Santa’s Elves Now Working In China Chinese Towns Transformed Into Centers For Toy Production

To find Santa’s workshop, start at the North Pole and point your reindeer south - way south, until you arrive at the paved-over rice paddies of southern China.

Here you’ll find Santa’s helpers: about 300,000 low-paid Chinese migrant workers, virtually all of them women in their late teens and early 20s.

By night, St. Nick’s helpers live in fenced-in concrete dormitories with five to eight people in a room. By day, in hundreds of factories spread across this part of southern China, they work on assembly lines, molding, painting, scraping, testing and boxing toys that will sit under trees and hang from mantelpieces in homes across America and Europe.

No holly decks these halls, there is no whistling while they work, and the only jingle is the sound of money being made by toy companies.

Once a small fishing village, Shenzhen over the past 15 years has been transformed into an industrial export center by China’s experiment in market economics. Factories here now make everything from clothes to computer keyboards.

But the initials SEZ could easily stand for “Santa’s economic zone.” Southern China has become the

toy workshop of the world. More than 40 percent of the toys sold in the United States are made in China. They have an export value of $4.7 billion and a retail value six to eight times that much.

Items range from Christmas ornaments to Disney dolls. One factory alone makes one-third of the world’s pop-up books for children. With such volume, shipments are made not by sled but by the container load, in ships leaving the nearby harbor of Hong Kong.

The growth of Shenzhen’s toy industry has been fueled by foreign investment and cheap labor. “The industry has gone in for low-cost labor ever since World War II,” said David Miller, head of an American association of toy manufacturers. As a result, American toy makers have moved their operations from Japan to Taiwan to Singapore to Thailand and now to China.

About 15,000 of Santa’s elves work in China for the two Ting companies, including 6,000 at the biggest of three Qualidux plants. They stand on the lowest rung of the toy-making chain. If a toy costs $10 in the United States, it probably had a price of $1.60 when it left the factory in Shenzhen. Of that factory price, only 10 percent to 25 percent went into labor costs.

One of the elves there is Yu Zhongnan, 25, an assembly-line supervisor. Like other migrants who are recruited by provincial governments in poor areas such as Sichuan, Hunan and Jiangxi, she said that “you can earn more money here, and see different things.” More is a relative term. The average wage in this factory is $75 to $85 a month, one-eighth as much as the average worker in Hong Kong earns and not much more than an urban American teenager can make mowing lawns for a couple of days.

At times, the job of being a Santa’s helper can be a dangerous one. Two years ago, a faulty fuse sparked a fire in a Shenzhen toy factory that took the lives of 87 workers who had been locked inside because the owners feared the workers might steal some of the toys. Chinese authorities jailed the Hong Kong owner of the factory, a Chinese director and two fire officials who accepted bribes to overlook hazards during inspections.