After the ten-thousand-worker factory vanished, he had 20 years of migrant workers' daily life on camera
Others photographed the era's anomalies; he insisted on photographing its ordinary days — meals, punch-ins, English classes. When the ten-thousand-worker factory really did disappear, only a very few people had kept this archive.
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The logic of the assembly line is to make a person's value unimportant
After the Foxconn suicides, Zhan Youbing was asked what he made of them, and he said he had thought about it seriously: every assembly-line method works by subdividing the process so that manufacturing output is more stable and the people are more replaceable. Translated, those two sentences mean — anyone can do it, and anyone will do it just as well. The machine had not yet replaced the man, but the person's value was already almost unimportant. This was the underlying motive for his later picking up a camera and aiming it at his fellow workers: inside a system that deliberately flattens individual difference, to record specific people.
— Zhanyou BingRiding the green-skin train felt like riding into a bandits' den
In 1995, after leaving the army, he went south. The car was already full at the originating station in Wuchang — people on the seats, people under the seats, people sleeping on the luggage racks, people everywhere in the toilets and the gangways between cars. At Chenzhou someone smashed a window with a brick and shoved people onto the train like livestock. For more than thirty hours he could not sit and could not drink water; after getting off, his abdomen was badly swollen. At the Guangzhou railway station he was then cheated by touts into being ‘sold like a piglet’ — first they took twenty-odd yuan and said it was for Dongguan, then on the expressway they charged another ten for the toll, and if you did not pay, someone came up and slapped you, and in the end they dumped you in a wasteland with nothing around and made you change vehicles. He says he used the term for years and only understood what it meant last year.
— Zhanyou BingHe did 102 push-ups for a security guard job
In 1995 it was hard to find work after coming out, and men had a far harder time than women — factory hiring notices stated outright that they only took female workers aged 18 to 25. He saw a hiring notice by National Highway 107, and the security captain had all the applicants lie down in the parking lot and do push-ups to screen their stamina. The count was drawn out; by 20 people began dropping, by 40 only eight or ten were left, by 50-something only he was left. The captain said you're bragging, go on then, and he did 102. After he got up they had him spar with someone; the other man dropped into a split, he turned sideways, caught the leg and flipped him. That was how he got his first job: gate security at a hotel, 450 yuan a month.
— Zhanyou BingAn 1,800-yuan camera and 48-yuan rolls of film
In 2002 he agonised for a long time before buying his own camera: his wage was only around 1,500, he already had a child, and his wife was still back home. He called to discuss it, and his wife said, well, if you like it, buy it. The camera was 1,800 yuan; film, even bought ten rolls at a time wholesale, was 48 each, plus 5 for developing and another ten or twenty for prints — a very large drain on him in that era. What he shot at first was factory events, visiting guests, employees in a tug-of-war, and he assumed unconsciously that photography was just a matter of technique, of getting a clear shot. Later he read Chinese photography magazines and found there was so much learning in photography, and that he had no standard by which to measure it, so he bought the New York Institute of Photography textbook, whose first lesson is the three criteria of a good photograph.
— Zhanyou BingA model-contest photo passed ten million clicks, then he was told to delete it
In 2007 the factory began holding model contests; the workers went on stage in swimsuits, evening gowns and uniforms they had made, and there was pole dancing too. In 2008 he changed position, went to the stage backdrop and shot downward, with the models in front and a dense black mass of audience in the distance, and sent it to Tencent in time; it went up on the portal site and got tens of millions of clicks in a morning. But online comments said this was picking a mistress for the boss and a lover for the factory director, the framing was distorted, the boss came under enormous pressure and told him to delete it. Tencent said it could only be hidden, other sites' viral reposting could not be stopped, and in the end they served him a notice reserving the right to pursue the matter.
— Zhanyou BingThat photo of the woman worker looking up — he had not planned to use it
On 5 January 2011, as a senior supervisor, he went into the clean room to inspect fire safety, and because the work required it he openly brought his camera. Clean-room work allows a four-minute break after two hours; the place where you change work clothes was hung all over with clean-room suits nobody was wearing, and two people were sitting in front, one of them a fellow Hubei native. He pressed the shutter once or twice, and his fellow townsman heard the sound and looked up at him. He says the experience people gave him when he was learning photography was that ‘a photo where the subject looks at the lens is not a good photo’, so he never used this one. Later Ren Yue, a teacher at Renmin University of China, organised the Off-Pix award, he submitted it, and it was actually put up as the lead image. He looked at it seriously afterwards and admitted it had its own pull — different readers will have different inner responses to it, so a photographer should interpret his own photos as little as possible.
