Drawing on the article by Ngai and Chan (2012) and making reference to relevant theory, critically evaluate the approach to management adopted by Foxconn in China. Consider whether management practices should or could be changed to reduce worker alienation.

Format:
You are expected to engage with the management and organizations literature and be familiar with key theories in the field. In addition, you need to demonstrate an understanding of institution, organization and industry-specific factors in the analysis.

Topic:
During the last decade, Foxconn Technology Group has come under the journalistic spotlights due to unrest and strikes at several of its plants in mainland China. Using relevant theories, analyse the organizational culture at Foxconn. Discuss whether there is a link between the firm’s organizational culture and workers’ unrest, or whether the unrest is unrelated to the firm’s organizational culture and simply is part of a broader historical/social trend in today’s China. When discussing the workers, please pay attention to the composition of the workforce and whether and how it has changed over time (origin, age, gender etc).
Modern China
38(4) 383–
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DOI: 10.1177/0097700412447164
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447164MCX38410.1177/0097700
412447164Pun and ChanModern China
© 2012 SAGE Publications
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1Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
2Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey, UK
Corresponding Author:
Pun Ngai, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon,
Hong Kong
Email: punngai@gmail.com
Global Capital, the State,
and Chinese Workers:
The Foxconn Experience
Pun Ngai1 and Jenny Chan2
Abstract
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn
Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the
development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital
expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides
an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion
as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of
capital expansion because of the incomparable speed and scale of its capital
accumulation in all regions of China. This article explores how the workers at
Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, have been subjected
to work pressure and desperation that might lead to suicides on the one
hand but also open up daily and collective resistance on the other hand.
Keywords
global capital, Chinese state, student workers, rural migrant workers, Foxconn
Technology Group
When Time magazine nominated workers in China as the runners-up for the
2009 Person of the Year, the editor commented that Chinese workers have
brightened the future of humanity by “leading the world to economic
Articles
384 Modern China 38(4)
recovery” (Time, Dec. 16, 2009). However, the new generation of Chinese
migrant workers—those born in the reform era in the post-1978 cohort—
seems to perceive themselves as losing their futures. In 2010, a startling eighteen
young migrant workers attempted suicide at the production facilities of
Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group (???????); fourteen
died, while four survived with injuries (SACOM, 2010, 2011). All were
between 17 and 25 years old—in the prime of youth. Chinese media has
dubbed the tragedy the “suicide express” (????) (Zhongguo jingji wang,
April 9, 2010). This article assesses the changing pattern of global capital
accumulation now playing out in China in order to understand the consequences
for workers of the distinctive character of corporate domination with
the support of the state.
This article represents the collective efforts of Foxconn Research Group,
an independent team consisting of teachers and students from mainland
China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan joined together to understand the Foxconn
experience and its impact on young migrant workers’ lives.1 In the first phase,
between June and December 2010, we collected 1,736 valid questionnaires
through snowball sampling methods and conducted worker interviews offsite
in major Foxconn factory areas in nine cities: Shenzhen, Wuhan,
Kunshan, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, Langfang, and Taiyuan. In
the second phase, we documented the labor conditions at two new Foxconn
factories in Chengdu and Chongqing municipalities in March 2011 and revisited
the Shenzhen industrial community from mid-October to November
2011 (see the appendix for the surveyed Foxconn factories in eleven cities in
South, East, North, Central, and West China).
Existing literature has argued that China’s rise is a state-driven globalization
process in which the state has facilitated export-led growth relying primarily
on joint-venture and wholly owned foreign capital (Huang, 2003;
Guthrie, 2009; Gallagher, 2005). China’s heavy reliance on foreign direct
investment during the past decades, far more extreme than in other East Asian
countries during their industrial take-off, has brought about not only highspeed
economic growth but has also widened labor and social inequality and
led to environmental deterioration (Solinger, 2009; Chan, 2011; Dahlman,
2011). The peculiar proletarianization process of Chinese internal migrant
workers helps lower not only production costs but also social reproduction
costs in host cities (Pun and Lu, 2010). Like other foreign-invested companies
in China, Foxconn has largely benefited from the state-driven globalization
process and the unique process of proletarianization since it has enjoyed
preferential policies offered by local governments and cheap production and
Pun and Chan 385
labor costs when it moved its production base from Taiwan to mainland
China in the late 1980s.
Against this common structural background, our research shows that the
corporate growth of Foxconn in China demonstrates a new phenomenon of
capital expansion in terms of the size of workforces, the scale of factory compounds,
and the number of factories dotted over the map of the country.
Having a total workforce of over one million in China, Foxconn has grown
into a mega world workshop, with the smallest single factory compounds
employing some 20,000 to the larger ones with an extraordinary number of
over 400,000. Foxconn has become a monopoly capital firm and it now dominates
the global market by producing half of the world’s electronic products.
The astonishing speed of capital expansion across geographic space was
achieved through an alliance with the Chinese state, especially at the local
level. In particular, local governments compete to get Foxconn to set up new
factory compounds in their territories so as to boost GDP growth under their
jurisdiction, to the extent that they ignore the enforcement of labor laws and
hence the protection of workers. Foxconn’s growth has been facilitated by the
Chinese state through the provision of extensive land, infrastructural support,
and a supply of labor, resulting in a distinctive management model and a
global factory regime, leading to worker grievances and feelings of
desperation.
The Foxconn model or experience refines the argument that most of the
foreign-invested companies in China are small- and medium-sized enterprises
(Huang, 2003). It also challenges the belief that by deepening the economic
reform and by furthering the influx of foreign capital into China, the basis for
the institutionalization of legal protections for workers would be strengthened
(Guthrie, 2009; Gallagher, 2005; Lee, 2007). The Foxconn experience points
in the opposite direction. As migrant workers, Foxconn workers enjoy little
labor protection in the society at large and suffer from a heightened work pressure
and desperation in the workplace that lead to suicides on the one hand but
also daily and collective resistance on the other hand.
Foxconn: The Electronics Workshop of the World
Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, more commonly known by its trade
name Foxconn, was founded in Taipei in 1974. The name Foxconn alludes
to the corporation’s ability to produce electronic connectors at nimble foxlike
speed. Foxconn is currently the world’s largest contract manufacturer of
electronics, providing “6C” products—computers (laptops, desktops, tablet
386 Modern China 38(4)
personal computers such as iPads), communications equipment (iPhones),
consumer products (digital music players, cameras, game consoles, TVs), car
parts (automotive electronics), content (e-book readers such as Kindle), and
health care products (Foxconn Technology Group, 2010: 8). The corporate
annual revenue reached an all-time high at 2.9972 trillion Taiwan New
Dollars (approximately US$101.4 billion) for the year 2010, with a year-onyear
increase of 53 percent (Foxconn Technology Group, 2011: 4).
Foxconn has evolved into a global industrial leader in three stages. The
first stage was to advance into mainland China under the coastal development
strategy in the early reform period. The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone
(SEZ), at the northern border of Hong Kong, was opened to Western and
Asian capital investments in 1980. Local officials provided overseas investors
with a wide array of preferential policies including tax exemptions,
cheap land, and streamlined procedures for export. In 1988, Foxconn set up
its first offshore factory in Shenzhen, with a small workforce of 150 internal
migrant workers from the countryside in Guangdong province, of whom
some 100 were women (Foxconn Technology Group, 2009: 10; Xu and Xu,
2010: 202). The first floor of the all-in-one factory compound was a canteen,
the second to fifth floors the production lines, and the sixth floor the dormitory
for the Chinese assembly workers (whereas the Taiwanese expatriates
lived in rental apartments in town). In the early stage of production, middleand
high-level management was controlled by Taiwanese.
During the 1990s, Foxconn, in its second stage of expansion, greatly benefited
from the inexpensive supply of internal migrant labor as it demanded
more human resources. It employed the methods of the specialization of
labor and the diversification of production lines in various factory compounds
in different regions. It also employed an increasing number of skilled Chinese
staff and workers for low- to mid-level management. Foxconn, by the turn of
the twenty-first century, had consolidated its production in clusters in two
regions: the Pearl River Delta in the south and the Yangzi River Delta in the
east, where local governments such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Kunshan
provided businesses with preferential tax policies, land and industrial infrastructure,
and a substantial supply of labor.
The third and latest stage of Foxconn’s rise is the building of monopoly
capital by mergers and the relocation of production facilities across all regions
in China. Since the early 2000s, Foxconn has tapped into the lower cost labor
and infrastructural resources in the northern, central, and western regions. As
early as 2002, CEO Terry Gou was crowned “the king of outsourcing” by
Bloomberg Businessweek (July 8, 2002)—when Foxconn was still behind
long-standing industry leaders Solectron and Flextronics. In the same year,
Pun and Chan 387
the company became China’s leading exporter. As of December 2008,
Foxconn’s global sale revenues reached US$61.8 billion (Foxconn
Technology Group, 2009: 11), even higher than some of its high-profile corporate
customers such as Dell and Nokia. As consumer demand for electronic
goods rose following the recovery from the 2008–2009 global financial crisis,
Foxconn jumped to 60th—from its previous 112th—in the 2011 Global
500 listing of the biggest corporations (CNN Money, July 25, 2011).
Foxconn integrates production into a chain extending from raw material
extraction to final assembly to reduce market uncertainties and to enhance
cost- and time-effectiveness. Through mergers and acquisitions as well as
strategic partnerships, Foxconn has been able to shorten its downstream supply
chain by manufacturing some parts in-house. Spokesman Arthur Huang
explained the company’s cost-saving methods: “We either outsource the
components manufacturing to other suppliers, or we can research and manufacture
our own components. We even have contracts with mines which are
located near our factories” (quoted in New York Times, July 6, 2010).
Foxconn, subject to the iron law of capitalist production that positions
the individual capitalist in competition with the others in the market, has
intensified its race for new business. In making desktop and tablet computers
and laptops, it has fought for orders against specialized Taiwanese
manufacturers such as Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, and Wistron.
It has also shipped smartphones in short delivery times, “grabbing contracts”
(??) from Chinese makers ZTE (Zhongxing Telecommunication
Equipment Corporation) and Huawei Technologies. In order to secure production
orders from leading brands such as Samsung Electronics, Hewlett-
Packard (HP), Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and Nokia, Foxconn has
widened its product portfolio and upgraded its technology in a bid for
future business. By mid-to-late 2011, Foxconn was projected to capture
more than half of the world market share in electronics manufacturing and
service (iSuppli, July 27, 2010).
“In 20 years,” a business executive suggested, “there will be only two
companies—everything will be made by Foxconn and sold by Wal-Mart”
(Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 9, 2010)—an exaggeration, but it does
underline the impressive growth of Foxconn in the Chinese and global economy.
Indeed, China is a key geopolitical site for Foxconn, providing it with
more than a million manufacturing workers, that is, a sheer number far more
than its total workforce in all other countries where it has invested.2 Foxconn’s
China operation also extends from production to retail sales.3
Our interview data show that the influx of rush orders has pushed Foxconn
production workers to their physical and psychological limits, leading to
388 Modern China 38(4)
workers’ suicides as well as individual and collective resistance in the workplace.
In the next section, we analyze Foxconn’s domination in relation to the
Chinese state’s strategy of wealth accumulation and more balanced coastal
and inland development. These shifts in state policies have shaped the working
lives of the new generation of rural migrant workers.
The Chinese State and Local Accumulation
Foxconn’s achievement as a big-name electronics contract manufacturer is
an important factor contributing to China’s emergence as the workshop of
the world and the second largest economy in the world. Building on the
foundation of heavy-industry growth during the state socialist era from the
1950s to late 1970s, Chinese reformers moved to initiate market reforms
and emphasize light industry and services. From the 1990s to the present,
local governments have given Asian-invested and domestic firms economic
support, which varies from region to region, allowing them to become suppliers
to Western technology multinationals through exports (Segal, 2003; Leng,
2005; Appelbaum, 2009; Hung, 2009).
The Chinese national economy has thus undergone a fundamental transformation
from being based on heavy industry, with guaranteed lifetime employment
and generous welfare provided to urban workers, to one that mainly relies
on foreign and private investments and massive use of migrant laborers in light
industries, where wages and labor protection are severely suppressed. The postsocialist
state has further controlled workers’ self-organization and, consequently,
wages to facilitate low-cost exports (Perry and Selden, 2010; Chan and
Wang, 2005). Throughout the decades of rapid light industrialization, the manufacturing
wages of the so-called Asian tigers rose from approximately 8 percent
of U.S. wages in 1975 to over 30 percent in the 1990s through 2005; by contrast,
China’s manufacturing wages over the years from 1980 to 2005 remained fairly
low, at approximately 2–3 percent of U.S. wages (Hung, 2008: 162). Despite
important measures to increase legal minimum wages from the mid-2000s, the
Chinese state has sustained social divisions and class inequalities among the
working people by the household registration (hukou) system, hence making
possible China’s capital accumulation through private-sector industrial growth
in which an abundant supply of rural labor is assured (Selden and Wu, 2011;
Pun, Chan, and Chan, 2010; Chan, 2010).
