Translocal Chinese Family Firms in Newcastle

While the arrival of ethnic Chinese factories in Newcastle in the 1980s has been well documented, what is less well known are the internal variations among them and how they evolved. I distinguish three subgroups of ethnic Chinese clothing firms in Newcastle: Hong Kong large exporters (da fuzhuang chang 大服装厂), Taiwanese knitting firms (maoyi chang 毛衣厂), and mainland Chinese cut-make-and-trim (CMT) firms (chengyi chang 成衣厂). The Hong Kong exporters were large transnational companies producing mainly for the US market. They arrived in the early 1980s but had all closed by the mid-2000s due to the appreciation of the South African currency, increasing wages and the introduction of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in 2001.Footnote ¹⁸ Firms now operating in Newcastle are Taiwanese knitting firms (around 30) and mainland Chinese CMT firms (around 90). They are all small family firms. Each employs 50–400 workers depending on their production scale.

Taiwanese and mainland Chinese companies in Newcastle represent two distinct forms of family firms. Like typical family firms in Taiwan, Taiwanese knitting firms in Newcastle involve both parents and children (usually adult sons) and have a clear gendered division of labour. Whereas the male members work on the first phase of knitting, in which yarn is woven into knitted fabric on computerized machines, the female members manage the second phase in which they supervise Zulu women workers as they sew the fabric into final knitwear items. Mainland Chinese CMT firms, however, represent a radical form of family business. They are often built upon a boyfriend–girlfriend partnership that was formed between a female production line supervisor (daixian 带线) and a male mechanic (jixiu 机修) during their employment as management staff in the large Hong Kong and Taiwanese firms. When the two have acquired some capital and management skills, they spin off from their employers and jointly start a clothing plant. This explains the rapid proliferation of small garment firms in Newcastle after the departure of the big firms in the mid-2000s. The two partners usually have spouses and families back in China but enter such a relationship for emotional needs and business purposes. I call such partnerships “production couples.”Footnote ¹⁹ My survey data suggest that 61 per cent of mainland Chinese CMT firms in Newcastle are built upon such partnerships, and the rest are regular small family-owned businesses like the Taiwanese firms.

Local Chinese refer to production couples as “wild” or “undomesticated” couples (yefuqi 野夫妻). Yefuqi generally do not produce offspring and continue to use factory-generated wealth to support their respective families in China. Importantly, by maintaining a long-term boyfriend–girlfriend relationship in Newcastle, these couples are accommodated not as social outcasts but as active participants in the local Chinese community. One may compare these couples with other forms of “couples of convenience,” such as “temporary couples” among migrant workers in urban China and “secondary families” among early generations of Chinese immigrants overseas.Footnote ²⁰ However, two things distinguish these production couples. First, the male and female partners of a production couple possess distinct but essential skills that underpin their joint clothing business; second, the production couple and garment factory produce and sustain each other in that “as a production couple opens a new business and hires supervisors and mechanics, the shop floor then would serve as a womb for future production couples.”Footnote ²¹

Although the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese firms occupy discrete segments of garment manufacturing and represent distinct forms of family business, they share three important characteristics that separate them from state capital and transnational private capital. First, they are translocal companies. These firms are started, owned and run by Taiwanese and mainland Chinese (a few of whom have South African citizenship) and are exclusively registered locally. Unlike Chinese state-owned or transnational private companies, these translocal firms enjoy no connections with lead firms or sourcing companies in global production networks. They lack the capacity for redeployment and do not sustain headquarters in China or elsewhere. Producing mainly for the domestic market, these firms are thus more embedded in the local economy.

