I stumbled upon “North China Factory” (Tony Ianzelo & Boyce Richardson, 1980) at the National Film Board of Canada’s excellent online archive. It’s an hypnotic portrait of life at a Chinese factory in the midst of a major transition: from Mao’s fully planned, smokestacks-across-the-horizon economy to the globalized “opening up” liberalism of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms. At 21 minutes in, a teacher tries to impress upon her class the virtue of learning the Roman alphabet, part of a national attempt to simplify Mandarin and standardize a sprawling tree of languages across the country; two minutes later, the students practice their English.Now, thirty years later, the No. 2 Cotton Mill – where over six thousand workers manufacture 90 million yards of high-quality cloth per year, and one of the first factories whose machines and equipment were almost entirely made in China – may as well be a windmill mill, producing the technology the U.S. needs to clean up its own environment. Also: it’s located in Nevada.
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