332 AAssignmentsReaction Paper 1

Goodbye iSlave Qiu, Jack Linchuan

Published by University of Illinois Press

Qiu, J. L.. Goodbye iSlave: A Manifesto for Digital Abolition. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016. Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.

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3 manufacturing iSlaves

The historical and legal studies of slavery, at least in my understanding, offer several crucial insights for an inquiry into iSlavery and forms of enslavement in this era of digital media:

• Rather than pre- modern or anti- modern, slavery—especially starting from the Atlantic triangular trade—is part and parcel of capitalist modernity.

• It is common for slavery to mutate over time with extraordi- nary elasticity.

• Slavery works through sociocultural alienation and political- economic domination.

• Resistance and abolition are fundamental to the transforma- tion of slavery.

• Slave systems wax and wane, resulting from and accelerating geopolitical change.

• The goal of slavery is to exploit the labor and/or body of the enslaved.

• Hegemonic consumption culture, relying on media and com- munication technologies, is a pillar of slave- powered econo- mies.

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• Slavery is better defined as de facto condition rather than de jure status.

• The substance of slavery is “the powers attaching to the right of ownership,” such as possession, use, transfer, profit, and disposal.

• Slavery and “institutions and practices similar to slavery” exist if any of the aforementioned “powers” is found to have been exercised.

My task, from here on, is to apply this framework in examining twenty- first- century slavery and digital labor conditions. First, in this chapter, I shall conduct a critical assessment of iSlave conditions in its first basic form of manufacturing iSlaves, as exemplified by Foxconn workers in China. Then, this framework will be applied in chapter 4 to shed light on the second domain of manufactured iSlaves, as in Apple’s business model and the New Economy of apps in general. This will be followed by a discussion in chapter 5 on slave resistance and abolition movements from antiquity to the present. Conceptually, the manufacturing mode of iSlavery consists of all the labor force required in the productive processes of digital media indus- tries. It can be waged or unwaged, formal or informal, handling mostly tasks of material manipulation. There are many modes of manufactur- ing iSlaves—be they Congolese mine workers or Indonesian child labor.1 Even though the following analysis focuses on Foxconn in China, the world’s largest gadgets manufacturer, the overall argument is global in its scope: despite advances in technology, severe conditions of isolation and exploitation have persisted, even deteriorated, not only at particular times and places, not only to certain individuals, but systematically at the level of the world system.

Foxconn: the Long Seventeenth Century

In 1974, as Terry Guo (Chinese name: Guo Tai- ming) started Hon Hai, a small Taiwanese factory making plastic parts for black- and- white TV sets,2 no one expected his plant to churn out half the world’s digital gadgets four decades later. In 1985, Hon Hai created the trademark

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“Foxconn” for purposes of overseas expansion, including setting up assembly lines in mainland China, where its first facility, “Foxconn Ocean Precision Computer Components Factory,” started operation in 1988.3 By then, Guo had already been known among his Taiwanese peers as a ruthless character: “You want his money, he wants you dead!”4

After a decade of meteoric growth, Foxconn eliminated several of its competitors and became a leading supplier for almost all major global IT brands around the turn of millennium. In 2001 Guo hired Michael Chung, a high- level executive from Apple, to start a special unit produc- ing Apple products.5 This was a decisive move. A decade later, Foxconn would draw “60 to 70 percent of its revenue from assembling gadgets and other work for Apple Inc.”6

As the company was on its way to becoming the largest exporter out of China, Guo remained relatively unknown to the public due to his “super- low- profile.”7 But by 2005, when he became the richest Taiwan- ese tycoon, Guo had already acquired a peculiar reputation for aggres- siveness and frugality.8

The decade following 2005 witnessed the descent of Foxconn into the world’s most fatal and notorious sweatshop. In 2006 a British news- paper reported terrible working conditions and low pay in one of Fox- conn’s facilities in Longhua, Shenzhen, infamously dubbed “the iPod city.”9 After losing his wife in 2005 to cancer and a bitter battle against mainland Chinese reporters in 2006,10 Guo turned into the very oppo- site of his previous public image. Holding hands with female celebrities, he became for about two- and- a- half years “Taiwan’s playboy tycoon” favored by Chinese paparazzi.11

Meanwhile, in 2008, a newly sold iPhone in the United Kingdom was found to contain the images of a lovely Foxconn worker, known as “the iPhone girl.”12 No one could confirm her identity. The incident was likely a PR stunt. It seemed, for a while, that Foxconn and its owner had mas- tered the art of diverting attention from workers’ life and work—until the suicide of Sun Danyong in July 2009.13

Sun jumped from the twelfth floor after being interrogated by Fox- conn guards because he lost an iPhone prototype. The Chinese press investigated and exposed the tragedy thoroughly. Foxconn admitted managerial problems and suspended the head of its security unit from

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duty.14 A senior manager responsible for making iPhones also resigned as a result of pressure from Apple.15 Few could foresee though that the case was the harbinger of something much worse: in the first five months of 2010, fifteen young workers jumped or fell from tall build- ings to kill themselves (table 3.1).16 Thirteen of them died; two others suffered injuries, with one paralyzed for life.

