In October, when David Barboza published his Wen Jiabao investigation, Chinese officials lashed out, accusing him of having “ulterior motives” and trying to “smear” China. The New York Times website was blocked in China, and it was later revealed that the newspaper’s headquarters were subjected to a sustained hacking effort, which appeared to be aimed at acquiring Barboza’s personal communications. Bloomberg, which published an investigative report on the networks of power and wealth surrounding current President Xi Jinping, was also blocked in China and hacked following the report.

Following the Pulitzer announcement, Chinese authorities repeated the accusations against the New York Times. From AFP (via Economic Times):

The story, which was published in October last year, alleged close relatives of Wen have made billions of dollars in business dealings.

It provoked anger from authorities in China, who said it was part of a “smear” by “voices” opposed to the country’s development. The Times’ Chinese and English websites were subsequently blocked in China and remain inaccessible.

“Our position towards this issue is very clear. We believe the relevant report by the New York Times reporter is with ulterior motives,” foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said at a regular press briefing Tuesday.

Foreign reporters based in China know they face consequences from authorities if their reporting delves into areas the government does not want exposed. ChinaFile hosted a roundtable discussion titled, “Why Does China Mess with the Foreign Press?”, in which Columbia University’s Andrew Nathan discusses the widespread perception among China’s leaders that such investigative reports are sourced by players with their own political agenda:

A senior Chinese whose job it is to gather intelligence asked me both of these questions –why did the Times attack the premier and who gave them the information — and was incredulous when I answered that the wealth of Wen’s wife had been widely known for years, and this was a story just waiting to be written by a reporter with the skills to get the facts. He must have thought I was either naive or a liar. Such is the paranoia of the Chinese political class.

David Barboza has explained that all his reporting was based on scrupulous reading of public documents. Isabel Hilton points out that Chinese reporters often face harsher consequences for their investigative reports, and cites the case of Jiang Weiping, who was imprisoned for his reporting on Bo Xilai and other local officials in the 1990s.

Update: In a further crackdown on foreign media, the State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a directive this week forbidding journalists from “using news or informational products from foreign media or foreign websites” without prior permission.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2013. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, david barboza, foreign correspondents, foreign media, Foxconn, jiang weiping, new york times, press freedom, Wen Jiabao
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Where the old guard of Chinese contemporary art lived through the Cultural Revolution, the experiences of this new generation are more rooted in the everyday competition of urban life, and the rapid changes that China has gone through as they grew up. For one installation, the 30-year-old artist Li Liao laboured at a Foxconn factory for 45 days. With his wages he bought the very iPad Mini model he had been assembling. He displays it—alongside his work overalls, identity badges and contract—as “Consumption”. (The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has posted an interview with Mr Li.)

But they are not entirely divorced from the past. In another work, Zhao Zhao, a 30-year-old former assistant of Ai Weiwei, cut cubes out of stone Buddha statues that had been destroyed by Red Guards, “to return them to their original state…in a repetition of history”. And that tank fashioned from leather cannot help but hold a particular charge in a post-1989 Chinese setting, even if the artist who conceived it, He Xiangyu, was only three years old when those tanks rolled into central Beijing.

Bao Dong, himself 33 and one of the exhibit’s two curators, said that “since 2000…China’s artists no longer only face an autocratic system but one of soft power. The market and capitalism [is] a soft, invisible cage.” It takes just as much courage to be original and daring in these conditions, he thinks, and such is the challenge for young artists who have “grown up in a society and culture beset by binaries, constantly toggling between extremes”.

Photographs and more information on the exhibition are available at the Ullens Center’s website.

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Post tags: art, art exhibition, artists, Cultural Revolution, Evan Osnos, Foxconn, IPad, June 4th, Red Guards, Tiananmen Square
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The Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing has an intriguing new take on China’s place in the debate over Apple, iPhones, and the people who make them. While Americans hash out the moral ups and downs of having our electronics produced by Chinese factory hands, a young performance artist named Li Liao decided to jump into the middle of it. He got an assembly-line job making iPads, and forty-five days later he used his wages to buy one. As an exhibit, he put the iPad on a pedestal, tacked up his uniform and badges, and framed his contract. The effect, on a white gallery wall, is a strangely addictive ready-made tableau about the intersection of money, aspiration, and technology. I watched two young men separately linger over it for very different reasons: one was a hip Chinese gallerygoer in chunky glasses and a camel-hair coat, taking it all in; the other was a gallery security guard in a borrowed suit and white gloves. He was studying the details of the contract.

