我还没有让自己得到充分的发展 就结婚，我只能嫁给一个平凡的工人， 所以我根本不着急。”

Chen Ying: "When I went home for the new year, everyone said I had changed. They asked me, what did you do that you have changed so much? I told them that I studied and worked hard. If you tell them more, they won’t understand anyway."

陈颖（音译）说：“我过年回家的时候 每个人都说我变了，他们问我： 你怎么会有这么大的改变？ 我告诉他们，我很努力地学习和工作， 即便你想给他们讲更多，他们反正也不能理解。”

Wu Chunming: "Even if I make a lot of money, it won’t satisfy me. Just to make money is not enough meaning in life."

吴春明（音译）： “即使我赚了很多钱 也无法满足我自己。 赚钱并不是生活全部的意义。”

Xiao Jin: "Now, after I get off work, I study English, because in the future, our customers won’t be only Chinese, so we must learn more languages."

肖金（音译）说： “现在我下班以后，就会去学英语 因为在不久的将来，我们的客户将不仅仅是中国人， 所以，我们需要学习更多的语言。”

All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old.

以上的话，都是出自一些年轻女孩的口， 她们仅仅18、19岁。

So I spent two years getting to know assembly line workers like these in the south China factory city called Dongguan. Certain subjects came up over and over: how much money they made, what kind of husband they hoped to marry, whether they should jump to another factory or stay where they were. Other subjects came up almost never, including living conditions that to me looked close to prison life: 10 or 15 workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and nights ruled by the factory clock. Everyone they knew lived in similar circumstances, and it was still better than the dormitories and homes of rural China.

因此，我花了两年时间去了解流水工作线上的工人们 例如在中国南部的一个工业城市——东莞。 有一些主要的问题不断的重复着： 他们到底赚了多少钱， 她们想要嫁给怎样的人， 他们是否想要跳槽 还是留在一个工厂内。 另一些话题，则几乎不被提起 例如：在我眼中如牢狱般的生活条件 10-15个工人住在一个房间里， 50个人公用一个厕所， 日以继夜地按照工厂的要求来作息。 他们每一个人都知道，即便是住在如此的环境里面 也会比他们在中国农村的老家的条件 好得多

The workers rarely spoke about the products they made, and they often had great difficulty explaining what exactly they did. When I asked Lu Qingmin, the young woman I got to know best, what exactly she did on the factory floor, she said something to me in Chinese that sounded like "qiu xi." Only much later did I realize that she had been saying "QC," or quality control. She couldn’t even tell me what she did on the factory floor. All she could do was parrot a garbled abbreviation in a language she didn’t even understand.

工人们很少谈论他们制造的产品， 他们往往很难解释清楚 他们到底做了什么。 我访问了吕清民（音译） 这个年轻的女孩是我最了解的， 我问她她在工厂里到底从事什么工作 她用中文告诉我，听起来像是 “秋西。” 很久以后，我才知道她说的是 "QC"，也就是质量监控。 她竟然都不能告诉我她在工厂里做的是什么。 她能做的就只是模仿一个英文缩写的发音 而这个语言是她根本就不懂的。

Karl Marx saw this as the tragedy of capitalism, the alienation of the worker from the product of his labor. Unlike, say, a traditional maker of shoes or cabinets, the worker in an industrial factory has no control, no pleasure, and no true satisfaction or understanding in her own work. But like so many theories that Marx arrived at sitting in the reading room of the British Museum, he got this one wrong. Just because a person spends her time making a piece of something does not mean that she becomes that, a piece of something. What she does with the money she earns, what she learns in that place, and how it changes her, these are the things that matter. What a factory makes is never the point, and the workers could not care less who buys their products.

马克思认为这就是资本主义的悲哀 疏远了工人与他们所制造的产品。 与传统的鞋匠或者木匠不同， 工人在工厂没有控制权， 在她所做的工作中，没有快乐， 没有真正的满足或理解。 但同许多马克思 坐在英国图书馆的阅读室里想出来理论一样， 这一点，他错了。 仅仅因为一个人用她的时间 去制造一件物品，并不代表 她就变成了这件物品。 她用她赚的钱去做了什么 她在那个地方学到了什么技能，以及她如何被改变 这些才是重要的。 一个工厂制造什么并非重点， 工人们也不在乎谁买了他们制造的产品。

Journalistic coverage of Chinese factories, on the other hand, plays up this relationship between the workers and the products they make. Many articles calculate: How long would it take for this worker to work in order to earn enough money to buy what he’s making? For example, an entry-level-line assembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months’ wages for an iPhone.

