The China trade: our jobs for their cheap goods is how these workers have shaped the Tar Heel economy--and they're not finished.

• Author: McMillan, Alex Frew
• Position: 25TH ANNIVERSARY

Few people can sew jeans as well as Lee Chitak. His bosses at Comeglory Trading Co. say he's due for promotion because he is so efficient, one of the best on the shop floor. He should be. Lee has been sewing clothes for 16 years--half his life. He hails from Heyuan, a forest-ringed city in southern China that scientists believe gave birth to the SARS epidemic four years ago. He left school after nine years and, like many of those born in China's backwaters during the last few decades, moved to a bigger city to make more money. A few years ago, he landed in Dongguan.

Work is why most people come to this city of 1.6 million that sprawls over 952 square miles--bigger than all but a few North Carolina counties. It's a broad swath of factories, worker dormitories, warehouses, commercial districts, construction sites and farms. Sometimes it's hard to tell whether the brick buildings are being built or falling down. The taxis have thick, stainless-steel bars between the front and back seats so customers can't attack drivers.

Dongguan's workaday gloom contrasts sharply with the skyscrapers and glitz of nearby Hong Kong. In the 1960s and '70s, companies based in the former British colony opened many small factories and later ended up here, in the Pearl River delta. Foreign investment followed after China began opening up to the West in the late 1970s, helping to make the region the most dynamic part of that country's blossoming economy. Comeglory, started two years ago by three brothers from Hong Kong, tapped into the region's pool of apparel workers.

North Carolina has people who do the kind of work that Lee does. It used to have many more. Since June 1990, the number of jobs in apparel manufacturing has plummeted 78%. Now there are fewer than 22,000. Some were eliminated because of technological advances that increased efficiency, but many apparel companies have closed or shifted their production to places such as China, where labor costs much less. In North Carolina, cut-and-sew workers average about $2,000 a month. In Dongguan, Lee's base pay amounts to about $100 a month. He also gets paid for each piece he turns out--usually boosting his monthly pay to about $250.

Work consumes Lee's life to a degree seldom seen among rank-and-file workers in the United States. He lives in a dorm next to the factory, which makes designer jeans for companies in Europe and North America. He eats in the company mess hall and normally knocks off late, sometimes 11 p.m. That leaves him little time to play billiards in the cafe around the corner or watch soccer on TV. Curfew is midnight. The next morning, he starts work at 8. He gets to see his wife and two children in Heyuan, about 60 miles away, on his two days off a month.

He says he's satisfied with his job on the production line, but he wants better things for his sons, who are 9 and 3. "I want them to get to a high grade in school, go to university and then work in government offices. I didn't do that much school, and working life is too tough. I want my sons to have better work." He hopes he can arrange for them to enter one of the prominent Beijing universities--which might involve bribes. Wouldn't he miss them if they moved hundreds of miles away? "It doesn't matter, as long as they can get much better prospects."

Lee's yearning for a brighter future is shared by many of his countrymen. They live in a nation that has careered from communism to something approaching capitalism in just a few decades. When BUSINESS NORTH CAROLINA began publishing in 1981, there wasn't a privately owned business in China. In 1990, the private sector employed 5% of the work force. Now, though the nation still is run by the Communist Party, that figure is about 75%. China has 786 million...