So while we consumers in the US buy cheap products that are Made in China; the Chinese seek out wearing clothes that depict the American lifestyle. It’s a weird economic and cultural dependency. And the financial dependency of migrant workers to make those cheap products for Americans is what is contributing to their own loss of traditional culture. When we buy Made in China, not only are we taking jobs away from American domestic production, we are also luring the Chinese, both Han and ethnic minorities, away from continuing their own traditional culture.
During my first trip to Guizhou, it seemed obvious that the solution to this was to create jobs in the countryside and pay the villagers the same, if not more, than what the coastal factories were offering them every month. My competition wasn’t other brands, it was the coastal factories that were luring this young work fore away from their villages. The trade-off would be that they could stay in their own village, take care of their kids, be able to watch the grandparents, live at home and not in a factory dorm with bad living conditions, and have health insurance and government benefits that they can only receive by living in their own houkou (?). They would be healthier, happier, and would continue their traditional culture. It seemed like a no-brainer to me, of course they would prefer it!
I would need to create the demand for their fabrics and embroideries in order for this to work. After speaking to Chinese fashion editors and store buyers in the cities, it was clear that it was too early for China to accept hand-made goods from rural ethnic minorities in the countryside. It was too close to home for them, and hand-made was too familiar to their own poverty of just a few decades ago. They would certainly buy them if they were cheap, but hand-made crafted items are actually expensive if you are hiring others to produce it for you. In France, crafting a hand-made garment is given the esteemed distinction of haute couture. In China, the perceptions is that the makers are so poor that they had to hand-make it themselves.
So I would have to develop demand for their fabrics in the West where hand-crafted items were more valued and respected. For the Europeans, they still live on the land of their ancestors and have a history of craftsmanship and luxury brands have used it as part of their DNA. For Americans, the land of immigrants, their appreciation for craftsmanship is due to a lack of traditional culture, as the country is so young and still in the process of forming a distinct one that will last the test of time.
The only indigenous groups that could link the country to the land are Native Americans, but encounters with these groups in the big cities are rare, as they had been moved to reservations a hundred years ago (fact-check year). Perhaps it is this nationwide guilt of what the American government had done to the Native Americans in the past that paints our generation’s respect for these tribes today. There is a general sense of fascination for these native cultures that were once part of our history but are now hard for the average American to find. Perhaps it is because we destroyed our own ethnic minorities in the past that we know what the consequences are and are now trying to support them. And perhaps it is only after it is all destroyed that China will, like Americans today, finally come to respect their own ethnic minority culture.
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It was not until 3 years later when I finally did meet a 16-year old girl and was fluent enough in Chinese to ask about her ambitions. After her grandmother showed us a traditional silk costume she had handwoven and made by herself, which the curious young girl was seeing for the first time in her life, I asked if this was something she would be interested in learning. Her response was a definite “yes!” — if she could get paid for it, and would open up a workshop to produce my orders. Even in a small remote village, she reflected the optimistic entrepreneurial mindset that dominates modern China – a country where 50% of young girls say they want to grow up to be an entrepreneur.
If I was to get any fabric made, it was clear that I’d have to find a way to motivate these young teenagers to start learning the techniques from their parents. But once I started sketching, getting them excited my designs took no effort at all. Like so many girls around the word, fashion and clothing got them excited. It was clear that the way to get them motivated about weaving their grandmothers’ traditional cloth was through the lens of modern fashion.
At what point do we draw the line between real craftsmanship and faux craftsmanship? Real artisanal and fake artisanal for marketing purposes? And does it even matter?
I would argue certainly yes, especially if there is cultural appropriation involved as has been the case with the Maasaii tribes in Kenya (site source), whose beaded costumes and image are often used as inspiration by fashion brands. To site the people of inspiration is not enough. J. Crew went directly to copying a Miao textile as a scarf, largely unnoticed and with no mention of the tribe that made it (website). Each time a native print or technique is taken without crediting its source is taking a symbolic piece that has been developed over many generations and put on display, in a cheap reproduction if it’s digitally/mass-produced, and judged by a crowd of outsiders who have no connection to what they are looking at and must only appreciate it for its aesthetic purposes. All the knowledge that it carries is lost, and it is reduced to a simple scarf sold on a website for $49 (find exact price and webpage). By copying an indigenous textile and not engaging with the tribes that make it is a big mistake for fashion and apparel brands – not only for legal and ethical reasons, but because it misses big opportunities for meaningful and rewarding collaborations – the kind that the public is actually craving right now.