Did the experience change your perceptions of Apple one way or the other?

I worked at Foxconn for forty-five days. Before that, I was already an Apple consumer. I don’t think this experience changed my perception of the products; it only made one thing clearer: many of the products in this world actually have nothing to do with the workers who made them. To most of the workers there, Apple was just a name, a logo.

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When Ms. Pu was hired at this Foxconn plant a year earlier, she received a short, green plastic stool that left her unsupported back so sore that she could barely sleep at night. Eventually, she was promoted to a wooden chair, but the backrest was much too small to lean against. The managers of this 164,000-employee factory, she surmised, believed that comfort encouraged sloth.

But in March, unbeknown to Ms. Pu, a critical meeting had occurred between Foxconn’s top executives and a high-ranking Apple official. The companies had committed themselves to a series of wide-ranging reforms. Foxconn, China’s largest private employer, pledged to sharply curtail workers’ hours and significantly increase wages — reforms that, if fully carried out next year as planned, could create a ripple effect that benefits tens of millions of workers across the electronics industry, employment experts say.

Other reforms were more personal. Protective foam sprouted on low stairwell ceilings inside factories. Automatic shut-off devices appeared on whirring machines. Ms. Pu got her chair. This autumn, she even heard that some workers had received cushioned seats.

The changes also extend to California, where Apple is based. Apple, the electronics industry’s behemoth, in the last year has tripled its corporate social responsibility staff, has re-evaluated how it works with manufacturers, has asked competitors to help curb excessive overtime in China and has reached out to advocacy groups it once rebuffed.

Foxconn, which manufactures electronics for the likes of Apple, Dell, Samsung and others, pledged earlier this year to improve conditions in its factories after the Fair Labor Association published a report finding violations of both Chinese law and industry codes of conduct. Apple also issued a statement to The New York Times in response to its questions for the article:

“Apple takes working conditions very seriously and we have for a long time. Our efforts range from protecting to empowering to improving the lives of everyone involved in assembling an Apple product. No one in our industry is doing as much as we are, in as many places, touching as many people as we do. Through years of hard work and steadfast commitment, we have set workplace, dormitory and safety standards, sought help from the world’s leading experts, and established groundbreaking educational programs for workers. Since 2008, more than 200,000 factory workers have taken free classes including college-level courses provided by Apple, and over one million employees have been educated on their rights through our worker empowerment training program.

“We believe workers everywhere have the right to a safe and fair work environment where they can earn competitive wages and express their concerns freely. Our suppliers have to live up to that if they want to do business with Apple.

…

“Apple is in a unique position to lead and we have embraced this role since the earliest days of our supplier responsibility program. We do all these things out of respect for our customers and, most of all, the people who make our products.”

See also the New York Times’ previous in-depth reporting on Foxconn as part of their iEconomy series: Part 1: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work and Part 2: In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad . Read more about Foxconn, Apple and labor conditions in China via CDT, including, “This American Life’s Foxconn Retraction: Reactions,” which looks at recent coverage of Foxconn.

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The translations are by Rogier Creemers of China Copyright and Media.

17 March 2007, 23:26

All websites: Concerning the mass-type incident in Lusong District, Zhuzhou City, Hunan, only use Xinhua and Hunan provincial news website copy, do not open trackers, it is not permitted to publish information from other sources. Website forums and blogs may also not discuss this.

17 March 2007, 23:23:02

Concerning the mass-type incident in Lusong District, Zhuzhou City, Hunan, only use Xinhua and Hunan provincial news website copy, do not open trackers, it is not permitted to publish information from other sources. Website forums and blogs may also not discuss this.

16 March 2007, 18:39:31

Do not report the situation of the China Huawen Investment Co. Ltd.

Do not report the situation of the China Huawen Investment Co. Ltd., forums, blogs and other interactive segments are not to discuss this.

16 March 2007, 18:35:01

Important correction notice: Data concerning network questions at Premier Wen’s press conference this morning.

The data concerning netizens’ questions to premier Wen provided at Premier Wen’s press conference of this morning is corrected as follows: “Only on the Internet, more than 100,000 questions were asked to premier Wen, the number of individual clicks exceeded 26 million.” All websites are requested to rapidly correct this.

