Inside China’s fast-fashion factories as a US trade war looms

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:08Today, how Trump's trade war is crippling workers in China.

0:20So we're just walking into Datang village, one of the urban villages in Guangzhou, where there are hundreds and hundreds of garment workers in tiny workshops already pressing and ironing materials for the day. Amy Hawkins is The Guardian's Beijing correspondent, and she recently took a trip to one of the manufacturing capitals of China. These areas are densely packed, round shackle buildings, known as handshake buildings. Because they're so close together, you can literally shake hands between the two of them. You might have never been anywhere like Guangzhou, But you've almost certainly come across something that was made there.

1:00And now they are where much of the world's cheap fashion comes from. So around 15 % of China's textile exports come from Guangdong, the province we're in. And much of that is concentrated in urban villages like this. The conditions for workers are far from ideal. It's hot. It's humid. But their output is frenetic, and the constant whir of sewing machines is inescapable.

1:37For years, factories like this one have been the lifeblood of China's economy. Until Trump's escalating tariffs almost stopped trade dead. A temporary and partial truce was agreed between the US and China. That's due to expire on Tuesday. Time is running out and a deal hasn't been reached. Where does that leave the garment workers of Guangzhou? From The Guardian, I'm Noshin Iqbal. Today in Focus, could Trump's trade war kill fast fashion?

2:13Amy Hawkins, you're The Guardian's senior China correspondent based in Beijing, and you've been reporting on China's trade tariff war with the US, on the impact it's having on people in China. But before we get into it, can you really just remind listeners exactly what this trade war is about and how it emerged? When Donald Trump entered the White House in January, he made it very clear that he wanted to impose tariffs on Chinese imports and kind of imports from anywhere into the US. He had started a trade war with China in his first term as president, and he made very clear that he planned to continue it now that he was back in the White House.

2:51And, you know, we didn't know how high those tariffs would be. And they started out, I think, at something like 10%. And then it's all sort of ratcheting up until April when Trump announced what he called Liberation Day.

3:05Amy Hawkins:My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Waiting for a long time. April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. The tariffs with China were the main target because the US has a massive trade deficit with China, which means that it imports a lot more from China than exports. And Donald Trump has a real problem with this. He sees it as a kind of almost like ideological issue. He wants to rebalance and he wants America to domestically manufacture the things that it was buying from China, such as cheap clothes, cheap electronics.

3:55China has responded and imposed reciprocal tariffs on US imports. And we got into this kind of tit-for-tat escalation until May, when the two sides agreed to pause for 90 days while they tried to strike some kind of trade deal. And the negotiations for that are ongoing for the deadline of the 12th of August for the US and China to reach a deal. So you recently took a trip to Guangzhou. That is a major fast fashion manufacturing hub in China. And you spoke to people working there in the clothing industry. Can you tell me what you found? Yeah, it was really interesting. So I went to Guangzhou because I wanted to see how this trade war was kind of affecting people who are actually making the stuff that Donald Trump is complaining so much about, the stuff that we all buy every day.

4:42You know, the vast majority of it comes from China. You know, on the Chinese side, in the official media and from the government, their narrative has been, oh, we can withstand this trade war. You know, U.S. consumers want our goods. For lots of these factory bosses, we're saying that while initially the impact will be on the consumer in the U.S., their prices will go up. But if that means they stop placing orders, we're in big trouble because we've got the trade war, but we've also got a host of other problems. Like the Chinese domestic economy is not doing very well. and so people were definitely worried about what's going to happen after August 12th and if the tariffs go back to what they were before, which was as high as 145%, then lots of factory bosses said they would have to consider closing down their factories.

5:29They're barely breaking even as it is.

5:39Can you tell me more about Guangzhou as a place? So Guangzhou is the third biggest city in China. It has a population of about 20 million people. And it's in the southern province of Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong. And this region in China has long been a kind of import-export hub. It's kind of China's gateway to the world in many senses. and it transformed over the last 30 years from a series of fishing villages to this densely packed, very modern in some ways, glittering seafront city. China became this huge manufacturing hub, the kind of factory of the world as people call it and a lot of that was concentrated in Guangdong province in part because China's leaders at the time designated it as a special economic zone, as preferential tax regimes and so on to try and boost investment and boost business there.