As market reform deepens, industries in the coastal areas have been shifting
inland, driven by rising production costs and inflation, a shortage of labor in
coastal China, and the country’s strategy to open its interior (Goodman, 2004;
McNally, 2004). The State Council has approved plans for the Cheng-Yu
Economic Zone (?????, i.e., Chengdu and Chongqing), a regional project
Pun and Chan 389
to link up the economic development between the two cities of Chengdu and
Chongqing, in order to further boost the economy of West China (Xinhua, Mar. 4,
2011). With the encouragement of the central government, local government
leaders promote the export-oriented growth model by creating a businessfriendly
environment on the one hand, and reverse the historical trend of labor
out-migration by improving local employment on the other hand. At the same time,
young workers and married migrants have increasingly taken the job opportunities
opened up in their native place instead of moving to distant provinces. Government
statistics of 2009 showed that East China is still the primary destination for rural
migrant workers nationwide. However, Central and West China have narrowed
the gap: more than 90 million migrants worked in the eastern region, around 24
million in the central region, and nearly 30 million in the western region
(National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). Our study, however, shows that while
Foxconn Chongqing and Foxconn Chengdu were able to recruit laborers from
their respective territories, most of the “local workers” were rural migrants from
the countryside who had to commute for at least a few hours to their workplaces
and were not able to go home on their day off on the weekend.
In short, Foxconn, like other leading investors, is moving energetically to
take advantage of lower wages and local government incentives to build new
production facilities in central and western regions. There are over 30
Foxconn factories across mainland China (in some cities Foxconn operates
more than one production facility; Figure 1).
Local inland governments engage in business partnerships with Foxconn by
providing it with access to land, roads and railways, bank loans, and labor under
their jurisdiction. In June 2009, Sichuan provincial and Chengdu city officials,
to promote the “go west” strategy and the post-2008 earthquake reconstruction
program, led a delegation to Foxconn’s headquarters in Taiwan to sign a memorandum
of cooperation. Chinese officials promised to facilitate the relocation of
more industries to the west, making possible the formation of an efficient supply
chain network like those previously created in Guangdong and in the greater
Shanghai area. A vice director of the Chengdu Hi-Tech Zone recalled that “there
was a great deal of negotiation involved over the last five years before we got his
[Foxconn CEO Terry Gou’s] investment. It was not easy for Chengdu to stand
out in those cities vying for investment” (quoted in China.org.cn, Oct. 28, 2010).
The Sichuan government leaders prioritized the construction of a Foxconn production
complex and dormitories as the “Number One Project” (????).
The US$2 billion Foxconn investment project is the biggest to date in the province
(Xinhua, Oct. 22, 2010). As of the summer of 2010, a total of 14 villages in
Deyuan had been demolished to create the 15-square-kilometer industrial space
designated for a comprehensive Foxconn Living Zone (i.e., approximately five
times larger than the Foxconn’s flagship Longhua factory in Shenzhen). During
390 Modern China 38(4)
Figure 1. Foxconn production facilities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
Source. Foxconn Technology Group (www.foxconn.com.cn, 2011).
Note. Foxconn production sites are located in four main geographic clusters:
1. The Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province in the south: Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan,
Zhongshan, and Huizhou
2. The Yangzi River Delta and big cities on the eastern coast: Shanghai, Jiangsu province (Kunshan,
Nanjing, Huai’an, Changshu), Zhejiang province (Hangzhou, Ningbo, Jiashan), and Fujian
province (Xiamen)
3. The Bohai Gulf area and big cities of northern China: Hebei province (Beijing, Tianjin,
Langfang, Qinhuangdao), Shanxi province (Taiyuan, Jincheng), Shandong province (Yantai), and
Liaoning province (Yingkou, Shenyang)
4. The big cities in central and western China: Henan province (Zhengzhou), Hubei province
(Wuhan), Hunan province (Hengyang), Chongqing, Sichuan province (Chengdu), and Guangxi
province (Nanning).
our field observation in March 2011, we learned that the township and village
governments have offered free labor recruitment services for Foxconn Chengdu.
A Sichuan worker colorfully commented,
Pun and Chan 391
Foxconn is hiring, the whole city has gone crazy too (???????).
Local officials grab people and ask if they’d be willing to go work at
Foxconn. The government has made it an official task. Officials at each
level have a recruitment quota. Isn’t this recruitment crazy?
At the government buildings of the towns of Hongguang and Pitong, for
example, the human resources officers directly assisted walk-in job applicants
to arrange interviews at Foxconn. These services, made available since
Foxconn Chengdu commenced its production in the third quarter of 2010,
have greatly lowered corporate recruitment costs.
Moreover, the Sichuan leaders have waived Foxconn a “significant” amount of
rent and tax for the expanding investment projects. The renovated “northern plant”
in the Chengdu Export Processing Zone and the completely new or still-underconstruction
“southern plant” in the Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development
Zone are provided to Foxconn at “far below the market rate.” It is not surprising
that Foxconn CEO Terry Gou praised the government for its cooperation:
[I’m] very much impressed by the efficiency of local government
departments that led to the start of the project. . . . Foxconn will add
investment to make the [Chengdu] factory one of Foxconn’s key production
bases in the world. (quoted in Chengdu Weekly, Jan. 2, 2011)
Perhaps a more significant finding of our fieldwork is the “dispatch” (??)
of students from vocational schools to work in surveyed Foxconn factories
through the mediation of education officers of respective local governments
in Wuhan, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Kunshan, Langfang, and
Taiyuan. Student interviewees reported to us that Education Departments and
government officers in charge have “requested” their schools to arrange
internships at Foxconn factories. Under China’s Education Law, students
who carry out internships organized by their schools maintain a student identity
at all times. Student interns do not receive the protection of the Labor
Law since their relationship with the work organization is not defined as
employment. Since the students are not subject to the Labor Law regulations,
conflicts that arise between the students and the work organization cannot be
handled as labor disputes. As the students are not defined as laborers in the
legal sense, they do not enjoy trade union membership either.
Hence we found that student workers at Foxconn with internships organized
collectively by their schools have become an enormous worker community
in Foxconn factories across the country. The majority of student
interns we encountered came from their second or third year of study, and a
few had just finished their first-year exams in June. Most were 16 to 18 years
392 Modern China 38(4)
of age. Despite the maximum eight-hour work day stipulated by Education
Ministry regulations, the intern workers at Foxconn frequently did excessive
overtime work during the day or night shift. Many students complained that
I feel that what I’ve learned in my major is of no use; I’ve used nothing
here (????).
Regardless of your major, you’re asked to do things they want; there’s
no relation to what you study in school.
We don’t learn any technical skills at Foxconn; every day is just a
repetition of one or two simple motions, like a robot.
Foxconn’s “student internships” are actually a way of implementing “student
labor” (???) to help raise output and increase profits by paying subminimum
wages during the busy season. Foxconn exploits legal loopholes that
do not require it to sign a formal labor contract for the use of student workers.
The cost of labor is further reduced since student interns, unlike migrant workers,
are not entitled to government-run social insurance schemes (since they are
not protected under the labor laws and regulations). In all these ways, Foxconn’s
labor regime—characterized by tight control of workers and super-exploitation
of students—contributes to its rapid capital accumulation.
In short, the dominance of Foxconn, we argue, is achieved through the
dismantling of the socialist economy by the reform and open-door policy in
general and a deepening engagement between local government and capital,
in accumulation specifically, over recent years. Local governments compete
fiercely to host Foxconn production bases to enhance economic growth,
offering lucrative resources to the technology giant. A network of electronics
manufacturing coordinated by Foxconn is thus expanding quickly across
mainland China. Inside the “Foxconn campus,” management organizes labor
processes through a highly centralized and hierarchical production system, in
which the workforce is subjected to a panoptic discipline, resulting in workers’
suicides and resistance (Table 1).
Migrant Workers in the Foxconn “Campus”
A Foxconn “campus”—as the company managers like to call it—is a distinctive
dormitory factory regime, which organizes the sphere of production
and the sphere of reproduction. Foxconn’s biggest manufacturing
campus—Shenzhen Longhua—currently has more than 430,000 workers.
Pun and Chan 393
Table 1. Suicides at Foxconn in China, January 2010–December 2011
Gender Age Native Place
Foxconn
Facility
Date of
Suicide Remarks
1. Rong Bo M 19 Hebei Langfang 8 Jan 2010 Jumped from the
eighth floor
2. Ma Xiangqiana M 19 Henan Guanlan 23 Jan 2010 Fell from building
3. Li (surname) M 20s Henan Longhua 11 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fifth floor
4. Tian Yub F 17 Hubei Longhua 17 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fourth floor
5. Li Weib M 23 Hebei Langfang 23 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fifth floor
6. Liu Zhijun M 23 Hunan Longhua 29 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fourteenth floor
7. Rao Shuqinb F 18 Jiangxi Guanlan 6 April 2010 Jumped from the
seventh floor
8. Ning (surname) F 18 Yunnan Guanlan 7 April 2010 Jumped from building
9. Lu Xin M 24 Hunan Longhua 6 May 2010 Jumped from the
sixth floor
10. Zhu Chenming F 24 Henan Longhua 11 May 2010 Jumped from the
ninth floor
11. Liang Chao M 21 Anhui Longhua 14 May 2010 Jumped from the
seventh floor
12. Nan Gang M 21 Hubei Longhua 21 May 2010 Jumped from the
fourth floor
13. Li Hai M 19 Hunan Guanlan 25 May 2010 Jumped from the
fourth floor
14. He (surname) M 23 Gansu Longhua 26 May 2010 Jumped from the
seventh floor
15. Chen (surname)b M 25 Hunan Longhua 27 May 2010 Slit his wrists after
failing to jump
16. Liu (surname) M 18 Hebei Nanhai 20 July 2010 Jumped from building
17. Liu Ming F 23 Jiangsu Kunshan 4 Aug 2010 Jumped from the
third floor
18. He (surname) M 22 Hunan Guanlan 5 Nov 2010 Jumped from building
19. Wang Ling F 25 Hebei Longhua 7 Jan 2011 Jumped from the
tenth floor
20. Hou (surname) M 20 Sichuan Chengdu 26 May 2011 Jumped from the
fifth floor
21. Cai (surname) M 21 — Longhua 18 July 2011 Jumped from the
sixth floor
22. Li Baoqiang M 18 Henan Guanlan 15 Oct 2011 Jumped from building
23. Li Rongying F 21 Shanxi Taiyuan 23 Nov 2011 Jumped from building
24. Xie Yanshe M 21 Henan Longhua 26 Nov 2011 Hanged to death
Source. Research data and various news reports.
a. Media reported Ma Xiangqian’s death as the “first” of the thirteen “chain suicide jumpers”
from January 23 to May 27, 2010, at two Foxconn facilities in Longhua and Guanlan towns,
Shenzhen city.
b. Survived with injuries.
394 Modern China 38(4)
This 2.3-square-kilometer campus includes factories, warehouses, twelvestory
dormitories, a psychological counseling clinic, an employee care
center, banks, two hospitals, a library, a post office, a fire brigade with two
fire engines, an exclusive television network, an educational institute,
bookstores, soccer fields, basketball courts, a track and field, swimming
pools, cyber theaters, supermarkets, a collection of cafeterias and restaurants,
and even a wedding dress shop. This main campus is divided into
ten zones, equipped with first-class production facilities and the “best”
living environment since it is the model factory for customers, centraland
local-level governments, and visitors from media organizations and
other inspection units. In the same city of Shenzhen, another production
campus, called Guanlan, composed of over 120,000 workers, has none of
the “additional” facilities of Longhua, consisting exclusively of multistory
factories and high-rise dormitories that are quite common among foreignowned
companies.
In other major Foxconn factory areas, the scale of production and the size
of the workforce are also very large, over 100,000 workers. Within the walls
of Foxconn, most of the employees are young migrants who work and live on
the campuses. In the survey, the average age of Foxconn respondents was
21.1 years; the youngest 15 years. To supplement our structured questionnaires,
we have documented workers’ narratives and field observations to
present the working and everyday lives of the young Foxconn employees.
Our primary concern is the dominating mode of corporate governance and its
impact on workers’ well-being.
In the Foxconn Group, the production lines on the factory floor are centrally
administered by their respective departments or sections, which are
directly responsible to their business units, business divisions, and ultimately
business groups (see Figure 2). At present, there are fifteen Foxconn business
groups in all, differentiated by product specialization and/or corporate
customers.