16 March 2007, 18:27:27

The article “Beijing Researches Salary Incentive Mechanisms–Plans to Compensate Meritorious Retiring SOE Bosses” is inaccurate, where it has been reprinted, please delete it, forums and blogs are not to discuss this.

19 March 2007, 18:16:28

The post “The True Story of Foxconn Coming to Shenzhen” and corresponding information is not to be disseminated, news, forums and blogs may not disseminate or discuss it, existing posts are to be deleted without exception.

19 March 2007, 17:25:58

Concerning the selection of the Hong Kong Chief Executive, transmit Xinhua or People’s Daily Net copy without exception, other reports may not be reprinted; at the same time, manage forums, blogs and other interactive segments well, strictly block discussions seizing the opportunity to attack our political system or “one country, two systems.”

19 March 2007, 17:23:05

On the incident that happened in two mosques in Pinglang City, Gansu, do not reprint corresponding reports without exceptions, this may not be disseminated on interactive segments.

19 March 2007, 16:11

All websites: Please put the People’s Daily comment “Strengthen a Concerned Mentality–Eagerly Pioneer and Forge Ahead” on the main page of websites and in the header of the news center and maintain it there until 9:00 AM tomorrow.

20 March 2007, 9:43

(1) Urgent! All websites are to speedily delete the text “Mainland Tourists Hope to Travel to Taiwan on May Day.”

(2) All websites: Premier Wen will visit Japan at the end of the month, for reports involving the Sino-Japanese relationship in the near future, strictly manage trackers well, delete those irrational and jeering discussions. Now, please earnestly delete trackers for “Professor Suggests Chinese and Japanese Academics to Go to Nanjing to Discuss the Issue of the Massacre,” “Joint Sino-Japanese History Research to Include the Topic of the Responsibility for the Japanese War,” and other reports.

20 March 2007, 10:01

All websites are requested to conduct a complete clean-up of their website’s audiovisual and podcast content from 20 March to 25 March, delete information involving reactionary and obscene content and uncivilized content, we will inspect this especially next week.

2007年3月北京网管办发出的禁令（二）

2007年3月17日23:26

各网：关于湖南省株洲市芦淞区群体性事件，只采用新华社和湖南省新闻网站稿件，不开跟贴，不得刊登其他来源的消息。网站论坛、博客也不得讨论。
2007-03-17 23:23:02

关于湖南省株洲市芦淞区群体性事件，只采用新华社和湖南省新闻网站稿件，不开跟贴，不得刊登其他来源的消息。网站论坛、博客也不得讨论。
2007-03-16 18:39:41

有关中国华闻投资有限公司的情况不报道

有关中国华闻投资有限公司的情况不报道，论坛、博客等互动环节不讨论。

2007-03-16 18:35:01

重要更正通知:今天上午温总理记都会关于网络问题的数据

今天上午温总理记者招待会上有关网民向总理提问题的数据更正如下：“单就互联网上向总理提问题的已经超过10万多条，点击的人数超过2600万人次。”请各网站速更正。
2007-03-16 18:27:27

北京研究薪酬激励机制 拟补偿有功退休国企老总一稿失实，已转的请删除，论坛，博客不讨论。

2007-03-19 18:16:28

《富士康引出深圳真相》的贴文及相关信息不传播，新闻、论坛、博客不传播、不讨论，已有的贴文一律删除。
2007-03-19 17:25:58

有关香港特首的选举，一律转载新华社、人民网的稿件，不得转载之外的报道；同时要管理好论坛、博客等互动环节，严格封堵借机攻击我政治制度、一国两制的言论。

2007-03-19 17:23:05

发生在甘肃省平良市两座清真寺的事件,一律不转载相关报道,互动环节不传播。
2007年3月19日16时11分

各网:请将人民日报社论《增强忧患意识 锐意开拓进取》在网站首页、新闻中心大头条位置保持至明天早晨9时。
07年3月20日09时43分

1. 加急！各网迅速删除“大陆游客有望五一赴台旅游”一文

2.各网：温总理将于本月底访日，近期涉及中日关系的报道请严格管理跟帖，删除那些非理智、谩骂的言论。现在，请认真清理《教授建议中日学者去南京讨论大屠杀问题》、《中日历史共同研究将列入日本战争责任议题》等报道的跟帖。
07年3月20日10时01分

请各网站于3月20日至25日，对本网站视频、播客内容进行全面清查，删除涉及反动、淫秽内容及不文明内容的信息，我们将于下周专项检查。

These translated directives were first posted by Rogier Creemers on China Copyright and Media on December 19, 2012 (here). This post is the 42nd in the series.