Table 3.1 list of foxconn workers who jumped or fell to death from high places in the first five months of 2010

name Gender age location Time reason

1 ronG, bo male 19 langfang Jan 8 Jump from 8th floor

2 ma, Xiangqian

male 19 Guanlan Jan 23 fall from building

3 li, hongliang male 28 longhua march 11 Jump from 5th floor

4 Tian, yu* female 17 longhua march 17 Jump from 4th floor

5 li, Wei male 23 langfang march 23 Jump from 5th floor

6 liu, Zhijun male 23 longhua march 29 Jump from 14th floor

7 rao, Shuqing*

female 18 Guanlan april 6 Jump from 7th floor

8 ninG, yaoqiong

female 18 Guanlan april 7 Jump from high place

9 lu, Xin male 24 longhua may 6 Jump from 6th floor

10 Zhu, chenming

female 24 longhua may 11 Jump from 9th floor

11 lianG, chao male 21 longhua may 14 Jump from 7th floor

12 nan, Gang male 20 longhua may 21 Jump from 4th floor

13 li, hai male 19 Guanlan may 25 Jump from 4th floor

14 mr. he (Given name unknown)

male 23 longhua may 26 Jump from 7th floor

15 mr. chen (Given name unknown)*

male 25 longhua may 27 attempted to jump but was stopped. cut his wrist.

* survived with injury Source: Sacom, Workers as Machines: Military Management at Foxconn (october 12, 2015), 2, available at http://ow.ly/mDak5 (accessed on may 7, 2015).

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The terrible “Foxconn Suicide Express”17 of fifteen workers trying to kill themselves in five months was followed by activist campaigns, dur- ing which “iSlave” emerged as a powerful meme against corporate mis- behavior.18 Foxconn and Apple have been targeted by the press, labor organizers, Chinese authorities, international NGOs, as well as artists, including Mike Daisey, whose monologue “The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs” caused major controversy in 2012.19

Among the most visible campaigns is the joint investigative team of students and scholars from twenty universities in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong (henceforth, “the twenty- university joint team”). Along with talented students of my university, I have taken part in this network, whose key node is SACOM (Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, a Hong Kong- based labor NGO). Since 2010 the team has released four major reports on Foxconn, covering a wide range of issues, from suicide and salary to work injury and union operation.20

Appconn, on the other hand, has kept denying the allegations. Terry Guo blamed suicides on workers’ “personal relationships,” “breakups” and “family disputes,”21 while Tim Cook and his executives emphasized Apple’s admirable endeavor in ensuring labor standards.22 However, in May 2013, after a dispute over Foxconn’s production quality, Apple moved part of its supply chain to Pegatron, another Taiwanese manu- facturer, marking a rare moment of distancing itself from Foxconn.23

High- profile suicides continued at Foxconn well into 2015, including the death of Xu Lizhi, a worker- poet who jumped from the seventeenth floor.24 He gained much posthumous fame. As Emily Rauhala wrote for Time magazine:

Factory life [at Foxconn] made Xu feel like a machine, a half- human with a “stomach forged of iron / full of thick acid, sulfuric and nitric.” The same jig that forced workers’ “skin to peel” replaced their human tissue with a “layer of aluminum alloy.” He felt dehumanized, stunted, as if the work itself was stealing his ability to conjure language beyond “working words” like “workshop, assembly line, machine, work card, overtime, wages . . .”25

With the release of iPhone 6 in late 2014, Foxconn, along with Peg- atron, was targeted by BBC’s Panorama in an episode titled “Apple’s

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Broken Promises” for abusing workers by forcing them to work exhaust- ingly long hours.26 The twenty- university joint team report of 2014, for instance, found that overtime work at Foxconn far exceeds China’s legal maximum of thirty- six overtime hours per month. In the busy season of 2014, assembly- line workers were found to have performed 140 hours of overtime work each month, several months in a row, sometimes up to 152 hours in the most hectic month—4.2 times beyond the legal cap.27 Despite the slowing down of China’s manufacturing sector, it was still reported in January 2015 that Terry Guo “expect(s) his executives to meet 30 percent year- on- year increases and has a very forceful manage- ment style.”28

The plight of Foxconn workers has been heatedly discussed. Yet so many basic questions remain: Are the workers really willingly exploited because they are better paid and/or have nothing better to do? Did they commit suicide simply due to psychological problems and breakups? Is it true that Foxconn has been unfairly targeted because it is associated with Apple Inc.? Colorful and controversial as the Foxconn story has been, it would be better not to devote too much attention to corporate spin, bloody fanfare online, or so- called “expert opinions” from those who never set foot in the factory. Instead, the spotlight should be on the de facto conditions workers experience, as will be illuminated in the following pages. Again, one may ask: Why does this electronics industry of assem- bling digital gadgets deserve our scrutiny? The usual answers are often exclusively contemporary, lacking historical depth. Yet as Slavoj Zizek points out about “the dialectic of the Old and the New”: “It is those who propose the constant creation of new terms (‘postmodern society,’ ‘risk society,’ ‘informational society,’ ‘postindustrial society,’ etc.) in order to grasp what is going on today who miss the contours of what is actually New. The only way to grasp the true novelty of the New is to analyze the world through the lenses of what was ‘eternal’ in the Old.”29

Slavery, as discussed in the previous chapter, is one such “novelty” from the seventeenth century. It is still around in this century that we call the twenty- first. For, after all, the institutions and practices similar to slave systems centuries ago are not completely gone. They just assume different forms.