Foxconn competes on “speed, quality, engineering service, efficiency, and
added value” to maximize profits (Foxconn Technology Group, 2009: 8). Its
13-level management hierarchy with clear lines of command is organized in
a pyramid; in the chain of layers in the workshop alone, frontline workers
face multiple layers of management from assistant line leaders, line leaders,
team leaders, and supervisors (see Figure 3). There is a broad three-tiered
incentive scheme at Foxconn: at the upper stratum are decision-making leaders,
rewarded by the company with share dividends and job tenure for their
loyalty, commitment, and seniority; at the middle level are managing and
supervisory staff, rewarded by housing and monetary benefits; and, at the
Pun and Chan 395
lower rung are ordinary workers, whose wages and welfare are minimal
(Samsung Economic Research Institute, China, 2008: 12).
The labor process in Foxconn is organized by a hierarchical management
principle: “Disassemble the entire industrial process to identify the crucial
points, simplify, and then reassemble the parts as a whole” (Xu and Xu, 2010:
152). Division of labor is so detailed that workers see themselves as merely “a
cog in the machine.” Senior managers formulate strategic plans and rules and
standards and the lower level staffers have to execute them with the lowest costs
to achieve the greatest efficiency. Foxconn production operators in general do
not require “skill” or thought; only strict implementation of instructions from
management and mechanical repetition of each simple movement are required.
Corporate Culture
“Leadership is being decisive. Leadership is a righteous dictatorship.
Leadership is a battle between experimenting and practicality” (????,
????, ??????, ????????????), says Terry Gou,
the CEO and founder of Foxconn (Zhang Dianwen, 2008: 23). Gou’s
1 • Foxconn Group
2 • Business Group*
3 • Business Division
4 • Business Unit
5 • Department / Section
6 • Production Line
* Currently, there are 15 Business Groups in Foxconn.
Figure 2. Foxconn production organization
Source. Foxconn Technology Group (2011).
396 Modern China 38(4)
Quotations evoke collective memories of the older generation of people who
came of age during the collective era and recited Chairman Mao’s Quotations
in political campaigns and in schools. In the Taiwanese-invested firm, when
Foxconn staff test for promotion, some of the test questions are to write
Gou’s Quotations from memory. Several famous examples are:
Execution is the integration of speed, accuracy, and precision (???
??, ????, ??, ???????).
Growth, thy name is suffering (??, ????????).
Outside the lab, there is no high-tech, only execution of discipline
(???????????, ???????). (Zhang Dianwen,
2008: 29, 44, 3)
No admittance except on business—every Foxconn factory building and
dormitory has security checkpoints with guards standing by 24 hours a day.
CEO
Vice
president
General
managers
Associate general
managers
Directors
Managers
Associate managers
Project managers
Supervisors
Team leaders
Line leaders
Assistant line leaders
Production operators & student interns
Figure 3. Foxconn management hierarchy
Source. Foxconn Technology Group (2011).
Pun and Chan 397
In order to enter the shop floor, workers must pass through layers of electronic
gates and inspection systems. Our interviewees repeatedly expressed
the feeling that the entry access system made them feel as if working at
Foxconn is to totally lose one’s freedom:
We’re not allowed to bring cell phones or any metallic objects into the
workshop. They’re confiscated. If there’s a metal button on your clothes
or necklace, it must be removed, otherwise you won’t be allowed in, or
they [security officers] will simply cut the metal button off.
While getting ready to start work on the production line, management will ask
the workers: “How are you?” (???). Workers must respond by shouting in
unison, “Good! Very good! Very, very good!” (?, ???, ???). This
militaristic drilling is said to train workers as disciplined laborers. Production
quotas and quality standards are passed through channels down to the frontline
workers at the lowest level of the pyramid.
Workers recalled how they were punished when they talked on the line,
failed to keep up with the high speed of work, and made mistakes in work
procedures. Several women workers attaching speakers to MP3-format digital
audio players said,
After work, all of us—more than a hundred persons—are made to stay
behind. This happens whenever a worker is punished. A girl is forced
to stand at attention and read aloud a statement of self-criticism. She
must be loud enough to be heard. Our line leader would ask if the
worker at the far end of the workshop could hear clearly the mistake
she made. Oftentimes girls feel they are losing face. It’s very embarrassing.
Her tears drop. Her voice becomes very small. . . . Then the
line leader shouts: “If one worker loses only one minute [by failing to
keep up with the work pace], then, how much more time will be wasted
by a hundred people?”
Line leaders, who are also under pressure, treat workers harshly in order
to reach productivity targets. The bottom line for management is daily output,
not workers’ feelings. Workers, in return, made fun of their line leaders
in their daily life by mocking Foxconn’s “humane management” (????
?) as “human subordination” (?????). A male worker sharply
commented,
If someone makes a mistake at Foxconn, the person below them must
take responsibility. If something bad happens, I get screwed, one level
398 Modern China 38(4)
screws another. . . . Higher-level people vent their anger at those below
them, but who can workers vent to? That’s why frontline workers
jumped from those buildings.
Factory-floor managers and supervisors often give lectures to production
workers at the beginning and the end of the work day. After working
a long shift of a standard 12 hours (of which four hours are illegally
imposed, forced overtime),4 workers still have to stand, for often 15 minutes
to half an hour, and listen to speeches, although the content of such
meetings remains the same: the management evaluates the production target
of the previous shift, reminds workers of the tasks they need to pay
special attention to, and reiterates work rules and regulations. Workers
know too well that branded electronic products are expensive and there is
no margin for mistakes. Several workers at a mobile phone assembly workshop
commented,
We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here. We’re trapped
in a “concentration camp” (???) of labor discipline—Foxconn
manages us through the principle of “obedience, obedience, and absolute
obedience!” (??, ??, ????). Must we sacrifice our dignity
as people for production efficiency?
Despite management’s attempt to take panoptic control over the workers
on the production line, we found that the workers resisted in a variety of
ways, including daily and collective resistance: stealing products, slowdowns,
stoppages, small-scale strikes, and sometimes even sabotage, which
put back production badly. During our research, Foxconn workers informed
us from time to time that if they could not put up with their management on
the line, they would take concerted action and work as slowly as possible in
order to embarrass their line leaders. Once the workers won by having their
line leader changed because this line leader was too harsh; in another
instance, everybody stopped working on the line when the production order
was in a rush, gaining managerial concessions. In short, there are inevitable
tensions and resistance built into the repressive regimen of Foxconn, despite
its hype of harmony and “mutual love and care” (????).
Wages and Work Hours
“Heart to heart, Foxconn and I grow together” (???, ????????)
reads a bright red banner hanging at the new factory in Foxconn Chengdu. It
Pun and Chan 399
suggests that the workers and the company identify with each other as if they
shared one big heart. The corporate propaganda team has created a dream of
riches through labor and has tried to persuade workers that success and
growth are only possible through working diligently. Yet, many workers
debunk these kinds of rosy dreams as distant and unrealistic.
As of March 2011, the basic monthly wage (with 40-hour normal work
weeks) of assembly-line workers was 950 yuan (or US$147) in Foxconn
Chengdu and 1,200 yuan (or US$186) in Foxconn Shenzhen, with all the other
nine surveyed Foxconn factories falling in this range, with variation by geographic
location. All the workers and student interns interviewed had “agreed”
to work overtime to earn more money, totaling 1,600 yuan to 2,000 yuan a
month. The wage rates of average workers at Foxconn, we believe, generally fit
the national pattern: in 2009 the average wages of the 145 million migrant
workers (including overtime) were estimated at 1,417 yuan a month (National
Statistical Bureau, 2010). So the complaints of Foxconn workers center not on
illegal underpayment of wages but on the perceived huge gap between themselves
and their higher-level managers as well as salaried people in the cities.5
Foxconn likes to point out that workers have signed written “agreements” for
overtime. This agreement is meaningless since workers enjoy no effective protection
from being fired for refusing overtime. While the mandatory overtime
work in China stipulated by the Labor Law is 36 hours per month, most of the
Foxconn workers usually have 80 hours of overtime work each month. In our
interviews, workers described “exhaustion to the point of tears.” In our summer
2010 questionnaire survey, more than 80 percent of the 1,736 respondents had
“four days of rest or less in a month” during the peak seasons. Our findings are
highly consistent with that of the 5,044-person survey conducted by the
Shenzhen Human Resources and Social Security Bureau in the same period:
72.5 percent of the Shenzhen Foxconn workforce put up with excessively long
working hours to earn extra income (Diyi caijing ribao, June 17, 2010).
“The People of Foxconn” or ???, literally meaning “wealthy” and
“healthy” people, rings with a dark irony to many “Foxconn People” we
talked to. The Foxconn workers often took this phrase as a joke when they
received their monthly wage. Regarding his present meager wages, one
25-year-old worker—an eminently marriageable age—expressed anxiety
about his future life, and especially after having a family:
I’m no longer able to muddle through my job in Shenzhen. Every
month I make only over a thousand yuan, and if I don’t marry I could
get by a few years, but if I marry, I’ll have to raise kids, it’s really not
enough for that. . . . Our days are truly hectic, and even if you’re strong
400 Modern China 38(4)
it’s difficult. Most people in my dorm are unmarried, and I feel that
married people generally won’t come here, the wages are so low.
Production Intensity and Work Pressure
Workers said that after the basic wage was increased to 1,200 yuan in June
2010, a clear increase in production was scheduled and production intensity
increased. A group of young workers at the Shenzhen Guanlan factory
responsible for processing cell phone casings said, “Production output
was set at 5,120 pieces per day in the past, but it has been raised by 20
percent to 6,400 pieces per day in recent months. We’re completely
exhausted.”
The biggest Longhua factory could produce as many as 137,000 iPhones
in a 24-hour day, or more than 90 a minute, as of September 2010 (Bloomberg
Businessweek, Dec. 9, 2010). Management used stop-watches and computerized
industrial engineering devices to test the capacity of the workers and if
workers being tested were able to meet the quota, the target would be
increased day by day until the capacity of the workers reached the maximum.
Another group of workers at the Kunshan factory commented, “We
can’t stop work for a minute. We’re even faster than machines.” A young
woman worker added, “Wearing gloves would eat into efficiency, we have
a huge workload every day and wearing gloves would influence efficiency.
During really busy times, I don’t even have time to go to the
bathroom or eat.”
Foxconn claimed that production workers who stand during work are
given a ten-minute break every two hours but our interviewees said that
“there is no recess at all,” especially when the shipment is tight. In some
departments where workers nominally can take a break, they are not allowed
to rest if they fail to meet the hourly production target. Working overtime
through the night in the electroplating, stamp-pressing, metal-processing,
paint-spraying, polishing, and surface-finishing units is the toughest, according
to workers interviewed.
Buyers of Foxconn products—the world’s marquee corporations, including
Apple, HP, Intel, Nokia, and so forth—want their computers and iPhones
fast to meet global demand. The corporations pressure Foxconn so that they
can compete against each other on price, quality, and delivery. To fulfill the
requirement of speedy production and shipment deadlines, Foxconn transfers
the work pressure to the frontline workers. For example, Apple has
been trying to get its white models of iPhone 4 out to the market without
delay, while keeping up with the availability of iPhone 4 black models. This
Pun and Chan 401
drive for productivity and quality leads to constant pressure on Foxconn
workers. The electronics parts and components are assembled quickly as
they move up the 24-hour non-stop conveyor belts. Posters on the Foxconn
workshop walls and between staircases read:
Value efficiency every minute, every second (????????)
Achieve goals, otherwise the sun will no longer rise (????, ?
???????)
The devil is in the details (????????)
On an assembly line in the Shenzhen Longhua plant, a worker described
her work to precise seconds: “I take a motherboard from the line, scan the
logo, put it in an antistatic-electricity bag, stick on a label, and place it on the
line. Each of these tasks takes two seconds. Every ten seconds I finish five
tasks.”
Workers reported competing with each other to get a production bonus. In
the workshops where our researchers conducted participant observation, a
company job-evaluation system of Grades A, B, C, D, and Distinction was
applied to encourage workers to do overtime work and not to take leave,
otherwise the bonus would be reduced. Under these circumstances, the pressure
becomes unbearable.
Each frontline worker specializes in one specific task and performs
monotonous, repetitive motions at high speed. The rotating day and night
shift system and extreme work intensity take away any feeling of freshness,
accomplishment, or initiative toward work. In the production process, workers
occupy the lowest position, even below the lifeless machinery. “Workers
come second to and are worn out by the machines,” was one worker’s
insightful summary of the worker–machine relationship. Others shared a
sense of low self-worth: “I’m just a speck of dust in the workshop.” This is
the “renewed” sense of self that arises after countless lectures from section
leaders and production line leaders.