© Anne.Henochowicz for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
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During its traditional disassembly of one of Apple’s latest desktops, however, repair guide site iFixit noted that “Interestingly, this iMac claims to have been assembled in the USA.” While custom-configured, American-assembled Macs are not unheard of, other reports have also surfaced of new, standard-configuration iMacs bearing the “Assembled in USA” marking. At 9to5 Mac, Seth Weibtraub tried to unravel the mystery:

The “Assembled in USA” label doesn’t just mean that foreign parts screwed together in the U.S. either. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission assumes that a ”substantial transformation” must happen in the U.S. for the label to be used.

Specifically, the FTC states that the label “Assembled in the USA” should be the following:

A product that includes foreign components may be called “Assembled in USA” without qualification when its principal assembly takes place in the U.S. and the assembly is substantial. For the “assembly” claim to be valid, the product’s last “substantial transformation” also should have occurred in the U.S. That’s why a “screwdriver” assembly in the U.S. of foreign components into a final product at the end of the manufacturing process doesn’t usually qualify for the “Assembled in USA” claim.

[…] Perhaps Apple is still outsourcing the manufacture to Foxconn and others, but it is actually assembling the products in a U.S. plant? To the surprise of some, Foxconn has a few locations in the U.S., but it isn’t known if they are actually making anything here.

Weintraub also pointed out another case of an iMac “Assembled in Ireland”.

The discovery coincides with a feature at The Atlantic by Charles Fishman, on America’s “Insourcing Boom”. Fishman explains how rising oil prices and wages in China, booming natural gas production and greatly increased productivity in the U.S., and unanticipated benefits from designing and building appliances in the same location have, in many cases, reversed the logic for manufacturing in China. He focuses on General Electric’s huge Appliance Park facility in Louisville, Kentucky, whose workforce hit a low of 1,863 last year after a 1973 peak of 23,000.

[… T]his year, something curious and hopeful has begun to happen, something that cannot be explained merely by the ebbing of the Great Recession, and with it the cyclical return of recently laid-off workers. On February 10, Appliance Park opened an all-new assembly line in Building 2—largely dormant for 14 years—to make cutting-edge, low-energy water heaters. It was the first new assembly line at Appliance Park in 55 years—and the water heaters it began making had previously been made for GE in a Chinese contract factory.

[…] In the midst of this revival, [GE CEO Jeffrey] Immelt made a startling assertion. Writing in Harvard Business Review in March, he declared that outsourcing is “quickly becoming mostly outdated as a business model for GE Appliances.” Just four years after he tried to sell Appliance Park, believing it to be a relic of an era GE had transcended, he’s spending some $800 million to bring the place back to life. “I don’t do that because I run a charity,” he said at a public event in September. “I do that because I think we can do it here and make more money.”

Immelt hasn’t just changed course; he’s pirouetted.

[…] What’s happening in factories across the U.S. is not simply a reversal of decades of outsourcing. If there was once a rush to push factories of nearly every kind offshore, their return is more careful; many things are never coming back. Levi Strauss used to have more than 60 domestic blue-jeans plants; today it contracts out work to 16 and owns none, and it’s hard to imagine mass-market clothing factories ever coming back in significant numbers—the work is too basic.

[…] And of course, manufacturing employment will never again be as central to the U.S. economy as it was in the 1960s and ’70s—improvements in worker productivity alone ensure that. Back in the ’60s, Appliance Park was turning out 250,000 appliances a month. The assembly lines there today are turning out almost as many—with at most one-third of the workers.

See also ‘Made in US, But Sold in China‘ at CDT.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, exports, Foxconn, GE, imports, labor costs, manufacturing, natural gas, oil prices, United States
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The case involves Zhang Tingzhen, a 26-year-old engineer who had nearly half his brain surgically removed after surviving an electric shock a year ago.

