Migration and the Female Labor Force

Only the poorest Ningbo families seem to have sent women to work in local factories. But women workers in Ningbo factories seem to have had no access to the Shanghai factory labor market.^[80] Though it remains unclear which families sent women to Shanghai to work and what their status was, the gazetteer for Dinghai County, an island, claims that thousands of its own men and women migrated to Shanghai to work during the early twentieth century. And it is possible that jobs outside the home in Shanghai carried less of a stigma among Ningbo women who migrated there to work far from the prying eyes of local gossips.^[81]

The reasons for Shanghai's appeal are not difficult to find. Shanghai factories—regardless of Ningbo factory owners' claims—paid better wages than the Ningbo mills. According to a 1930s survey, female textile workers in Shanghai could expect to earn an average of slightly over 12 yuan per month; in Ningbo, as we have seen, monthly factory jobs for women during that time

[78] The Hefeng Cotton Spinning Mill, for instance, paid most of its workers—1,343 of 1,785 employees—by the day, only 20 by the month, and none by the year. CIH:C , p. 483. Yarn from the mill continued to supply local home weavers; it was too coarse to compete in the international market. Yarn from the Hefeng mill was sold in Guangxi, Guangdong, Sichuan, and Tianjin, as well as within Zhejiang Province (p. 485). Perhaps thousands more women were also employed by the factories to do piecework at home under contract, using raw materials supplied by their employers (p. 532).

[79] Comments by retired Hefeng mill workers, Ningbo, November 1988.

[80] Retired Hefeng mill workers told me that they were aware at the time that many Ningbo women went to Shanghai to work, but they had no way to get there themselves: "You had to have a relative, someone you knew, a connection, a route [yao you luzi ]."

[81] Abundant evidence for the presence of Ningbo women and men in the Shanghai work force suggests that the taboo on women going out to work may have been honored in the breach, at least by many women. See, for example, Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, which mentions thousands of men and women from Dinghai County working in Shanghai and in Hankou. On Ningbo workers in Shanghai, see also references in Yuen Sang Leung, "Regional Rivalry in Mid-Nineteenth Century Shanghai: Cantonese vs. Ningpo Men," Ch'ing-shih wen-t'i 4, no. 8 (1982): 40; and Emily Honig, "The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican-Era Shanghai," Modern China 15, no. 3 (1989): 250–51.

were available only to supervisors.^[82] Moreover, many Ningbo workers had easy access to the Shanghai job market, following networks of kinship and friendship long since established by sojourning Ningbo entrepreneurs. In Shanghai, Ningbo's reputation for fostering discipline, hard work, and local pride made Ningbo workers desirable.^[83] As male Ningbo workers joined Ningbo's merchant elite abroad,^[84] their wives, daughters, sisters, and friends-of-friends followed. It was well known in Shanghai factories that Ningbo women did not have to find jobs through demeaning negotiations with labor contractors.^[85] One source suggests that Ningbo workers were placed through workers' associations (gonghui ), which guaranteed good service to the employer and screened working conditions for the employee.^[86] Ningbo maids and Ningbo factory workers benefited from the reputation of their native place throughout Shanghai.^[87] Women factory workers in the Shanghai cotton mills all understood that Ningbo recruits would be given the finer, higher-paying women's jobs.^[88] And Ningbo prostitutes in Shanghai

[82] Mukoyama Hiro, "Kyu Chugoku ni okeru rodo joken," Ajia kenkyu 8, no. 4 (1961): 42. Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 175, reports wages ranging from 14 yuan to 27 yuan per month for the top jobs in the Shanghai mills. The 1923 gazetteer for Dinghai County reported maids' monthly wages in Shanghai at 3–4 yuan , implying that already the mills were luring women out of domestic work and into the factories. See Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a. Note that real wage rates may have been less important than the promise of stable employment. Ningbo's factories were not a source of steady income.

[83] Honig, "Politics of Prejudice," pp. 258–59, argues persuasively that reputation was less important than personal connections and access to jobs in various levels of the Shanghai economy.

[84] On the rise of occupational associations composed of semiskilled workers in Shanghai, see the North-China Herald , July 18, 1910, p. 74. On the growth of the Ningbo working class in Shanghai, see also Susan Mann Jones, "The Ningpo Pang and Financial Power at Shanghai," in Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds., The Chinese City Between Two Worlds (Stanford, 1974), pp. 86–88. Ningbo women working for Westerners in private homes earned 3 to 4 taels a month. Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a.

[85] See Honig, Sisters and Strangers , p. 97.

[86] Dinghai xianzhi, fangsu : 51a, mentions recruitment through gonghui but does not explain exactly how it worked.

[87] On regional stereotypes of factory workers in the Shanghai textile mills, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 57–58 et passim; and Chu-fang Chang, "Chinese Cotton Mills in Shanghai," Chinese Economic Journal and Bulletin 3, no. 5 (1928): 907–8. Chang observes, "Most of the skilled hands employed in the engine rooms are Shanghai and Ningpo natives. Ningpo woman hands are more skilled than their sisters from other provinces."

[88] For more on the prestige of Ningbo women workers, see Honig, Sisters and Strangers , pp. 71, 75, 181. In interviews conducted in Shanghai in October 1988, some middle-class Ningbo women told me that most Ningbo women working in the factories at that time were there because of connections to the Green Gang. These informants insisted that factory work for women was not considered respectable by most Ningbo people. This may explain why the main gazetteer account of female factory workers in Shanghai comes from a peripheral Ningbo county, Dinghai.

served an exclusive clientele of merchants and officials from their native place, working in hotels instead of brothels.^[89]

Like the Subei region described by Emily Honig elsewhere in this volume, the Ningbo area produced its own distinctive labor market signs and linkages, channeling women workers out of the locality to jobs elsewhere. But unlike Subei people, who were consigned to the lowest-paying, most demeaning jobs, Ningbo people in Shanghai were distinguished by their ties to Shanghai's new bourgeoisie. Perhaps for that reason, it is extremely difficult to obtain precise information about the number and class background of Ningbo women factory workers. The respectable Ningbo woman was to stay at home while her menfolk went out to work to support her. Her presence in a factory was an embarrassment to her native place.