Workers’ awareness of their position was painful: “Fate is not in your
own hands but in your superior’s.” On Foxconn factory floors, conversation
on the production line between assembly workers is forbidden. “You’ll
receive a warning letter for breaking the rule,” a female worker from
Foxconn’s Shenzhen Guanlan plant said. Managers enforced a policy of
demerit points to drive workers to work harder. A 22-year-old worker
explained, “The policy is used to penalize workers for petty offences. You
402 Modern China 38(4)
can lose points for having long nails, being late, yawning, eating, or sitting
on the floor. There’s a whole load of things. Just one point means losing
my monthly bonus.”
A long working day of enforced silence, apart from the noise of the
machines, is the norm. On certain assembly lines, however, workers said
that control over the work pace was much more relaxed because their senior
managers would not be present at the workplace and hence their line leaders
could be a little bit more lenient. At midnight, the workers said, “sometimes
we could talk and laugh if we didn’t affect the production; sometimes we
might fall asleep and fall down on the ground. If we woke up immediately
and continued working, nobody would scold us.” Workers who could not
endure the work pressure and isolation quit within a few months. In the survey
conducted outside of Foxconn’s Hangzhou factory, a woman worker
who had just quit said, “It’s such a cold environment on the shop floor. It
makes me feel depressed. If I continue to work at Foxconn, I may commit
suicide too.”
Loneliness and Fragmented Lives
Foxconn provides workers with “conveniences” (????) such as collective
dormitories, canteens, services, and entertainment facilities in
order to incorporate the entire living space under the factory’s management,
serving the just-in-time global production strategy. To a large
extent, workers’ living space is merely an extension of the workshop.
Food and drink, sleep, washing, and other aspects of workers’ daily lives
are scheduled just like the production lines, with the goal not to satisfy
workers’ needs as people but rather to reproduce workers’ physical
strength at the lowest cost and shortest time in order to satisfy the factory’s
production requirements. But at Foxconn, there is no true rest even
after getting off from work. Workers with different jobs and even nightshift
and day-shift workers are mixed into the same dormitory. As a result,
workers frequently disrupt each others’ rest because of different working
hours. In addition, random dormitory assignments often break up existing
networks of social relations, hindering communication and interaction
between workers. In this lonely space, workers have forfeited their personal
and social lives.
All the Foxconn production sites feature a combination of factories and
dormitories—its Shenzhen facilities have the astonishing number of 33
company dormitories with another 120 rented dormitories in the nearby
Pun and Chan 403
community. The Foxconn Group is now trying to shift production workers
from its higher cost, overcrowded Shenzhen site to other facilities. The
dormitory labor regime remains unchanged. Most migrant workers live in
the dormitories, but they do not have a normal life in their “home”—they
are living with strangers, not allowed to cook, and not permitted to receive
friends or families overnight. Whether the worker is single or married, he
or she is assigned a bunk space for one person. The private space is virtually
reduced to one’s own bed behind a self-made curtain.
From the perspective of labor control, these factory-provided dormitories
mean that production and labor reproduction activities take place in a
self-contained, all-encompassing geographical locality. This facilitates
flexible production through imposing overtime work, as the distinction
between “home” and “work” is blurred. The lengthening of a work-day to
24 hours to meet the global production schedule means that the appropriation
of labor surplus is absolute. Such a socio-spatial arrangement strengthens
managerial domination, wherein control over labor is extended from
the factory shop floor to the sphere of everyday life. The dormitory labor
system is a cost-efficient solution for companies like Foxconn to ensure
that workers spend their off-hours just preparing for another round of production.
Thus, workers face a double pressure within and outside the factory,
to the extent that workers are stripped of social living spaces.
Company policy clearly isolates workers, making it difficult to organize
collective action. Localistic and friendship networks are weakened or cut off.
A worker acutely observed,
Our batch of new hires totaled 120 persons. Most of us came from
schools in Hubei; mine has 20 people. The company divided us into
five different groups for training. After training, I was assigned to an
assembly line. My new friends, whom I met during the training, were
all placed in different positions. . . . I consider this arrangement as a
way of preempting workers from “making trouble” (??). This is why
Foxconn workers are free to jump from buildings but not to “make
trouble.”
As a result, interpersonal relations between workers are very weak, despite
the fact that most are in their late teens or early 20s. Now we begin to understand
why some workers have taken their lives.
Tian Yu is a 17-year-old survivor. On March 17, 2010, this carefree girl
who once loved laughing and flowers jumped off the fourth floor of the
404 Modern China 38(4)
Shenzhen Longhua factory worker dormitory. Compared with over a dozen
other young lives that were ended, she was lucky—she lived. Yet in some
ways she is less fortunate, because her young body remains paralyzed after
many surgeries, and she will spend the rest of her life in a hospital bed or
wheelchair.
Inside the “forbidden Foxconn city,” all production workers, like Tian
Yu before her tragedy, go to work, return exhausted from overtime work, go
to sleep, have no free time to themselves, and no “extra” time for each
other. A typical work day begins at 8 am and finishes at 8 pm. On the
product-parts inspection line, Tian Yu was often reprimanded by her line
leaders for poor quality, rejected parts, and “not working fast enough.” Her
seven roommates in the dormitory were all from other business groups;
there was no one to share the hardships at work. In her only 30-odd work
days, she could not overcome the deep state of helplessness, and decided to
end her life. She calmly recalled in the ward:
I entered Foxconn on February 8, 2010, and asked to go straight to
work the next morning. In the enormous factory, I lost my way.
Finally I arrived at the line—late at my first day of work. . . . At the
time when I should have received my first month’s wages, I didn’t
get my wage-card. I asked my line leader what went wrong. She
simply told me to ask at the Guanlan plant [an hour away by bus].
There, I asked one after another and still couldn’t find a clue. I was
like a ball being kicked around (?????????). No one
tried to help.
Anger and frustration built up. Instead of going to work early the next
morning, Tian took desperate action.
Foxconn entered Shenzhen in 1988, but the Longhua plant set up a
trade union only at the end of 2006, under the double pressure of media
publicity exposure of their Apple-branded iPod manufacturing conditions
and the mobilization of the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions. The
Foxconn union chairwoman is a special assistant to the CEO. Apparently,
Foxconn workers, like most Chinese workers, lack the means to appeal
for help. Among the 1,736 worker survey respondents, nearly 90 percent
said they did not participate in a trade union, 40 percent believed that the
factory had no union, and the majority do not understand the function of
a trade union.
In the wake of the multiple suicides, Foxconn dormitories throughout the
country were all wire-grilled. The company installed 3,000,000-square-meters of
Pun and Chan 405
safety nets, which were hung around outdoor stairways of dormitory buildings to
prevent employees from jumping. Workers now live “in a cage” (????).
Conclusion
We may say that Foxconn is a new development of monopoly capital
which is generating a gigantic global factory regime that dominates the
lives of the new generation of Chinese migrant workers and creates new
forms of hardship and suffering to an extent not confronted by the previous
generation of migrant workers. The market dominance of the millionworker-
strong Foxconn corporation is facilitated by a deepening process
of China’s economic transformation at the national level as well as a
deepening alliance between business and local governments. Factory relocation
costs are reduced as officials in interior provinces compete for
investment to the extent that they disregard fundamental principles of
labor and educational law enforcement. Despite central government leaders’
call for industrial restructuring, the mainstream approach of rightssuppressed,
low-cost exports remains intact. From the lived experiences
of migrant workers and student interns, it is clear that they face severe
difficulties in seeking to safeguard their rights and have their grievances
redressed. Contradictions between capital and labor have cumulated at the
point of production, resulting in widespread labor grievances as well as
struggles.
Foxconn as a form of monopoly capital generates a global “race to the
bottom” production strategy and repressive mode of management that
weighs heavily on the rural migrant workers who form its work force,
depriving them of their hopes, their dreams, and their future. Within the
walled cities of Foxconn, workers are struggling to improve their lives in
the face of a factory discipline requiring that they meet ever higher productivity
demands. When the Chinese government does not enforce labor
law, employers like Foxconn feel free to ignore state restrictions on overtime
in order to flexibly meet global just-in-time manufacturing and logistic
imperatives. On the factory floor, work stress associated with the
“scientific” production mode and inhumane management is intense.
Alienation of labor and the lack of social support are common experiences.
Young migrant workers in their late teens to mid-20s, who have been
placed in the “first-class” Foxconn factory-cum-dormitory environment,
have experienced severe loneliness, anxiety, and alienation. Suicide is
merely the extreme manifestation of the migrant work experience for hundreds
of millions.
406 Modern China 38(4)
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful for the support of the independent Foxconn Research Group,
especially Lu Huilin, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, and the postgraduate students of Peking
University, Tsinghua University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. We are
also thankful to Mark Selden, Chris Smith, Jos Gamble, Yunchung Chen, Debby
Chan, Yiyi Cheng, Jack Qiu, and Gregory Fay.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Appendix
Surveyed Foxconn Factories in 11 Chinese Cities, June 2010
–November 2011
Names Main Products No. of Workforce
Foxconn Shenzhen
(Longhua and Guanlan
towns)
iPhones, iPads, iPods, printers,
game consoles, e-book
readers, TVs, MP3 players,
cameras
500,000+
Foxconn Kunshan (Jiangsu) Electronic connectors 80,000+
Foxconn Nanjing (Jiangsu) Software, electronic
components
20,000+
Foxconn Shanghai
(Songjiang district)
Personal computers, network
devices
20,000+
Foxconn Tianjin Servers, memory chips,
routers
20,000+
Foxconn Taiyuan (Shanxi) Raw material processing,
electronic components
80,000+
Foxconn Langfang (Hebei) Mobile phones 150,000+
Foxconn Hangzhou
(Zhejiang)
Wireless communications
equipment
80,000+
Foxconn Wuhan (Hubei) Personal computers, cameras,
game consoles
50,000+
Foxconn Chongqing Laptops and TouchPads
(exclusively for HP)
20,000+
Foxconn Chengdu
(Sichuan)
iPads (exclusively for Apple) 150,000+
Source. Adapted from various Foxconn publications and authors’ field notes.
Pun and Chan 407
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article:
Funding support was received from two research grants from the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University, titled “The Making of Trans-Border Community in the Pearl
River Delta: A Trans-Border Urban Governance Analysis” and “The Making of Working
Class Community: Space, Gender and Labor,” and a Reid Research Scholarship from the
University of London.
Notes
1. The first author carried out four field trips in the cities of Shenzhen, Kunshan,
Taiyuan, Chongqing, and Chengdu in the summer of 2010, October 2010,
December 2010, and March 2011; the second author conducted a one-month
investigation in Chongqing and Chengdu in March 2011 and revisited the
industrial community in Shenzhen from mid-October to November 2011. Both
researchers have been members of the joint-university Foxconn Research Group
since its establishment in June 2010.
2. Foxconn Technology Group owns manufacturing facilities and research and
development centers in Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New
Zealand, the Middle East, Southeast and South Asia, Russia, Europe, and the
Americas.
3. Foxconn manages chain stores (e.g., Wan Ma Ben Teng, Media Mart [Wan
de cheng], and CyberMart [Saibo shuma guangchang]) in big cities, tapping
into the growing domestic consumer market. China’s domestic market grew
by close to 10 percent in 2011, much faster than either the United States or
Europe.
4. According to China’s Labor Law (effective January 1, 1995) and Labor Contract
Law (effective January 1, 2008), to ensure occupational health and safety,
overtime hours may not exceed one to three hours in a day and 36 hours in a
month.
5. Mark Selden and Wu Jieh-min (2011: table 6) analyze the ratios between average
urban employee wages and local minimum wages in Shanghai, Suzhou, and
Shenzhen, respectively (1992–2008). The ratios will be even higher if the differences
in welfare benefits are taken into account.
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and structures of inequality in two epochs.” Asia-Pacific J. 9, 5 (no. 1).
www.japanfocus.org/-Jieh_min-Wu/3480.
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Mexico Choose Global Liaisons, 1980–2000. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press.
Time (2009) “Runners up: the Chinese worker.” Dec. 16.
Xinhua (2010) “Foxconn opens new US$2 billion plant in Southwest China.” Oct. 22.
——— (2011) “New economic zone to further open western region.” Mar. 4.
XU MINGTIAN and XU XIAOMEI (2010) Fushikang zhenxiang (The truth about
Foxconn). Hangzhou: Zhejiang daxue chubanshe.
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ZHANG DIANWEN (2008) Jiema Gou Taiming yulu (Decoding Terry Gou’s quotations).
Taipei: Tianxia wenhua.
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de ‘siwang lieche’?” (Who can get hold of Foxconn’s “suicide express”?). April 9.
Biographies
Pun Ngai is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences,
Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her current research interests include labor,
gender, socialist theory, and history.