His plight came to light after Reuters reported that Taiwan firm Foxconn sent telephone text messages to his family telling them it would cut off funding for his treatment and other expenses if they did not remove him from hospital in Shenzhen city and submit him for a disability assessment 70 km (43 miles) away in Huizhou, where the company says he was hired.

But his father, Zhang Guangde, is contesting that and says his son was hired in Shenzhen, not Huizhou, where wages and compensation levels are substantially lower than in Shenzhen.

[…] Labour activists say Zhang’s case highlights a common practice among large companies in China, which sign work contracts with employees in inner Chinese cities, where wages and compensations levels are relatively low, and then deploy them to work in more expensive cities.

Meanwhile, after Foxconn recently admitted to using underage laborers on its assembly lines, David Pierson at the Los Angeles Times examines local governments’ role in such labor rights violations:

The controversy also highlights the role of China’s vocational schools, which labor activists say are paid by companies to provide them with low-wage factory hands.

“The basic point of the system is to provide cheap labor to manufacturers,” said Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong nonprofit promoting workers’ rights. “Ideally, you go to vocational school to learn a trade so that you’re in a good position to get a job when you graduate. In reality, the vocational schools make money by sending kids to factories. It’s a fairly manipulated form of labor available to manufacturers whenever they need it.”

[…] Many vocational schools are run by local authorities, who are eager to help major employers such as Foxconn fill their assembly lines, especially during peak production periods. In return, vocational schools are paid about $100 for each intern they provide to a factory, according to the New York-based China Labor Watch.

[…] ”None of us wanted to work there, but we had no choice,” said another of the interns, a lanky 15-year-old with a peach-fuzz crew cut assigned to put finished PlayStations into boxes. “You can’t fight the school and the system.”

See more on Foxconn via CDT.

© Mengyu Dong for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: child labor, Foxconn, labor conditions, labor disputes, labor rights, migrant workers, rights lawyers
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By chance, I watched that debate a few miles from where many of those iPads, Macs, and iPhones are made in southern China. The following day — today, Thursday, China time — I was inside the most famous of these outsourcing centers. This is the Foxconn “campus” in the Longhua area of Shenzhen, north of Hong Kong. Some 220,000 people work there; about a quarter of them live on site; and several thousand new employees are recruited, trained, and brought onto staff each week, because turnover at Foxconn and many of these Chinese manufacturing centers is so high. Foxconn has been controversial over the years because of allegations of sweatshop operation and of militaristic surveillance and discipline, plus a wave of worker suicides in 2010. I’ll have more to say on the current state of Chinese manufacturing at Foxconn and elsewhere very soon, with a now-very-much-overdue article in the magazine.

[...]

I am always surprised by things in China, but this day was at the more-surprising-than-usual end of the spectrum

For more images of the Foxconn campus, see photos by Jordan Pouille. See also a post about a recent strike by Foxconn workers in Zhengzhou. Read more about Foxconn via CDT.

© Sophie Beach for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Foxconn, James Fallows, labor conditions, migrant workers
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[Foxconn recruiter] Wang Chunpei received some phone calls and messages on October 6 from some workers on strike in the campus, requesting him not to employ new workers and to join the strike. Wang said there were three to four thousand workers that refused to work overtime. He told the reporter, until the night of October 6, there were still many people that protested by refusing to work. Until 12 AM, striking employees were “suppressed” by assistant security guards at Foxconn. Several workers who led the strike were forced to resign, and the line leader who first initiated the verbal conflict with workers “cannot work here any more”.

On October 6, Foxconn spokesperson Liu Kun told the media, “the labor union has been trying its best to communicate, and this situation has essentially calmed down.” However, he did not explain the specific causes of this strike.

After interviewing several Foxconn workers, this reporter learned that this conflict originated from the fact that the three-day break for the national holiday in Foxconn was not implemented in all production facilities. Some production facilities had no day off during the holiday, including some production lines in Area K (there are eight areas, including A, K, B, E, C, F, D, L, and Area K, F, and L are all assembling iPhones).

Other workers talked about excessive pressures they face to complete difficult tasks and work overtime due to a labor shortage at the facility. A Foxconn executive told the Examiner that the low supply of iPhone 5s is due to the challenges in building the product. In the same interview, he acknowledged an incident between workers and management at the Zhengzhou plant, where iPhone 5s are produced:

The iPhone 5 is being assembled at Foxconn plants in Zhengzhou and Guan Lan, China. Although Foxconn earlier denied any labor unrest at the Zhengzhou plant, the executive did mention the recent conflict between assembly line workers and quality inspectors in Zhengzhou last month.