Second, these firms are small family businesses with a distinct accumulative imperative. Profit margins for garment producers have decreased significantly as competition worldwide intensifies. South Africa's textile and clothing industry is no exception and has been declining rapidly with severe informalization in the post-apartheid era.Footnote ²² In Newcastle, the average annual profit of a factory is around two million rands. Considering the number of family members involved and the time and hard work it requires, garment manufacturing is far from a high-profit-margin business. When asked about ethnic Chinese firms’ competitiveness, a Taiwanese business leader remarked: “We are small and flexible. We can combine and take fragmented orders at competitive prices and make a modest profit. Big firms can't do so.”Footnote ²³ However, in an interview with the author, Nikki Lau, a former manager of a large Hong Kong exporter, criticized such behaviour as unsustainable. “These small factories have no cost accounting and profit calculation system whatsoever. They accept low-price orders because they don't know how to assess invisible production costs such as implied rent [some industrialists own factory premises], depreciation of machinery and other repair and management expenditures. This is not going to last well.”Footnote ²⁴ While Lau might be right in that Taiwanese and mainland Chinese factories’ cost accounting is not as rigorous as those of her former transnational employer, what she fails to understand is that in times of reduced profits these firms rely increasingly on other revenue sources. Some extract rental income from purchased factory premises. Most firms run factory shops and benefit from selling surplus and substandard order items (referred to as “stock” by Taiwanese and mainland Chinese producers). As one factory shop owner informed me, her factory shop could reap an annual profit of between 500,000 and one million rands.Footnote ²⁵ Family members sometimes collect proceeds from engaging in the garment import trade. Since most Taiwanese and mainland Chinese have the intention to settle for medium- to long-term periods, they invest locally and see Newcastle as home in a real sense. As they often say to me, “we won't leave as long as we can help the family eat (hun kou fan chi 混口饭吃).”

Understanding that their family business portfolios prioritize the gross family revenue is crucial because it allows family factories to endure disruptive strikes and low seasons. It also renders them less concessionary when responding to workers’ wage demands. On the one hand, small, translocal family capital is less finance driven and more territorially bounded than global private capital. Its primary goal is to support the family (or the production couple's respective families). On the other hand, unlike state capital, whose economic and political embeddedness makes it more prone to local pressures, family capital's embeddedness is purely economic and does not necessarily lead to concessionary tendencies. This is not to dismiss the Chinese contribution to employment in Newcastle. In fact, compared to the transnational Hong Kong exporters that preceded mainland Chinese factories in Newcastle, the mainland Chinese and Taiwanese factories can be characterized as providers of low-wage but stable employment. This resembles the “exclusion” versus “exploitation” comparison between global private capital and Chinese state capital outlined in Lee's study.Footnote ²⁶

The concurrence of workers’ strikes and “employers’ strikes” in Newcastle is an important illustration of translocal Chinese family firms’ less negotiable tendencies. Unions are politically strong in post-apartheid South Africa due to the tripartite alliance of the ruling African National Congress party, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party. Over the last two decades, industrial relations in Newcastle's ethnic Chinese factories have become contentious due to the minimum wage controversy. In 2003, the South African Clothing and Textile Workers’ Union (SACTWU) created the National Bargaining Council for the Clothing Manufacturing Industry (NBC) as a new vehicle to set national sectoral wages, which the minister of labour then extended to all non-metro areas.Footnote ²⁷ Ethnic Chinese factories in Newcastle decided not to comply on the basis that the NBC was composed of union members and large, higher-wage employers who were mainly from the Western Cape. One Chinese industrialist leader commented: “The NBC will ruin South Africa. The wages are not linked to production.”Footnote ²⁸ Subsequently, the SACTWU and NBC organized multiple strikes in Newcastle. When the SACTWU and NBC, collaborating with the Department of Labour and local sheriffs, threatened to forcefully shut down ethnic Chinese factories in 2010, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese firms organized a series of “employers’ strikes.” They shut down unanimously for several days as a gesture of protest. Since then, such employer's strikes have become a common tactic for these factories to resist minimum wage demands. Over the past decade, most Taiwanese and mainland Chinese factories were paying around 60 per cent of stipulated minimum wages.Footnote ²⁹ This must be understood in the context of South Africa's high unemployment rate and the demand for low-skill jobs.Footnote ³⁰

