Life and death in Apple’s forbidden city
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The dormitories look typical. I arranged to stay in one through a different friend; mine wasn't arranged by the company.
Now I'm in Taiwan, and life is better here. Factories are newer and cleaner, and working hours are more sane. Chinese factories often set long shifts because there's nothing to do in the local area except work. Kaohsiung has much more local culture than Shenzhen, so the workers are more interested in time off, and happier for it.
I've been here for 3 years to get the necessary work experience for future visas. I'm now considering other options, particularly New Zealand or Australia, where my girlfriend and I both want to go.
Please ask me if you have any other questions, I'm willing to share my experiences.
Some photos from a trip here: https://goo.gl/photos/FawpURbZweNNQt288
I am working on some electronics and will be back in Shenzhen sometime this year, although I'm not sure if I will stay on much longer afterwards, I don't know if it's that much fun to live there.
You will not likely face any racism at all, unless you go into strange places. But you won't get it from everyday people. If anything they'll more than likely assume you're educated and have good manners. They pretty much give you the benefit of the doubt.
Knowing (even basic) mandarin goes a long way.
My personal experience is that Kaohsiung has more social life than Shenzhen, which is partly government policy (no Facebook in China, segregated churches for foreigners, difficult to get English-teaching visas so fewer foreigners around).
Learning Mandarin is super hard. I'm introverted and can't just pick it up through language exchange like the English teachers seem to do. I spend my days in front of a computer screen, not talking to people.
I wrote https://pingtype.github.io to help with my studies. If you have feedback about that program, please tell me! Also check the blog on there to read more about the ways I've tried and failed to learn.
Living at the same financial level is difficult in Taiwan. The government requires skilled foreigners (tech workers) to be paid 2x the minimum wage. English teachers get paid even more, with fewer hours. There are some digital nomads who work over the internet, but they come illegally on tourist visas (that's common, and the government doesn't really care in Taiwan).
My lifestyle is comparable to local people, though. The extra savings goes towards 1 or 2 intercontinental trips per year when I can visit family. I'm neither rich nor poor - I get paid double what local people do, but half the salary expected by NZ immigration for me to be considered "skilled". (I really hope they will adjust for purchasing power parity). My personal expenses are mostly food, rent, and electronics, and all of those are very cheap here (but delicious).
In short, if you're interested, come to visit! You won't regret it. Or if you're in Canada, I'm going to Vancouver from the 26th August - 2nd September and I can introduce you to some international groups there (CouchSurfing, First Baptist Internationals) where you can make some Taiwanese friends.
For me, as an introvert, I felt quite uncomfortable sometimes, people will randomly walk up to you and start a conversation, or they'll try to sneak a picture of you. And then you have the usual people who just stare you down. But I assume that's more because they don't see many Western faces. (Although Shenzhen has quite a large expat population)
But I never had anyone being racist to me.
Just remember people would be really curious about you all the time, especially if you're tall (by East-Asian standards).
What people usually do after their shift ends? Just return to their respective dorms? Are their any public spaces in or around the factory where people gather?
First I went to Xingda Hongye in Fushazhen, near Zhongshan, China. It's a long way outside the city, and there is seriously nothing to do nearby. There's a small café on-site, and people sometimes go for a walk down to the (polluted) river. Otherwise they hang out in the (male/female segregated) dorms, playing card games and watching videos online. A few people have laptops and play computer games. Some people also hang out in the cafeteria, or play some sports (ping pong is popular). There isn't a single social room though, so people just kind of scatter throughout the campus when they're off work.
In Shenzhen, I stayed in a factory dormitory in Longgang, but was working in an office. It would take 20 minutes by bus to the nearest metro station (Universiade), which made it difficult to see my girlfriend at the time, because the bus would no longer run so late. I would go out to nearby restaurants to eat instead of staying in the company. There was a nice park nearby where I'd eat a bendon lunchbox. There was also a school, and some of the school kids were picking mangos from the trees on the side of the road to eat, for fun. They all wanted to take pictures with the handsome foreign boy, haha. All the people in Shenzhen are not local though - the city was purpose-built for electronics manufacturing, and people speak Mandarin instead of the local Cantonese because they come from all over. I made friends with a guy from Xinjiang (the Muslim separatist state) at a noodle shop, and he made some delicious noodles. The lack of Facebook and church made it hard for me to make many local friends though. QQ and WeChat are fine for one-on-one chatting, but hard to make Groups and Events. Another interesting thing to note is that many business owners (including my boss there) are Taiwanese. Despite the political tension, there are a few ways that Taiwanese can invest in the Special Economic Zone areas, and they do.
Meanwhile in Taiwan, the workers mostly come from SE Asia (Philippines, Vietnam). That means the managers can speak much better English. The factory is inside a special compound (Nanzi Export Processing Zone), and does not include accommodation. There's 2 universities nearby, history going back about 400 years, and plenty of genuinely local people who are there to live, not just to work.