6:31It's long been a place with lots of outsiders coming in. And I think it makes the people there quite open, like walking around there as a journalist. People are very happy to talk to foreigners. They're very used to dealing with, you know, business people and the like kind of coming in and out. So it has a very kind of open to the world type feeling, which other parts of China don't always have. And it also sounds quite central to China's economy. Yes, yeah. In this period of talking about kind of the 90s, early 2000s, it really was the engine of growth for China's economy, as all of a sudden the world could start buying cheap plastic goods and cheap clothes made in China, driven by the fact that China's labor costs were so low and people were willing to work just extremely punishing hours, which to this day is still the kind of norm there.

7:17I think there have been investigations in recent years about working conditions in Guangzhou's clothing factories, particularly in the factories that supply brands that we can buy in the West. And while it's definitely the case that, you know, the absolute norm there is for people to be working 60, 70-hour weeks, maybe they get one rest day a month, I don't think anyone there, at least no one I spoke to, would say, oh, this is a kind of problem for us. Chinese labor law says that you should only work eight hours a day, but everyone in Guangzhou seems to think it's a kind of meaningless joke to suggest that you would only work eight hours a day.

7:53in part because they can't keep up with the demand of orders from overseas markets. Amy, at what point did the fast fashion industry really begin to boom? And, you know, as you say, workers couldn't even keep up with the pace of orders. I think the thing that's really changed in the past few years is since the pandemic, the absolute boom in online shopping that we've seen in the UK and the US and the dominance of two Chinese companies in that space, one called Xi 'an and one's called Timu, which lots of people might have heard of by now, but they were basically unknown Chinese companies, you know, five years ago.

8:28And they have completely exploded and come to dominate the fast fashion industry in America. Now Xi 'an represents about 50 % of the fast fashion industry in the US. Wow, that's staggering. And when you're in Guangzhou, you really feel it. Like, I wasn't there to do a story about Xi 'an in particular but people I spoke to there said Shein had completely changed the game there before the big brands might have opened their own kind of dedicated factory which would have employed a lot of people but it's kind of confined to that space now any kind of small little workshop can sign up to be a Shein supplier and take on some of the orders because there's so much demand from the consumer side like endless tap of orders coming that could be spread out among all these small informal workshops, whereas previously that was kind of gatekept by the bigger factories.

9:18Created a lot more work for people, but also had pushed prices down even more. And, you know, that whole model is they are selling clothes to consumers for literally like$3 a top or something like that. The margins are so thin. It sort of brings up this tension then, doesn't it? Because on the outside, anyone would look at those prices and think, absolutely, anyone who is making those things has to be working in an exploitative industry. The numbers don't add up. But you're saying that the workers there, that's not one of their central complaints. It's like a kind of mentality thing as well. I think if you're a rural worker in China and you come to the city to try to earn more money, the absolute expectation in China is that you're going to be working extremely punishing hours.

9:59And I think these people often don't have a high level of education from a set of choices in front of them. This is the best choice in terms of this this is their route to making the most money. I didn't meet people there who complained necessarily about the conditions, even though it's in breach of Chinese labour laws, in breach of Xi 'an stated policies, in breach of what we would consider, you know, acceptable working conditions. So the idea is that we may see it as exploitative, but for the workers there, it's the least exploitative option that they have? Or not the least exploitative, but the most profitable.

10:40Can you tell me for a typical worker in that fast fashion industry in Guangzhou, what will their day look like? They might be employed full time by a factory, but often they will turn up in the morning and go to their happy kind of informal labour markets in these different manufacturing hubs where they'll turn up, recruiters from local factories will come.

11:06and they'll have a sample of you know a top or a dress that they go and order for that week and they want someone who can sew their hem on thousands of dresses over the next few days and the workers will go around and inspect the garments and see what kind of work is available and what's being offered to pay they will go to one of the nearby workshops and they might sign a contract for like you know that day or that week or that month and just get to work and it's you know just extremely repetitive monotonous work and there are people who are just literally like ironing shirts the whole day and then putting them into packaging met someone who was doing quality control on pairs of jeans that were going to be sold on sheet and so she's just snipping off the loose threads of pairs of jeans how many would you estimate she did in a day yeah I think it was like kind of in the hundreds so typically they get paid depending on the complexity of the task anywhere between 2 RMB to about 10 RMB per item, which is about 20p to a pound per item.

12:04And this is part of the reason as well why people work such long hours because you're paid per piece. So the longer you stay and the more pairs of jeans you check or the more shirts you sew, the more you get paid. And what's the cost of living like there? I mean, for the workers, can they live relatively well on the income they make? If they've signed with a workshop for a longer time they might live literally in the back of the place where they're working you know rents are fairly low the cost of living in some ways is quite cheap like most of the workers I spoke to were able to send money home every month they can send a few hundred or a few thousand RMB home a month I would say like the average from people I spoke to would be they're earning maybe like 10 ,000 RMB in a month which is about a thousand pounds which is definitely a good salary for China for that kind of work as well.