Jenny Chan is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History and Social Sciences, Royal
Holloway, University of London. Her current research interests include labor processes,
social movements, and globalization.

Drawing on the article by Ngai and Chan (2012) and making reference to relevant theory, critically evaluate the approach to management adopted by Foxconn in China. Consider whether management practices should or could be changed to reduce worker alienation.

Format:
You are expected to engage with the management and organizations literature and be familiar with key theories in the field. In addition, you need to demonstrate an understanding of institution, organization and industry-specific factors in the analysis.

Topic:
During the last decade, Foxconn Technology Group has come under the journalistic spotlights due to unrest and strikes at several of its plants in mainland China. Using relevant theories, analyse the organizational culture at Foxconn. Discuss whether there is a link between the firm’s organizational culture and workers’ unrest, or whether the unrest is unrelated to the firm’s organizational culture and simply is part of a broader historical/social trend in today’s China. When discussing the workers, please pay attention to the composition of the workforce and whether and how it has changed over time (origin, age, gender etc).
Modern China
38(4) 383–
410
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DOI: 10.1177/0097700412447164
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447164MCX38410.1177/0097700
412447164Pun and ChanModern China
© 2012 SAGE Publications
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1Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong
2Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey, UK
Corresponding Author:
Pun Ngai, Department of Applied Social Sciences, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon,
Hong Kong
Email: punngai@gmail.com
Global Capital, the State,
and Chinese Workers:
The Foxconn Experience
Pun Ngai1 and Jenny Chan2
Abstract
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn
Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the
development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital
expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides
an account of how the state facilitates Foxconn’s production expansion
as a form of monopoly capital. Foxconn stands out as a new phenomenon of
capital expansion because of the incomparable speed and scale of its capital
accumulation in all regions of China. This article explores how the workers at
Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, have been subjected
to work pressure and desperation that might lead to suicides on the one
hand but also open up daily and collective resistance on the other hand.
Keywords
global capital, Chinese state, student workers, rural migrant workers, Foxconn
Technology Group
When Time magazine nominated workers in China as the runners-up for the
2009 Person of the Year, the editor commented that Chinese workers have
brightened the future of humanity by “leading the world to economic
Articles
384 Modern China 38(4)
recovery” (Time, Dec. 16, 2009). However, the new generation of Chinese
migrant workers—those born in the reform era in the post-1978 cohort—
seems to perceive themselves as losing their futures. In 2010, a startling eighteen
young migrant workers attempted suicide at the production facilities of
Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group (???????); fourteen
died, while four survived with injuries (SACOM, 2010, 2011). All were
between 17 and 25 years old—in the prime of youth. Chinese media has
dubbed the tragedy the “suicide express” (????) (Zhongguo jingji wang,
April 9, 2010). This article assesses the changing pattern of global capital
accumulation now playing out in China in order to understand the consequences
for workers of the distinctive character of corporate domination with
the support of the state.
This article represents the collective efforts of Foxconn Research Group,
an independent team consisting of teachers and students from mainland
China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan joined together to understand the Foxconn
experience and its impact on young migrant workers’ lives.1 In the first phase,
between June and December 2010, we collected 1,736 valid questionnaires
through snowball sampling methods and conducted worker interviews offsite
in major Foxconn factory areas in nine cities: Shenzhen, Wuhan,
Kunshan, Shanghai, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Tianjin, Langfang, and Taiyuan. In
the second phase, we documented the labor conditions at two new Foxconn
factories in Chengdu and Chongqing municipalities in March 2011 and revisited
the Shenzhen industrial community from mid-October to November
2011 (see the appendix for the surveyed Foxconn factories in eleven cities in
South, East, North, Central, and West China).
Existing literature has argued that China’s rise is a state-driven globalization
process in which the state has facilitated export-led growth relying primarily
on joint-venture and wholly owned foreign capital (Huang, 2003;
Guthrie, 2009; Gallagher, 2005). China’s heavy reliance on foreign direct
investment during the past decades, far more extreme than in other East Asian
countries during their industrial take-off, has brought about not only highspeed
economic growth but has also widened labor and social inequality and
led to environmental deterioration (Solinger, 2009; Chan, 2011; Dahlman,
2011). The peculiar proletarianization process of Chinese internal migrant
workers helps lower not only production costs but also social reproduction
costs in host cities (Pun and Lu, 2010). Like other foreign-invested companies
in China, Foxconn has largely benefited from the state-driven globalization
process and the unique process of proletarianization since it has enjoyed
preferential policies offered by local governments and cheap production and
Pun and Chan 385
labor costs when it moved its production base from Taiwan to mainland
China in the late 1980s.
Against this common structural background, our research shows that the
corporate growth of Foxconn in China demonstrates a new phenomenon of
capital expansion in terms of the size of workforces, the scale of factory compounds,
and the number of factories dotted over the map of the country.
Having a total workforce of over one million in China, Foxconn has grown
into a mega world workshop, with the smallest single factory compounds
employing some 20,000 to the larger ones with an extraordinary number of
over 400,000. Foxconn has become a monopoly capital firm and it now dominates
the global market by producing half of the world’s electronic products.
The astonishing speed of capital expansion across geographic space was
achieved through an alliance with the Chinese state, especially at the local
level. In particular, local governments compete to get Foxconn to set up new
factory compounds in their territories so as to boost GDP growth under their
jurisdiction, to the extent that they ignore the enforcement of labor laws and
hence the protection of workers. Foxconn’s growth has been facilitated by the
Chinese state through the provision of extensive land, infrastructural support,
and a supply of labor, resulting in a distinctive management model and a
global factory regime, leading to worker grievances and feelings of
desperation.
The Foxconn model or experience refines the argument that most of the
foreign-invested companies in China are small- and medium-sized enterprises
(Huang, 2003). It also challenges the belief that by deepening the economic
reform and by furthering the influx of foreign capital into China, the basis for
the institutionalization of legal protections for workers would be strengthened
(Guthrie, 2009; Gallagher, 2005; Lee, 2007). The Foxconn experience points
in the opposite direction. As migrant workers, Foxconn workers enjoy little
labor protection in the society at large and suffer from a heightened work pressure
and desperation in the workplace that lead to suicides on the one hand but
also daily and collective resistance on the other hand.
Foxconn: The Electronics Workshop of the World
Hon Hai Precision Industry Company, more commonly known by its trade
name Foxconn, was founded in Taipei in 1974. The name Foxconn alludes
to the corporation’s ability to produce electronic connectors at nimble foxlike
speed. Foxconn is currently the world’s largest contract manufacturer of
electronics, providing “6C” products—computers (laptops, desktops, tablet
386 Modern China 38(4)
personal computers such as iPads), communications equipment (iPhones),
consumer products (digital music players, cameras, game consoles, TVs), car
parts (automotive electronics), content (e-book readers such as Kindle), and
health care products (Foxconn Technology Group, 2010: 8). The corporate
annual revenue reached an all-time high at 2.9972 trillion Taiwan New
Dollars (approximately US$101.4 billion) for the year 2010, with a year-onyear
increase of 53 percent (Foxconn Technology Group, 2011: 4).
Foxconn has evolved into a global industrial leader in three stages. The
first stage was to advance into mainland China under the coastal development
strategy in the early reform period. The Shenzhen Special Economic Zone
(SEZ), at the northern border of Hong Kong, was opened to Western and
Asian capital investments in 1980. Local officials provided overseas investors
with a wide array of preferential policies including tax exemptions,
cheap land, and streamlined procedures for export. In 1988, Foxconn set up
its first offshore factory in Shenzhen, with a small workforce of 150 internal
migrant workers from the countryside in Guangdong province, of whom
some 100 were women (Foxconn Technology Group, 2009: 10; Xu and Xu,
2010: 202). The first floor of the all-in-one factory compound was a canteen,
the second to fifth floors the production lines, and the sixth floor the dormitory
for the Chinese assembly workers (whereas the Taiwanese expatriates
lived in rental apartments in town). In the early stage of production, middleand
high-level management was controlled by Taiwanese.
During the 1990s, Foxconn, in its second stage of expansion, greatly benefited
from the inexpensive supply of internal migrant labor as it demanded
more human resources. It employed the methods of the specialization of
labor and the diversification of production lines in various factory compounds
in different regions. It also employed an increasing number of skilled Chinese
staff and workers for low- to mid-level management. Foxconn, by the turn of
the twenty-first century, had consolidated its production in clusters in two
regions: the Pearl River Delta in the south and the Yangzi River Delta in the
east, where local governments such as Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Kunshan
provided businesses with preferential tax policies, land and industrial infrastructure,
and a substantial supply of labor.
The third and latest stage of Foxconn’s rise is the building of monopoly
capital by mergers and the relocation of production facilities across all regions
in China. Since the early 2000s, Foxconn has tapped into the lower cost labor
and infrastructural resources in the northern, central, and western regions. As
early as 2002, CEO Terry Gou was crowned “the king of outsourcing” by
Bloomberg Businessweek (July 8, 2002)—when Foxconn was still behind
long-standing industry leaders Solectron and Flextronics. In the same year,
Pun and Chan 387
the company became China’s leading exporter. As of December 2008,
Foxconn’s global sale revenues reached US$61.8 billion (Foxconn
Technology Group, 2009: 11), even higher than some of its high-profile corporate
customers such as Dell and Nokia. As consumer demand for electronic
goods rose following the recovery from the 2008–2009 global financial crisis,
Foxconn jumped to 60th—from its previous 112th—in the 2011 Global
500 listing of the biggest corporations (CNN Money, July 25, 2011).
Foxconn integrates production into a chain extending from raw material
extraction to final assembly to reduce market uncertainties and to enhance
cost- and time-effectiveness. Through mergers and acquisitions as well as
strategic partnerships, Foxconn has been able to shorten its downstream supply
chain by manufacturing some parts in-house. Spokesman Arthur Huang
explained the company’s cost-saving methods: “We either outsource the
components manufacturing to other suppliers, or we can research and manufacture
our own components. We even have contracts with mines which are
located near our factories” (quoted in New York Times, July 6, 2010).
Foxconn, subject to the iron law of capitalist production that positions
the individual capitalist in competition with the others in the market, has
intensified its race for new business. In making desktop and tablet computers
and laptops, it has fought for orders against specialized Taiwanese
manufacturers such as Quanta Computer, Compal Electronics, and Wistron.
It has also shipped smartphones in short delivery times, “grabbing contracts”
(??) from Chinese makers ZTE (Zhongxing Telecommunication
Equipment Corporation) and Huawei Technologies. In order to secure production
orders from leading brands such as Samsung Electronics, Hewlett-
Packard (HP), Sony, Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and Nokia, Foxconn has
widened its product portfolio and upgraded its technology in a bid for
future business. By mid-to-late 2011, Foxconn was projected to capture
more than half of the world market share in electronics manufacturing and
service (iSuppli, July 27, 2010).
“In 20 years,” a business executive suggested, “there will be only two
companies—everything will be made by Foxconn and sold by Wal-Mart”
(Bloomberg Businessweek, Dec. 9, 2010)—an exaggeration, but it does
underline the impressive growth of Foxconn in the Chinese and global economy.
Indeed, China is a key geopolitical site for Foxconn, providing it with
more than a million manufacturing workers, that is, a sheer number far more
than its total workforce in all other countries where it has invested.2 Foxconn’s
China operation also extends from production to retail sales.3
Our interview data show that the influx of rush orders has pushed Foxconn
production workers to their physical and psychological limits, leading to
388 Modern China 38(4)
workers’ suicides as well as individual and collective resistance in the workplace.
In the next section, we analyze Foxconn’s domination in relation to the
Chinese state’s strategy of wealth accumulation and more balanced coastal
and inland development. These shifts in state policies have shaped the working
lives of the new generation of rural migrant workers.
The Chinese State and Local Accumulation
Foxconn’s achievement as a big-name electronics contract manufacturer is
an important factor contributing to China’s emergence as the workshop of
the world and the second largest economy in the world. Building on the
foundation of heavy-industry growth during the state socialist era from the
1950s to late 1970s, Chinese reformers moved to initiate market reforms
and emphasize light industry and services. From the 1990s to the present,
local governments have given Asian-invested and domestic firms economic
support, which varies from region to region, allowing them to become suppliers
to Western technology multinationals through exports (Segal, 2003; Leng,
2005; Appelbaum, 2009; Hung, 2009).
