Live Working or Die Fighting

Shenzhen, 2003: “When they came into the room the guys were sheepish and so was I; every one of them was missing a limb. I had dragged them across the city to meet me in this tatty rooming house because, for a Western journalist, going to Longgang – an industrial suburb of Shenzhen – is only possible with a government minder. And they did not want to meet one. ‘I was loading cotton into the front of a mattress machine…,’ Cao Xian-yi tells me, indicating the stump of his arm to complete the story. They were all young, they were all migrants, they were all sacked.”

​Live Working or Die Fighting: How The Working Class Went Global (2007)