Egyptian Factories, Sichuan Schools, and the Unfilled Promises of Globalization

Adam Minter reviews Leslie Chang’s “Egyptian Made” and Peter Hessler’s “Other Rivers.”

By Adam MinterJuly 31, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Politics

• History

ONE MORNING IN 2016, Leslie T. Chang watched Rania Saeed Mohamed slaughter a duck at home in Saft al-Sharqiya, a village roughly 165 miles south of Cairo. Mohamed was a supervisor in a nearby textile factory. But on this morning, she inhabited what Chang depicts as her inescapable role: Egyptian mother and wife. As she worked, she ordered one of her children to pull feathers from the bird, and another to hold the meat as she butchered it with a knife.

Chang, who spent a decade based in Beijing, China reporting for The Wall Street Journal and doing research for her acclaimed debut book Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (2008), recalls seeing a nearly identical scene in rural China in 2005. But, as she writes in Egyptian Made: Women, Work and the Promise of Liberation, her riveting new work that revisits some themes from her China-based first book, there was a difference: the Chinese children refused to help. “People in rural China accepted that the younger generation would leave the village,” Chang writes. “They would live in a city and shop at a supermarket and never need to know how to pluck feathers” from a freshly slaughtered duck.

The juxtaposition is jarring, especially coming from Chang. In Factory Girls, she presented globalization and economic development as progressive forces that had opened up new opportunities and possibilities for Chinese women. Egyptian Made is a pessimistic and sometimes furious sequel that documents how the same economic forces can entrench authoritarianism at home. Chang joins a growing chorus of thinkers questioning the promise and past of globalization. Was it a temporary moment bound to be interrupted by deeply entrenched cultures? Or is it now just in temporary retreat?

Of course, globalization has always had its critics, especially in the developed countries of the West. Among the activist class, the plight of “cheap” labor and its exploitation in the factories of China are a decades-long cause. Factory Girls was an eloquent counterargument that gave agency to the young women whom Western labor activists (among others) claimed to be defending in the abstract.

Chang focused on two young women who—like millions of peers—moved from the countryside to South China boomtowns. Removed from the stultifying patriarchy of Chinese village life, Chang’s subjects developed careers and love lives. Meanwhile, their paychecks, remitted back to the village, turned age-old village hierarchies upside down, investing young women with authority and status. She observed this firsthand. One memorable scene finds Chang, a Chinese American who weaves some parts of her forebears’ experiences in China into Factory Girls, taking a trip to the native village of one of her subjects and being welcomed into the household as a kind of honorary family member. She was even offered a place in a bedroom shared by several female family members.

The impact of the book was—and is—significant. During the late 2000s and early 2010s, a period during which I lived in Shanghai, dog-eared copies of Factory Girls were passed among expatriates (especially those in the manufacturing sector). Some embraced it as validation of what they had seen and experienced on their own while living and working in China. Others, more cynically, embraced it as a rationalization. Either way, the book is a classic document of the period.

A progressive outlook on globalization informed Chang’s initial feelings about Egypt when she moved there in 2011. Back then, Chang writes, she was convinced that outsiders were assessing Egypt wrong: “It was full of accomplished women, I believed, and was progressive and cosmopolitan in ways that many Western observers didn’t care to admit.” After five years in the country, she concluded that she had been “mostly wrong.” But it’s not just her preconceptions about Egyptian women that she concedes: “The story of Egypt, and particularly its women, calls into question almost everything we believe about how globalization is supposed to play out.”

To her considerable credit, Chang immersed herself in the Arabic language and Egyptian culture. But misconceptions were inevitable. For example, her initial work plan—to embed in an Egyptian village and learn about the country’s women there—simply wasn’t possible in a militarized, authoritarian country. So, Chang started thinking about the Egyptian female labor force and found her way back to factories.

