Nelson Reinsch’s cotton leaves the Compress in Lubbock and turns left toward China. Usually by truck, but sometimes by train, the cotton heads through the blank space of west Texas, New Mexico, and Nevada, stopping finally at the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach, California. The cotton boards a ship and keeps going west, arriving a few days later at the port in Shanghai, and into the deafening pulse of China’s weird new capitalism. Here, the Reinsch cotton is spun into yarn, knitted into cloth, cut into pieces, and finally sewn into a T-shirt. A “Made in China” label will be tacked to the collar. Thus transformed, the Texas cotton will return to America.¹

Nelson and Ruth’s son, Lamar, thinks it is funny that he never thought about the Reinsch cotton actually going to China. In fact, even as a professor in a business school, Lamar’s cotton consciousness ended at the gin in Shallowater. He never thought about what happened next, where the cotton went, or how it got there. But there is a low buzz about China in Lamar’s childhood memories. At the gin, or at church, or at the dinner table, China was one of the things grownups talked about, one of the topics that would make his parents sigh and shake their heads. To a child, the China conversations were like the weather conversations, or the cotton price conversations. China, cotton prices, weather: the wildcards in the life of a Texas cotton farmer. Lamar remembers only that China mattered.

China matters even more today. During the past several years, I found that it was impossible to get more than one or two minutes into a cotton conversation anywhere in the world before someone mentioned China and heads began to shake. Today, China is not only the largest buyer of American cotton, it is also projected to soon produce more than 40 percent of the world’s cotton textiles.² ³ Cotton was America’s eighth largest export to China in 2007, and U.S. cotton exports to China more than tripled between 2000 and 2007. In a circular linkage that ebbs and flows (but mostly grows), demand by Americans for cheap clothing from China leads to demand from China for cotton from America.

As the Texas cotton is hoisted from the ship in Shanghai, it enters not just a new country but a new global industry. The production of textiles and apparel is almost as old as agriculture, and, since the beginning, agriculture and textiles have been linked: Whether wool, silk, flax, or cotton, whatever humans have spun or woven had to first be grown. Today, however, the agricultural and industrial chapters in a T-shirt’s life often take place on different continents. It takes a little over a third of a pound of cotton lint to produce a T-shirt, maybe 15 cents’ worth, so an acre of west Texas farmland can produce about 1,200 T-shirts each year. In a good season, then, Nelson could produce enough cotton for over a million T-shirts, and, as we have seen, he does this by supervising not people but land, capital, and technology. But to become a T-shirt, the cotton requires workers: cutters, spinners, knitters, and stitchers. While the labor component of American cotton production is almost too small to be measured, labor still accounts for more than half of the value added in the production of apparel. So Nelson’s cotton travels to China, to where the people are.

Travelers who wistfully bemoan the homogenization of the world today will feel better if they travel between Lubbock and Shanghai. When I first traveled to Lubbock in 2000, the city had yet to open its first Starbucks, and I could buy ostrich leather cowboy boots but not a cappuccino. At the same time in Shanghai, Starbucks appeared everywhere, but so, too, did exotic goods such as ground rhino horn and bear bile. Today, globalization has brought the cities a bit closer together: There is now Texas-style barbeque in Shanghai (it’s not great) and plenty of Chinese food (also not great) in Lubbock. Within a two-week period in October 2004, both Shanghai and Lubbock got their first Hooters restaurants. Yet while cultures may be converging in Paris and New York, or L.A. and Hong Kong, it will likely be a while before one can buy ostrich leather boots in Shanghai or ground rhino horn in Lubbock. Physically, culturally, and temperamentally, the cities are planets apart. Yet the cotton textile industry is as important to Shanghai as the cotton agricultural industry is to Lubbock, so the very different cities are bound together by soft cotton fiber, and each city keeps a constant watch on the other.

