There’s a moment early in Who Killed Vincent Chin? (1987), Christine Choy’s documentary about the murder of Chinese-American Vincent Chin by two white Detroit auto workers, in which several auto workers sit around a bar and talk candidly about their jobs being outsourced to Asia. They may be losing their jobs but at least, they contend, it is because there exists in America, unlike in Asian countries, a just and immutable right to good treatment and fair wages, and that would never change.
More than thirty years later, American Factory documents the arrival of Chinese Fuyao Glass America (FGA), a Chinese-based automotive glassmaking company, into a disused GM plant just outside of Dayton, Ohio. American Factory marks a return for directors Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar to the same plant they filmed for The Closing of a GM Plant (2008), except the tables have turned: American workers now work for a Chinese company that pays less than half of the hourly wage they had previously earned as GM employees. Fuyao’s decision to offshore manufacturing labor from China to the States marks just how rapidly the landscape of global capital has evolved and continues to evolve: once considered too expensive compared to their Asian counterparts, it is now blue-collar American labor, both politically and economically weakened from decades of offshoring and diminishing union membership, that appears to be a great bargain.
The documentary begins with a young Chinese couple enjoying a view of Dayton; in their eyes, America is a strange novelty. Later, we see an assembly of Chinese middle management receive a primer on the purportedly salient aspects of American culture: Americans like to dress casual, even when it is inappropriate. They like big cars, they have an inflated sense of entitlement: “You can even make jokes about the President, nothing will happen to you.” What makes these pronouncements funny to American viewers is that they are basically true; what makes them uncomfortable is that it is usually the Americans who get to issue blanket, culturally reductive generalizations about other cultures, not serve on the receiving end of them.
Still, Fuyao’s arrival in Moraine, Ohio is marked with optimism, even if it is hard to downplay the surrealness of FGA’s entrance into a quintessentially American blue-collar town. Overcoming the culture clash, as Fuyao’s CEO Cao Dewang says, is what makes FGA a worthwhile challenge. Efforts toward assimilation are made, both substantive and symbolic: American executives are hired to put familiar white faces at the company’s fore; there’s a heartwarming friendship that forms between furnace supervisor Rob Haerr and engineer Wong He; the film captures a telling moment in which Dewang declines an employee’s suggestion that they hang a painting representative of China in the company’s reception area, and orders that they hang America-themed artwork instead, remarking “When in Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Eventually, and maybe inevitably, the cultural goodwill between the American workers and Chinese management sours. FGA struggles to turn a profit and reach its production goals in the first year; amid low worker morale, talk of unionization grows. For Dewang, the prospect of a unionized workforce at FGA is anathema, and he threatens to shut down FGA entirely if the workers unionize. An important caveat that goes unmentioned in the documentary is that if Dewang did so, he would be forfeiting fifteen million dollars in tax credit the Ohio Tax Credit Authority and Republican Governor John Kasich granted Fuyao based on payroll and hiring targets, among other incentives. In one of the more interesting ironies to emerge in the documentary, Dewang is untroubled by the incongruity between Fuyao’s deep ties to China’s Communist Party and his own staunchly anti-labor position with regards to FGA, an incongruity that is deepened when a delegate of FGA’s white middle-management employees visits Fuyao’s headquarters in Fuqing, China. The way things are done in Fuyao’s domestic factories is eye opening to these white managers: Chinese workers appear more docile, more mechanized than their American counterparts, more willing to work longer hours for less pay. Their private lives also appear intertwined with the public face of the company; in one particularly dystopic scene, several Fuyao employees actually get married onstage during a company banquet.
The documentary’s third act, as it were, revolves around the question of whether or not FGA employees will vote to unionize with United Auto Workers (UAW). This segment of the documentary is especially grim; caught between high production numbers demanded by FGA’s automotive clients and FGA’s quality control department, workers face a stressful work environment and higher than normal rates of workplace injury. Workers in favor of unionization are targeted by management, and a consulting firm is hired to come in and “advise” workers to vote against unionization.
Then American Factory pauses in the story, removing us from the factory floor drama of unionization to paint a sympathetic and intimate portrait of Cao Dewang as he describes his personal struggles navigating a multinational company and his nostalgia for the pastoral simplicity of his childhood in pre-Cultural Revolution China. The documentary seems to be striving here for journalistic balance, equipoise—but a balance between what? The material interest of FGA’s workers and CEO Dewang’s humanity? If so, this is a false equivalence—one need not diminish one to acknowledge the merits of the other. As the work of two white American filmmakers, American Factory reveals most clearly here a well meaning though misplaced anxiety for potentially coming off as racially biased. However, moments like these are what makes American Factory so compelling – not only its depiction of the phenomenon of reverse-offshoring, but the film’s self-consciousness with regards to its own place amidst the knotty matrix of national, cultural, and political allegiances portrayed therein. It is the people in a factory that makes a factory meaningful, a point that the film returns to again and again—a point ominously undercut in American Factory’s final scenes depicting the imminent future of industrial automation and automated labor.
Like its subject matter, American Factory’s release history is unprecedented; premiering at Sundance’s 2019 Film Festival and selected for Tribeca Film Festival’s inaugural Critics’ Week, American Factory is the first project presented as part of Barack and Michelle Obama’s new film production company, Higher Ground. Given his administration’s support for Clinton and Bush-era free trade relations with China (PNTR status), only further weakening American labor, Obama’s involvement in the film’s distribution is more than a little ironic. Nevertheless, American Factory is a politically significant, if not the most politically significant documentary of the year as it sheds light on a new and profound shift in the American working class.
