In the past, farmers, farmers, were seen as the backbone of China, but in this new era of industry, things would change. In the Shanghai cotton mills “machines were kept running twenty-four hours a day, twelve months a year.” (Honig 3). The working class would support the upper class and the general public by creating manufactured goods and textiles to sell in markets. As a result, those who constituted the working class in China were able to mass-produce products that would provide an economic boost to China's urban areas. However, not all workers came from urban regions. Temporary workers from rural areas often came to cities in search of labor as the need for agricultural labor decreased. Furthermore, because rural families were poor, children went to the city to relieve the financial burden at home and send money home to further support the family remaining outside the city. Most workers who operated machinery came from China's lower classes and sought positions that did not require skilled labor, although this was not always the case. Typically, unskilled jobs were given to children, especially during the 1920s, until they proved unprofitable and unnecessary (Hershatter 53). In the cotton mills of Shanghai there was a great diversity of age of workers. There were many seven-year-old children, young women (who brought their newborns into the factories), working alongside men and women many years older than them (Honig 54). The workers were not only divided by age, but also by gender. and geographic location. In Shanghai, most workers employed in cotton mills were women, while in Tianjin, male workers were predominant in factories until World War II. Approximately...... half of the paper......, Ch'u and Winberg Chai. The changing Chinese society. New York: New American Library, 1962. PrintChen, Janet Y.. Guilty of Destitution: The Urban Poor in China, 1900-1953. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. PrintHershatter, Gail. The workers of Tianjin, 1900-1949. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. Print.Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986. PrintSmith, Bradley F.. The Long Shadow of War: World War II and Its Aftermath: China, Russia, Britain, America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986. PrintTsin, Michael Tsang. Nation, governance and modernity in China: Canton, 1900-1927. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. PrintYeh, Wen-Hsin. Becoming Chinese: Steps to Modernity and Beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Print