Journalist Alex Harney shows how China is able to offer such amazingly low prices to the rest of the world. What she has discovered is a brutal world in which intense pricing pressure from Western companies combines with corruption and a lack of transparency to exact an unseen toll in human misery and environmental damage. Despite a decade of monitoring, foreign businessmen all too often have no idea of the conditions under which goods they buy are made. But change is coming. A generation of Chinese flocked from the rural interior to the coastal factories, in the largest mass migration in human history--but that migration has slowed dramatically. As pollution worsens and infrastructure buckles and grassroots activism grows, pressures are mounting that will not dissipate without profound change. Managing the violence of that change is China's greatest challenge in the near future, and managing its impact on the world economy may be ours.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 313-319) and index.

Hooked -- The five star factory -- The physical cost -- The gold rush -- The stirring masses -- The girls of room 817 -- Accounts and accountability -- The new model factory -- The future of the China price.