Youbing Zhan: Migrant Workers in China’s Assembly Line

For 15 years, Youbing Zhan was himself one of around 300 million migrants working in the industrial heart of China. Taken close up, in almost casual yet extremely impressive pictures, he documents the everyday life of the so-called mingong in Dongguan, with images between hope and assembly lines, factories and leisure time.

Whether high-tec devices, tools, electronics or fashion items, the “Made in China” list of products offers endless possibilities for meeting market demands. Manufacturers have been depending on migrant works for decades, men and women – the mingong – who move from the structurally-weak provinces in the west of the country. They are driven by the hope of getting better paid jobs and social improvement, as well as by curiosity. In reality, they work for exploitative wages, without contracts, and without health or safety protection; and the country only sees them as second-class citizens.

For 15 years, Zhan himself was among China’s roughly 300 million migrant workers – a number growing constantly. Originally from Hubei province in the interior of the country, he worked, among others things, as a security guard in factories located in the surroundings of Guangzhou, a boom town over a thousand kilometres from his original home. The city lies in the south Chinese province of Guangdong, between Macao and Hong Kong, in the Pearl River delta, one of the most commercially-active districts. By chance, in 2000, Zhan got his hands on a camera during one of his work assignments. A colleague, who was also the editor of the company’s in-house newspaper, asked him to take photos of an official visitor who had been announced. Zhan took the photos and soon bought himself a digital camera. “Working in Guangdong while my family remained in Hubei, I realized my illiterate elders had no understanding of my life there. Photography became a way to bridge this gap and share my experiences,” he explains before adding, “as a fellow migrant worker, I felt compelled to document our ordinary lives.” In fact, the press tends to focus primarily on extreme events and does not show everyday reality. And yes, Zhan also says that taking photographs was difficult at first. To start with, his employer feared that trade secrets and protected technologies could be leaked to the public, and that the processes in the factory might be misinterpreted. Zhan’s first pictures appeared in in-house company publications, but others in newspapers and blogs soon followed.

Photography gradually became an increasing part of Zhan’s life, an important point of tranquillity, which he describes as, “stability amidst change”. do on his own experiences and photographed up close, his images convey a striking immediacy. They show workers captured between training sessions, assembly lines and suitcases, revealing the monotony of their daily lives as well as brief moments of leisure, rest and community. Most of his pictures were taken in the cramped and chaotic environments in and around factories, direct and unsparing, reflecting the confinement and stress of working life. Above all, and with painful, almost casual, documentary clarity, they reveal at whose expense the neo-liberal market economy and the fast-paced, consumption-driven Western society thrives.

Youbing Zhan’s series was submitted by Jiawen Hu, one of this year’s group of international LOBA nominators.