Where Underpants Come from: From Checkout to Cotton Field – Travels Through the New China
by Joe Bennett
—Reviewed by Adam Fleisher
It is probably safe to say that most consumers are awed by how inexpensive everyday household items have become. Of course, a sense that stuff is cheap thanks to China is good enough for most of us — we don’t have a second thought about our discount shopping.
But Joe Bennett is not most people. While perusing the underwear section in his local department store, Bennett, a New Zealand travel writer, felt overwhelmed by the mysteriousness of it all. With middlemen, shipping, marketing and overhead, how exactly was it possible for a five-pack of underwear made in China to cost a little more than four dollars by the time it hit the shelves in Christchurch?
Bennett wanted to see the economic powerhouse in action, and relieve his relative ignorance of the country that plays such a tremendous role in how we live. He achieved both these goals in his travels to China, which he recounts in Where Underpants Come From.
Alas, Bennett’s economic story is somewhat limited by his literal pursuit of the eponymous question. He details his experience seeing cotton planted and grown and cleaned and baled and turned into thread. He watches thread turns into cloth, and cloth is sewn into clothing – four million garments a month, all bound for export – at a factory in Quanzhou. He pays a visit to his department store’s procurement center in Shanghai. He travels to the logistics company that puts his underwear – and just a few other goods – onto massive container ships in the port outside Shanghai.
In the course of these jaunts, we do get some impressions of China’s economy. Labor is tight and turnover high for both professional jobs in downtown Shanghai, and also for the worker drones in the air-conditioned, well-lit, quiet “sweatshops.” And Bennett finds that China – even China – does not have an endless supply of virtually-free labor. As he points out, the country’s global manufacturing dominance, while amazing, is also ephemeral: clothing costs pennies to manufacture because the peasants imported from the countryside to make it are earning pennies. Labor shortages will eventually affect China’s economy like they would any other: the cost of labor will rise and manufacturers will be priced out by even cheaper competitors.
Where Underpants Come From astutely captures these dynamics, but Bennett slips a bit when trying to extrapolate from the behavior of individual Chinese people to the country’s potential as a modern, advanced market economy. For instance, he notes that the locals refuse to wait in line to buy metro tickets, instead crowding about and elbowing toward the machines. Bennett makes the mistake of assuming that the people pushing past him, thanks to their self-interested behavior, are “clearly naturals at the free market.” Of course, he’s actually observing a sort of anarchy, which doesn’t work so well in markets. If there is a lesson to be drawn about China from such behavior, it might be that self interest at the expense of rules and regulations could become problematic as China’s economy becomes more complex over the next few decades.
Bennett’s skills as a travel writer serve him much better when he focuses on human interactions and social dynamics. Bennett is thrilled by the kindness and camaraderie of the people he meets in restaurants and bars, who laugh as he struggles to pick up greasy morsels with chopsticks and exchange toasts with him. He is outraged by the treatment of China’s central Asian minorities, and presciently sees the ethnic tensions boiling in Urumqi in Xinjiang province. He is amused by how his guides struggle with English, and fascinated by how his drivers navigate the chaos and lawlessness of the streets, as cars, carts, bikes and pedestrians constantly threaten each other. Bennett, with anecdotes like these, creates an affectionate portrait of the country that is supplying the world with everything, right down to our underpants.
Excerpt: “People exercise alone or in groups wherever they wish. Here are smiling, don’t-care dancers such as I saw in public parks in Shanghai, a troupe of elderly women doing s assort of choreography with bamboo staves, elderly men writhing in the slow absorbed elegance of what may be t’ai chi, numerous middle-aged women cheerfully failing to hit shuttlecocks, and a man in a suit. He is marching slowly on the spot. He raises both hands above his head. Then he raises one leg straight out in front of him like a shelf bracket. A hand comes down to touch the toe. . . . I make no effort to pretend I am not watching him. He doesn’t notice.”
Further Reading: China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America
*Photo courtesy Unkle Cheese.
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