The cities have been linked together by cotton fiber for nearly a century, but evolution in Lubbock has taken place alongside revolution in Shanghai. In July 1921, when the Texas cotton stood broiling in the first summer of Nelson Reinsch’s life, before there really was a Lubbock, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was founded in a Shanghai school-house. At this point, nearly half of the factory workers in Shanghai were employed in the cotton mills, and whatever labor tensions simmered in China boiled over in the Shanghai mills.⁴ Throughout the 1920s, igniting events in the textile mills—beatings, wage cuts, murders—spilled up and down China’s coast, mobilizing workers and paralyzing industry.⁵ Labor activism in 1920s China was not for the weak of heart: As the workers stood up, the army squashed them, and many strike leaders in the textile industry were publicly beheaded as a lesson to others.

But as Shanghai’s cotton textile industry bred the labor revolutionaries, it also generated the lavish wealth that transformed Shanghai into an X-rated Disneyland for the new industrialists. As cotton agriculture took hold in west Texas, Shanghai became known for its glittering and seamy decadence. The city offered the new industrialists opium dens, “singsong houses,” and amusements for any appetite. And though it is not at all clear who counted or how, Shanghai in the 1930s reportedly had more prostitutes per capita than any city in the world.⁶ Perhaps most illustrative of Shanghai during this period were the “pleasure palaces” to be found lining the main roads of the International Settlement. A wide-eyed American visitor remembers the Great World Pleasure Palace this way:

On the first floor were gaming tables, singsong girls, magicians, pick-pockets, slot machines, fireworks, bird cages, fans, stick incense, acrobats and ginger. One flight up were ... actors, crickets and cages, pimps, midwives, barbers, and earwax extractors. The third floor had jugglers, herb medicines, ice cream parlors, photographers, a new bevy of girls, their high collared gowns slit to reveal their hips, and (as a) novelty, several rows of exposed (Western) toilets. The fourth floor had shooting galleries, fan-tan tables, ... massage benches, ... dried fish and intestines, and dance platforms ... the fifth floor featured girls with dresses slit to the armpits, a stuffed whale, story tellers, balloons, peep shows, masks, a mirror maze, two love letter booths with scribes who guaranteed results ...and a temple filled with ferocious gods. On the top floor and roof of that house of multiple joys a jumble of tightrope walkers slithered back and forth, and there were seesaws, Chinese checkers, mahjongg, ... firecrackers, lottery tickets, and marriage brokers.⁷

With a 12-hour workday and often just two holidays per year, the cotton mill workers lacked both the price of admission and the time to visit this multistoried wonder. So, as the divide between labor and capital yawned wider, the Communists gradually and secretly infiltrated the cotton mills, where thousands of workers were locked in a steamy hell, ripening for revolution. In 1949, when Nelson’s children were young and the Mexican migrants were still crawling through his fields, the Communists drove the mill owners from Shanghai, closed the pleasure palaces, and seized the factories for the people. Women cotton mill workers alone comprised more than one-third of the infamous Shanghai proletariat.⁸

And in the 1960s, as Nelson’s sons rode the cotton trailer with their pitchforks, Mao Zedong and his Red Guards went mad in the Cultural Revolution, terrorizing the management of the spinning and weaving factories, forcing the lucky managers to confess to capitalist crimes, the less lucky to be jailed, and the least lucky to be executed or face starvation in the countryside. And finally, in the late 1970s, as Nelson’s module builder freed his children from the farm, China reopened its door to the world. Shanghai grandparents, after a 30-year break, tasted chocolate and coffee again, and Shanghai parents tasted them for the first time. The blinding neon lights returned to Nanjing Road, the Great World Pleasure Palace was turned into a G-rated shopping mall, and China began to sell T-shirts to Americans.

Through all of the revolutions—Nationalist, Communist, Cultural, and now Capitalist—the cotton spindles have clattered on, an unbroken thread through the tumultuous times.

Comparatively speaking, things have been very quiet in Lubbock.