— Zhanyou BingOne set of ID papers lent to many people; after social security went online, his years of service were zeroed out
When he came out to find work in 1995, Hubei people were not wanted, Henan people were not wanted, Anhui people were acceptable, so he borrowed an Anhui man's ID card. At the time factories' information was separate, there was no networked computer system, and the social security system did not require contributions either, so this set of papers was lent to many people and got into many factories. But after 2000 social security began to be networked, and the system would not accept it — same ID number, same name, same registered household address, and the company decided you were dishonest and zeroed out your years of service. He says this will not do; our generation is about to reach retirement age, and those years of service are real. When even present-day life is not secure, it is simply impossible to think about retirement twenty or fifty years away.
— Zhanyou BingDensity: he photographed for 20 years before discovering it was everywhere
In 2019 he curated a set of photographs around the thread of dense migrant-worker life, and won the excellence award and the Alpa award at the third Hard Instant Image Awards. Workers' gatherings shot from high above, heads packed with almost no gaps; collective dormitories hung all over with clothes, airtight seen from a distance; and workshop switches, key cabinets, lockers holding bowls and chopsticks — neatly divided structures producing a visual sense of density. He says at first it was unconscious: shooting with his phone every day, shooting security training, shooting a fellow worker he happened to see on the road, accumulating day by day, on and off for almost 20 years. When there were so many eras in so many factories, he had not observed in that way, and then one morning he found it so frightening — even the switches looked spectacular.
— Zhanyou BingTime as the warp, space as the weft: a lifetime to understand one society
The complete thread he worked out was: time as the warp, space as the weft, the life cycle as the guiding principle, and capital's impact on the industrial zone as the axis, forming a composite three-dimensional record including sound, images, video, text and objects. Later he changed method: starting from the keyword dagong (working for wages), he looked up ten main keywords on Baidu Scholar, then searched all related terms on Baidu, got 322 of them, went into Baidu Images and began screenshotting them all — this is the internet's understanding of dagong, to be presented together with his own understanding from actually photographing, in one huge exhibition space. He says this is us watching the era from inside an illusory era, while the real era is ignored. He compares himself to a Sherpa: the famous mountaineers get the credit, but it is the Sherpas who carry the loads — I will just be that Sherpa.
— Zhanyou BingIn their own words · checked verbatim
Back then when you came out to work, it wasn't about getting on a train — you felt like you'd got into a bandits' den.
那时候出来打工 就不是说你坐车 那你就感觉到 你就是坐上了土匪窝
Zhanyou Bing6:11
This is this era: we watch the era from inside an illusory era, while the real era is ignored.
这就是这个时代 我们在一个虚幻的时代里 观看时代 而真实的时代是被忽略的
Zhanyou Bing40:32
I often say that if we use a lifetime to understand a society, the understanding we reach will certainly not be bad; but if we can only see society in a single day, it will certainly be shallow.
我常说如果我们用一生来理解一个社会的话 他理解的道理一定不会很差 但是我们能用一天来看到的社会的话 他一定很肤浅
Zhanyou Bing41:33
Figures
| Zhan Youbing's monthly wage at his first job | 450 yuan | 13:14 |
| Zhan Youbing's monthly wage at the Shenzhen airport hotel | 800 yuan | 15:14 |
| What Zhan Youbing spent on his first camera | 1,800 yuan | 17:16 |
| Wholesale price of film | 48 yuan a roll | 17:16 |
| Number of push-ups he did when applying to be a security guard | 102 | 12:13 |
| Dongguan's labour shortage in 2004 | 230,000 people | 23:22 |
| Number of enterprises that closed in Dongguan that year | 1,464 | 32:27 |
| Employees affected by the closure of Hejun Group's two Dongguan plants | 6,500 | 32:27 |
| Total number of photographs Zhan Youbing has taken | 200,000 | 38:30 |
| Number of related keywords returned by the Baidu search | 322 | 39:31 |
Glossary
- selling piglets
- In the mid-Qing, Cantonese were shipped to America to build railways like pigs being transported; later it meant being cheated by middlemen and drivers who piled on charges along the way to work.
- autoethnography
- The researcher takes himself as the object of study, recording the life of the group he belongs to rather than studying an outside ethnic group.
- Magnum
- Magnum, the internationally known photography agency; Zhan Youbing went through its website studying its photographers' work one by one.
- Off-Pix
- A photography award organised by Ren Yue, a teacher at Renmin University of China; Zhan Youbing submitted to it and was shown as the lead image.
How to listen
Founders and content people interested in the shift in manufacturing, documentary photography, and the situation of migrant workers; anyone who wants to understand how the Pearl River Delta factory era disappeared.
The show promo and event notices at the start, 0:00-1:08, can be skipped.