Third, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese firms produce new gender dynamics within families. Scholars have long regarded family and kinship as the foundational spirit of Chinese capitalism and a crucial reason for ethnic Chinese firms’ competitiveness in the global arena.Footnote ³¹ Division of labour along gender lines within the family is a vital feature of ethnic Chinese family firms. However, Newcastle's ethnic Chinese firms add to our understanding of gender and family business in two ways. On the one hand, unlike transnational Chinese family firms where women's central role is maintaining “soft” cultural capital such as cultivating business networks (guanxi 关系), “face value” and a conducive home environment,Footnote ³² women members in Newcastle's family firms take on the “hard” part of the production work. They are on the shop floor directing work, giving sewing instructions and managing women workers. The male members are engaged in “soft” office work, including securing orders and talking to the unions. Men consider their partners capable and good at sewing and disciplining African women workers. Gary Zhao commented fondly about his partner: “She is so blunt. She can get things done just like that. She is very straightforward and doesn't know how to hide her opinions at work. I like that. She knows about sewing. She knows how to be tough on workers because that is how you get the productivity.”Footnote ³³

While the traditional literature has shed light on the processes through which women's labour is underpaid or appropriated in the patriarchal familial structure, multiple interviews undertaken for this study suggested that male and female partners of most production couples share their annual profit on an equal basis. However, the gender relationship between the partners is not entirely equal when considering the hard labour of sewing work on the shop floor. Also, when disputes occur between the Chinese female manager and an employee, the Chinese man is often the arbiter who has the final say about whether to punish or fire an employee. Therefore, while managing the factory might be an empowering experience for some women, the patriarchal power structure remains in place.

Encountering and Managing Heipo Workers

Initially, ethnic Chinese industrialists assessed Zulu women workers from the perspective of productivity. Lilly Wei, a female mainland Chinese industrialist, recalled that “fat” and “slow” were her first impressions of Zulu women when she arrived 20 years ago.Footnote ³⁴ Nikki Lau, the former manager of Newcastle's first Hong Kong exporter firm, used similar imagery:

Though such comments sound racist, they should be understood in two contexts. First, global manufacturing capitalism is well known for its preference for nimble fingers and docile bodies. In East Asia, it was easy for the industrialists to take for granted young, “shy, and hardworking” girls with “slim bod[ies], sharp eyes, [and] nimble fingers,” which was itself a “homogeneous and orientalist construct” that has served the interests of transnational capital and China's “reified patriarchal culture.”Footnote ³⁶ Second, black women in South Africa had largely been excluded from industrial work until the second half of the twentieth century due to the country's long and violent history. Important factors that had marginalized Zulu women in South Africa include the traditional patriarchy in Zulu society, gender-biased missionary education and the male migrant labour system that had underpinned South Africa's mining capitalism.Footnote ³⁷ Black women became attractive to industrial production only after cheap male workers and women of other races became less attainable or affordable.Footnote ³⁸ Ethnic Chinese industrialists had little understanding of Zulu women's socio-economic marginalization and their relatively short histories of participation in modern factories.

The racial imagery reported by ethnic Chinese industrialists is different from that espoused by Western colonialists. In early colonial Africa, Europeans sexualized African bodies, circulating photographs of nude or semi-nude African women and of their buttocks and breasts. The tragedy of Sara Baartman, an indigenous South African woman who was captured and exhibited in Europe as a freak show attraction, is a powerful example.Footnote ³⁹ Language about African female bodies suggested asymmetrical relations and served to justify the sexual and racial hierarchy in the colonies.Footnote ⁴⁰ When Western colonialists complained about slack African workers, their encounters were often primarily with black male workers such as miners and plantation workers in southern and eastern Africa.Footnote ⁴¹ After the Second World War and with the onset of African independence movements, colonial states in Africa became more concerned with stabilizing the African “industrial man,” and the role of African women was defined not as the productive labour but the wife or mother figure to nurture modern, stable African workers.Footnote ⁴² In the 1980s, ethnic Chinese garment producers arrived in Newcastle in a different context and with a rather distinct gendered lens on production. This informs their obsession with Zulu women's productive capacity.

