(完整版)张彤禾：工人的声音TED演讲词(英文完整版).doc

Hi. So I d like to talk a little bit about the people who make the things we use every day: our shoes, our handbags, our computers and cell phones. Now, this is a conversation that often calls up a lot of guilt. Imagine the teenage farm girl who makes less than a dollar an hour stitching your running shoes, or the young Chinese man who jumps off a rooftop after working overtime assembling your iPad. We, the beneficiaries of globalization, seem to exploit these victims with every purchase we make, and the injustice feels embedded in the products themselves. After all, what s wrong with a world in whichoanwaonrkiPehr one assembly line can t even afford to buy one? It s taken for granted that Chinese factories are oppressive, and that it s our decshireeafporgoods that makes them so. So, this simple narrative equating Western demand and Chinese suffering is appealing, especially at a time when many of us already feel guilty about our impact on the world, but it inaccusraatelsoand disrespectful. We must be peculiarly self-obsessed to imagine that we have the power to drive tens of millions people on the other side of the world to migrate and suffer in such terrible ways. In fact, China makes good for markets all over the world, including its own, thanks to a combination of factors: its low costs, its large and educated workforce, and a flexible manufacturing system that responds quickly to market demands. By focusing so much on ourselves and our gadgets, we have rendered the individuals on the other end into invisibility, as tiny and interchangeable as the parts of a mobile phone. Chinese workers are not forced into factories because of our insatiable desire for iPods. They choose to leave their homes in order to earn money, to learn new skills, and to see the world. In the ongoing debate about globalization, what s been missing is the voices of the workers themselves. Here are a few. Bao Yongxiu: ” My mother tells me to come home and get married, but if I marry no