The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (2014) | Hacker News Reader

The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (2014)

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64 points_haoa36 comments

We're all a part of this. I've been asking myself questions, at an increasing rate lately, like "where does all this material come from?", "who makes all this stuff?", "what's the effect of making this?', etc., and any hint of an answer leads to nowhere good quite quickly. That is especially true when you consider the human and other animal elements. Just looking into the trash makes you realize the insane amount of single-use material that is used for daily life. Search the food Amazon throws away, including masses within the usable dates. Even things that are not single use makes my mind be boggled where all the stuff comes from.

Humanity's obsession with growth and scale is like a dark force we have to actively fight against, but the obsession is winning handily. And it feels that less and less are pushing against it, with many pushing for it.

If you'd like another depressing read, Derrick Jensen's "Bright Green Lies" is a good one. It does the very uncomfortable math on "Ok, so, you want to power civilization with wind/solar/nuclear/etc? What does that look like in mountain tops removed, valleys filled with tailings, habitats blown to pieces, etc?" The answers aren't good.

A number of the environmental groups have subtly shifted over the past decade or two from "How can we protect the environment?" to "How can we maintain industrial civilization levels of energy consumption and all our conveniences, but carbon neutral?" They are not the same question or issue, even though they're often confused.

Aren’t solar panels made from sand/silicone? Wouldn’t a solar run world look like a place where our sand deserts are instead covered in panels. You don’t even need that many (in space) to power the whole planet.

Not sure about lithium, but I suspect it’s not terrible as we don’t need that much.

I agree on your last point. It's very sad. An example I've come up with is fusion. The many scientists and engineers working on fusion, and the fans on the sidelines, are a bit too wide-eyed that it will "save" humanity. While it will obviously be much cleaner than existing energy production plants, I predict its cleanness will be outstripped by its enabling of even greater consumption.

I very much hold little hope for civilization at the rate we're going. Like you say, we've gone from trying to be in a sustainable balance to just trying to keep up. Technology is just allowing us to destroy everything about the planet and even our own societies.

And thank you for the reference. Although, I'm not sure I can take reading and watching more depressing material. It feels like learning how to scream into the wind.

We cull deer populations (etc) so they don't run out of resources but fail to see any connection to our environmental concerns. Not advocating for culling people, but certainly the footprint we have deemed necessary.

Endless growth isn't possible but most economic systems demand that it happen.

Nothing remarkable about anything here. The machine respects people as much as it respects. the environment; it doesn't.

That's just the pickle though - short of straight up eugenics there aren't really any legitimate "solutions" to the endless growth problem humanity faces.

I don't think it was your intention to say eugenics is a legitimate solution, so I'll go on record saying it isn't a solution. It's a recurring problem across the world.

Any legitimate solution to even just population growth would see the 1% of the 1% have less wealth, and that’s the real reason why any solution will never work. That’s not even addressing culling economic growth and addressing things like wealth distribution and equality, which would be necessary for setting fair population growth constraints.

Humanity is damned simply because of, well humanity. We’re chimps at heart and don’t want to share.

"Dying for an iPhone" is a good read on the state of Foxconn and Apple's labor practices, which seem to generally continue to be "abusive at best."

It does lead to not really wanting to touch any of modern consumer electronics, though.

I know that’s the popular western view. But at least in this case, it doesn’t seem to be related to Foxconn. It looks as though Xu even enjoyed his time at Foxconn (given he left and then came back, and was actively involved in the newspaper). The problem was, he wasn’t enjoying his time in society.

I think the high suicide rate is related to the plight of migrant workers (datong) in China. It is a reflection of just how hard life in China is for the urbanising population. If you’ve spent time in the big 3 cities, you’ll have seen this phenomenon, a massive exploited workforce often homeless, or living in cramped conditions.

"enjoyed his time at Foxconn" is not remotely an accurate summary of the fine article - perhaps it's more like the opposite

Why did he leave, and then come back? If it was so horrible? His poems were published in the Foxconn newspaper… Do you think they would publish it if they thought it was criticism of their own organisation?

> Why did he leave, and then come back? If it was so horrible?

The article said he was running out of money.

> His poems were published in the Foxconn newspaper… Do you think they would publish it if they thought it was criticism of their own organisation?

What made you think he sent and they published all of them?

    A screw fell to the ground
    In this dark night of overtime
    Plunging vertically, lightly clinking
    It won’t attract anyone’s attention
    Just like last time
    On a night like this
    When someone plunged to the ground

> over 30 of his writings were published in Foxconn’s internal newspaper Foxconn People (富士康人), including poems, essays, film reviews, and news commentaries {…} Xu posted the titles of these writings on his blog in a post called “The Maturation Given to Me by a Newspaper,” indicating his gratitude for this platform for his literary aspirations.

He ran out of money in Jiangsu, so went back to work at Foxconn in Shenzhen. That’s like being short of money in Chicago and looking for work in LA… it’s clear. Again if you really hated the place would you even consider it? It’s not like there are no other opportunities for an ex Foxconn employee in China.

> It looks as though Xu even enjoyed his time at Foxconn

That is opposite his words in the article. He did not appear to enjoy his time at Foxconn.