12:55I've heard from people who visited many years ago, it is ultimately a lot quieter than it used to be. And I think that is a sign of the fact that China's economy isn't doing that well. As you walk down the street, a lot of the factories will also be boarded up. But you went to some of the really busy bonds. What were they like? When I was in Guangzhou, I went to a urban village called Datang. And as I arrived there around 8am, I expected to find the factories just kind of opening up for the day. but actually I found people already hard at work and often they were kind of coming towards the end of a shift that had started 11pm the night before.

13:30So we've just been talking to some garment workers in Datang and something that's very apparent particularly in the early morning is that people here tend to just work through the night so everyone we spoke to said they start work around 11pm, midnight, 1am and they work kind of 10 to 12 hours through the night. the reason that the clothes can get to the consumer so quickly is because they have this 24-hour work cycle. What did the workers that you spoke to, what did they say about their quality of life and the kind of work they did and how they felt about it? It is really hard work. One guy I spoke to, he wanted to make clear maybe it looked easy what he was doing because he was just repeatedly stuffing clothes into baths, but he was like, this is hard-earned money.

14:18He was on his feet all day.

14:22They're in their 50s or 60s. I met one guy who had come to Guangzhou recently because the labor market is a bit more informal and he could quite easily pick up work, even though he was above retirement age. I met people who may they have young children who have stayed in the village where they're from, and the money they send back home will mean that their child can go to school or go to a better school. It's not like they're living on kind of poverty wages, especially if you're someone who doesn't have much formal education. you're a bit older you don't have the energy to be working in like construction or these kind of courier jobs where people are like rushing around the city delivering packages and so on and so if you're someone who's a bit older but does still need to earn money it's a decent option.

15:05Nonetheless as that worker said to you you know it's hard-earned money it's punishing hours it's incredibly monotonous repetitive and all the rest of it and I wonder how have workers conditions changed and the jobs that they're doing since Trump began the trade war. I mean, I throw it to one woman who said it's just kind of harder to find work, which pays a wage that she considers acceptable, just because before, whereas someone might have been receiving kind of orders like 20 ,000 pairs of jeans that month, you know, might have gone down to 10 ,000 jeans. The fall in orders that people were describing were really quite extreme.

15:44At one of the labour markets I went to in the morning in Guangzhou, I met a woman called Miss Chiu, who's in her 40s, had come looking for day work at one of the nearby factories. And although there were recruiters there showing kind of like silky leopard print top, which someone was trying to find workers to sew the hems for and do the finishing touches for, she felt that either there weren't enough orders being placed and so there wasn't enough demand for work or the work that was being offered, it wasn't offering enough money. And she very explicitly tied it to the trade war because she said there aren't as many foreign orders coming into these factories and so these factories, even if they want to work, they might only want to work for a few days rather than a whole week.

16:33Something that Labour analysts have noted is that when also the supply of what is so unpredictable as it has been during the trade war, you know, you had the tariff and then they're poor, but they might come back. And the kind of uncertainty is also very bad working conditions because it encourages workers to take as much as possible when the work is available. So work extremely long hours. They can't say, oh, I'll only work eight hours today because I know that I've got a guaranteed income for the next month or so. How has the Shein model made China's fast fashion industry more vulnerable to the trade war.

17:06Guangdong alone exported$7 billion of textiles to the US last year. And so not having access to that market and seeing a fall in orders or a fall in demand is a really big problem for workers in these industries. And if the workers weren't employed to make these clothes, are there any alternatives? What else could they be doing or would they be doing. I mean, I think that's part of the problem is that China does have this unemployment issue at the moment. There's not like loads of jobs to go around and the industries which are employing a lot of people are these kind of manufacturing jobs or one of the only kind of growth industries at the moment is the world of couriers and logistics and people driving around cities and delivering meals and packages to people, which is really kind of only suited to younger people and is very physically tiring in its own way.

18:00At the same time, the Chinese government is really promoting the growth of the industries it calls new productive forces, which is electric vehicles, batteries, artificial intelligence. But if you don't have a high level of education, it's very hard to get a job in any of those industries. And they ultimately don't employ as many people as these kind of labour-intensive, more low-skilled work.

18:28Coming up, with no deal in sight and a deadline looming, what impact is that having on the Chinese economy?

