When a massive Chinese industrial park lands in rural Ethiopia, a dusty farming town finds itself at the new frontier of globalisation. In this interview, Max Duncan talks about his feature-length film, co-directed with Xinyan Yu, that documents the opportunities and ruptures that play out for three women in search of prosperity. Speaking to Dan Nixon (Managing Editor, LSE Inequalities), Max explores what the film has to say about capitalism, international development – and the dream of a better life…

Max, tell me about the basic premise of the film.

Sure. Made in Ethiopia follows three women through the expansion of the biggest Chinese industrial park in Ethiopia. The park currently has roughly 20,000 workers spread across roughly 100 Chinese factories – making garments, shoes, ceramics and pretty much anything you can imagine. The “Phase Two” expansion would create another 30,000 jobs, but that involves appropriating a large chunk of the neighbouring countryside.

Filmed over four years, we follow three principal characters: Motto, the Chinese director of the industrial park, who grew up quite poor in northern China as part of the generation that really profited from China’s economic boom; Beti (pictured above), a young worker in a jeans factory who, like many others, has moved to the area from another part of the country to make her fortune, or not, as the case may be; and Workinesh, a mother of six who lives in a small farmstead in Dibdibbe Village, half of which is being relocated – and in her family’s case, both their land and their home is to be given up. 

And the film portrays some of the opportunities afforded by the arrival of the park, but also some of the downsides.

Yes – I think the upsides are quite clear in that the park has created 20,000 jobs and Ethiopia is looking to create jobs wherever it can. In many ways, the country’s situation is not dissimilar to China’s in the 90s, if on a smaller scale: a large young population, and not that many resources to rely on. And so on paper, at least, there’s a great appeal to bringing in low-cost manufacturing jobs in the short-term, as well as the potential for the transfer of skills and knowledge so that Ethiopia can do its own thing further out.

As for the downsides, as it developed, the film became a case study for the difficulties of development. You see in several places in the film situations where things are not being done as well as they could be. For example, with the land appropriation, the Chinese have paid the compensation to the local government but they in turn haven’t distributed all of this to the farmers, including replacement land for them in town to build new houses. And so the farmers won’t move.

Or another issue surrounds labour relations. The problem is not just the wages, which obviously by international standards are extremely low at $50 per month (although this is not a bad salary for manual work in that region – it’s comparable to what other foreign investors or Ethiopian employers pay). The bigger challenge here is inflation, at the local/regional level: the workers rent small rooms or live in dormitories but the rapidly rising cost of land around the industrial park means that everything gets more expensive very quickly. So even if the wages sound promising, in reality, workers often find that they’re not sufficient for them to be able to put money aside and invest in their future.

What comes across as the documentary unfolds is that the new reality is incredibly nuanced. The picture that emerges goes beyond simplistic narratives of victims and villains, winners and losers, and so on.

I certainly hope that comes across. One of the things we tried really hard to do was to come to this without judgement. We have three central characters and then the side characters and in each case they get the opportunity to express their motivation and their perspective. In many ways the film is about perspectives on a particular situation.

Regarding nuance, I think the perspective of Workinesh is a good case in point. Yes, she’s being forced to give up her land, her home and her way of life. But you know what, she’s somebody who isn’t in love with rural life as a woman, having grown up in quite a traditional society, having even been kidnapped into marriage by her husband. So she isn’t enamoured by traditional village life and she envisages her daughters living in the town and having a more modern existence.

And I think her story is really striking audiences because a lot of people in the West tend to side with the village because there’s an instinctive idea that “factories are bad” and that this kind of development is ruthless and exploitative. But here’s a woman who frankly finds living in the village ruthless and she has absolutely been exploited by her husband and a patriarchal system… So her story makes people pause to consider the push and pull of development – and the question of which future is she really going to be happier in.

It’s also clear that the depiction of Motto eschews black-and-white narratives…

I think it would have been easy to make Motto this one-sided character, especially with the expectations that people have in the West about the intentions of the Chinese (be it investors or government officials) in countries like Ethiopia. In the film, we wanted to actually express these motivations from a personal point of view: what development has meant for Chinese people, and what she believes that it can mean for Ethiopia – the country she’s been living in for 14 years. Of course, you don’t have to believe what she says and I think in many ways her argument is countered by what some of the other individuals depicted have to say. But it deserves listening to.