After I leave work, I visit kids in the hospital with a Christian group, or study Chinese, or go to the CouchSurfing meetup. On weekends I go hiking, to music concerts (lots of indie rock here), hot springs, waterfalls, or church. There's a lot more happening here than in China, in my opinion.
Are you talking about passing on your British citizenship to a child born abroad?
I'm interested to know how getting a New Zealand permanent residency helps?
NZ PR is permanent - I can leave and go back any time. It also allows children born in NZ to get citizenship. Taiwanese or Canadian PR is not permanent - if you leave for a few years, you lose it. Therefore I would need to get citizenship before having a "home". Citizenship takes 4 years, NZ PR takes only 2 years.
I just want to earn the right to live in a country with the woman I love and have children together, without always worrying that one of us will have a visa denied and be forced to move.
Having said that I personally think it is a low horizon trap for many entrepreneurs which is why I left.
In NZ there is a saying along the lines of, "entrepreneurs don't go further than the 3 B's: the Batch, the Beamer, and the Boat."
"Exploitation" is a subjective and loaded term, but the labour market in Shenzhen and the broader Guangdong region is extremely competitive. There is a general shortage of labour and those workers are highly mobile; as a result, wages are increasing rapidly in all major cities. Low-skilled, low-margin industries like textiles have been largely priced out of the Chinese labour market, with all but the most sophisticated production moving to lower-wage economies.
I won't pretend that China is a utopia, but it's doing a very good job of improving the living standards of ordinary people.
Cities like San Francisco and London are full of people who live in cramped shared apartments and work ridiculously long hours. Some of them are graduates working for a startup, some of them are immigrant labourers working in construction. They're not planning on staying there forever, but they've chosen the best opportunity available to them.
When I found a job that actually paid money in Shenzhen, I moved there, and life was alright.
Before China I'd been trying to find a job in the Netherlands but failing to do so. Before that I'd spent all my savings on trying to be a missionary in the UK, but then nobody had actually donated so it wasn't sustainable. After China I went to Korea to start studying Ph.D. at KAIST. The university promised me a scholarship, but they didn't pay, and I dropped out after my savings from China were gone. Then I went to India for 5 months to work for a social enterprise for free accommodation and 120 USD per month for food (it was barely enough). Finally, I got a job in Taiwan, and life has been wonderful since then - food and shelter are no longer a worry, and I can save up to fly and visit my family once or twice a year.
edit: I enjoyed k-tv on my visits to Shenzhen.
Number of suicides by age group and gender. CHINA (mainland, selected rural and urban areas*), 1999.
Age (years) 5-14 15-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55-64 65-74 75+ All
Males 83 626 1357 1287 1196 1165 1325 1009 8048
Females 64 915 1937 1351 1186 1017 1273 1045 8788
Total 147 1541 3294 2638 2382 2182 2598 2054 16836
the same age group has the lowest suicide rates in other countries (eg, US) as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
long form: https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/02/the-link-between-unem...
Random paper: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/02779536939...
He heard rumors that the Chinese mafia would pay workers to commit suicide at Foxconn in exchange for money for their family in the countryside. The mafia would then threaten suicide attempts as leverage to extort concessions from Foxconn.
Not sure if it's true (was only a rumor), but certainly got me thinking about it from another perspective.
Some of my buddy's work:
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvwj3k/chinas-21st-centur...
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2015/0...
Around 2000, I worked at a startup that was streamlining the globalization logistics for large manufacturers. One aspect of our software was a qualitative and quantitative rating system for factories in low-cost countries. One of our largest challenges was coming up with reliable scoring metrics that couldn't be gamed by the factories. Because Of this, we eventually had to resort to randomly sending physical auditors to factories.
I wasn't part of that side of the business, but we had systems that allowed these auditors to enter data and notes. It wasn't uncommon for them to report on suicides. At the time, we didn't know much about Chinese culture beyond what we understood through movies and such, so we thought that 'suicide' was a euphemism for 'forced suicide'. Who knows - But, people would just disappear, at least at a seemingly higher rate in China than elsewhere. It was quite chilling.
You need to take it one step further; you should compare it to the suicide rate of healthy, employed young adults. If (for example) the suicide rate is higher than employed adults, but comparable to unemployed, it would show a serious problem at the factory.
In many industrialized countries suicide rates are not spread equally across all demographic groups.
Then, "Foxconn CEO, Terry Gou, had large nets installed outside many of the buildings to catch falling bodies. The company hired counsellors and workers were made to sign pledges stating they would not attempt to kill themselves."
"In 2012, 150 workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump. They were promised improvements and talked down by management; they had, essentially, wielded the threat of killing themselves as a bargaining tool. In 2016, a smaller group did it again. Just a month before we spoke, Xu says, seven or eight workers gathered on a rooftop and threatened to jump unless they were paid the wages they were due, which had apparently been withheld. Eventually, Xu says, Foxconn agreed to pay the wages and the workers were talked down."
"The body-catching nets are still there."