“Come to China,” Patrick Xu told me when we first met in Washington. “I’ll show you everything.” In the spring of 2000, a few months after leaving Lubbock, I took Patrick up on his offer. During the next eight years, I returned a number of times. Like any frequent visitor to China, my most significant impression of the country is one of frenetic change: promising change, unsettling change, but most of all accelerating change. Whenever I returned to Lubbock, the terrain was pretty much as I had left it. This was not the case when I returned to China.

The Chinese Wall

After the first edition of this book was published in 2005, some of the most common questions I heard from readers were about how easy (or difficult) it had been for me to gain access to Chinese factories. And when I did visit a factory, readers wondered, how did I know whether I was seeing reality or a seeing a show? Would not the real conditions in the factories be kept hidden from visitors?

It is not hard to understand readers’ reservations. Even people who have spent their careers in China are often confounded by various forms of secrecy in both business practices and public policy. China of course still maintains significant restrictions on freedom of the press as well as freedom of expression, and consistently ranks low on various measures of transparency.⁹ The Communist Party excels at the control of information, in ways big and small, and censorship of all manner of inconvenient truths is the rule rather than the exception. How, in such an environment, could a professor from America expect to see the truth?

Yet, during the 2000-2006 period, I found that access to factories was easy to arrange and that both managers and workers were welcoming and forthcoming. Unfortunately, this changed somewhat after the first edition of this book was translated into Chinese in 2006. My reception changed, even though most readers found my treatment of China to have erred, if anything, on the side of the sympathetic. In retrospect, I see that my initial easy access to factories, workers, and managers was the result of the fact that I was both a Professor and a Nobody.

China has a centuries-old tradition of hospitality, even for Nobodies, and managers and workers during the 2000-2006 period were always generous with their time and insights. Chinese culture also has a deep respect for education, so I noticed that the fact that I was a Professor seemed to open doors as well.

After the first edition of the book was published in Chinese, however, I was no longer a Nobody and a Professor: I had instead become a Writer. When I asked to return to the two factories that I had discussed in the book, my requests were politely denied. Now that I had written a book, I was told, speaking to me could have negative consequences. “Things are somewhat complicated,” one note read. “Please understand.”

Alexandra Harney, the former Financial Times reporter, had similar difficulties in her role as a journalist. However, when Harney took a leave of absence from her job at the FT and accepted an academic post in Hong Kong, her access was immediately eased and she was able to complete her book, The China Price.

Interestingly, my experience in China as both a Nobody and a Writer was in sharp contrast to my experience in Texas and Washington. The hospitality in Lubbock is Texas-sized for everyone: Writers, Professors, Nobodies, and Somebodies. (“Well, if anybody is going to take the time to come all the way down here to see us, the least we can do is show them around,” John Johnson said to me.) In Washington, life is a challenge for Nobodies, because while many people I contacted were gracious, many others had something more important to do than return a professor’s phone calls. Once I was a writer, however, getting Washington to return phone calls was a piece of cake: Everyone wanted to be in the book. (After I spoke with one relatively powerful Washington type, a mutual acquaintance warned me, “You’d better put him in the book. Or else he’ll throw a fit.”) I was fascinated by the opposing dynamic: In Washington, authors are courted, and in China they are still feared.

Yet, during the past several years I have been able to continue to visit many modern, privately owned textile and apparel factories in China. Sensitivities seem to be raised only in traditional state-owned firms, and among older managers. However, because I was unable to return to the Shanghai Number 36 Mill or the Shanghai Brightness Garment factory after 2006, in the updates on these factories I have relied on secondary sources as well as my contacts in China.

