The deaths of 10 young people in the electronics plant have opened up a discussion about the human cost of breakneck economic growth, writes CLIFFORD COONANin Shenzhen
SAFETY nets cover the walkways of the dormitory, while a high Perspex railing lines the roof of the building, home to thousands of workers at the Foxconn electronics plant in Longhua district, Shenzhen.
Posters on the doors of the dorm rooms, which house eight to a room in bunk beds, show smiling Chinese movie stars, but a darker reality lurks behind them.
The nets are a desperate attempt to stop young people from launching themselves into oblivion from the roofs of their dormitories. There have been 13 suicide attempts at the southern Chinese factory, 10 of them successful, mostly by jumping off dormitory buildings. No one knows where the wave of suicides has come from or why this is happening now. This factory town is transfixed by the deaths, which have opened up a wider discussion about the human cost of breakneck economic growth.
“I don’t understand why people are doing this,” says an 18-year-old worker surnamed Qin from Guangxi province. “If they are under great pressure, they should quit, not kill themselves. Work pressure is always like this.”
Everyone is young here – there are few elderly or even middle- aged people. All the Foxconn suicides were aged between 18 and 24.
Qin has just come out of the west gate of the facility, where his job is to measure the size of components. He is wearing a light blue polo shirt, a standard sight here in Longhua, where about 300,000 of Foxconn’s 420,000 employees in Shenzhen work.
“The working hours are too long, 12 hours a day, and we’re not allowed to talk, which is boring and not healthy,” he says.
This plant, which is like a small city covering 3sq km, is where Apple’s iPads and iPhones are made, where Dell and Hewlett- Packard have many of their laptops made and where the components for many brands of mobile phone are assembled.
Palm trees on the roadside are the only sign that you are in the sub-tropical south, rather than anywhere else in contemporary post-industrial China. Foxconn did not allow us to enter the complex, but the plant dominates the Longhua section of town so completely that everything is Foxconn-related.
The noodle stalls and hairdressers beside the west gate are patronised almost exclusively by Foxconn workers, and the trucks on the roads are bringing goods to or from the plant. From the road, you can see that safety barriers have been put up on the roofs of every building in the complex.
Despite the all-mod-cons on offer, including swimming pools, air conditioning and other amenities not found in many of the factories in this southern Chinese hub – which is just across the border from Hong Kong – all is not well. Workers have complained about the militaristic way in which the working environment is run, and the fact that the only way for people to improve on their €100-a-month basic wage is to put in lengthy overtime hours.
Some believe that the kind of work people have to do at Foxconn – soul-destroying piecework with little respite in an oppressively difficult atmosphere – is making people depressed and suicidal, but this does not explain why the suicides are taking place there, and not at other big manufacturing plants.
Others have said the suicides are the result of an “immature mentality” among those born between 1980 and 1999 – a generation thought by many Chinese to be spoiled. There is also the “cluster” theory – that the suicides are basically contagious among the young people.
Testimonies are mixed. Zhang Liu (20), from Hunan province, is waiting for a lift outside the west gate, having just quit Foxconn to join another company as a clerical worker. “I don’t understand the suicides, they must be depressed,” she says. “This would never happen to me because I am a happy worker. My work was easy – 10 hours a day, with a break every two hours, and I was allowed to talk.”
Two brothers from Hunan province, aged 18 and 20, approach the walkway to the dormitory. They have been working at Foxconn for four months, and their job is to shift circuit boards around the plant.
“The air is bad, but we can talk,” says the elder brother. “The work is okay. We used to be able to smoke on the roof, but since the suicides, that’s not allowed. The dormitories are not great.”
The younger brother says: “We don’t know about why the suicides are happening, but the pay isn’t great. We did hear there would be a pay rise, but don’t think it will be 30 per cent. We’ve seen the swimming pool, but don’t know anyone who has used it,” he adds.
Some of those who took their own lives were said to be suffering from depression, while in some cases no explanation has been given to protect the privacy of their families. Some whisperings – dismissed by most people I spoke to – have it that those who jumped did it for money, as 100,000 yuan (€12,000) in compensation would mean a lot to a poor family.