That conflict was said to be due to new quality control procedures put in place to alleviate scratch problems with the iPhone 5′s aluminum casing. He added, “The Zhengzhou site, which was set up in 2011, is still pretty new to us. We are still learning how to manage the work force there.”

Read more about Foxconn via CDT.

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The Taiwanese company, which also uses the trade name Foxconn Technology Group, 2038.HK +2.07%said that it had employed interns as young as 14 at its campus in Yantai, in the northeastern Chinese province of Shandong, for approximately three weeks. Hon Hai said it took “immediate steps” to return the interns to their educational institutions.

The company didn’t disclose specifics, including how many were hired, and it wasn’t clear what products are made at the plant. But it said in a statement that despite “a strict company policy of not commenting on our customers or their products,” that “our Yantai facility has no association with any work we carry out on behalf of Apple.”

Reuters has more on Foxconn’s statement to the public:

“This is not only a violation of China’s labour law, it is also a violation of Foxconn policy and immediate steps have been taken to return the interns in question to their educational institutions,” it said.

Foxconn made the announcement after investigating Chinese media reports of underage interns among its China workforce of 1.2 million. It said it had found no evidence of similar violations at any of its other plants in China.

Foxconn said it would work with local government to bar the schools involved in the Yantai case from the intern program unless shown to be compliant with labour law and company policy.

“However, we recognize that full responsibility for these violations rests with our company and we have apologized to each of the students for our role in this action,” the firm said.

The acknowledgement from Foxconn came in response to Chinese media reports and a statement from China Labor Watch. The U.S.-based NGO said that the interns were “mainly sent to Foxconn by schools” and that the schools involved should take responsibility, according to BBC News, though the group also admitted that Foxconn did not check their identification and should also accept blame. Duncan Innes-Ker of the Economist Intelligence Unit told BBC News that the problem stretches beyond fake IDs:

“The market for relatively unskilled labour in China has been tightening, and now there is even more incentive for companies to relax their standards, so they try and fill up their work spaces,” he said.

“Companies do have a responsibility to check with the people that they are hiring are above that age.

“The difficulty is the enforcement of regulation which in China has been a grey area for a number of years.”

Foxconn said that 2.7 percent of its 1.2m workforce are currently interns, according to The Financial Times.

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Post tags: Apple, child labor, Foxconn, interns, Shandong, Yantai
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[…] In addition to demanding that workers work during the holiday, Foxconn raised overly strict demands on product quality without providing worker training for the corresponding skills. This led to workers turning out products that did not meet standards and ultimately put a tremendous amount of pressure on workers. Additionally, quality control inspectors fell into to conflicts with workers and were beat up multiple times by workers. […]

CLW’s release states that these conditions led to a strike involving as many as 4,000 workers at Foxconn’s Zhengzhou plant. This report was swiftly picked up by the tech and general media, but Adam Minter at Shanghai Scrap and Stan Abrams at China Hearsay both expressed reservations. At Bloomberg View on Wednesday, Minter dug deeper into the strike story’s origins and development, and found the single Weibo user who may have knocked $13 billion off Apple’s market cap.

As the story grew, journalists and bloggers who tried to confirm the event found themselves forced to rely on China Labor Watch’s word. Meanwhile, Foxconn, Apple’s primary contractor and the owner of the factory where the alleged strike occurred, denied that anything more than several isolated incidents between workers and quality control personnel had occurred and insisted that iPhone 5 production would not be delayed.

The lack of additional information is highly unusual: In contemporary China, it’s the rare brawl that isn’t recorded by somebody’s smartphone, while large-scale unrest is either accompanied or followed by a virtual data dump of accounts, photos and films. To be sure, Foxconn restricts the ability of its employees to carry phones into factories, but there’s no question that many Foxconn employees not only have smartphones (a brief perusal of Foxconn employees who tweet to Sina Weibo proves it), but also use them.