Shanghai Number 36 Cotton Yarn Factory

The Shanghai Number 36 Cotton Yarn Factory is on the far-eastern outskirts of the city, reached by a one-hour drive through a crowded landscape that manages to be colorfully bleak. While the drive to the Reinsch farm is a journey through nothingness, the drive to the cotton yarn factory is a journey through an impossibly crowded jumble of alleys and high-rises, shacks and workshops, bakeries and tea shops, bicycles and pushcarts, water buffaloes and chickens. Mostly, however, southeastern China is a giant factory floor. Though some factories are new and gleaming, many are ramshackle and dusty workshops making things like hose fittings, engine parts, shoes, umbrellas, bicycles, toys, and socks.

Down a bumpy, unpaved road where people cook on the sidewalks and the buildings look close to collapsing, a quick left turn leads to a jumble of buildings. To the visitor who cannot read Chinese there is no hint at all about the purpose of the buildings until one arrives at a loading dock. There, in stacks perhaps 30 feet high, sit bales of Texas cotton.

Stepping into the Number 36 Cotton Yarn Factory for the first time was more than a sensory assault. The noise is a metal blanket, a deafening clatter of real machines, rather than the electronic buzzing or beeping emitted by factories in America. The metal noise blanket smothers not only conversation but thinking as well. Everyone and everything in the factory wears a light dusting of cotton flurries. For breathing, there is not air, but dusty steam, as the factory is kept moist to reduce the incidence of broken yarn. Perhaps the worst sensory assault, because there is no reason for it, is the color inside this factory. It might be titled Communist Green, and it is everywhere. I kept looking back at the walls to make sure that the color was really there: It was ugly enough to be astonishing. But to compensate for the awful color and deafening noise there is the feel and smell of the cotton itself. As the cotton is transformed from plant into yarn, it becomes softer and softer—impossible not to touch—and the musty-sweet smell of the cotton and yarn is comforting and mildly addictive. Coming from Texas, Shanghai smells foreign: green tea, frying dumplings, hairy crabs. But here in the factory, Shanghai smells like the Shallowater cotton gin.

The word factory conjures up an image of linear assembly, one thing attaching to another and another until an end product, a collection of parts made into a whole, appears at the end of the line. But nothing is assembled in the production of cotton yarn, and nothing is linear, either. The process is a transformation rather than an assembly, and almost every stage of the process is circular rather than linear: winding, twisting, spinning, coiling.

The cotton bales, still speckled with Texas leaf bits and rabbit fur, are hacked open, and the contents are sucked into a French-made vacuum cleaner. The vacuum cleaner’s tubes are clear Plexiglas, and the clumps break up and whoosh through the tubes to clean whatever bits of Texas dirt and rabbit were left behind by the gin in Shallowater. Whereas the cotton had to be compressed to a brick for shipping, now it must be blown apart into a cloud in preparation for spinning. After it is blown apart, it is smoothed into a soft flat blanket. The blanket is a sheet of fluff, with soft tufts pointing in every direction. Next, the cotton is carded, tiny wire teeth forcing the fluff to lie down flat and face its fibers in the same direction. The now-flat blanket is drawn into a snowy rope perhaps an inch in diameter, called a sliver (pronounced with a long i).

The slivers are but a brief moment in the transformation from Texas plant to Chinese yarn, but for me they were the best part of the factory. The slivers are so transparent and gossamer that they are almost not there, like ghosts in a children’s cartoon, and they are impossibly soft. My sensory experience in the factory was complete: I could not wait to escape the metal noise blanket and the appalling Communist Green walls, but I wanted to take the smell and the slivers back home with me to Washington.

The slivers are coiled around and around into tall metal cans, until they mound over the top like ropes of cotton candy. The ropes are then fed into the spindles and are twisted into yarn. In the final circular process, the yarn is wound onto bobbins, leaving a spool of yarn the size and shape of a motel ice bucket.

Supervising all of this circular motion was Tao Yong Fang, manager of the Number 36 factory. Tao stands not much taller than Nelson Reinsch’s belt buckle, and she is so slight that she looks as if she could be picked up by a west Texas windstorm. But Tao walked and talked at double speed while seeing everything and knowing everyone in the factory.