The Chinese national economy has thus undergone a fundamental transformation
from being based on heavy industry, with guaranteed lifetime employment
and generous welfare provided to urban workers, to one that mainly relies
on foreign and private investments and massive use of migrant laborers in light
industries, where wages and labor protection are severely suppressed. The postsocialist
state has further controlled workers’ self-organization and, consequently,
wages to facilitate low-cost exports (Perry and Selden, 2010; Chan and
Wang, 2005). Throughout the decades of rapid light industrialization, the manufacturing
wages of the so-called Asian tigers rose from approximately 8 percent
of U.S. wages in 1975 to over 30 percent in the 1990s through 2005; by contrast,
China’s manufacturing wages over the years from 1980 to 2005 remained fairly
low, at approximately 2–3 percent of U.S. wages (Hung, 2008: 162). Despite
important measures to increase legal minimum wages from the mid-2000s, the
Chinese state has sustained social divisions and class inequalities among the
working people by the household registration (hukou) system, hence making
possible China’s capital accumulation through private-sector industrial growth
in which an abundant supply of rural labor is assured (Selden and Wu, 2011;
Pun, Chan, and Chan, 2010; Chan, 2010).
As market reform deepens, industries in the coastal areas have been shifting
inland, driven by rising production costs and inflation, a shortage of labor in
coastal China, and the country’s strategy to open its interior (Goodman, 2004;
McNally, 2004). The State Council has approved plans for the Cheng-Yu
Economic Zone (?????, i.e., Chengdu and Chongqing), a regional project
Pun and Chan 389
to link up the economic development between the two cities of Chengdu and
Chongqing, in order to further boost the economy of West China (Xinhua, Mar. 4,
2011). With the encouragement of the central government, local government
leaders promote the export-oriented growth model by creating a businessfriendly
environment on the one hand, and reverse the historical trend of labor
out-migration by improving local employment on the other hand. At the same time,
young workers and married migrants have increasingly taken the job opportunities
opened up in their native place instead of moving to distant provinces. Government
statistics of 2009 showed that East China is still the primary destination for rural
migrant workers nationwide. However, Central and West China have narrowed
the gap: more than 90 million migrants worked in the eastern region, around 24
million in the central region, and nearly 30 million in the western region
(National Bureau of Statistics, 2010). Our study, however, shows that while
Foxconn Chongqing and Foxconn Chengdu were able to recruit laborers from
their respective territories, most of the “local workers” were rural migrants from
the countryside who had to commute for at least a few hours to their workplaces
and were not able to go home on their day off on the weekend.
In short, Foxconn, like other leading investors, is moving energetically to
take advantage of lower wages and local government incentives to build new
production facilities in central and western regions. There are over 30
Foxconn factories across mainland China (in some cities Foxconn operates
more than one production facility; Figure 1).
Local inland governments engage in business partnerships with Foxconn by
providing it with access to land, roads and railways, bank loans, and labor under
their jurisdiction. In June 2009, Sichuan provincial and Chengdu city officials,
to promote the “go west” strategy and the post-2008 earthquake reconstruction
program, led a delegation to Foxconn’s headquarters in Taiwan to sign a memorandum
of cooperation. Chinese officials promised to facilitate the relocation of
more industries to the west, making possible the formation of an efficient supply
chain network like those previously created in Guangdong and in the greater
Shanghai area. A vice director of the Chengdu Hi-Tech Zone recalled that “there
was a great deal of negotiation involved over the last five years before we got his
[Foxconn CEO Terry Gou’s] investment. It was not easy for Chengdu to stand
out in those cities vying for investment” (quoted in China.org.cn, Oct. 28, 2010).
The Sichuan government leaders prioritized the construction of a Foxconn production
complex and dormitories as the “Number One Project” (????).
The US$2 billion Foxconn investment project is the biggest to date in the province
(Xinhua, Oct. 22, 2010). As of the summer of 2010, a total of 14 villages in
Deyuan had been demolished to create the 15-square-kilometer industrial space
designated for a comprehensive Foxconn Living Zone (i.e., approximately five
times larger than the Foxconn’s flagship Longhua factory in Shenzhen). During
390 Modern China 38(4)
Figure 1. Foxconn production facilities in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan
Source. Foxconn Technology Group (www.foxconn.com.cn, 2011).
Note. Foxconn production sites are located in four main geographic clusters:
1. The Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province in the south: Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan,
Zhongshan, and Huizhou
2. The Yangzi River Delta and big cities on the eastern coast: Shanghai, Jiangsu province (Kunshan,
Nanjing, Huai’an, Changshu), Zhejiang province (Hangzhou, Ningbo, Jiashan), and Fujian
province (Xiamen)
3. The Bohai Gulf area and big cities of northern China: Hebei province (Beijing, Tianjin,
Langfang, Qinhuangdao), Shanxi province (Taiyuan, Jincheng), Shandong province (Yantai), and
Liaoning province (Yingkou, Shenyang)
4. The big cities in central and western China: Henan province (Zhengzhou), Hubei province
(Wuhan), Hunan province (Hengyang), Chongqing, Sichuan province (Chengdu), and Guangxi
province (Nanning).
our field observation in March 2011, we learned that the township and village
governments have offered free labor recruitment services for Foxconn Chengdu.
A Sichuan worker colorfully commented,
Pun and Chan 391
Foxconn is hiring, the whole city has gone crazy too (???????).
Local officials grab people and ask if they’d be willing to go work at
Foxconn. The government has made it an official task. Officials at each
level have a recruitment quota. Isn’t this recruitment crazy?
At the government buildings of the towns of Hongguang and Pitong, for
example, the human resources officers directly assisted walk-in job applicants
to arrange interviews at Foxconn. These services, made available since
Foxconn Chengdu commenced its production in the third quarter of 2010,
have greatly lowered corporate recruitment costs.
Moreover, the Sichuan leaders have waived Foxconn a “significant” amount of
rent and tax for the expanding investment projects. The renovated “northern plant”
in the Chengdu Export Processing Zone and the completely new or still-underconstruction
“southern plant” in the Chengdu Hi-Tech Industrial Development
Zone are provided to Foxconn at “far below the market rate.” It is not surprising
that Foxconn CEO Terry Gou praised the government for its cooperation:
[I’m] very much impressed by the efficiency of local government
departments that led to the start of the project. . . . Foxconn will add
investment to make the [Chengdu] factory one of Foxconn’s key production
bases in the world. (quoted in Chengdu Weekly, Jan. 2, 2011)
Perhaps a more significant finding of our fieldwork is the “dispatch” (??)
of students from vocational schools to work in surveyed Foxconn factories
through the mediation of education officers of respective local governments
in Wuhan, Chengdu, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Kunshan, Langfang, and
Taiyuan. Student interviewees reported to us that Education Departments and
government officers in charge have “requested” their schools to arrange
internships at Foxconn factories. Under China’s Education Law, students
who carry out internships organized by their schools maintain a student identity
at all times. Student interns do not receive the protection of the Labor
Law since their relationship with the work organization is not defined as
employment. Since the students are not subject to the Labor Law regulations,
conflicts that arise between the students and the work organization cannot be
handled as labor disputes. As the students are not defined as laborers in the
legal sense, they do not enjoy trade union membership either.
Hence we found that student workers at Foxconn with internships organized
collectively by their schools have become an enormous worker community
in Foxconn factories across the country. The majority of student
interns we encountered came from their second or third year of study, and a
few had just finished their first-year exams in June. Most were 16 to 18 years
392 Modern China 38(4)
of age. Despite the maximum eight-hour work day stipulated by Education
Ministry regulations, the intern workers at Foxconn frequently did excessive
overtime work during the day or night shift. Many students complained that
I feel that what I’ve learned in my major is of no use; I’ve used nothing
here (????).
Regardless of your major, you’re asked to do things they want; there’s
no relation to what you study in school.
We don’t learn any technical skills at Foxconn; every day is just a
repetition of one or two simple motions, like a robot.
Foxconn’s “student internships” are actually a way of implementing “student
labor” (???) to help raise output and increase profits by paying subminimum
wages during the busy season. Foxconn exploits legal loopholes that
do not require it to sign a formal labor contract for the use of student workers.
The cost of labor is further reduced since student interns, unlike migrant workers,
are not entitled to government-run social insurance schemes (since they are
not protected under the labor laws and regulations). In all these ways, Foxconn’s
labor regime—characterized by tight control of workers and super-exploitation
of students—contributes to its rapid capital accumulation.
In short, the dominance of Foxconn, we argue, is achieved through the
dismantling of the socialist economy by the reform and open-door policy in
general and a deepening engagement between local government and capital,
in accumulation specifically, over recent years. Local governments compete
fiercely to host Foxconn production bases to enhance economic growth,
offering lucrative resources to the technology giant. A network of electronics
manufacturing coordinated by Foxconn is thus expanding quickly across
mainland China. Inside the “Foxconn campus,” management organizes labor
processes through a highly centralized and hierarchical production system, in
which the workforce is subjected to a panoptic discipline, resulting in workers’
suicides and resistance (Table 1).
Migrant Workers in the Foxconn “Campus”
A Foxconn “campus”—as the company managers like to call it—is a distinctive
dormitory factory regime, which organizes the sphere of production
and the sphere of reproduction. Foxconn’s biggest manufacturing
campus—Shenzhen Longhua—currently has more than 430,000 workers.
Pun and Chan 393
Table 1. Suicides at Foxconn in China, January 2010–December 2011
Gender Age Native Place
Foxconn
Facility
Date of
Suicide Remarks
1. Rong Bo M 19 Hebei Langfang 8 Jan 2010 Jumped from the
eighth floor
2. Ma Xiangqiana M 19 Henan Guanlan 23 Jan 2010 Fell from building
3. Li (surname) M 20s Henan Longhua 11 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fifth floor
4. Tian Yub F 17 Hubei Longhua 17 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fourth floor
5. Li Weib M 23 Hebei Langfang 23 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fifth floor
6. Liu Zhijun M 23 Hunan Longhua 29 Mar 2010 Jumped from the
fourteenth floor
7. Rao Shuqinb F 18 Jiangxi Guanlan 6 April 2010 Jumped from the
seventh floor
8. Ning (surname) F 18 Yunnan Guanlan 7 April 2010 Jumped from building
9. Lu Xin M 24 Hunan Longhua 6 May 2010 Jumped from the
sixth floor
10. Zhu Chenming F 24 Henan Longhua 11 May 2010 Jumped from the
ninth floor
11. Liang Chao M 21 Anhui Longhua 14 May 2010 Jumped from the
seventh floor
12. Nan Gang M 21 Hubei Longhua 21 May 2010 Jumped from the
fourth floor
13. Li Hai M 19 Hunan Guanlan 25 May 2010 Jumped from the
fourth floor
14. He (surname) M 23 Gansu Longhua 26 May 2010 Jumped from the
seventh floor
15. Chen (surname)b M 25 Hunan Longhua 27 May 2010 Slit his wrists after
failing to jump
16. Liu (surname) M 18 Hebei Nanhai 20 July 2010 Jumped from building
17. Liu Ming F 23 Jiangsu Kunshan 4 Aug 2010 Jumped from the
third floor
18. He (surname) M 22 Hunan Guanlan 5 Nov 2010 Jumped from building
19. Wang Ling F 25 Hebei Longhua 7 Jan 2011 Jumped from the
tenth floor
20. Hou (surname) M 20 Sichuan Chengdu 26 May 2011 Jumped from the
fifth floor
21. Cai (surname) M 21 — Longhua 18 July 2011 Jumped from the
sixth floor
22. Li Baoqiang M 18 Henan Guanlan 15 Oct 2011 Jumped from building
23. Li Rongying F 21 Shanxi Taiyuan 23 Nov 2011 Jumped from building
24. Xie Yanshe M 21 Henan Longhua 26 Nov 2011 Hanged to death
Source. Research data and various news reports.
a. Media reported Ma Xiangqian’s death as the “first” of the thirteen “chain suicide jumpers”
from January 23 to May 27, 2010, at two Foxconn facilities in Longhua and Guanlan towns,
Shenzhen city.
b. Survived with injuries.
394 Modern China 38(4)
This 2.3-square-kilometer campus includes factories, warehouses, twelvestory
dormitories, a psychological counseling clinic, an employee care
center, banks, two hospitals, a library, a post office, a fire brigade with two
fire engines, an exclusive television network, an educational institute,
bookstores, soccer fields, basketball courts, a track and field, swimming
pools, cyber theaters, supermarkets, a collection of cafeterias and restaurants,
and even a wedding dress shop. This main campus is divided into
ten zones, equipped with first-class production facilities and the “best”
living environment since it is the model factory for customers, centraland
local-level governments, and visitors from media organizations and
other inspection units. In the same city of Shenzhen, another production
campus, called Guanlan, composed of over 120,000 workers, has none of
the “additional” facilities of Longhua, consisting exclusively of multistory
factories and high-rise dormitories that are quite common among foreignowned
companies.