Aside from describing Zulu women as being “fat” and “slow,” ethnic Chinese refer to their employees as heipo, regardless of age and marital status. It is interesting to note that local Zulu people call female factory workers “mama mabhodini,” meaning “factory mothers.” I talked to more than 100 women workers in Newcastle. All were mothers or grandmothers, but very few were married. Among the 45 workers with whom I conducted extended interviews, only six were married. This identification reveals the profound socio-economic changes in South Africa over the last half century. Accelerated female migration and mass male unemployment resulting from the economic slowdown and large-scale mechanization on the mines and white farms since the mid-1970s has led to the breakdown of African families in South Africa.Footnote ⁴³ The massive retrenchment of male workers in the 1980s and 1990s was accompanied by a rapid feminization of the labour force, especially in the manufacturing and service sectors, resulting in shifting landscapes of work and home.Footnote ⁴⁴ As black men in South Africa lost the socio-economic security to marry, black women began to rely on intergenerational support between themselves in the household, forming the so-called “female-linked family.”Footnote ⁴⁵ This transformation of the African family is important for women workers’ labour reproduction because intergenerational support among female members allows one person to come out and work while another stays behind to look after children and attend to other needs in the house. Most Zulu women workers I interviewed lived in such female-linked households.

The presence of “factory mothers” contradicts our conventional understanding of factories in early industrializing societies. For example, in Europe, America and Asia, young and unmarried women usually worked at the factories for a limited period in their late teens and early twenties before returning to their rural homes or starting families through marriage in the cities.Footnote ⁴⁶ In such cases, “factory girls” or “factory daughters” were hardworking but transient workers who always anticipated a more meaningful post-factory life. In some workplaces where the strong-willed, less docile “matron workers” were central to industrial production, working mothers tended to have more autonomy vis-à-vis managerial demands.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Newcastle, I have seen women workers in their twenties, thirties, forties, fifties, and even sixties. For them, physically exhausting sewing jobs are not a transient stage but a lifelong career choice.

The gendered dimension in Chinese perceptions of their purportedly slack workers is equally important. In debunking the culturalist explanation of African workers’ alleged laziness, scholars have suggested that the difference between contemporary Chinese and African work ethics is due to colonial factors, and that the spread of industrialization may eventually cause Chinese and African work ethics to converge even further.Footnote ⁴⁸ What is missing in the existing analysis, however, is twofold. First, while some Chinese industrialists indeed perceive heipo to be “slow,” they consider them to be better workers than black men. As one Chinese employer told me: “Here, men are lazy and don't work. Women work. The heipo will have a boyfriend for several months and have a child, and then the man leaves. She may find another boyfriend and have another kid. This goes on and on. They don't have the kind of family values that we have.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Although a small number of Zulu men work in the factories as cutters and machinists, Chinese industrialists consider Zulu men not only “lazier” but also “troublemaking” (mafan 麻烦). Chinese employers complain that they like to drink, are unwilling to work extra shifts on weekends and often cause fights between women workers in girlfriend–boyfriend affairs. Chinese also worry that male employees may bring violence (four Chinese had been killed in robberies by their former male workers in recent years). Second, the changing political economy also matters for workers’ alleged lack of motivation to work harder. In South Africa, declining wages and the informalization of the labour market have forced precarious workers to look for a reliable livelihood outside the workplace. Poor people now rely more on household-centred livelihood strategies, and numerous women engage sexually with multiple partners in what Hunter calls “materiality of sex” for survival.Footnote ⁵⁰

While viewing Zulu women as relatively unproductive workers, ethnic Chinese industrialists consider their traits as mutable, given the right policy environment and management practices. In part, this is because they have observed a significant increase in their workers’ sewing skills over the past 40 years. For example, as Lau said, her employees were slow at the beginning but they were “willing to learn (yuanyi xue 愿意学) the sewing skills.”Footnote ⁵¹ Wei also confirmed that “now, some of them can work as fast as I do.”Footnote ⁵² In Newcastle, Chinese employers have adopted two major methods to raise production: the collective goal system and hiring migrant workers.

The collective goal system is a measure implemented to encourage employees to work faster. The system works in the following way: The supervisor sets a work target (e.g. 100 pieces per day) for the workers; everyone is required to reach the goal to get their normal pay (say, 100 rands). However, if a worker fails to reach the target, her normal pay gets deducted proportionally. If the worker exceeds her goal, a bonus is given as a reward.Footnote ⁵³ Since each worker only sews one segment of a finished garment, if someone consistently lags behind her target, she will jeopardize the work pace of the entire line. Line members receive a bonus or a wage reduction according to their collective performance. Production, many Chinese agree, has increased after they implemented such a system.