记者报道了关于中国工厂的新闻 另一方面，也强调了 工人与产品之间的联系。 很多文章都在计算： 这些工人要工作多久，赚来的钱 才够买一件他们制作的产品？ 举个例子，一个初级组装生产线的工人 在中国组装iPhone配件 要倾其2个半月的工资才能买一台iPhone。

But how meaningful is this calculation, really? For example, I recently wrote an article in The New Yorker magazine, but I can’t afford to buy an ad in it. But, who cares? I don’t want an ad in The New Yorker, and most of these workers don’t really want iPhones. Their calculations are different. How long should I stay in this factory? How much money can I save? How much will it take to buy an apartment or a car, to get married, or to put my child through school?

但说真的，这些计算有任何意义吗？ 再举个例子，我最近写了一篇文章 登在纽约客杂志上， 但是也供不起我在杂志上登一个广告。 但是，谁在乎？我不需要在纽约客上登广告 其实，大部分的工人，也不是真的需要iPhone。 他们的计算方式是不同的。 我在工厂要待多久？ 我能存多少钱？ 我需要多少钱才能买个房子，买辆车， 才能结婚，或者足以送我的小孩去学校？

The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor. About a year after I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me home to her family village for the Chinese New Year. On the train home, she gave me a present: a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim. I thanked her, assuming it was fake, like almost everything else for sale in Dongguan. After we got home, Min gave her mother another present: a pink Dooney & Bourke handbag, and a few nights later, her sister was showing off a maroon LeSportsac shoulder bag. Slowly it was dawning on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic.

这些我试图去了解的工人们 对他们和产品之间的联系有着很抽象的解读。 大概在我遇到陆青敏，也就是小敏的一年后 她邀请我去她农村的家做客 过春节。 在回家的火车上，她给了我一个礼物： 一个棕色皮质的Coach牌零钱包。 我谢了她，虽然我很自然地认为这应该是个山寨的产品， 就好像东莞在出售的大部分产品一样。 回家以后，小敏给了她妈妈另一个礼物： 一个Dooney & Bourke牌的粉色手提包， 几天以后，她的姐姐正在展示 一个红褐色的LeSportsac单肩包。 慢慢地，我好想明白了 这些东西都是她们工厂生产的 每一件东西，都是正品

Min’s sister said to her parents, "In America, this bag sells for 320 dollars." Her parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechless. "And that’s not all — Coach is coming out with a new line, 2191," she said. "One bag will sell for 6,000." She paused and said, "I don’t know if that’s 6,000 yuan or 6,000 American dollars, but anyway, it’s 6,000." (Laughter)

小敏的姐姐告诉她父母 “在美国，这个包要卖320美金。” 她的农民父母看了看，无言以对。 还有，Coach正在推出一系列新产品2191 她说：“这个好像要卖6000。” 她停顿了一下：“我不知道是6000人民币，还是 6000美元，无论如何都是6000啦。” （笑声）

Min’s sister’s boyfriend, who had traveled home with her for the new year, said, "It doesn’t look like it’s worth that much."

小敏姐姐的男友也回到家 与她一起过年， 他说：“看起来不值这么多钱。”

Min’s sister turned to him and said, "Some people actually understand these things. You don’t understand shit."

小敏的姐姐对他说：“有的人 就是懂这些东西，你懂啥。”

(Laughter) (Applause)

（笑声）（掌声）

In Min’s world, the Coach bags had a curious currency. They weren’t exactly worthless, but they were nothing close to the actual value, because almost no one they knew wanted to buy one, or knew how much it was worth. Once, when Min’s older sister’s friend got married, she brought a handbag along as a wedding present. Another time, after Min had already left the handbag factory, her younger sister came to visit, bringing two Coach Signature handbags as gifts.

在小敏的世界里，Coach包包有一个很奇怪的价值。 它们虽然不是一文不值，但是相比起它们的实际价值 还是相差甚远，因为她们所结识的人里面 几乎没有人想要买，也没有人知道这值多少钱。 有一次，小敏大姐的一个朋友结婚 她带着一个手提包作为给新人的礼物。 又一次，小敏已经离开手提包的工厂了 但她的小妹妹来看她的时候 带了两个经典款Coach作为礼物。

I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, "An American classic. In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbags from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather. Six skilled leatherworkers crafted 12 Signature handbags with perfect proportions and a timeless flair. They were fresh, functional, and women everywhere adored them. A new American classic was born."