A search for the origins of China Labor Watch’s report reveals that at least one person recorded the Oct. 5 events. His real name is unknown, but on Sina Weibo, China’s leading microblogging service, he goes by the handle Ye Fudao — a name that can be roughly translated as “The Wild Husband’s Cleaver.” […]

Read on. For more on China’s workers, see portraits by Lucas Schifres and a TED talk by Leslie Chang, via CDT.

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Post tags: Apple, Foxconn, iPhone, labor conditions, labor disputes, strikes, Zhengzhou
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The campus used by 79,000 workers in Taiyuan in northern Shanxi province showed the damage caused by the Sunday clash among laborers that left more than 40 people hospitalized. Windows in a bathhouse, supermarket, arcade and parked cars were shattered.

Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou has moved in recent years to improve conditions at his factories after a spate of suicides. The company’s largest customer, Apple Inc., pressured Foxconn to make the changes.

But some improvements had not reached Taiyuan, workers said. They charged that the facility has inferior food, poor sanitation and overcrowded dorms, while security guards are young, poorly trained and too aggressive.

“The guards here use gangster style to manage,” said Foxconn worker Fang Zhongyang, 23, outside campus gates. “We are not against following rules, but you have to tell us why. They won’t explain things, and we feel like we cannot communicate with them.”

Reuters also talks to workers at the Taiyuan plant:

Wang, who did not want his full name published, is among thousands of workers housed in a vast complex where tensions aggravated by regimented and cramped living conditions boiled over on Sunday into a violent mass riot.

“The bathrooms are simply disgusting and people are constantly stealing things,” Wang said as he stood outside of the factory in the northern city of Taiyuan, owned by Apple Inc’s largest contract manufacturer, Taiwan firm Foxconn.

Until the riot, which turned from a personal dorm squabble into battles between police and about 2,000 workers and spilled over into Monday, the focus of labor discontent in China had been on production lines, especially those making products for Apple.

The unrest, which left about 40 people injured, metal factory gates flattened, cars overturned and windows smashed, shifted the focus on to broader living conditions, particularly for migrant workers who live in thousands of factory dormitories around the country.

Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin reports on online discussions between workers about the incident:

Workers’ sentiment on China’s online forums was divided, some angry, some joyful. Workers were eager to post photos and make comments on the events. And some workers from other Foxconn plants in Henan, Shandong, and Shenzhen posted letters praising the Taiyuan workers for their courage to start a riot.

Amid the general exuberance, there were a few voices calling on workers to stay calm and be rational. A worker, who said he had been employed at Taiyuan Foxconn for three years, highlighted the failure of the Foxconn trade unions to properly represent workers’ interests. This he said had complicated the longstanding conflict between management and workers. He hoped workers could handle the conflict in a rational manner in order to avoid unnecessary casualties.

This post was immediately challenged by another worker, who responded that workers had not meant to instigate a riot but that they had no other way to address injustice. When they called a hotline to complain about the abusive security guards, for example, they were told their complaint could not be handled.

For more on the Foxconn incident, read “Foxconn Closes Plant After Worker Brawl” and “Foxconn Plant Open, But Broader Issues Persist” via CDT.

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Post tags: Foxconn, labor conditions, migrant workers
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If Chinese factory workers are feeling frustrated with life, that is likely to get worse before it gets better, as the economy faces a volatile period captured in an August story in Southern Weekend headlined “The First Layoff in the Last Ten Years.”

The riot at Foxconn—or any of the other five hundred “mass incidents” that China records on an average day—has implications far beyond Apple. Labor activists say that they are happening more often this year than last. A little over a week ago, six thousand workers at a Flextronics Technology factory in Shanghai went on strike for severance pay. In June, it was a hundred workers in a mini-uproar at another Foxconn plant. They are no longer simply calling for better wages. “Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to lower-cost cities in the interior,” as the Times put it.

It was largely business as usual on Tuesday, writes The Financial Times’ Kathrin Hille, but observers say that more issues will likely resurface despite Foxconn’s attempts to improve conditions. Her interviews revealed many of the work-related frustrations of employees at the Taiyuan plant, from the obvious (unpaid wages to lack of overtime during the upcoming National Day holiday) to the less-than-obvious:

Another staff member, who asked not to be named, says many felt inspired by the anti-Japanese protests across the country earlier this month.

“It is so rare in China that you can demonstrate when you’re unhappy about something. It felt like the right moment,” he says.