It’s good that she did. Chang is a meticulous business reporter whose patience with her characters and subject matter pays off in a rich and resonant narrative. Occasionally, she becomes bogged down recounting academic studies of Egyptian women. But those passages are quickly overcome by wonderful accounts of the factory floor, and the women who in turn fascinate and frustrate her. Chang’s thesis, that the interpersonal dynamics of the factory replicate those at home and in the village, is deeply rewarding, both intellectually and emotionally.

Throughout Egyptian Made, China lingers as a crucial and surprising supporting player. The differences between the two ancient civilizations can be stark. In China, for example, young women gain independence in part by migrating hundreds of miles away from family to work in factories. In Egypt, women “migrate” a few miles, perhaps, from home to the factory, ensuring that the family remains central to daily life.

Meanwhile, it’s men who typically migrate much further for work, often to Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Middle Eastern countries with deeply conservative outlooks on women and family. When the men return, they bring money and those conservative outlooks with them. That combination reinforces the patriarchal conservatism that defines the lives of so many Egyptian women.

For example, families typically spend years accumulating the household goods, such as appliances and tea sets, that a woman is supposed to contribute before she can be married. Those items were always expensive; thanks to globalization, and the growing variety of goods available to Egyptian consumers, the price of marriage continues to rise. The consequence is that women are tied even more tightly, via finance, to their traditional roles. Culture, not globalization, prevails.

From Chang’s perspective, that creates a social and economic tragedy. “Over and over, I watched women diminish themselves to satisfy a man,” she fumes, reflecting on the promising careers of women halted to stay home alone, or with children. From her perspective, it’s not just an interpersonal issue. She views the unequal position of women as the country’s most pressing issue. Among other problems, forcing millions of capable, educated women to stay home is a colossal waste of human resources that could build a better, more affluent Egypt.

Near the end of Egyptian Made, Chang muses that the trajectory of Egyptian women can’t be imposed from above, much less via globalization. Instead, change, if it ever comes, will be determined “by the dramas inside families.” It’s an uncomfortable conclusion, especially for those who view globalization and markets as progressive, liberating forces.

Chang’s disappointment is shared widely. At the beginning of his new book, Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, Peter Hessler, Chang’s husband, asks: “How could a country experience so much social, economic, and educational change, while the politics remained stagnant or even regressive?” It’s a question that could be asked about many countries since the mid-2010s. Ethnonationalism is now, ironically, a transnational movement.

But Hessler’s question was pointed at China, and with good reason. For decades, American advocates of trade and engagement argued that prosperity would ultimately be a liberalizing force in China. Hessler knows that view well. In the mid-1990s, he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Sichuan Province, where he taught at a small college in Fuling. It was an optimistic time for the country and its young people. The economy was just beginning its epic boom. Economic and cultural opportunity was everywhere.

In his renowned 2001 memoir, River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze, Hessler described what that change looked like. Students, often the first in their families to receive higher education, started to have economic ambitions beyond their small towns. Along the way, they embraced the NBA, Michael Jordan, and their American teachers. Over the course of the book, these details suggested, implicitly, that bridges could be built between radically different civilizations.

But can they? In 2019, Hessler, Chang, and their two young twins moved to Chengdu. Hessler took up a position teaching at Sichuan University, and the couple’s daughters enrolled in a Chinese school.

For Hessler, the return journey and the subsequent book were very much intended as sequels. He had long harbored the hope of teaching in Sichuan again and learning about a new generation of students, after intervening years that saw him write not just several notable books on China but also a book of his own about Egypt. From a journalistic standpoint, he was highly sourced: for more than two decades, during time living in varied places, the New Yorker staff writer kept up with his former students, many of whom were keen to offer in-person, ongoing commentary on the changes that they—and now their children—had been experiencing.

Those changes are outwardly profound. In the 1990s, Hessler reminisces, his students were short and had so few changes of clothes that he could identify them by the few distinct clothing items they wore—for example, a Chicago Bulls jersey. Two decades later, he was struck on a “visceral level” by how much taller young people had become, thanks to better nutrition. Meanwhile, he could no longer identify students by clothes alone—except, perhaps, for the one who attended class wearing $450 Air Jordans.

