INSIDE BRA CITY

0 Comments | Sunday Mirror, Sep 4, 2005 | by from COLIN WILLS

IT doesn't rate even a passing mention in the tourist guides as visitors to China sweep past on their way to the Great Wall.

Yet this ugly collection of breeze-block factories and warehouses can fairly claim to be one of the true wonders of the modern world. This is International Underwear City - otherwise known as Knickertown or Braville - the most amazing industrial operation on Earth.

Covering 20 square miles and still growing, this place is to underwear what Detroit and Dagenham used to be to cars. Except instead of driveshafts and carburettors it deals in lace panels and stretch elastic.

You want to know how powerful it is, how influential, how global? Simply look at the label on any item that you are wearing beneath your clothes. If it says "Made In China", the chances are it was manufactured here, in the industrial sprawl of Foshan, in Southern China's Guangdong Province.

We are here because of the Bra Wars crisis, the result of a spectacular cock-up by EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson. In an attempt to safeguard jobs, particularly in southern Europe, Mandelson blocked Chinese imports over and above specified quotas. He trumpeted it as a "win, win, win" deal. As it has turned out, the loser has been the customer. Much winter stock from China is cramming warehouses on Europe's borders while store owners in Britain gaze out over empty shelves.

Underwear City is gargantuan. There are 300 factories, their gates heavily guarded, making underwear of every shape, colour and size. More than 40,000 machinists grind away from early morning to late at night, the clatter of the machines like water over pebbles. Their wages are pitiful by Western standards. Huang Xiao Lan, a teenage machinist, earns around pounds 70 a month working seven days a week from 8am to 8pm - and often until midnight. She has just two days off a month. In Britain, a similar young worker would earn pounds 750 a month for a 42-hour week, so how can any Western company compete? No wonder Chinese lingerie is flooding into High Street shops like Oasis, Next and TopShop. Ranges include Debenham's Caprice and La Senza. This is the new hustling, energetic China that Tony Blair will visit this week. Nothing represents it more vividly than the International Underwear City. The symbols of this astonishing world are enormous billboards, 20 metres high, which line its approach roads. Gorgeous, smiling women - mostly Western - look down from them dressed in luxurious lingerie. The message seems to say: "Here we can make you attractive, sexy, seductive."

Underwear City is spankingly modern. The first bricks were laid just five years ago, with a budget of pounds 50million. Since then it has attracted some of the world's biggest lingerie manufacturers, eager to get their products made at a fraction of their sale price. The gap is spectacular. Bras retailing for pounds 25 in the UK High Street are made at pounds 1 each in Underwear City. The whole enterprise is driven by high profits for the companies and low prices for the customer. Centralising underwear production has huge advantages.

"Being located here means we have a stable and knowledgeable workforce," says Luo Shun Xin, owner of the Jealousy factory. "It increases our efficiency."

But when the difference between manufacturing costs and retail price can reach 2,500 per cent, are the men and women on the production line - working without union representation - the real losers? Huang Xiao Lan is 19, and sees her job as a salvation. She travelled 1,600 miles from a small farming community in Central China to work here. She arrived with four friends from her village. They all work for the Kang Yi underwear company, sharing a dormitory supplied by the firm free of charge. Rules are strict. Workers do not leave the factory floor until they have finished their daily quota of around 400 items each. The factory is patrolled by managers who continually inspect quality and preach motivation.

Like all of the girls who work here, Huang has no idea which brand name she is working for. She only knows that the bras she makes have to be for Western women - "big girls" as she calls them. "They are high quality," she says. "Better than you get in China." It is hard, repetitive work and by global standards very badly paid. Huang receives pounds 70 a month, but to her it is untold riches. "I would rather be earning this money in the factory than earning a tenth of it in a rice paddy," she explains."My dormitory is provided by the factory and I spend about pounds 17 on food." She is proud to be the main breadwinner for her family. "I can send money to my family and still save pounds 35 for myself. I am well off, I am lucky."

More than 60 per cent of the 180,000 people employed in Underwear City are migrant workers. Huang's free time consists of two days off a month, plus 10 days annual holiday.

Like most, she takes this at Chinese New Year. If she wants a holiday any other time she has to make an application. She never has. "Where would I go?" she asks. "It takes two days just to get home!"