In an interview with Gawker, China labor scholar Eli Friedman spoke at length about evolving labor conditions in China, including the ongoing shift in geographic concentration by companies such as Foxconn:

The major thing that Foxconn has done, which is to some extent indicative of a broader trend, is a lot of capital relocation from these coastal areas, like Shanghai and Shenzhen, into the interior. They’re doing that for that a number of reasons: the cost of labor and land are cheaper. In the interior the local governments are more excited about trying to attract investment—if you’re in Sichuan Province on the west, you’d get more tax breaks; you get the government mobilized to try and find workers for you. So a lot of these factories are moving into the interior.

Workers will now, to a greater extent, be living in the same place they work. Whereas now migrant workers come from interior and western provinces to the coast. And when they’re in these big cities in the coastal areas they don’t have access to public goods like education, health care, housing and subsidies. But if they’re back in the interior, they might be more in their own community, and things might be a little bit more stable.

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Post tags: anti-Japan demonstrations 2012, Apple, Foxconn, labor rights, labor unrest, mass incidents, riots, Shaanxi, unpaid wages
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The Taiyuan plant, which employs about 79,000 workers, makes automobile electronic components, consumer electronic components and precision moldings. An employee told Reuters the plant also makes parts and assembles Apple’s iPhone 5.

In a statement, Foxconn cited police as saying about 40 people were taken to hospital for medical attention and a number were arrested.

The company said the incident escalated from what it called a personal dispute between several employees at around 11 p.m. on Sunday in a privately managed dormitory, and was brought under control by local police at around 3 a.m.

Taiwan-based Foxconn is the world’s largest contract maker of electronic goods and has come under fire along with Apple for the labor conditions at its China factories, though a report released last month found that conditions were improving. The New York Times reported that unconfirmed photographs and video emerged on social media showing riot police and smashed windows at what is believed to be Foxconn’s Taiyuan plant:

Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, a nonprofit advocacy group in Hong Kong seeking collective bargaining and other protections for workers in mainland China, said workers in China had become increasingly emboldened.

“They’re more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice,” he said.

The same Taiyuan factory was the site of a brief strike during a pay dispute last March, Hong Kong media reported then.

Social media postings suggested that some injuries might have occurred when people were trampled in crowds of protesters.

See also “Meet China’s Factory Workers” from CDT.

© Scott Greene for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, Foxconn, labor conditions, riots, Shaanxi, Taiyuan
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Griffin Technology, a company in Nashville that makes Apple accessories, said that moments after Apple introduced the iPhone 5, its employees were making final design tweaks in its prototyping shop, where 3-D printers turn out mock-ups of future products. Many Griffin employees had already traveled to China from the United States to be there when the iPhone 5 was introduced.

[…] Similarly, employees of Incase, a maker of iPhone cases based in San Francisco, crowded into a conference room to watch online reports of Apple’s presentation, said Dave Gotta, the chief executive. Employees in China were waiting at factories for final design specifications so they could get started making cases.

[…] Some companies take unsanctioned routes to get ahead of the game. Hard Candy Cases, a case maker, sent iPhone 5 cases to journalists before Apple even introduced the phone. Tim Hickman, chief executive of the company, said manufacturers in Shenzhen, where his cases are made, sent around design information for unreleased iPhones to attract case makers like himself.

“The factories have gone from, ‘Shhh, hey, buddy, look at what I have for you,’ to making it part of their presentation,” he said.

Others try to get a head start by sifting through the flood of rumours and purported leaks that precedes any Apple announcement, and then gambling on those that seem most credible. See ‘The Shadowy World of iPhone Cases‘, a Bloomberg report that followed the iPhone 4S launch last year, via CDT.

The flexibility that allows these companies to finalise product details at such short notice is a characteristic of China’s industrial machine that Apple itself vigorously exploits: see Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher’s January New York Times article on how the U.S. lost out on iPhone work. For China-relevant information on the iPhone 5, see Tech in Asia’s coverage; for analysis of the crowded Chinese marketplace into which the new phone will land, see Paul Mozur’s report at The Wall Street Journal; and for netizens’ gleeful mockery of the device’s extended screen, see Ministry of Tofu.

© Samuel Wade for China Digital Times (CDT), 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Apple, factories, Foxconn, industry, iPhone, manufacturing, Shenzhen
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