There’s a chance, certainly if you’re reading this in the Middle East or Africa, that those jeans you’re wearing were made in Shaxi.
It’s a typical Chinese factory town, just across the Pearl River estuary from Hong Kong.
There’s a Kentucky Fried Chicken here, probably not much more than an occasional treat on a migrant worker’s salary but a sign nonetheless that China’s decade-long export fuelled boom has been driving up incomes.
Hundreds of enterprises employ more than 40,000 workers who make tens of millions of garments a year.
Most are mass produced, ready-made goods, which is the reason that they are bound for those cheaper markets.
In the day or so that we’ve been here, we’ve met workers from Sichuan, Hebei, Hunan and Jiangxi provinces, as well as other parts of Guangdong.
For years this has been China’s bargain with its mobile masses – steadily increasing wages in return for hard work far from home.
But increasingly it seems that the bargain is not always a happy one, and Shaxi’s recent outburst of civil strife appears to be further evidence of the mistrust and simmering tension in China’s migrant communities.
We kept a low profile on the streets of the town last night.
To say the least, foreign journalists are not always welcome at what China calls “mass incidents”.
We saw hundreds of chanting, marching riot police, moving in formation through the streets, the black plastic of their helmets and shields reflecting the street lights.
At one point, I found myself ducking behind a row of beanstalks in a tenement garden while about 80 police gathered outside, just one of dozens of such groups guarding government buildings, banks and petrol stations.