18:50Amy, how big a problem is Trump's trade war for China's wider economy? It's definitely a problem for China's economy. You can see that China's negotiating very hard with the US at the moment. It's the export of critical minerals, which US companies desperately need to make cars, to make military equipment and so on. And China's really playing all the cards that it has. And while I'm sure consumers in the US will find it very difficult to see their price increase if the tariffs go up again, China's economy has really struggled to recover from the pandemic and has become very reliant on export. and the government is like aggressively trying to boost domestic spending and you know you've got this market of 1.4 billion people in China and you would think they would be able to spend enough money to keep the Chinese economy afloat but so far that has failed to materialize because especially since the pandemic people don't want to spend money people are always saving for a rainy day the Chinese economy is very vulnerable to anything which limits its ability to export to other countries, especially the US.

19:52What is it that we're expecting to hear from the end of these negotiations between China and the US? As you've mentioned, China has this Trump card, no pun intended, with rare minerals and things that the US really does want. What do you expect to hear in the coming days? Basically, Trump wants to rebalance this trade deficit that he has with China. So he wants China to buy more from the US than it currently is, and he wants the US to buy left from China. So you might see something like China pledging to invest in certain industries or buy certain US agricultural products, for example. I mean, historically, China used to buy American soybeans and in recent years, it's kind of pivoted away.

20:35But China is obviously willing to turn off the tap of the commodities that it controls if necessary. Because I mean, those minerals are needed in everything and all electronics and sort of modern cars, TVs. And so that's going to have a big hold on the US market. So it's a bargaining chip. How significant is that to how China plays this? It's very significant. And it's obviously shown itself to be very effective because before this truth was agreed and when China had banned the export initially, you had car companies like Ford saying, you know, they had to stop production at one of their factories because they had run out of supplies of critical rare minerals that they needed to make in magnets for their cars.

21:14And so So car companies in particular have been really, really upset about this situation. It will take many years to build up a supply chain outside of China because that is such kind of dirty, difficult work that lots of countries have not been willing to do that. And of course, at one point, the tariffs imposed on China were 145%. Amy, where do you expect that number might land in the coming days? If they don't reach a deal, I think there's a chance also that they might extend this kind of pause they're in. because going back to 145 % tariffs and 125 % Chinese tariffs on US goods, I mean, that's effectively a kind of embargo on trade between the world's two biggest economies.

21:57Once you get above like 50, 60%, you know, no one's buying the goods. And so it becomes almost symbolic at that point. That would suggest all these negotiations, but for nothing. And again, it introduced this kind of instability for the workers who are at the sharp end of this. And going back to the workers from everything, think you heard and spoke to them about. How worried do you think they are? Yeah, I would say people are worried. I mean, I spoke to definitely lots of kind of factory managers who said they're on the brink of shutting down their factories just because it's been so difficult.

22:33They're in a slightly like wait and see time. There's an increasing sense there that the U.S. is too unreliable. So I've definitely spoke to people who said that even if we reach a deal. My long-term strategy, if I want to keep my factory going, is to not get too linked to the US market, because who knows what could happen in a year's time.

23:00Well, there's this thing that might be niggling in the back of some people's minds, which is that fast fashion and companies like Shein have long been criticised, not only for the exploitative work, but for the devastating environmental impact of people just buying and throwing away such cheap clothes. Amy, could the end of fast fashion be an unexpected silver lining to this trade war? People's demand for cheap goods isn't really going anywhere. You know, we've seen in other industries, peep factories or companies move their supply chains to Southeast Asia, to other countries to avoid tariffs.

23:36And the Trump administration has also imposed tariffs on countries like Vietnam and Cambodia to try and kind of stop that from happening, close these loopholes. But nonetheless, it's kind of like a bit of a whack-a-mole situation because companies want to keep making money. I don't think Shein is just going to give up on its model and making money overnight. So we've already seen the trade war has had a serious impact on prices. So for example, a recent analysis found that the average price of clothes on Shein had increased by 23 % between April and July this year. But then I think consumers know that that price increase is just because of tariff plan and it's not like encouraging this idea of, oh, we should spend more on clothing because then the worker at the other end of it have paid an ethical price.

24:22Like, I don't know, my personal view is that people's general expectation of workers' rights and their supply chain isn't so deeply embedded that they are willing to kind of pay more to ensure that. What a bleak picture. Amy, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks for having me. That was Amy Hawkins, The Guardian's Beijing correspondent. You can read her reporting on this story and more at theguardian.com. A spokesperson for Shein said that Shein is committed to providing a safe and fair work environment for all our suppliers' employees. And that's it for today. This episode was presented by me, Nosheen Iqbal.