Chang has a special advantage as a reporter: she is a Chinese-American woman, and so she was able to talk with the Chinese factory girls in a way that a man (or a foreigner) never could. That said, she also recognizes the limits of her reporting: She makes no claim to be reporting on ALL factory women, but only those who were willing to talk with her. "Almost everyone I knew in Dongguan was a striver. To some extent, this was self-selecting: A person with ambition was more likely to be open to new things, and that included talking to me."
A second limit in her reporting is her family's past politics: they were deeply tied to Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang government, and fled with him to Taiwan in the late 1940s. Thus we see China through the filter of a Kuomintang supporter and we expect to see conservatism praised. No disappointment here, but even accounting for her anti-communist bias, the picture that emerges is depressing. Manual labor is despised, even by the young people who are doing it. "To die poor is a sin." A speaker at a privately-run commercial school that runs self-help classes after work for factory workers, exhorts his students: "Leave the assembly line. Don't let people say, 'You are the lowly workers.' We must lift up our heads and say, 'We can also be successful.'"" There is no mention of what happens to those who remain on the assembly line.
Dongguan is modern, capitalist, free-market China at its worst. Chang sums up this "New China" with a quote from Square and Round, a best-selling book by Ding Yuanzhi, who "toured the country teaching people how to manipulate their way to success as he had done."
Square and Round painted a bleak world of complicated relationships, intense workplace politics, two-faced friendships, corrupt dealings, and status-conscious bosses with absolute power over one's fate. Colleagues undermined one another in front of their superiors. Bosses exploited their authority in order to belittle others and obtain bribes. Cynical men got the most attractive women. Money and status were the measure of happiness. Honesty was never the best policy. If the government had been paying attention, it would have surely banned this book -- never had I seen such a dark vision of Chinese society so calmly acknowledged as fact. [196-197]
My major criticism of Factory Girls is that it is really two books behind one cover. The main book, and the better one, is about the young women who work in the new enterprise-zone factories in China. The second book is a series of digressions about Chang's own family history. I would recommend that readers skip the chapters (6, 11 and 14) about the family. Chapter 6 could have been summed up as a brief philosophical side comment instead of going on for 50+ pages.