我打开一个有拉链的口袋 看到一张卡片写着一些英文： “美国经典。 1941年那些表皮磨光的 美国棒球手套 启发了Coach的创始人 促使其研发了一个新系列的手提包： 奢华、柔软的的表面和手套的皮质一样。 6名技巧纯熟的皮革工人制造12只经典款手提包 他们有着精准而快速的手艺。 这些手提包新颖，具有相当的功能性，世界各地的女人都喜欢 一个新的美国经典诞生了。”

I wonder what Karl Marx would have made of Min and her sisters. Their relationship with the product of their labor was more complicated, surprising and funny than he could have imagined. And yet, his view of the world persists, and our tendency to see the workers as faceless masses, to imagine that we can know what they’re really thinking.

我想知道马克思是否会被小敏 和她的姐妹所影响。 她们与产品之间的关系 更复杂、惊奇而且有趣 这都超出他的想象。 但是，他对这个世界的观点没变，而我们却将 这些工人们看成是一群上不了台面的群体， 想象一下，假如我们可以了解工人们的真实想法。

The first time I met Min, she had just turned 18 and quit her first job on the assembly line of an electronics factory. Over the next two years, I watched as she switched jobs five times, eventually landing a lucrative post in the purchasing department of a hardware factory. Later, she married a fellow migrant worker, moved with him to his village, gave birth to two daughters, and saved enough money to buy a secondhand Buick for herself and an apartment for her parents. She recently returned to Dongguan on her own to take a job in a factory that makes construction cranes, temporarily leaving her husband and children back in the village.

我第一次见到小敏的时候，她刚满18岁 她刚刚辞去在一家电子设备工厂的 组装生产线的工作。 接下来的两年，我看着她换了5次工作， 最后固定在一个比较赚钱的职位 是在一个硬件工厂的采购部门。 不久，她嫁给了一个打工仔， 然后移居到了他的村子， 生了两个女儿， 他们存够了钱给她买了一辆二手别克车 给她的父母买了房子。 最近她独自回到东莞 在一个起重机工厂里找了份工作， 暂时与她村里的丈夫和孩子 分居两地。

In a recent email to me, she explained, "A person should have some ambition while she is young so that in old age she can look back on her life and feel that it was not lived to no purpose."

在最近的一封邮件里，她解释： “人们年轻的时候，应该有所抱负 那么在他们老的时候，回首过去 就不会觉得这一生都毫无意义。”

Across China, there are 150 million workers like her, one third of them women, who have left their villages to work in the factories, the hotels, the restaurants and the construction sites of the big cities. Together, they make up the largest migration in history, and it is globalization, this chain that begins in a Chinese farming village and ends with iPhones in our pockets and Nikes on our feet and Coach handbags on our arms that has changed the way these millions of people work and marry and live and think. Very few of them would want to go back to the way things used to be.

在中国，有1亿5千万像她一样的工人， 其中三分之一，是离乡背井的女性， 她们在工厂、酒店、餐厅 或者是大城市的建筑工地工作。 这么算来，是她们创造了历史上一个庞大的人口迁移的数字， 而这个产业链的起点，就是“全球化”的风靡 从中国的农村 到最终进入我们口袋里的iPhone和脚上的耐克 还有手中的Coach手提包 这改变了数百万人的 工作、婚姻、生活和思想。 他们其中很少有人 愿意回到过去的生活。

When I first went to Dongguan, I worried that it would be depressing to spend so much time with workers. I also worried that nothing would ever happen to them, or that they would have nothing to say to me. Instead, I found young women who were smart and funny and brave and generous. By opening up their lives to me, they taught me so much about factories and about China and about how to live in the world.

我第一次去东莞的时候，我很担心 担心与工人相处的时间会很压抑沮丧。 我也担心他们永远不会改变， 或者他们也没有什么能对我说的。 然而，我发现那些年轻的女性都很聪明、风趣 而且勇敢、大方。 通过向我展示她们的生活， 她们教给我很多关于工厂 关于中国，以及如何生存在这个世界的道理。

This is the Coach purse that Min gave me on the train home to visit her family. I keep it with me to remind me of the ties that tie me to the young women I wrote about, ties that are not economic but personal in nature, measured not in money but in memories. This purse is also a reminder that the things that you imagine, sitting in your office or in the library, are not how you find them when you actually go out into the world.

这就是小敏在回家的火车上 送给我的Coach钱包。 我一直保存着它，由此提醒着我与这些 我记录过的年轻女生的联系， 这些并不是因为经济而是因为个人情感的联系， 价值并不是在于金钱而是记忆。 这个钱包也是一个提醒， 你坐在办公室或图书馆里时所想象的东西 和你走出去真正接触的东西 并不一样。

Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

谢谢。（掌声） （掌声）

Chris Anderson: Thank you, Leslie, that was an insight that a lot of us haven’t had before. But I’m curious. If you had a minute, say, with Apple’s head of manufacturing, what would you say?