Taiwanese and mainland Chinese employers also hire migrant workers from neighbouring countries to increase production. They are Basotho, Swazi and Malawian women. Among them, Basotho women are in the majority. Foreigners must have proper paperwork to work legally in South Africa. In Newcastle, allegations are prevalent that the Basotho women have “stolen” local jobs, are willing to work long hours for lower pay and do not participate in strikes. In 2020, migrant women constituted up to 20 per cent of the workforce in Chinese firms.Footnote ⁵⁴

The wage differential is the primary incentive for Basotho women to migrate. Thokoleng, a worker from Lesotho who arrived in 2008, remembered that her monthly pay in Maseru, Lesotho's capital city, was about 650 rands and that she started making 1,200 rands after she came to Newcastle. Interviews indicate that around the late 2000s, mainland Chinese industrialists began to go and recruit workers in Maseru, a city that has been host to a cluster of Taiwanese export-oriented clothing firms since the 1980s. What prompted mainland Chinese industrialists to look for potential workers there was that Basotho women had already acquired skills from their previous employment in Taiwanese clothing firms. A dozen mainland Chinese industrialists in Newcastle also had worked as management staff there and still maintained links with their former employers.Footnote ⁵⁵ Therefore, ethnic Chinese diasporic business networks have facilitated communications between industrialists in Newcastle and those in Maseru.

While in Newcastle, most Basotho women are provided with accommodation inside the factory premises. This arrangement prevents unnecessary exposure of Basotho women to unionists and immigration officers, and makes overtime work and night shifts during peak seasons easier to manage. As one Chinese employer said to me, “Basotho workers work hard (kengan 肯干) and don't bring you trouble (naoshi 闹事, referring to strikes).”Footnote ⁵⁶ Thepiso, one Basotho woman who had moved out of the factory dormitory and rented a place in the township, complained to me, “Living in the factory, you work hard because sometimes we work from 7 [a.m.] to 10 [p.m.] or even until 3 in the morning. When living outside, you get time to rest and do your own things. While inside, you are working non-stop.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Thokoleng echoed such views by stressing that “[when living inside] you are not allowed to have a boyfriend, you have to sneak out to see your boyfriend … it's better to rent outside because when you are tired you leave your job at 5 in the afternoon and don't have to work overtime.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Factory Mothers’ Resistance Tactics and Discourses

Unsuccessful strikes to raise wages do not mean that workers accept their subordination in their everyday life. Zulu women workers preserve a degree of dignity and solidarity through a set of creative and gendered tactics. These include verbal and discursive subversion, work disruptions and the cultivation of a shared sense of a moral economy.

Zulu women have adopted linguistic subversion as their most immediate tactic. In the factories, verbal attacks occur in both directions. Slindi made the following comments: “Our boss is rude to the workers, but rudeness is from both sides. Workers are also rude.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Sometimes workers shout back by calling their ethnic Chinese managers “shabi” 傻逼 (idiots) or “kongkong” 空空 (Minnan dialect for “idiots”), and their managers would stare at them, stunned, and just laugh. Of course, shabi and kongkong are highly insulting terms. Zulu workers’ smart deployment of the word, even without knowing its precise meaning, conveys a sense of wit and humour. For them, linguistic subversion signals a compelling claim to equality and dignity, regardless of the racial or status hierarchy.

Outside the factory, women workers gossip about their bosses. One such occasion is on their way to work. Commuter buses and minicabs become a vibrant social space where gossip and stories circulate. “Everything was fine when I woke up. I felt happy knowing that I was going out to work. But when I saw the factory gate, I felt bad because I knew that I was going to be shouted at,” recalled a former worker. She continued, “On the bus to work, we would chat about the Chinese, about how they treated us at work and how disrespectful some of them were.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Workers also joke about their bosses’ broken English. By emphasizing their bosses’ rude manners and broken English, Zulu women workers lodge their complaints against incivility.

