Am I the Only Survivor? Global Capital, Local Gaze, and Social Trauma in China
I don’t know how I survived, but I am the only one who can be alive. All the women from my village died in the fire. I still can’t believe that I’m lucky enough to have escaped the gates of hell. . . .
a survivor of a factory fire in China
Fire, pain, and memory flashed into Xiaoming’s life story, highlighting a social trauma that runs through the lives of dagongmei, migrant working daughters, in this time of restructuring for China’s state socialist system. Reform-era China is imaged through a lens focused squarely on the global market, a lens that not only occludes new forms of class and gender inequality—and thus legitimizes them as necessary evils—but also leaves the voices of individuals subsumed within the collective enterprise. Who cares? A giant China is coming, a few thousand deaths a year mean nothing. After all, it was the West that was the first to dream of and promise a giant China to come in the twenty-first century! Thus was triggered a mighty desiring machine in mainland China, its effects felt especially among the elite. The desiring machine, with all its power, was targeted on one goal: to set the nation inexorably on the track of globalization, yu quanqiu jiegui, and join the World Trade Organization. What has been tragic is the calling up of a generation of young women to work toward this dream of integration with the global economy. A consideration of China’s subaltern condition within the global order could have foretold the voices of tragedy—the tragedy of compressed time and space and the tragedy of compressed grievances—hidden, yet not choked off. Social explosions emerged from time to time, severely suppressed, leaving behind deep social traumas that continue to haunt the country.
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