During 2010, 18 workers attempted suicide at Taiwanese-owned Foxconn Technology Group’s Chinese facilities, where Apple and other branded products are produced. They ranged in age from 17 to 25 — the prime of youth. Fourteen died, while four survived with crippling injuries. These shocking events attracted world attention to Foxconn, Apple, China’s export industry and the experience of Chinese workers. What had driven these young workers to commit such a desperate act? What relationship did these tragic events bear to the electronic products that we not only prize but many believe define our contemporary civilization?
China’s pivotal role in electronics manufacture has reshaped regional and global production networks previously dominated by Japan and its former colonies Taiwan and South Korea. Since the 1980s, the world’s leading electronics brands have abandoned production and assembly and relocated many of these activities to China. The contemporary Chinese state has simultaneously partnered with global and domestic capital to create a new working class centered on rural migrant workers. Following the massive layoffs that accompanied restructuring and privatization of China’s state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, and the subsequent expansion of private domestic and foreign firms, many workers are now employed by transnational corporations, including Foxconn, the leading Asian investor and the world’s largest electronics producer.
This book documents the struggles of a new generation of workers who produce our smartphones and tablet computers, indeed, the entire spectrum of high-tech consumer electronics. Foxconn is a representative or archetypical case of a global labor regime in the contemporary Chinese political economy. The mystery that our investigation seeks to explore is not only the “inside story” of Foxconn; it is also the nature of global capitalism embodying with specific relationship between Foxconn and its brand-name buyers, the largest and richest being Apple, as well as that between Foxconn and the Chinese state. These are the relationships that shape conditions on the factory floor and ultimately workers’ lives. An in-depth study of the most powerful electronics contractor and the lives of its workers enable us to draw out the deep contradictions among labor, capital, and the Chinese state in global production.
China’s pivotal role in electronics manufacture has reshaped regional and global production networks previously dominated by Japan and its former colonies Taiwan and South Korea. Since the 1980s, the world’s leading electronics brands have abandoned production and assembly and relocated many of these activities to China. The contemporary Chinese state has simultaneously partnered with global and domestic capital to create a new working class centered on rural migrant workers. Following the massive layoffs that accompanied restructuring and privatization of China’s state-owned enterprises in the 1990s, and the subsequent expansion of private domestic and foreign firms, many workers are now employed by transnational corporations, including Foxconn, the leading Asian investor and the world’s largest electronics producer.
This book documents the struggles of a new generation of workers who produce our smartphones and tablet computers, indeed, the entire spectrum of high-tech consumer electronics. Foxconn is a representative or archetypical case of a global labor regime in the contemporary Chinese political economy. The mystery that our investigation seeks to explore is not only the “inside story” of Foxconn; it is also the nature of global capitalism embodying with specific relationship between Foxconn and its brand-name buyers, the largest and richest being Apple, as well as that between Foxconn and the Chinese state. These are the relationships that shape conditions on the factory floor and ultimately workers’ lives. An in-depth study of the most powerful electronics contractor and the lives of its workers enable us to draw out the deep contradictions among labor, capital, and the Chinese state in global production.
About
the Authors
PUN
Ngai is Professor in the Department of Applied Social
Sciences at Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is the author
of Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (2005), for which
she won the C. W. Mills Award. This book was translated into
French, German, Italian, Polish, and Chinese. She produces numerous articles in
Modern China, China Journal, China Quarterly,
Global Labor Journal, Cultural Anthropology, Feminist Economics, Current
Sociology, The Third World Quarterly, and Work, Employment and Society, among others.
Recently she has co-authored
and co-edited four books on construction workers, Foxconn workers, and social
economy in Hong Kong and China (in Chinese).
Jenny
CHAN is Departmental
Lecturer in Contemporary China Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Area
Studies, University of Oxford. Educated at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong (BSSc in Sociology) and the University of Hong Kong
(MPhil in Sociology), she was a Reid
Research Scholar while pursuing her PhD at the University of London. In
2013-2014 she received the prestigious Great Britain-China Educational Award. Currently she serves as Board Member of
the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Labor
Movements (2014-2018). Her recent articles have appeared in Current Sociology, Modern China, Human
Relations, Critical Asian Studies,
Global Labor Journal, The
Asia-Pacific
Journal, The South Atlantic Quarterly, New Labor Forum,
and
New Technology, Work and Employment.
Mark SELDEN
is Research Fellow at the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at NYU, Senior Research Associate in the East Asia
Program at Cornell University, and editor of The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus. A specialist on the
modern and contemporary geopolitics, political economy and history of China,
Japan and the Asia Pacific, his work has ranged broadly across themes of war
and revolution, inequality, development, regional and world social change,
social movements and historical memory. Books include China in
Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited; The Political Economy of Chinese Development; Chinese Village, Socialist State; Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and
Resistance; and The Resurgence of East Asia: 500, 150
and 50 Year Perspectives.