Zulu women also circulate rumours to demand civility. In the township, “Chinese eat blacks” is a longstanding rumour. While no one could identify the origins of the rumour, the suspicion might have derived from the drudgery of work and the coercive disciplinary measures that a few Taiwanese industrialists initially adopted in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, the 2001 accident in which a pregnant mother of twin babies died during a night shift might have helped the rumour spread.Footnote ⁶¹ While Zulu women criticize ethnic Chinese employers for their inappropriate management methods, many women also appreciate the availability of factory jobs. As one worker remarked, “I hate those Chinese who run the nightclubs and liquor shops here, but I do not have negative comments about the Chinese factory owners. They are so brave to come from far away to make money. There is nothing wrong about that. What they demand from us is to get the result that they want. They are very straight[forward] people.”Footnote ⁶²

Besides discursive subversion, Zulu women disrupt production through concrete actions. The most common tactic is the daily “abuse” of toilet, lunch and tea breaks. As one Taiwanese industrialist explained, “Tea break was said to be only 15 minutes. But the time lost before the break when women got slow while anticipating the break, as well as after the break until they became refocused, was no less than 30 minutes.”Footnote ⁶³ Zulu women also take advantage of individual workers’ disputes with their manager. On such occasions, they will stop working and shout together to protest and express solidarity. Zulu women sometimes disrupt work by performing rituals at the workplace. Before major holidays, workers use break time and turn the shop floor into a site for festive rituals. In early December 2015, as the Christmas holiday came near, a group of women rose during work and started to sing and dance. A couple of minutes later, others joined them with masks and makeshift costumes improvised from fabric items in the factory. Without any evident planning, they performed a spectacular traditional marriage parade. Gary Zhao sighed to me, “See, this is black people. They easily become happy. What can you do about that?” Gary further informed me that even during regular workdays, if one woman started to sing, everyone else would follow suit. “Heipo like to qihong 起哄 (gather together and create a disturbance to work).”Footnote ⁶⁴

Zulu women's most powerful resistance tactic is the deployment of the moral economy of the factory mothers. This is a consensus among Zulu women workers concerning the legitimate ways of working that privilege stability and equality and that oppose divisiveness and the maximization of gains.Footnote ⁶⁵ For Zulu women workers, it is their dual duty at the factory and in the family that has engendered the new structure of this moral economy. Zulu women's negative portrayal of local Zulu supervisors and their ambivalent attitude towards Basotho workers are two examples of their shared sense of a moral economy.

Over the past decade, due to increasing difficulties in securing work permits for mainland Chinese staff and the rising costs of hiring them, Taiwanese and mainland Chinese firms in Newcastle have promoted some Zulu women workers to various mid-level supervisory positions. However, workers perceive local supervisors as “working for the Chinese and selling out their own people.” For the workers, supervisors who push for fast-paced work are people who “make other people's lives difficult.”Footnote ⁶⁶ As a result, excessive demands from the employers and the negative perceptions associated with management positions force many to decline promotion offers.

Zulu women castigate the ways in which ethnic Chinese industrialists put the migrant workers to work. Basotho women complain that local women portray them as unwelcome migrants who come to steal their men and jobs. However, when asked if law enforcement officers should expel Basotho women in town, Zulu women gave a unanimous “cha” (no). One worker explained:

Allowing Basotho women to work is not the cause of the problem. On the contrary, despite Basotho women's illegal status, Zulu women have justified the strangers’ rightful access to jobs by recognizing them as mothers and breadwinners. This shared identity conveys a sense of solidarity and compassion. While some Basotho women maximize their compensation through long hours of work, Zulu women do not accept such behaviours because the Basotho women could break the stability of income by completing an existing order, leaving few pieces to the locals and damaging what they perceive as the equal access to work.

Zulu women's critique of their Zulu supervisors and of how the employers use migrant workers is a testament to their resistance to the productive order. Zulu women emphasize that they have to “knock off” and come home to cook for their children and attend to family needs. This partly explains the relatively high absenteeism and turnover rates among Zulu women workers. It is precisely their role as women, mothers and sometimes wives that prevents Zulu women from working the long hours that the migrants do. While the strategic use of uprooted male migrant labour had existed in the development of South Africa's mining and manufacturing industries before,Footnote ⁶⁸ Zulu factory mothers in Newcastle construct discourses to criticize these strategies. The ways in which they relate to migrant women workers is also a uniquely gendered process.