And I think she is an extraordinarily complex person both for the things she says and the things she does. Yes, she’s ambitious and she wants to make money – this is her primary focus, for herself and for her company. At the same time, she’s also someone who is totally convinced that the Chinese model can and should work for Ethiopia. So she wants this prosperity for herself but also I think she does care about the Ethiopian people and the country that she’s made her home.

At the same time, as the film goes on, you see her reflecting on what she has sacrificed in her own life to get to this point: the fact that she’s left a young daughter on the other side of the world with her grandparents, who she barely gets to see. You see that she is human, she is compassionate, she does care; but at the same time, she can be very driven by her business ambitions.

One of the recurring themes in the film is about the dream of living a better life. There’s a striking scene that shows Motto dressed in a giant princess gown while she addresses Ethiopian workers, and local government officials, as well as Chinese factory supervisors, at a Chinese New Year gala. She explains how, growing up in her village, all she ever wanted was to be a princess with a big princess gown. Her parents were poor and so she couldn’t have such a dress, but now that she’s older, she’s bought the one (very cheaply) that she’s currently wearing.

That was one of those scenes where your eyes pop out as you’re filming it… It shows the realisation of her own dream at an individual level, but it also serves as an extraordinary metaphor about national prosperity – the idea that everybody can have a princess gown. As an aside, she also calls her own daughter “princess” when they speak on the phone – so this sense that her daughter on the other side of the world gets to be the princess that she never got to be.

In her gala speech, looking to the future, she says that “I want Africans to know that their dream may not be so far from reality after all” – as absurd as it may sound, while she’s wearing this really over-the-top dress.

Is this aspirational dream within reach? I think it’s a mixed picture but perhaps the counter to it is Beti’s story. Like Motto, Beti cares a lot about how she looks: she loves clothes and she dreams of being a designer. And she does make some progress: she goes to work in a factory and she actually manages to change job a couple of times, getting off the factory floor and into an office role and a little bit closer to the middle class lifestyle that she aspires to.

She wants to study in order to realise her dream. But in the end, she finds that she’s not able to sustain that on top of the demands of the job and paying the bills. So there’s a moment in the film where she says that her dream feels very far away from her. She says that instead of being able to chase a dream, ultimately, her and her cohort just go where life takes them. I think that speaks to the limitations for young people in Ethiopia and a lot of countries where the conditions aren’t really there for them to realise their potential.

Thinking back over your journey making this documentary over the past five years, how has your own understanding of the promises and the challenges around development changed?

I think one thing is that while you can’t say that this kind of industrialisation-led development is wrong – so many countries in the West did it, or in East Asia of course, with much success – if you are going to take this path, then you have to do it right. That may sound obvious, but it’s something that you see over and over in the film: that many of the problems arise because so many things aren’t being done as well as they could have been, whether that’s about corporate responsibility, or governments instituting a proper regulation of wages, or making sure that land transfers are done properly. All of these different aspects interrelate and together they make a huge difference to workers’ lives.

Perhaps the other take-away is about the prevalent “one-size-fits-all” mentality when it comes to development. Ethiopia as a country is very different to China – culturally, geopolitically, and in terms of the moment in global history in which it finds itself looking to make this leap forward. A lot of African countries look at China’s success and think, “OK, they did it, we can do it that way too”. This view is mirrored by a lot of the Chinese supervisors of the factories that we filmed – they essentially see the Ethiopian workers as a reflection of themselves from 30 years ago. They, too, came from very poor villages. They went to the East Coast of China to work. They worked 14 hours a day, every day, 360 days a year.

It’s obviously an incredible work ethic, but in reality, this one-size-fits-all mentality often doesn’t work. As well as hard work, there are all the other factors that shape whether an industrial initiative will be a success. Any foreign investor coming into a country needs to have a lot of local knowledge, understanding, empathy and respect for the ways that cultural and other factors may be different to their own. There’s a poignant scene where Beti, exhausted and somewhat perplexed, notes how this Chinese work ethic is admirable but that “we Ethiopians have our own way… [we] work, yes, but also have fun”. And more generally, when foreign companies come in and think “it’ll work if we just do it the same way that we did it”, they have to bring an open mind and be aware that things won’t necessarily pan out in the same way.

See the Made in Ethiopia official website for more details about the film and information about screenings.

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All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s). They do not represent the position of LSE Inequalities, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Image credits for all photos: Max Duncan. Courtesy of Hard Truth Films.