The significant changes in China weren’t limited to immediately observable physical differences. In the 1990s, he writes, only one in 12 young Chinese could enter any kind of tertiary education; these days, more than half are admitted. That has been a boon to China’s economy, generally. But Hessler and his former ’90s students who became parents are troubled by the consequences. Education no longer inspires deep reverence; instead, it’s just “another form of competition, a way for children to strive for class rank.”

In one of the book’s most poignant passages, Hessler describes the difficulty that he and Chang encountered when they tried to arrange playdates and parties for their daughters and their classmates. On one occasion, a panicked mother reached out to Chang, requesting that the children go to a science museum rather than spend a pleasant afternoon in unstructured play. “She wanted a destination with a clearly defined educational purpose,” Hessler writes; “otherwise, what would the girls possibly do, and what would they learn?” Eventually, Hessler and Chang gave up organizing parties.

What seems to trouble Hessler most, though, is the recognition that even those who strive hardest will be fenced in by the pervasive authoritarianism that has returned to China under Xi Jinping. For Hessler, it’s personal. From the beginning of his Sichuan sequel, he is thwarted by faceless bureaucrats. They refuse to give him permission to teach in Fuling. They monitor classes. And, ultimately, they refuse to renew his contract to teach at Sichuan University, forcing him to leave a country for which he feels deeply. Hessler, ever humble, concedes that, “even with prior experience in China,” he could not gauge this new political climate.

But that doesn’t mean he’s ignorant of it, either. Hessler spends time recounting previous periods in which Americans and American ideas were adopted and adapted, and then rejected, in China. In the early 20th century, the educator John Dewey’s lectures were wildly popular in China, but his methods were—for the most part—never adopted. In particular, his belief that children should be cultivated as critical and self-reflective individuals just didn’t fit into the regimented Chinese classroom culture. “[F]rom the American perspective, it often seemed as if China took the pragmatism without the democratic values, the science without the faith,” Hessler writes.

In this sense, the failure of globalization—at least, the American, WTO-oriented version—isn’t anything new. Rather, it’s a pattern in which a proud civilization picks and chooses from foreign ideas and makes them its own (or rejects them altogether). Some ideas—such as Marxism—fare better than others. But to some extent, all become, to use the favored Chinese Communist Party phraseology, something “with Chinese characteristics.” Globalization is just the latest entry in the ledger.

Other Rivers is overly long and disorganized. There are times when it sparkles, such as when Hessler describes his daughters reciting off-color versions of classic Chinese poems that they learn from their under-pressure classmates. But it often feels like Hessler is stuffing every stray thought he has about China into the narrative before he’s forced to leave the subject behind. The fact that he had wanted to stay longer to complete this book raises a question: if he had not had to leave prematurely, might he have had more material but written a shorter and tighter book?

At other times, it feels like he’s giving up. After Chang and his daughters depart China for the United States for the last time, Hessler spends a few weeks driving around the countryside he had come to know via bicycle as a younger man. He visits friends, often drinks too much, and is driven home. He’s a man out of time realizing that he can’t go home—or at least, back to the China he once knew—anymore.

That wasn’t the promise that China or the world of 1996 held for young, idealistic Americans. For those who embraced the idea that cultures could be bridged, it’s a crushing letdown. Was globalization, and its promise, just a late 20th-century fever dream? Or is it still possible to imagine a world shaped by markets and progressive values? Both of these sequels to star-making debut books suggest that the more things change, the more authoritarian they become. That’s a bleak outlook, and devoted readers of Hessler and Chang should hope that they both turn out to be wrong.

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Featured image: Hugh R. Hopgood. Papyrus Marsh, A.D. 1914–1916; original ca. 1427–1400 B.C.E. Gift of Rogers Fund, 1930. The Metropolitan Museum of Art (30.4.60). CC0, metmuseum.org. Accessed July 29, 2024.