The Number 36 Cotton Yarn Factory was built in 1944, five years before all factories were seized in the Communist Revolution. While much of China’s textile industry has been privatized to some degree since the 1980s, the Number 36 factory remained in 2008 a classic Chinese state-owned enterprise (SOE), though it has recently put toes in the capitalist waters by entering into a joint venture with a Hong Kong firm. When Tao was assigned to the Number 36 mill in 1983, she did not move so quickly. Tao, the workers, and the factory itself were cogs in the wheel of China’s central economic planning machine, with no room at all for initiative, no reason to be in a hurry. Well into the 1980s, the central planners delivered set quantities of cotton bales, machinery, and factory workers to the doorstep, and came back later to collect the production quota of cotton yarn.

Americans, and now Russians and Slovaks and Chinese, disdain such central planning for its inefficiencies. A system that ignores market signals, that provides no incentives, and that subsidizes losers cannot be efficient in producing goods and services. Central planners will produce the wrong goods, use the wrong inputs, set the wrong prices, hire the wrong people, and ultimately produce shoddy products, and not enough of them, anyway. But to meet Tao in the Number 36 factory was to realize that the real tragedy of central planning lies not in its inefficiency but in its crushing of the intellect, in 20 years of Tao’s energy and intelligence laid to waste. For 35 years, the spindles in the Number 36 mill clattered, and no one working in the mill had to decide anything. So, today, there is determination but bewilderment as the managers of the Number 36 mill face the basic questions of running a business rather than turning a cog: what to produce, where to sell, whom to hire, what to pay?

In 2008, I learned that Tao had recently left the Number 36 mill and had gone to work for “a big private company.” In this move, Tao had plenty of company. In the decade ending in 2004, the percentage of urban workers employed by SOEs fell by more than half, while the share employed by private companies quintupled.¹⁰ Many industry experts with whom I spoke in 2008 viewed the state-owned Number 36 mill as a relic whose days were numbered.

The Shanghai Brightness Number 3 Garment Factory

On the opposite side of Shanghai’s sprawl is another clump of buildings surrounded by farms. From the outside, the factory looks like a rural school-house. On the inside, the Reinsch cotton is again transformed, this time from yarn into clothing.

The bucket-shaped spools of yarn are unloaded from a truck and placed on a knitting machine. As draping folds of fabric slowly and rhythmically fall from the machine, a lone inspector facing a large mirror simultaneously eyes both sides of the fabric for defects. On the second floor of the factory, the fabric is cut into pieces: sleeves, fronts, backs, and collars. In the United States, T-shirt pieces are cut largely without human interference, in a process that involves lasers, software, and a great deal of capital. At Shanghai Brightness, however, cutting is a peopled process, a bustle of workers manning big saws, little saws, and just plain scissors. The cut fabric pieces are piled into plastic laundry baskets and ferried to the sewing room.

In the production of T-shirts and other apparel, it is the sewing stage that has been most difficult to mechanize. Almost every other stage of apparel production has gradually replaced labor with capital, in a trend that mirrors cotton production in the United States. But despite millions of dollars in research in mechanization, people are still required to piece together fabric and feed it into sewing machines. The sewing stage of a T-shirt’s life is also unique because it is sewing—not cotton farming, yarn spinning, or fabric knitting—that is most often associated with the evils of the sweatshop.

While both the Lubbock cotton farm and the Chinese textile mill had been completely foreign experiences for me, when I first walked into the sewing room at Shanghai Brightness I found an oddly familiar sight. Approximately 70 women were lined up in rows, each sitting at a sewing machine. It was relatively quiet, and on this sunny spring day the room was bright. Each woman performed just one operation, over and over again: sleeves, side seams, collars, or hems. At each worker’s side is a plastic laundry basket, which the worker gradually fills as she completes her designated operations. When the basket is full, it is passed to the worker behind for the next operation. It only took a minute for me to realize what the setting reminded me of: Our Lady of Bethlehem Academy, La Grange, Illinois, 1969, seventh grade. We were all girls, lined up neatly in rows. We were doing what we were told, over and over again, and we were quiet. It is not that the experience was awful, far from it. But we watched the clock obsessively, waiting for recess. When we looked up, we saw a large crucifix and Sister Mary Karen’s stern glare, so we usually looked back down. When the women at Shanghai Brightness look up, they see a sign on the wall:

Quality Has 3 Enemies: Broken Thread, Dirt, Needle Pieces

Then they look back down and continue working, waiting for recess, too.

