American Factory won an Oscar on Sunday at the 92nd Academy Awards for Best Feature Documentary.
The film follows an abandoned GM factory near Dayton, Ohio, which is reopened after years of being shuttered as the Chinese-owned-and-operated glass manufacturing giant, Fuyao.
The documentary unfolds as a one-hour-and-50-minute cultural collision.
Fuyao’s factory floor becomes something like a petri dish for an amazing cultural and economic experiment in which we see what happens when working class America is controlled by Chinese management and engineering.
There is very little, if any, Chinese yin to the American yang at Fuyao. Toward the beginning of the film, Chinese supervisors are briefed on the stereotypical American personalities they’ll be managing. They learn how Americans value freedom of expression, casualness, practicality, comfort and so on. One infers that these characteristics lie in contradiction to their own Chinese sensibilities.
The plant, at first, brings hope to the community of Dayton. The opening of Fuyao signifies an influx of jobs in a place previously left behind in the onslaught of globalization. Instead of an American factory opening shop in China (to take advantage of cheap labor, lack of red tape, etc.) we see what happens when this takes place the other way around. What fast becomes apparent is that these are not good jobs.
After the plant’s initial underperformance, a select group of American higher-ups are sent to Fuyao’s Chinese headquarters in Fuqing. The goal of the trip is to witness ways of working that can then be implemented back in Dayton. What the American representatives observe is a shipshape operation, institutionalized OCD and a factory run like a benevolent dictatorship by its billionaire founder, Chairman Cao.
After a day spent touring the Chinese plant, the American managers attend a company gala. They hear songs sung with lyrics paying homage to Fuyao’s company culture, performances expressing strident corporate patriotism and a wide profusion of Fuyao propaganda.
I kept waiting for one of the Americans to crack, to point out that none of this would fly in America. But this never happens. Instead, the American managers take their learnings home and try to enforce them on their Dayton working crews. To put it simply, the Chinese way of doing business doesn’t bode well in America.
American Factory left me in both shock and awe. I’ve been telling everyone I know to watch it. As an American that has spent a lot of time working in other countries, with individuals who view the world through totally different lenses, I have found that this documentary has a way of articulating what I have had difficulty expressing to my friends at home.
Although American Factory focuses primarily on the story of one midwestern manufacturing company — and therefore does not account for the sweeping differences that would be found among the infinitude of anecdotal examples across the myriad sectors of American industry — I think this documentary does a superb job of exploring the shattered mirror that is American culture.
I found it interesting to watch the Chinese try to navigate the inherent contradictions in American identity. It was like being a fly on the wall in a room where people were looking at our country from the outside in and all they were seeing was shapeshifting. This has been the story of my life while living and working abroad. No matter where I go, there is no shortage of uncertainty as to who and what I am.
For every foreign person that attempts to evaluate the structure of American identity, they all see something different. And yet, there is something distinctly American.
Chairman Cao of Fuyao attempts to quell this quagmire of American incongruities with an iron fist. He soon finds out that Americans respond to hierarchy in a much different way than his Chinese employees do in Fuqing. He learns that if he wishes for his company to succeed in the American Midwest, he must treat his labor force with dignity.
American Factory is a film worth watching because it casts a light on important social, political and economic discussions pertaining to the role of labor unions, AI takeover of repetitive jobs and the overall function of the individual worker in a global economy.
As our own nation feuds over what we want our identity to be, this documentary provides a rare example to which we can look to for proof that we are all in this together.
The Oscar awarded to the documentary’s directors, Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar, is well deserved. Their film shows how ordinary Americans are affected by forces far beyond our borders.
American Factory hints at what’s at stake. If you haven’t seen it yet, then I recommend you watch it.
Aaron French is a 2006 Osawatomie High School graduate who lives and writes in Paris, France.