谢谢，Leslie，真的很有见地 我们中很多人从未这么思考过。 但是我很好奇，如果你有一分钟时间 对Apple制造商的领导人说一些话 你会说什么？

Leslie Chang: One minute?

一分钟？

CA: One minute. (Laughter)

是的，一分钟。（笑声）

LC: You know, what really impressed me about the workers is how much they’re self-motivated, self-driven, resourceful, and the thing that struck me, what they want most is education, to learn, because most of them come from very poor backgrounds. They usually left school when they were in 7th or 8th grade. Their parents are often illiterate, and then they come to the city, and they, on their own, at night, during the weekends, they’ll take a computer class, they’ll take an English class, and learn really, really rudimentary things, you know, like how to type a document in Word, or how to say really simple things in English. So, if you really want to help these workers, start these small, very focused, very pragmatic classes in these schools, and what’s going to happen is, all your workers are going to move on, but hopefully they’ll move on into higher jobs within Apple, and you can help their social mobility and their self-improvement. When you talk to workers, that’s what they want. They do not say, "I want better hot water in the showers. I want a nicer room. I want a TV set." I mean, it would be nice to have those things, but that’s not why they’re in the city, and that’s not what they care about.

你们知道吗，那些工人们真正启发我的 是他们的自我激励、自我推进 还有足智多谋，都深深警醒着我 他们最想要的是教育，是学习 只是因为他们大部分有着穷困的家庭背景。 他们通常中学就离开学校了。 他们的父母大都是文盲， 他们独自来到城市打拼 晚上或者周末，他们去学习电脑的课程， 或者是学英语， 就是学一些真的非常非常基本的东西，你知道吗？ 例如如何在Word里面打字 或者用英语讲一些简单的事情。 所以，如果你们想要帮助那些工人 开展一些小型、集中、基础的课程 这会带来的结果就是 你的工人得到了提升， 但是希望，他们也会晋升到Apple更高的职位中 你可以帮助他们适应社会流动性 帮助他们得到自我的提升。 当你于工人们交谈，你就会知道这就是他们所要的。 他们不会说：我想要浴室里有更热的水 我想要一间更好的房间，想要一个电视 我的意思是，有这些东西固然很好 但是他们来到这个城市不是为了这些， 而且他们根本不在乎。

CA: Was there a sense from them of a narrative that things were kind of tough and bad, or was there a narrative of some kind of level of growth, that things over time were getting better?

他们有没有说过 生活环境真的很艰苦，或者是 自我得到提升以后，这些东西 也会得到相应改善？

LC: Oh definitely, definitely. I mean, you know, it was interesting, because I spent basically two years hanging out in this city, Dongguan, and over that time, you could see immense change in every person’s life: upward, downward, sideways, but generally upward. If you spend enough time, it’s upward, and I met people who had moved to the city 10 years ago, and who are now basically urban middle class people, so the trajectory is definitely upward. It’s just hard to see when you’re suddenly sucked into the city. It looks like everyone’s poor and desperate, but that’s not really how it is. Certainly, the factory conditions are really tough, and it’s nothing you or I would want to do, but from their perspective, where they’re coming from is much worse, and where they’re going is hopefully much better, and I just wanted to give that context of what’s going on in their minds, not what necessarily is going on in yours.

当然，当然了。我是说，大家都知道 这其实很有趣，我花了大概2年时间 在东莞生活 在这个时间里面，你可以看到每个人的生活 都在起着巨大的变化：变得更好，变坏，或者偏离轨道 但总体来说，都是在进步的。 只要你花足够的时间，就会变好 如果一个人十年前来到城市 现在应该已经成为城市的中层阶级， 所以总体趋势一定是变好的。 只不过你初入城市的时候 一下子还无法感知。看起来好像每个人都很穷 很失落，但这都不是真实的。 可以肯定，工厂的环境十分艰苦 在坐的你我都不会愿意前往， 但是比起他们所来自的地方，站在工人的角度来看 这都是值得的，他们也希望 所去的地方这些都会得到改善，我只想 把他们所想的东西陈述出来 而这些并不等同于你们所认定的东西。

CA: Thanks so much for your talk. Thank you very much. (Applause)

感谢你的演讲。 非常感谢。（掌声）

From www.ted.com