In other major Foxconn factory areas, the scale of production and the size
of the workforce are also very large, over 100,000 workers. Within the walls
of Foxconn, most of the employees are young migrants who work and live on
the campuses. In the survey, the average age of Foxconn respondents was
21.1 years; the youngest 15 years. To supplement our structured questionnaires,
we have documented workers’ narratives and field observations to
present the working and everyday lives of the young Foxconn employees.
Our primary concern is the dominating mode of corporate governance and its
impact on workers’ well-being.
In the Foxconn Group, the production lines on the factory floor are centrally
administered by their respective departments or sections, which are
directly responsible to their business units, business divisions, and ultimately
business groups (see Figure 2). At present, there are fifteen Foxconn business
groups in all, differentiated by product specialization and/or corporate
customers.
Foxconn competes on “speed, quality, engineering service, efficiency, and
added value” to maximize profits (Foxconn Technology Group, 2009: 8). Its
13-level management hierarchy with clear lines of command is organized in
a pyramid; in the chain of layers in the workshop alone, frontline workers
face multiple layers of management from assistant line leaders, line leaders,
team leaders, and supervisors (see Figure 3). There is a broad three-tiered
incentive scheme at Foxconn: at the upper stratum are decision-making leaders,
rewarded by the company with share dividends and job tenure for their
loyalty, commitment, and seniority; at the middle level are managing and
supervisory staff, rewarded by housing and monetary benefits; and, at the
Pun and Chan 395
lower rung are ordinary workers, whose wages and welfare are minimal
(Samsung Economic Research Institute, China, 2008: 12).
The labor process in Foxconn is organized by a hierarchical management
principle: “Disassemble the entire industrial process to identify the crucial
points, simplify, and then reassemble the parts as a whole” (Xu and Xu, 2010:
152). Division of labor is so detailed that workers see themselves as merely “a
cog in the machine.” Senior managers formulate strategic plans and rules and
standards and the lower level staffers have to execute them with the lowest costs
to achieve the greatest efficiency. Foxconn production operators in general do
not require “skill” or thought; only strict implementation of instructions from
management and mechanical repetition of each simple movement are required.
Corporate Culture
“Leadership is being decisive. Leadership is a righteous dictatorship.
Leadership is a battle between experimenting and practicality” (????,
????, ??????, ????????????), says Terry Gou,
the CEO and founder of Foxconn (Zhang Dianwen, 2008: 23). Gou’s
1 • Foxconn Group
2 • Business Group*
3 • Business Division
4 • Business Unit
5 • Department / Section
6 • Production Line
* Currently, there are 15 Business Groups in Foxconn.
Figure 2. Foxconn production organization
Source. Foxconn Technology Group (2011).
396 Modern China 38(4)
Quotations evoke collective memories of the older generation of people who
came of age during the collective era and recited Chairman Mao’s Quotations
in political campaigns and in schools. In the Taiwanese-invested firm, when
Foxconn staff test for promotion, some of the test questions are to write
Gou’s Quotations from memory. Several famous examples are:
Execution is the integration of speed, accuracy, and precision (???
??, ????, ??, ???????).
Growth, thy name is suffering (??, ????????).
Outside the lab, there is no high-tech, only execution of discipline
(???????????, ???????). (Zhang Dianwen,
2008: 29, 44, 3)
No admittance except on business—every Foxconn factory building and
dormitory has security checkpoints with guards standing by 24 hours a day.
CEO
Vice
president
General
managers
Associate general
managers
Directors
Managers
Associate managers
Project managers
Supervisors
Team leaders
Line leaders
Assistant line leaders
Production operators & student interns
Figure 3. Foxconn management hierarchy
Source. Foxconn Technology Group (2011).
Pun and Chan 397
In order to enter the shop floor, workers must pass through layers of electronic
gates and inspection systems. Our interviewees repeatedly expressed
the feeling that the entry access system made them feel as if working at
Foxconn is to totally lose one’s freedom:
We’re not allowed to bring cell phones or any metallic objects into the
workshop. They’re confiscated. If there’s a metal button on your clothes
or necklace, it must be removed, otherwise you won’t be allowed in, or
they [security officers] will simply cut the metal button off.
While getting ready to start work on the production line, management will ask
the workers: “How are you?” (???). Workers must respond by shouting in
unison, “Good! Very good! Very, very good!” (?, ???, ???). This
militaristic drilling is said to train workers as disciplined laborers. Production
quotas and quality standards are passed through channels down to the frontline
workers at the lowest level of the pyramid.
Workers recalled how they were punished when they talked on the line,
failed to keep up with the high speed of work, and made mistakes in work
procedures. Several women workers attaching speakers to MP3-format digital
audio players said,
After work, all of us—more than a hundred persons—are made to stay
behind. This happens whenever a worker is punished. A girl is forced
to stand at attention and read aloud a statement of self-criticism. She
must be loud enough to be heard. Our line leader would ask if the
worker at the far end of the workshop could hear clearly the mistake
she made. Oftentimes girls feel they are losing face. It’s very embarrassing.
Her tears drop. Her voice becomes very small. . . . Then the
line leader shouts: “If one worker loses only one minute [by failing to
keep up with the work pace], then, how much more time will be wasted
by a hundred people?”
Line leaders, who are also under pressure, treat workers harshly in order
to reach productivity targets. The bottom line for management is daily output,
not workers’ feelings. Workers, in return, made fun of their line leaders
in their daily life by mocking Foxconn’s “humane management” (????
?) as “human subordination” (?????). A male worker sharply
commented,
If someone makes a mistake at Foxconn, the person below them must
take responsibility. If something bad happens, I get screwed, one level
398 Modern China 38(4)
screws another. . . . Higher-level people vent their anger at those below
them, but who can workers vent to? That’s why frontline workers
jumped from those buildings.
Factory-floor managers and supervisors often give lectures to production
workers at the beginning and the end of the work day. After working
a long shift of a standard 12 hours (of which four hours are illegally
imposed, forced overtime),4 workers still have to stand, for often 15 minutes
to half an hour, and listen to speeches, although the content of such
meetings remains the same: the management evaluates the production target
of the previous shift, reminds workers of the tasks they need to pay
special attention to, and reiterates work rules and regulations. Workers
know too well that branded electronic products are expensive and there is
no margin for mistakes. Several workers at a mobile phone assembly workshop
commented,
We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here. We’re trapped
in a “concentration camp” (???) of labor discipline—Foxconn
manages us through the principle of “obedience, obedience, and absolute
obedience!” (??, ??, ????). Must we sacrifice our dignity
as people for production efficiency?
Despite management’s attempt to take panoptic control over the workers
on the production line, we found that the workers resisted in a variety of
ways, including daily and collective resistance: stealing products, slowdowns,
stoppages, small-scale strikes, and sometimes even sabotage, which
put back production badly. During our research, Foxconn workers informed
us from time to time that if they could not put up with their management on
the line, they would take concerted action and work as slowly as possible in
order to embarrass their line leaders. Once the workers won by having their
line leader changed because this line leader was too harsh; in another
instance, everybody stopped working on the line when the production order
was in a rush, gaining managerial concessions. In short, there are inevitable
tensions and resistance built into the repressive regimen of Foxconn, despite
its hype of harmony and “mutual love and care” (????).
Wages and Work Hours
“Heart to heart, Foxconn and I grow together” (???, ????????)
reads a bright red banner hanging at the new factory in Foxconn Chengdu. It
Pun and Chan 399
suggests that the workers and the company identify with each other as if they
shared one big heart. The corporate propaganda team has created a dream of
riches through labor and has tried to persuade workers that success and
growth are only possible through working diligently. Yet, many workers
debunk these kinds of rosy dreams as distant and unrealistic.
As of March 2011, the basic monthly wage (with 40-hour normal work
weeks) of assembly-line workers was 950 yuan (or US$147) in Foxconn
Chengdu and 1,200 yuan (or US$186) in Foxconn Shenzhen, with all the other
nine surveyed Foxconn factories falling in this range, with variation by geographic
location. All the workers and student interns interviewed had “agreed”
to work overtime to earn more money, totaling 1,600 yuan to 2,000 yuan a
month. The wage rates of average workers at Foxconn, we believe, generally fit
the national pattern: in 2009 the average wages of the 145 million migrant
workers (including overtime) were estimated at 1,417 yuan a month (National
Statistical Bureau, 2010). So the complaints of Foxconn workers center not on
illegal underpayment of wages but on the perceived huge gap between themselves
and their higher-level managers as well as salaried people in the cities.5
Foxconn likes to point out that workers have signed written “agreements” for
overtime. This agreement is meaningless since workers enjoy no effective protection
from being fired for refusing overtime. While the mandatory overtime
work in China stipulated by the Labor Law is 36 hours per month, most of the
Foxconn workers usually have 80 hours of overtime work each month. In our
interviews, workers described “exhaustion to the point of tears.” In our summer
2010 questionnaire survey, more than 80 percent of the 1,736 respondents had
“four days of rest or less in a month” during the peak seasons. Our findings are
highly consistent with that of the 5,044-person survey conducted by the
Shenzhen Human Resources and Social Security Bureau in the same period:
72.5 percent of the Shenzhen Foxconn workforce put up with excessively long
working hours to earn extra income (Diyi caijing ribao, June 17, 2010).
“The People of Foxconn” or ???, literally meaning “wealthy” and
“healthy” people, rings with a dark irony to many “Foxconn People” we
talked to. The Foxconn workers often took this phrase as a joke when they
received their monthly wage. Regarding his present meager wages, one
25-year-old worker—an eminently marriageable age—expressed anxiety
about his future life, and especially after having a family:
I’m no longer able to muddle through my job in Shenzhen. Every
month I make only over a thousand yuan, and if I don’t marry I could
get by a few years, but if I marry, I’ll have to raise kids, it’s really not
enough for that. . . . Our days are truly hectic, and even if you’re strong
400 Modern China 38(4)
it’s difficult. Most people in my dorm are unmarried, and I feel that
married people generally won’t come here, the wages are so low.
Production Intensity and Work Pressure
Workers said that after the basic wage was increased to 1,200 yuan in June
2010, a clear increase in production was scheduled and production intensity
increased. A group of young workers at the Shenzhen Guanlan factory
responsible for processing cell phone casings said, “Production output
was set at 5,120 pieces per day in the past, but it has been raised by 20
percent to 6,400 pieces per day in recent months. We’re completely
exhausted.”
The biggest Longhua factory could produce as many as 137,000 iPhones
in a 24-hour day, or more than 90 a minute, as of September 2010 (Bloomberg
Businessweek, Dec. 9, 2010). Management used stop-watches and computerized
industrial engineering devices to test the capacity of the workers and if
workers being tested were able to meet the quota, the target would be
increased day by day until the capacity of the workers reached the maximum.
Another group of workers at the Kunshan factory commented, “We
can’t stop work for a minute. We’re even faster than machines.” A young
woman worker added, “Wearing gloves would eat into efficiency, we have
a huge workload every day and wearing gloves would influence efficiency.
During really busy times, I don’t even have time to go to the
bathroom or eat.”
Foxconn claimed that production workers who stand during work are
given a ten-minute break every two hours but our interviewees said that
“there is no recess at all,” especially when the shipment is tight. In some
departments where workers nominally can take a break, they are not allowed
to rest if they fail to meet the hourly production target. Working overtime
through the night in the electroplating, stamp-pressing, metal-processing,
paint-spraying, polishing, and surface-finishing units is the toughest, according
to workers interviewed.
Buyers of Foxconn products—the world’s marquee corporations, including
Apple, HP, Intel, Nokia, and so forth—want their computers and iPhones
fast to meet global demand. The corporations pressure Foxconn so that they
can compete against each other on price, quality, and delivery. To fulfill the
requirement of speedy production and shipment deadlines, Foxconn transfers
the work pressure to the frontline workers. For example, Apple has
been trying to get its white models of iPhone 4 out to the market without
delay, while keeping up with the availability of iPhone 4 black models. This
Pun and Chan 401
drive for productivity and quality leads to constant pressure on Foxconn
workers. The electronics parts and components are assembled quickly as
they move up the 24-hour non-stop conveyor belts. Posters on the Foxconn
workshop walls and between staircases read:
Value efficiency every minute, every second (????????)
Achieve goals, otherwise the sun will no longer rise (????, ?
???????)
The devil is in the details (????????)
On an assembly line in the Shenzhen Longhua plant, a worker described
her work to precise seconds: “I take a motherboard from the line, scan the
logo, put it in an antistatic-electricity bag, stick on a label, and place it on the
line. Each of these tasks takes two seconds. Every ten seconds I finish five
tasks.”
Workers reported competing with each other to get a production bonus. In
the workshops where our researchers conducted participant observation, a
company job-evaluation system of Grades A, B, C, D, and Distinction was
applied to encourage workers to do overtime work and not to take leave,
otherwise the bonus would be reduced. Under these circumstances, the pressure
becomes unbearable.
