Do you have a purse, briefcase, suitcase, backpack, or even a laptop sleeve? There’s a 70-80% chance that all or part of it comes from Shiling town, in the Huadu district of Guangzhou city in Guangdong Province, China. Five square kilometers with a worldwide impact.
Join me on a journey into the global supply chain…
I recently read a novel centered around Guangzhou’s counterfeit bag trade called, appropriately enough, Counterfeit. Inspired by the novel, I visited the real life Guangzhou market that sells the final products, some counterfeit, some not.
Then, when a local tour company offered a day-trip called Made in China – An Insider’s Tour into the World’s Bag Factory, I had an opportunity to learn even more about the world of bag making. Is it weird that I jumped at the chance?
Our first stop was indeed a factory, albeit not one making counterfeits. We were welcomed in, given a presentation about the company, and encouraged to take pics and video despite signs saying otherwise.
No photos policies are actually often part of an effort to stop counterfeiting
However, as workers are paid not by the hour but by the finished product, we were warned they probably wouldn’t want to stop and chat with us.
Here is where I stop to acknowledge the many valid concerns about forced or sweatshop labor in China. And yet, an interesting development in the bag industry: China’s labor is already a bit too expensive for some western retailers. To compete, our guide/factory owner has opened factories in neighboring Myanmar, where labor is cheaper. Much of what they do here in China is now limited to purchasing materials, creating samples, and then shipping those across the border for mass production.
During our pre-tour Q&A, we talked about the human rights concerns in China and Myanmar and how to balance that with the fact that if you shut down a factory a thousand people are out of a job. And how the factory owners are beholden to the often fickle demands of big western retailers. When said retailers noticed the exchange rate between the Myanmar Kyat and pretty much every other currency was more favorable than it had been, they tried to negotiate a new, lower, price per bag. Which then required the factory owner to show the receipts for a) the extra cost of electricity when you are running your own generator because an unstable government can’t keep a stable power grid running, and b) the mid-month payment of rice and cooking oil to workers whose monthly paycheck was no longer quite cutting it.
Other than the laborers themselves, I don’t think there are any heroes in this story. That being said, I didn’t see any truly inhumane working conditions during my tour.
Conditions in the market and especially the subcontractor shops (see below), while not as good as the factory, were also not terrible. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t see working conditions that I would enjoy, I just didn’t see anything that made me feel committed to human extinction as the best possible course of action. Although I know those conditions could well exist somewhere. After all, this district is chock full of factories I didn’t see inside of.
Burned-out factory, a testament to unsafe conditions. While this fire was two years ago, I am sure the potential for others still exists.
Why so many bag factories in one place? Proximity to the wholesale market.
Imagine everything you can think of to make a bag and several things you haven’t. Thread? Fabric? Zippers? Foam? Paint? It’s all a couple of kilometers away.
You can go from factory to wholesale market to subcontractor district, all on foot. Although delivery bikes and tuk-tuks abound, to help speed things up.
Our last stop of the day was the aforementioned subcontractor area. While in the factory we saw machines that cut patterns and tested the durability of wheelie suitcases, and sewing machines that are set to semi-automatically stich a specific pattern, there’s still lots of work that needs to be done by hand. Plus work that needs to be done by specialized machines that not every factory wants to purchase. They farm this work out to small subcontractor shops lining the storefronts in nearby streets.
This district was certainly the grittiest part of our tour, with the least desirable working conditions. The neighborhood was also the epitome of dense urban living. Residential, working, shopping, and restaurant spaces are all stacked up on top of each other. Even I, a lover of mixed-use urban development, found this particular atmosphere a tad claustrophobic. You simply cannot understand the density of a Chinese city until you’ve visited one.
Final reflections
I suspect anyone who has any bag purchased at any price point at any major store (from the fanciest at Nordstrom to the cheapest at TJ Maxx), likely has a piece of Shiling village in their possession.
But it goes beyond the big retailers. Before this tour I would have told you that my bags were in that 20-30% that did not come from China. Because while I do love a bag, my favorites are unique items mostly picked up on my travels.
Now? I think I was naïve. Yes my bags come from the leather market of Fes, an Indie designer from Olympia, and a fair trade shop in Kazakhstan. But the buckles, snaps, zippers, and straps…where do those come from? I have my suspicions.
Also, this is exactly what I love about living in a foreign country. If I visited China on the standard two week trip, would I sacrifice a day of my precious vacation to visit a dingy Guangdong manufacturing district? Probably not.
Instead I live here, and while I have yet to make it to the Great Wall or Mao’s mausoleum, I have seen the birthplace of your handbag. Which is kinda cool.
Anxious to make use of the free time, I chose a tour of China’s wine country, Ningxia. Yes, there’s wine country in China, although it doesn’t attract the tourists of Napa Valley. Or even 
I just turned on my air conditioning. On March 18. Supposedly it might get colder next week but I’d been fighting against the March heat (!) for over a week and I couldn’t do it anymore. I need to be comfortable in my house because I’m always here. I’ve spent the last few months practically in hibernation.
It’s filled with many buildings in classic Lingnan (Cantonese) architectural style but its only real claim to fame is that Mao’s English language translator lived here.
A former guard tower has been turned into a cool museum chronicling Guangzhou’s history.
The park also contains what used to be the symbol of Guangzhou, the Five Rams Statue, based on a local legend of a terrible famine, broken only when five gods rode five goats down from heaven and bestowed food (and the goats?) upon the starving populace. These days the Canton Tower has taken over as the most recognizable Guangzhou landmark but old-timers know this one.
In Foreign Places 