Most Western media tend to focus on China’s economic advancement and newfound wealth, overlooking the other side of China — its poor countryside where people still live on less than $2 a day (fact-check this). As there are few jobs in the villages, they travel to the big cites and coastal factories to become migrant workers for most of the year. The money they make there is sent back to their families in the villages — their parents, their children, for their schooling and to build houses.
Without global demand for “Made in China” products, these village families would not be able to improve their lives. Already, their livelihood has improved significantly. Talk to any grandmother, and she’ll tell you how hard life used to be, how they made their own shoes because they couldn’t afford to buy any. Their life already seems difficult now, with all the farming and manual labor they must do just to survive; I can’t imagine what life must have been like before — to be so poor, that you didn’t have food to eat.
So this is why they find it funny that I am requesting them to make hand-made fabrics for me. For them, it is what they made because they couldn’t afford to buy it at the market.
Today, the average factory worker in China receives 3000 RMB ($463 USD) per month, which does not seem like much from a Western standard of living. But for those in rural China, this amount is enough to raise a family and build their home with, and it could go on for 10 years like this. And this is the reason why the craft has been dyeing out in China, because just 30 years ago (fact-check), the rest of China was also very poor. Until 19XX (find year), everyone was making the same amount of money, $50 USD per month, no matter how much or how little one worked. Everyone in China was poor then, and they can remember growing up with their mother making fabric for them in the home. In just XX years (fact-check), this has all since disappeared in China except in remote places like Guizhou.
So the real need in these villages is that they need local employments. While garment industry workers have lost their jobs to migrant factory workers in China in recent decades, isn’t it ironic that those Chinese migrant workers also can’t find jobs in their home villages. The sacrifices they make, to leave their family and become a migrant worker in a Chinese coastal factory, are correlated to the insatiable demands for cheaply-made fast fashion apparel by the American market.
Between the years 2000 – 2010 (fact-check with NY Times article), 300 villages were being destroyed per day. This is the first year, not just in China but globally, that more people are living in cities than in rural areas. By 2050, 50 million (fact-check) or XX% will have moved from the countryside to the cities of China. Shouldn’t this be considered progress that the country is improving the livelihood of so many people? Well, it depends on what you define as “progress”. This is not only happening in China, it is the plight of indigenous people and ethnic minorities around the world.
Our modern global society has become so removed from respecting nature that we are now experiencing the devastating consequences with global warming and climate change. More extreme weather patterns, floods, and hurricanes are just the topical symptom of the damage the last two centuries of human development has done to the Earth. (Find exact year)
I would argue that pulling so many people off the land that their ancestors inhabited for centuries destroys culture and the soul of a people. They may not realize this in the beginning, but it starts to settle in when they, like me, or any Chinese-American whose parents immigrated to the U.S., is looking for their own identity. It was only after I started going to China, the land of my ancestors, that I started to understand the importance of respecting nature. Until then, I was never interested in environmental sustainability. I thought it was a luxury, an aspirational lifestyle that, despite its good intentions, was expensive to maintain. But now I know what was missing in this equation.
The conveniences of modern city life warped space and time out of context for me, so I did not have a real sense of real timing, that is, nature’s timing that is slow and requires patience — not human-made artificial timing where everything is fast and strictly regimented.
I did not really understand what it meant to eat in-season and local. In New York, it seemed like a novel concept that one could try out, but nobody really adhered to it strictly. Restricted access to seasonal foods certainly did not exist for us. Pineapples and Fuji water were shipped year-round to the local Whole Foods, and Amazon Prime gave the false sense that everything we ordered online had come from a magic portal next door.
I did not know that it was possible to live without all this outside stuff, and that to do so could even be healthier — if not for the body, then certainly for clearing the mind. When I go to the grocery store and see 50 bottles of ketchup, the paradox of choice sets in and I end up not choosing any because I am so confused.
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