Film review or social comment?

Maybe this movie should be compulsory viewing to all those "Outsourcers"...

MOVIES - by Giovanni Fazio

China Blue

Rating: (5 out of 5) *****

Running time: 88 minutes
Language: Mandarin

<cut another film review>
The same could be said of "China Blue" a documentary on a Shaxi factory making blue jeans for
export.
Director Micha X. Peled spent many weeks filming within the Li Feng Clothes Ltd.
factory — with the cooperation of management, who seem to regard themselves as a model
operation — until his actions came to the attention of the authorities; his crew was arrested
and interrogated, for the crime of reporting on something as mundane as labor conditions.

Why is that? Well, the one essential truth that nobody can say these days is that China's
economic success — and that of the many Western companies subcontracting there — is based on
the most heinous exploitation of its workers. Peled could have made an overtly political film
on this, but instead he just focuses on the young women who work at one factory. And they are
all women, for — as the factory's gormless owner Mr. Lam points out — they are "docile" and easily controlled.

We meet Jasmine, just out of high school, and her friends Orchid, Jade and 14-year-old Lee Pin,
who work on a line cutting loose threads, attaching zippers, and stitching up waistlines too
big for them to comprehend. (Jordache is one label glimpsed in the film.) They live in company
dorms, 12 to a room, with no lives outside of work. They're paid pennies an hour, and often
work marathon shifts until they're literally collapsing at the tables.

Lam practices the time-honored scam of all shifty bosses: always be late paying and hold
several months' worth of your workers' salaries; that way, no matter how lousy the job,
people hang in there because they don't want to lose what they've already earned. Of course,
in a country with workers' rights, this is harder to do. But that's why everyone loves doing business in China.

Jasmine is a bright teenager, who keeps a diary that is heart-rending in the gap between her
dreams and the reality she finds herself in. Of her friends, only Orchid — who enjoys being a
vamp and dancing to pop tunes — seems to have the drive and vision to imagine a way out of her dead-end job.

"China Blue" will make you despair, and the factory being documented isn't even one of the worst.
This is the way the world is run, Peled shows us, a throwback to Dickensian conditions and pitiless
exploitation. It will also make you very pissed off. In a week where we've been asked to cry for
those laid-off Wall St. brokers who can't afford their private jets or Prada any more, save your
tears instead for Jasmine and her friends.

The exploited: Lee Pin and Jasmine Lee in "China Blue" © 2005 TEDDY BEAR FILMS
Director: Micha X. Peled