Tian Yu, who jumped from the third floor of her dormitory on March 17th and was badly injured, said she had a hard life and wanted to end it all.
In the absence of a simple, unifying explanation for the wave of suicides, rumours abound.
Like many people at Foxconn, Qin believes at least one of the deaths, that of a 21-year-old man named Liang, was murder. He fell from the seventh floor of the dormitory, there were four stab wounds on his body and a bloody knife was discovered at the scene.
Taiwanese entrepreneur Terry Gou owns Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, Foxconn’s parent company and the world’s largest contract maker of electronics. Gou says he can’t sleep at night and dreads answering his phone, fearing more news about deaths.
“The most worrying thing is those hidden groups with mental health problems,” he says. “The most critical thing is how to prevent tragedies from happening again.”
Gou sees himself as a father figure to his employees and is disturbed by the depiction as someone who runs “blood and sweat factories”. This could appear as an effort at generating positive spin in a difficult situation, but this paternalistic form of capitalism is common in Asia.
“He is tough on middle management, but takes, I think, a genuine interest in the conditions for the workers on the shop floor,” says one local businessman, who asks not to be named, but is a competitor of Foxconn.
“Conditions at Foxconn are pretty okay,” he adds. “Generally factories here that are owner- operated have good conditions; the problems generally start when they are run by absentee owners. These suicides are a real mystery.”
There is a heavy police presence, and I’m closely watched while wandering around the edge of the plant. A police officer on a bicycle cycles between me and an interview partner, glares.
Shenzhen has risen from a fishing village of a few thousand people to a city with a population of 14 million in just three decades.
The key to its success has been freewheeling capitalism, but the suicides have brought the wrong sort of attention. You sense the police hope the problem can be made to go away so Shenzhen can go back to making money again without complications.
Young workers wheeling suitcases descend from buses near the south gate, where scores have gathered at the recruitment centre.
“To apply here you only need your photo ID, no other documents are necessary,” runs a banner across the front of the centre. Most companies hiring require residence permits, qualifications and health certificates, but at Foxconn the process is straightforward.
“No fee is required for joining, so beware of fraudsters,” says another banner.
The recruiter arrives in his corporate polo shirt and lifts the shutters.
“The pay is okay here, same as anywhere else,” says a man surnamed Zhang (21), who has just come from Shaanxi province.
“I want to work because I need the money. I’ve heard about the suicides, of course . . . I’m not afraid, it’s the same anywhere else.”
Among those puzzled and upset by the suicide crisis is Apple boss Steve Jobs, who insisted the Foxconn plant was “no sweatshop”.
“You go in this place and it’s a factory, but my gosh, they’ve got restaurants and movie theatres and hospitals and swimming pools. For a factory, it’s pretty nice . . . but this is very troubling to us,” he told an All Things Digital online conference. “We’re all over this.”
Foxconn is bringing in psychological counsellors and Buddhist monks to deal with matters of the spirit, while this week's edition of New Weeklymagazine features a photograph of a Foxconn worker taking a club to a black inflatable figure, part of anger management therapy at the plant.
There is no evidence to suggest a link between the suicides and working conditions at Foxconn. Some commentators believe the deaths are emblematic of a broader social issue in New China as radical change causes seismic upheaval in the fabric of society.
Suicide is the second most common cause of death among China’s youth and young adults, after traffic incidents.
Han Han is the world’s most popular blogger, a racecar driver who has become the voice of the generation of Chinese born in the 1980s and 1990s.
Han has written a passionate blog about the plight of millions of young people of this generation working in the factories, describing the soulless lives they lead and their constant struggle to make ends meet in an increasingly competitive China.
He says young people have to do boring work for low salaries and, most frighteningly, they have no hope for the future. The possibility that these young people’s deaths might be the true price of cheap electronic goods is horrifying.
“You are China’s bargaining chip, hostages to GDP,” he wrote. “Such a pitiful thing: all of this hot blood in our hearts, splattered on the ground.”