If you can't fit nets you should consider other methods - one multi-storey carpark in England closed the whole top floor.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/suicide-preventio...
Why do we put up with "oh, it's the same everywhere, so it's not a problem" when they are directly responsible for creating this environment?
"This is an edited extract from The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Brian Merchant, published by Bantam Press (£16.99). To order a copy for £14.44 go to bookshop.theguardian.com"
They manufacture everything
It's worth pointing out that Wisconsin is giving billions to a company where working conditions so bad that workers have been killing themselves there since 2010: "It wouldn’t be Foxconn without people dying."
Suicide is very common. Pick any large company and you'll find similar rates of death by suicide.
This apologism misses the fact that the Foxconn suicide statistics are about suicide attempts on company grounds reported to the company. Most suicide attempts aren't known to the company - if someone dies outside the company, it's not necessarily known to the company or counted as part of the aggregate statistics.
I've known two people attempt suicide, and neither of them let their workplace know. Similarly, a friend of a friend committed suicide by flinging himself from a hospital roof - do you really think his company would count his death as being due to their workplace? Of course not, what company would ever tie a suicide to themselves if they could avoid it, regardless of whether they contributed to it.
In short, your argument makes the false assumption that the people killing themselves at their workplace are the only suicides in that demographic.
Although I don’t know what this does to your statistics; Foxconn employed and houses 2x magnitude more workers vs the apple campus (which houses none)
It will be interesting to watch to breakdown in China as tens of millions of angry citizens lose their jobs to automation. Combined with the demographic abomination they created with their 1 child policy I predict China will collapse eventually.
Also it's not a straight tax giveaway upfront, they have to hit incentives over time.
You mean the male surplus?
Compare the Chinese fertility rate, currently estimated at an abysmally low 1.6 children per woman, with the fertility rate in anything-goes Japan, at 1.4.
The big recent change is that measurements and penalties are starting to get written into these agreements. When you have to go that far, you probably shouldn't be doing it in the first place.
But I kept wondering the legality of actually stepping into an iPhone fab without permission. As the journalists might be seen as given prior approval, what if they saw the new iPhone and how does journalism in here functions toward revealing information v.s. respecting policies. I also felt that the reason this article was written is only for partially humanitarian cause, but still largely trying to capture curiosities from readership, and the risks definitely seem to have paid off.
Tellers, and clerks are another big group of people who might be hit pretty hard by automation.
You mean checkers? Because with self driving cars somewhere around the corner, I could see truckers getting replaced with self driving trucks sometime in the future.
You're correct. Here's a story of them replacing 60,000 people in one factory. Just incredible!
It's very hard to compare suicide rates internationally because different countries have different definitions, and the people who do the counting are not consistent.
The US probably undercounts suicide. The age standardised rate is roughly 13 per 100,000
China definitely undercounts suicide.
I'd really encourage others to look at the companies they buy from and see if they align with your morals before making a purchase.
Clients of Foxconn include Amazon, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Dell, Huawei, Nintendo, Sony, Toshiba, Motorola, Blackberry and many more. They don't just make iPhones. Next time you look at an XBox or Switch, guess where it came from? Do you know that workers prefer to work on the Apple lines because Apple has greater say in the factory conditions than the other clients and pays the workers on their lines more? When you looked into the companies you buy from, how far did that research go?
I still have my iPad Generation 1 as my use case for it is reading epub and pdfs and that hasn't changed since 2010. Also my ethical stance with regards too my consumerism is something I've been doing since 2014.
Granted my laptop is a Dell XPS 15 9550 and while the machine itself is very environmentally friendly Dell's ethical practices leave a lot wanting but so do the other ultrabook manufacturers. In my line of work I am often client facing therefore I need form and function. I'm at least aware of the trade off and my eyes are open with regards to whom I'm supporting with my money.
To answer your question about how far I go, I rely on Ethical Consumer a lot and my own internet searches before making a purchase. Of course I'm also on the lookout for reputable news articles that are focused on this area good or bad.
Our manufactures were in Guangzhou and Xiamen.
One thing that struck me when I was in China once was that human life didn't seem as valued as in the West. This planted a seed that had a profound influence on my thinking.
At that time I didn't think about ethics in our supply chain, my focus was solely on survival and then growth... but as I've gotten older I've seen how that's part of the problem. Consumers generally don't see the whole picture and they largely don't care. The theory goes if consumers did start to care, and changed their purchasing habits accordingly, the whole supply chain would be forced to change.
Many of the workers in those factories are women. After a few years, they often go back home as the wealthiest members of their families, with enough capital to build homes and start new businesses of their own. It's actually started a distinct demographic trend. People have all sorts of bizarre ideas about china. Sure the conditions in these factories are awful by western standards, but China isn't the west. The same basis for making decisions just don't apply. Hopefully they will one day, but we're not there yet.
Is the human assembly line ideal? No. But for many workers it seems that the alternatives in the rural areas are either non-existant or pretty bad.