张彤禾：中国工人的声音TED演讲词_ted演讲稿中英文3分钟
张彤禾：中国工人的声音TED演讲词由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“ted演讲稿中英文3分钟”。
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 le than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime aembling 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 aembly line can’t even afford to buy one? It’s taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppreive, and that it’s our desire for cheap goods that makes them so.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-obseed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways.In fact, China makes good 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.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 miing is the voices of the workers themselves.Here are a few.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.” 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.” 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.” 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.” All of these speakers, by the way, are young women, 18 or 19 years old.So I spent two years getting to know aembly 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: 10or 15
workers in one room, 50 people sharing a single bathroom, days and night 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.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 sounds 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.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 le who buys their products.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 in order to earn enough money to buy what he’s making? For example, an entry-level line aembly line worker in China in an iPhone plant would have to shell out two and a half months’ wages for an 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 caculations 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? The workers I got to know had a curiously abstract relationship with the product of their labor.About a year I met Lu Qingmin, or Min, she invited me to her family village for the Chinese New Year.On the train home, sha gave me a present: a Coach brand change purse with brown leather trim.I thanked her, auming 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 downing on me that these handbags were made by their factory, and every single one of them was authentic.Min’s sister aid to her parents, “ In America , this bag sells for 320 dollars.” Her
parents, who are both farmers, looked on, speechle.“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.” 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.” Min’s sister turned to him and said,” some people actually understand there things.You don’t understand shit.” In Min’s word, the Coach bags had a curious currency.They won’t exactly worthle,but they were nothing close to the 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 hand bag 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.I looked in the zippered pocket of one, and I found a printed card in English, which read, “An American claic.In 1941, the burnished patina of an all-American baseball glove inspired the founder of Coach to create a new collection of handbag from the same luxuriously soft gloved-hand leather.
