Qiu never made it back, and her village has never been the same. More than 100 years ago, Chinese “coolies” were recruited to harvest sugar cane in Mauritius. History is repeating itself, only now China sends tens of thousands of workers to Mauritius and other remote islands because they–unlike China–have a shortage of cheap labor but an abundance of “quota” (permission to export textiles to the United States and Europe). The workers, many of them from this verdant valley near the coastal city of Ningbo, are not so different from their forebears: at the Novel Garments factory in Mauritius, Qiu’s colleagues say they stitched pockets into Tommy Hilfiger jeans for 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 362.5 days a year. “We were treated like slaves,” says one of Qiu’s colleagues. “We had no choice but to obey.”
Except now they’re fighting back. During a monthlong illness that left her too bloated even to wear underwear, Qiu repeatedly begged her bosses to let her return to China. But by the time they diagnosed her pneumonia and granted her leave, she was nearly unconscious. She died on March 12, the same day another Chinese worker from Ningbo died falling from her bed. The twin deaths sent a wave of grief and outrage through the factory. That afternoon, 490 Ningbo workers began a 10-hour protest march to the Chinese Embassy in the capital of Port Louis. Soon joined by thousands of other Chinese workers, they demanded an investigation into the deaths and an immediate improvement in their work conditions. After a six-day sit-in strike–an act of rebellion that would require even more courage inside China–Novel Garments agreed to scale back working hours, offer Sunday holidays and pay for all overtime work.
The factories in Mauritius have returned to normal, but Qiu’s village is still gripped by a sense of injustice. Several hundred returned workers–along with Qiu’s father–have banded together to fight the company and its local recruiter. They are requesting back pay for unused “vacation,” unreturned security deposits and tens of thousands of hours of unpaid overtime. (A spokesman for Novel Garments says the Hong Kong-based company has always paid full overtime.) The group’s leader, a rail-thin young man named Shen Long Biao, petitioned the state-owned intermediary, the municipal government and a “powerful” leader in Beijing for assistance. His lobbying has led to the promise that a local official will visit Mauritius to investigate conditions for himself. Shen and his friend Wang Nengjiang are doubtful. “We can’t get justice in China,” says Wang. But ultimately, they still face the same pressures that have sent generations of poor Chinese overseas. “If there were more opportunities abroad,” Wang admits, “we would all be there.”