As I visited cotton farms and textile mills during the 2000-2008 period, the technological advances seemed to be taking place before my eyes. Each time I returned, there had been another leap forward in the quest to produce better, faster, and cheaper cotton fiber, yarn, and fabric. Yet the garment stage of production has changed very little over the years, and the sewing factories that I visited in 2008 used manufacturing processes that looked pretty much like those I had seen in 2000: In China and around the world, stitching a T-shirt still involves a young woman and her sewing machine.

Shanghai Brightness was founded in the mid-1980s as a Town and Village Enterprise collective owned by the local government. Like Tao Yong Fang, Su Qin, the company’s director, gained his early experience as a cog in the central planning wheel, assigned right out of school in 1976 to work in a state-owned garment factory. Also like Tao, he is gradually coming to terms with markets. Today, he has no guaranteed customers; instead he competes with over 11,000 T-shirt manufacturers in China alone, each trying to meet the relentlessly high standards of quality, delivery, service, and price in the international markets. Su does not remember any of these issues from his days in the state-owned garment factory, where he supervised the production of the utilitarian Mao-style jackets and trousers. He remembers no discussions at all about broken thread, dirt, or needle pieces. But today the T-shirts are commodities, and such details mean everything. Su remembers how surprised he was when he first heard a customer complain about needle pieces. But now Su has a metal detector, and every article of clothing passes through the detector on its way to the truck. Su’s efforts are paying off. During the past several years he has expanded from one factory to seven and has more than tripled the number of employees. When I went back to visit Shanghai Brightness in 2003, Su had left T-shirts behind and moved up the value chain into high-end cotton knit children’s wear. By 2008, Shanghai Brightness was operating eight factories, and employed 2,400 workers. The firm had again moved up the value chain and was producing apparel for U.S. major league baseball teams and for the Walt Disney company.

Shanghai Brightness funnels its knitted apparel to Shanghai Knitwear, the mammoth state-owned apparel export-import company that occupies the intermediary’s place between Chinese producers and American importers. Shanghai Knitwear maintains a secure spot as one of China’s top 100 exporters, and is among the top exporters of knit clothing in the country.¹¹ In 2007, China shipped nearly 365 million cotton knit shirts to the United States.¹²

Today, China dominates the global textile and apparel industries as the United States dominates the world cotton markets. In 1993, China became the world’s largest exporter of apparel, a position it has held every year since.¹³ Chinese apparel has significant markets in North America, Europe, and Japan, and Americans purchase approximately 1 billion garments made in China each year, four for every U.S. citizen.¹⁴ Since 1980, Chinese apparel exports have grown at an average annual rate of 30 percent, more than six times the rate of growth in merchandise trade.¹⁵ By 2007, China’s share of world apparel exports was approximately 30 percent (see Figure 5.1). Though the economic downturn that began in 2008 has affected Chinese producers, by most measures—production, exports, employment, or growth—China’s textile-and-apparel complex leads this global industry today.

Figure 5.1 Chinese and U.S. Apparel Exports (as % of World Apparel Exports), 1965-2006

Source: UN COMTRADE, 84 (Clothing), SITC Rev. 2.