  A space of ten square meters
  Cramped and damp, no sunlight all year
  Here I eat, sleep, shit, and think
  Cough, get headaches, grow old, get sick but still fail to die
  Under the dull yellow light again I stare blankly, chuckling like an idiot
  I pace back and forth, singing softly, reading, writing poems
  Every time I open the window or the wicker gate
  I seem like a dead man
  Slowly pushing open the lid of a coffin.

To the people who are arguing some variation of "Colonialism is actually a net GOOD for the colonized people!!"[1], I'd like to point out that this us NOT really an example of the "economic West" [2] colonizing China. Rather, it is the Chinese government allowing their workers to be exploited, with the complicity of the West. The Chinese government hopes to gain technological and economic parity or superiority to the economic West, all at the cost to the likes of Xu Lizhi. Cheap goods and labor are the bait offered to the West.

Western consumers are happy to lose their jobs over time in exchange for cheap goods. Western industrialists are happy to gain short term profits at the expense of long term decline. Western governments are happy to allow poor policy that allows this to happen because the industrialists have the best lobbyists.

Clearly there are more players in this game than just "Western consumers" and "Chinese factory workers". It's wrong to put the burden of responsibility just on the consumers. Policy played a big role in getting us into this mess. Policy will need to play a role in getting us out.

[1] No one actually said the word "colonialism", but it's a parallel argument heard countless times before.

[2] "Western" is not quite the right word because there are Eastern nations that are aligned with this economic bloc as well.

Have you ever considered the alternative to "allowing your workers to be exploited"? Should China have gone the way of Africa instead? Would that have led to better outcomes for the Chinese people? There is nothing better that can be done if you are already a victim of colonialism initially.

I was not trying to make any comment on what China should or should not do. Clearly, they are doing what their leaders consider to be best for themselves in the long run.

Rather, I was commenting on what I consider to be unrealistic views on China in the US.

This one in particular struck a cord with me:

一颗螺丝掉在地上

A screw fell to the ground

在这个加班的夜晚

In this dark night of overtime

垂直降落，轻轻一响

Plunging vertically, lightly clinking

不会引起任何人的注意

It won’t attract anyone’s attention

就像在此之前

Just like last time

某个相同的夜晚

On a night like this

有个人掉在地上

When someone plunged to the ground

The workers at the foxconn factories have a lower suicide rate than the average for all people in the provinces in which the factories are located.

A few dozen suicides is a normal number out of a population of 350,000 human beings, which is how many foxconn's iPhone City holds.

Agree, Foxconn is an over simplification that has somehow captured the mindshare… I guess because of Apple.

Foxconn doesn’t force people to work there, and they can resign at anytime.

The problem is, life outside of your houkou in China is soul crushingly hard. But if you are born in rural China your life in your houkou will be soul crushingly boring/mundane.

It’s not a good choice.

I feel like my shiny new iPhone is made of tears. This is awful.

Not just tears. Slave labor, child labor (cough DRC/Cobalt cough), and some good old ethnic cleansing thrown in for good measure.

It's increasingly hard to justify any use of modern consumer electronics. The whole ecosystem is shiny on the surface, absolutely horrid underneath on any level you care to look.

As an aside, the documentary on Atari describes the workers getting their teeth done and having happy smiles when the company was profitable and the wealth trickled down to the ordinary workers.

Past related threads:

The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18433548 - Nov 2018 (271 comments)

The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990-2014) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8561326 - Nov 2014 (83 comments)

During the 90's EA Spouse period and during the dotcom boom I saw people being crushed, burnt to a crisp and discarded like empty candy wrappers. No, it was not as extreme then, it took another decade and outsourcing to a foreign country to get as bad as we see here at Foxconn. Don't be fooled into thinking such overwork does not occur in your own country. Cast your eyes over at the web developers being abused right now...

Poor soul, he was crushed by the system, his place certainly wasn't there. I wonder how many human lives get wasted in the wrong place for a meager salary.

But Western markets get cheap disposable consumer gizmos, so isn't that a good trade in the end?

(not quite sarcasm, not quite serious, but this seems to be the unstated argument for this sort of stuff - yes, the human costs are tragic and such, but... the alternative is literally unthinkable, more expensive phones? Blame the CCP and carry on with posting)

God forbid we'd design repairable electronics that last longer, or that we'd write software that actually made efficient use of the hardware it runs on...

The world spins in pain and has for a billion years.

A billion Chinese people have been brought out of dire poverty by the manufacturing jobs that the export business has created. (https://ourworldindata.org/app/uploads/2017/02/poverty-decli...).

Life for half the world's people sucks - but companies like Apple make it better, not worse. I say this as someone who doesn't use any Apple products and doesn't particularly like the company.

This is incredibly oblivious to the fact that we, the West, as consumers are enabling these awful working conditions. Do we need to buy an iPhone every year? Does Apple really need to release a new iPhone every year? Your comment basically says: they're poor but they're not too poor. Is there a line where poverty becomes tolerable? In a world like ours, where we are so productive, where we can mass produces practically anything, poverty should not exist.

The thing is, if the West didn't buy, and China had no export market, life would get way worse for the average Chinese person. Rural farming is horrible compared to factory work, which is why Chinese people moved from rural farms to factory cities by the hundreds of millions over the last decades.

Can you cite some sources about rural or subsistence farming compared to factory work?

Here's a good Google search https://www.google.com/search?q=great+migration+in+china+far...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_farming

This is so horrible. Sent from my iPhone

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