Each frontline worker specializes in one specific task and performs
monotonous, repetitive motions at high speed. The rotating day and night
shift system and extreme work intensity take away any feeling of freshness,
accomplishment, or initiative toward work. In the production process, workers
occupy the lowest position, even below the lifeless machinery. “Workers
come second to and are worn out by the machines,” was one worker’s
insightful summary of the worker–machine relationship. Others shared a
sense of low self-worth: “I’m just a speck of dust in the workshop.” This is
the “renewed” sense of self that arises after countless lectures from section
leaders and production line leaders.
Workers’ awareness of their position was painful: “Fate is not in your
own hands but in your superior’s.” On Foxconn factory floors, conversation
on the production line between assembly workers is forbidden. “You’ll
receive a warning letter for breaking the rule,” a female worker from
Foxconn’s Shenzhen Guanlan plant said. Managers enforced a policy of
demerit points to drive workers to work harder. A 22-year-old worker
explained, “The policy is used to penalize workers for petty offences. You
402 Modern China 38(4)
can lose points for having long nails, being late, yawning, eating, or sitting
on the floor. There’s a whole load of things. Just one point means losing
my monthly bonus.”
A long working day of enforced silence, apart from the noise of the
machines, is the norm. On certain assembly lines, however, workers said
that control over the work pace was much more relaxed because their senior
managers would not be present at the workplace and hence their line leaders
could be a little bit more lenient. At midnight, the workers said, “sometimes
we could talk and laugh if we didn’t affect the production; sometimes we
might fall asleep and fall down on the ground. If we woke up immediately
and continued working, nobody would scold us.” Workers who could not
endure the work pressure and isolation quit within a few months. In the survey
conducted outside of Foxconn’s Hangzhou factory, a woman worker
who had just quit said, “It’s such a cold environment on the shop floor. It
makes me feel depressed. If I continue to work at Foxconn, I may commit
suicide too.”
Loneliness and Fragmented Lives
Foxconn provides workers with “conveniences” (????) such as collective
dormitories, canteens, services, and entertainment facilities in
order to incorporate the entire living space under the factory’s management,
serving the just-in-time global production strategy. To a large
extent, workers’ living space is merely an extension of the workshop.
Food and drink, sleep, washing, and other aspects of workers’ daily lives
are scheduled just like the production lines, with the goal not to satisfy
workers’ needs as people but rather to reproduce workers’ physical
strength at the lowest cost and shortest time in order to satisfy the factory’s
production requirements. But at Foxconn, there is no true rest even
after getting off from work. Workers with different jobs and even nightshift
and day-shift workers are mixed into the same dormitory. As a result,
workers frequently disrupt each others’ rest because of different working
hours. In addition, random dormitory assignments often break up existing
networks of social relations, hindering communication and interaction
between workers. In this lonely space, workers have forfeited their personal
and social lives.
All the Foxconn production sites feature a combination of factories and
dormitories—its Shenzhen facilities have the astonishing number of 33
company dormitories with another 120 rented dormitories in the nearby
Pun and Chan 403
community. The Foxconn Group is now trying to shift production workers
from its higher cost, overcrowded Shenzhen site to other facilities. The
dormitory labor regime remains unchanged. Most migrant workers live in
the dormitories, but they do not have a normal life in their “home”—they
are living with strangers, not allowed to cook, and not permitted to receive
friends or families overnight. Whether the worker is single or married, he
or she is assigned a bunk space for one person. The private space is virtually
reduced to one’s own bed behind a self-made curtain.
From the perspective of labor control, these factory-provided dormitories
mean that production and labor reproduction activities take place in a
self-contained, all-encompassing geographical locality. This facilitates
flexible production through imposing overtime work, as the distinction
between “home” and “work” is blurred. The lengthening of a work-day to
24 hours to meet the global production schedule means that the appropriation
of labor surplus is absolute. Such a socio-spatial arrangement strengthens
managerial domination, wherein control over labor is extended from
the factory shop floor to the sphere of everyday life. The dormitory labor
system is a cost-efficient solution for companies like Foxconn to ensure
that workers spend their off-hours just preparing for another round of production.
Thus, workers face a double pressure within and outside the factory,
to the extent that workers are stripped of social living spaces.
Company policy clearly isolates workers, making it difficult to organize
collective action. Localistic and friendship networks are weakened or cut off.
A worker acutely observed,
Our batch of new hires totaled 120 persons. Most of us came from
schools in Hubei; mine has 20 people. The company divided us into
five different groups for training. After training, I was assigned to an
assembly line. My new friends, whom I met during the training, were
all placed in different positions. . . . I consider this arrangement as a
way of preempting workers from “making trouble” (??). This is why
Foxconn workers are free to jump from buildings but not to “make
trouble.”
As a result, interpersonal relations between workers are very weak, despite
the fact that most are in their late teens or early 20s. Now we begin to understand
why some workers have taken their lives.
Tian Yu is a 17-year-old survivor. On March 17, 2010, this carefree girl
who once loved laughing and flowers jumped off the fourth floor of the
404 Modern China 38(4)
Shenzhen Longhua factory worker dormitory. Compared with over a dozen
other young lives that were ended, she was lucky—she lived. Yet in some
ways she is less fortunate, because her young body remains paralyzed after
many surgeries, and she will spend the rest of her life in a hospital bed or
wheelchair.
Inside the “forbidden Foxconn city,” all production workers, like Tian
Yu before her tragedy, go to work, return exhausted from overtime work, go
to sleep, have no free time to themselves, and no “extra” time for each
other. A typical work day begins at 8 am and finishes at 8 pm. On the
product-parts inspection line, Tian Yu was often reprimanded by her line
leaders for poor quality, rejected parts, and “not working fast enough.” Her
seven roommates in the dormitory were all from other business groups;
there was no one to share the hardships at work. In her only 30-odd work
days, she could not overcome the deep state of helplessness, and decided to
end her life. She calmly recalled in the ward:
I entered Foxconn on February 8, 2010, and asked to go straight to
work the next morning. In the enormous factory, I lost my way.
Finally I arrived at the line—late at my first day of work. . . . At the
time when I should have received my first month’s wages, I didn’t
get my wage-card. I asked my line leader what went wrong. She
simply told me to ask at the Guanlan plant [an hour away by bus].
There, I asked one after another and still couldn’t find a clue. I was
like a ball being kicked around (?????????). No one
tried to help.
Anger and frustration built up. Instead of going to work early the next
morning, Tian took desperate action.
Foxconn entered Shenzhen in 1988, but the Longhua plant set up a
trade union only at the end of 2006, under the double pressure of media
publicity exposure of their Apple-branded iPod manufacturing conditions
and the mobilization of the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions. The
Foxconn union chairwoman is a special assistant to the CEO. Apparently,
Foxconn workers, like most Chinese workers, lack the means to appeal
for help. Among the 1,736 worker survey respondents, nearly 90 percent
said they did not participate in a trade union, 40 percent believed that the
factory had no union, and the majority do not understand the function of
a trade union.
In the wake of the multiple suicides, Foxconn dormitories throughout the
country were all wire-grilled. The company installed 3,000,000-square-meters of
Pun and Chan 405
safety nets, which were hung around outdoor stairways of dormitory buildings to
prevent employees from jumping. Workers now live “in a cage” (????).
Conclusion
We may say that Foxconn is a new development of monopoly capital
which is generating a gigantic global factory regime that dominates the
lives of the new generation of Chinese migrant workers and creates new
forms of hardship and suffering to an extent not confronted by the previous
generation of migrant workers. The market dominance of the millionworker-
strong Foxconn corporation is facilitated by a deepening process
of China’s economic transformation at the national level as well as a
deepening alliance between business and local governments. Factory relocation
costs are reduced as officials in interior provinces compete for
investment to the extent that they disregard fundamental principles of
labor and educational law enforcement. Despite central government leaders’
call for industrial restructuring, the mainstream approach of rightssuppressed,
low-cost exports remains intact. From the lived experiences
of migrant workers and student interns, it is clear that they face severe
difficulties in seeking to safeguard their rights and have their grievances
redressed. Contradictions between capital and labor have cumulated at the
point of production, resulting in widespread labor grievances as well as
struggles.
Foxconn as a form of monopoly capital generates a global “race to the
bottom” production strategy and repressive mode of management that
weighs heavily on the rural migrant workers who form its work force,
depriving them of their hopes, their dreams, and their future. Within the
walled cities of Foxconn, workers are struggling to improve their lives in
the face of a factory discipline requiring that they meet ever higher productivity
demands. When the Chinese government does not enforce labor
law, employers like Foxconn feel free to ignore state restrictions on overtime
in order to flexibly meet global just-in-time manufacturing and logistic
imperatives. On the factory floor, work stress associated with the
“scientific” production mode and inhumane management is intense.
Alienation of labor and the lack of social support are common experiences.
Young migrant workers in their late teens to mid-20s, who have been
placed in the “first-class” Foxconn factory-cum-dormitory environment,
have experienced severe loneliness, anxiety, and alienation. Suicide is
merely the extreme manifestation of the migrant work experience for hundreds
of millions.
406 Modern China 38(4)
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful for the support of the independent Foxconn Research Group,
especially Lu Huilin, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, and the postgraduate students of Peking
University, Tsinghua University, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. We are
also thankful to Mark Selden, Chris Smith, Jos Gamble, Yunchung Chen, Debby
Chan, Yiyi Cheng, Jack Qiu, and Gregory Fay.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Appendix
Surveyed Foxconn Factories in 11 Chinese Cities, June 2010
–November 2011
Names Main Products No. of Workforce
Foxconn Shenzhen
(Longhua and Guanlan
towns)
iPhones, iPads, iPods, printers,
game consoles, e-book
readers, TVs, MP3 players,
cameras
500,000+
Foxconn Kunshan (Jiangsu) Electronic connectors 80,000+
Foxconn Nanjing (Jiangsu) Software, electronic
components
20,000+
Foxconn Shanghai
(Songjiang district)
Personal computers, network
devices
20,000+
Foxconn Tianjin Servers, memory chips,
routers
20,000+
Foxconn Taiyuan (Shanxi) Raw material processing,
electronic components
80,000+
Foxconn Langfang (Hebei) Mobile phones 150,000+
Foxconn Hangzhou
(Zhejiang)
Wireless communications
equipment
80,000+
Foxconn Wuhan (Hubei) Personal computers, cameras,
game consoles
50,000+
Foxconn Chongqing Laptops and TouchPads
(exclusively for HP)
20,000+
Foxconn Chengdu
(Sichuan)
iPads (exclusively for Apple) 150,000+
Source. Adapted from various Foxconn publications and authors’ field notes.
Pun and Chan 407
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article:
Funding support was received from two research grants from the Hong Kong
Polytechnic University, titled “The Making of Trans-Border Community in the Pearl
River Delta: A Trans-Border Urban Governance Analysis” and “The Making of Working
Class Community: Space, Gender and Labor,” and a Reid Research Scholarship from the
University of London.
Notes
1. The first author carried out four field trips in the cities of Shenzhen, Kunshan,
Taiyuan, Chongqing, and Chengdu in the summer of 2010, October 2010,
December 2010, and March 2011; the second author conducted a one-month
investigation in Chongqing and Chengdu in March 2011 and revisited the
industrial community in Shenzhen from mid-October to November 2011. Both
researchers have been members of the joint-university Foxconn Research Group
since its establishment in June 2010.
2. Foxconn Technology Group owns manufacturing facilities and research and
development centers in Taiwan, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia, New
Zealand, the Middle East, Southeast and South Asia, Russia, Europe, and the
Americas.
3. Foxconn manages chain stores (e.g., Wan Ma Ben Teng, Media Mart [Wan
de cheng], and CyberMart [Saibo shuma guangchang]) in big cities, tapping
into the growing domestic consumer market. China’s domestic market grew
by close to 10 percent in 2011, much faster than either the United States or
Europe.
4. According to China’s Labor Law (effective January 1, 1995) and Labor Contract
Law (effective January 1, 2008), to ensure occupational health and safety,
overtime hours may not exceed one to three hours in a day and 36 hours in a
month.
5. Mark Selden and Wu Jieh-min (2011: table 6) analyze the ratios between average
urban employee wages and local minimum wages in Shanghai, Suzhou, and
Shenzhen, respectively (1992–2008). The ratios will be even higher if the differences
in welfare benefits are taken into account.
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Biographies
Pun Ngai is an associate professor in the Department of Applied Social Sciences,
Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Her current research interests include labor,
gender, socialist theory, and history.
Jenny Chan is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History and Social Sciences, Royal
Holloway, University of London. Her current research interests include labor processes,
social movements, and globalization.