Yet as Americans snap up the cheap T-shirts along the beach, there is uneasiness in the United States about China’s dominance in the labor-intensive textile and apparel industries. In a one-party state, where information is controlled, how can consumers or anyone else really know what is going on behind the factory gates? In her 2008 book, The China Price, Alexandra Harney argues that relentless pressure on costs has led to widespread cheating and deception in China’s garment industry. The sweatshops, Harney contends, are skillfully and creatively hidden.

Could it be then that China’s victory in this industry is really a failure? A failure for U.S. trade policy, a failure for American workers, and a failure especially for Chinese workers, who toil in poor conditions for pitiful wages in a quest to produce the cheapest shirts? In The Race to the Bottom, Alan Tonelson argues that the enormous “surplus” of labor in China imperils workers worldwide, as international competition puts incessant downward pressure on wages and working conditions, leading the apparel and textile industries to favor the cheapest and most Draconian producers who remain hidden behind the Chinese wall. If the means to victory in this industry are to provide the lowest wages, the poorest conditions, and the most restrictive regimes to apparel producers—all behind a veil of secrecy—then isn’t the victory hollow at best? And does the race to the bottom have a bottom, or will the seemingly infinite surplus of unskilled workers in China lead to an incessant downward spiral into the depths of a Charles Dickens novel?

The “sweatshop” stories pour out of China almost as fast as the T-shirts, each more wrenching than the last. For example, the National Labor Committee found that apparel workers in China were:

young women forced to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day, earning as little as 12 to 18 cents an hour with no benefits, housed in cramped, dirty rooms, fed on thin rice gruel, stripped of their legal rights, under constant surveillance and intimidation—really just one step from indentured servitude ... ¹⁶

Globalization’s critics continue to charge that the price of cheap T-shirts is high indeed. Sweatshops spawned by global capitalism exploit the poor and powerless, forcing people without alternatives to work in prison like conditions for subsistence pay. The factory villages also destroy traditional family structures and cultures, and weaken indigenous agriculture. The powerless workers endure threats to their health and safety, as well as widespread cheating on payday.

As labor activists denounce the race to the bottom in wages and working conditions, environmental activists argue that the race is simultaneously destroying the environment. According to this argument, the incessant pressure to cut costs leads manufacturers to dump toxins into the air and water rather than to incur the costs of clean technology or compliance with regulations. The environmental catastrophe stories coming from China are every bit as sobering as the sweatshop stories. Of the 20 cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, 16 are in China, and the majority of the water in the country’s largest river systems is unsuitable for human contact.¹⁷

Figure 5.2 U.S. Apparel Prices vs. Import Share∗

∗Relative apparel prices computed by adjusting changes in apparel prices for changes in the CPI. 2008 data are annualized based on first half of year.

Source: Import share data from OTEXA; price data from BLS.

As U.S. apparel manufacturing has disappeared and imports have soared, the price of clothing in the United States has fallen markedly (Figure 5.2). Indeed, when I returned in 2008 to the same Walgreen’s store where I had purchased my T-shirt for $6.00, I found that the store was selling T-shirts at 4 for $10. However, critics claim, the cheaper and cheaper T-shirts from China are a victory for U.S. consumers and for corporate profits, but a failure for workers and for the planet. To free trade advocates, the clothing flowing into U.S. ports are evidence that the system is working; but to critics, the swells illustrate what is wrong rather than what is right with global capitalism.

But whether we view China’s dominance in textiles and apparel as a failure or victory, China’s position at the top is strikingly different from the dominance of U.S. cotton producers. While U.S. cotton growers have held their position for 200 years, experience suggests that dominance in the textile and apparel industries has historically been a fleeting moment, a brief stop in the race to the bottom in this intensely competitive industry. To understand China’s victory in the race today, to understand why American cotton travels so far to become a T-shirt, and ultimately to decide whether the race to the bottom (or perhaps the top) is a good thing or a bad thing, something to be stopped or facilitated, let us examine the course of the race itself: Where did it start? Where does it end? What happens to the winners and losers? And what about the air, the water, and the millions of young women eating thin rice gruel?