Posted on 02/04/2008 6:30:39 PM PST by charles m
The bright blue veil of the burqa is one of the most iconic and widely worn pieces of women’s clothing in Afghanistan. Since the fall of the Taliban, fewer women wear the burqa in Kabul, but elsewhere, in the provinces, the burqa is as ubiquitous as ever.
The Zamarai family, shown in the video, have been tailors and burqa-makers for three generations. But recently there’s a new player in the Kabul burqa market: China, which mass-produces a style of burqa that many women here find more fashionable than the Zamarais’ traditional hand-assembled garments.
The Chinese-made burqas’ tightly-crimped folds and machine-produced embroidery have become something of a fashion craze in the last few months in Kabul. As one burqa seller named Hassan explained to me in a crowded Kabul market, “Women love the new, modern style of the Chinese burqas.”
Since China’s entrance into the burqa market, Ali Ahmad speculates that 300 families have lost their jobs. “The Chinese have special machines that produce the entire burqa in a few minutes,” said Ali Ahmad, “We can’t compete with that.” The sewing machines his family uses are all hand-operated, although they’re cheap to buy at $100 dollars per machine. The Chinese sewing machines cost $4000. “No one can afford to buy that sort of machine in Afghanistan,” said Ali Ahmad. “Soon all our burqas will be made in China,” he says.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsweek.washingtonpost.com ...
sucks to be an Afghan manufacturer
LOL
Go get em China
Put them little Susie Wong slits in the sides
Fascinating video.
tomkow has got cometition.
I don’t like how China is gaining more and more control over manufacturing in our world. They are a rising power, and I worry they may one day surpass the U.S.
And those enterprising Chinese have not overlooked the soon-to-be booming European burqa market!
WELCOME TO THE CLUB - PAL !
To late,they got the most people..And they work for food..
If the women “love Chinese burqas”, imagine how they’d love NOT WEARING A BURQA!
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
A little black number ???
With pearls and heels
Given men who grew up with burqas, full facial nudity would drive them nuts.
bump
POOR TOMKOW
Tomkow you have competition
I don't think they're gaining control over anything. All the equipment they use was either invented or improved, iteration by iteration, elsewhere. When China becomes a developed country, their plants will be located overseas, and Chinese workers will make more money than than their counterparts in foreign plants. And none of them will worry about "losing control" of the hands that man sewing machines, soldering irons and electric screwdrivers - unskilled and semi-skilled labor isn't exactly hard to find.
The reality is that all manufacturers look for the lowest cost sourcing. This includes Chinese manufacturers, who are now looking towards foreign locales for their plants as Chinese land and labor costs skyrocket, and tax incentives and export subsidies are slowly reduced by the Chinese government. There's this myth that Chinese labor is the cheapest in the world. This is false. It is cheaper than a lot of its neighbors, but is definitely not the cheapest in the world. A lot of Latin America, Africa, Central and South Asia (including India, Pakistan and Bangladesh) have cheaper labor. The problem is that those countries have either no infrastructure (due to official corruption/incompetence) and high land and regulatory costs (also due to official corruption/incompetence). When you add these costs up, manufacturing in these lower-labor cost countries has been more expensive despite higher Chinese labor costs, up until recently.
The good news for lower labor cost countries is that China is starting to introduce the kind of onerous regulations that, when adopted in the West, turned Western countries into job-exporting machines. I expect that when these regulations are phased in, China will started hemorrhaging jobs to cheaper labor countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, etc.
All your burqa are belong to us.
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