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Foxconn Feitorias

Labor sociologists examine factories through their “factory regimes”— structures of production and discipline that regulate activities in the workplace.30 Some of these regimes are more “despotic,” as they use more brute force, others more “hegemonic” in their reliance on co- optation and their manipulation of organizational culture. Ruled by the world’s largest communist party, China, with its version of capitalism, has become a “museum of factory regimes” because it harbors many kinds of regimes that would otherwise exist in very different time and space, from the old socialist danwei work- units to restructured state- owned enterprises to new monstrous systems such as Foxconn.31 But when China’s leading sociologist Shen Yuan spoke about this “museum of factory regimes,” he did not refer to the feitoria, probably the oldest “factory” in history. The word “factory” only came into the English language since the late sixteenth century, and only after the Victorian era did its meaning stabi- lize as a social unit of industrial activities, especially manufacture.32 Yet, late- medieval Portuguese already had the word feitorias—not as places of production but as trading posts, trading no ordinary goods but slaves. These earliest “factories” were not in Europe. They were, instead, located mostly along the “slave coast” of West Africa. Among the most notori- ous feitorias was Lomboko on the coast of Sierra Leone, operated by the slave trader Pedro Blanco. Steven Spielberg’s 1997 film Amistad depicted the destruction of Lomboko.33

The feitorias served the capitalist world- economy long before the rise of industrial capitalism. Far from units of manufacture, these were, in essence, little more than prisons where slaves were gathered from Afri- can hinterlands, first in small numbers, then accumulated into the hun- dreds, to be traded onto European slave ships. For reasons of transporta- tion as well as defense, feitorias were usually found close to major river deltas of West Africa, such as the delta of the Escravos River in today’s Nigeria. Escravos was the Portuguese word for “slaves.” The geographic location of feitorias parallels that of Foxconn, whose largest and most strategic facilities in China were in Shenzhen of the Pearl River Delta and in Suzhou of the Yangtze River Delta despite its

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move into the inland provinces in recent years.34 These plants carried out the equivalent function of gathering labor power from the hinterlands, although their products of export were not “human cargo” but the gad- gets manufactured. Was this geographic similarity merely a coincidence? The feitorias were, on the other hand, military strongholds. Their main function was to constrain slaves who were only recently captured and subject to bondage by sealing off the place from unsanctioned out- side contact. The militarized nature of the feitorias was prominent, with their armed guards and jurisdictional independence from local authori- ties. This was highly comparable to Michel Foucault’s analysis in Disci- pline and Punish, where he argues that torture and bodily punishment work more effectively in a space of isolated enclosure.35 These systems of discipline, be they prisons or feitorias, clearly anticipate Foxconn’s “semi- military management factory regime” known for the social domi- nation and alienation therein.36

• • •

An open admirer of Genghis Khan, Terry Guo rules Foxconn as if it were an army. He borrows explicit terms from the Taiwanese military to name the rank and file of his manufacturing troops, whose total number exceeded 1.4 million in 2013 (slightly larger than all of the U.S. armed forces combined).37 The central unit to monitor productivity is called Zhanqingshi, meaning literally “War Intelligence Office.”38 According to a Chinese book praising Terry Guo, “Visiting the Longhua campus [of Foxconn] in Shenzhen, you could feel the atmosphere of an army officer training school. . . . In the soccer field located at the center of factory buildings, new employees were practicing military drills. Five of them formed a row, chanting slogans loudly.”39

Approaching Foxconn Longhua (which contained four hundred thou- sand workers in 2010, when most suicides occurred in this facility), one would find huge signs with bold Chinese characters, the kinds one would see near military bases in China, which read: “This factory area is legally established with state approval. Unauthorized trespassing is prohibited. Offenders will be sent to police for prosecution!” Of the hundreds of Chinese factory entrances I’ve seen, there is no other place with such intimidating signs.

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I thought this was meant only to scare off journalists and members of the general public. But even a policeman complained to me in 2013, “You know what they did? They gave me speed tickets!”40 This officer never expected to receive speed tickets because he drives a police vehicle. Yet he had to pay a fine for breaking Foxconn’s traffic rules, suggesting that the enclosure of Foxconn feitorias was indeed beyond the jurisdiction of local government. On the shop floor and in the neighborhood, Foxconn guards are known for their brutality toward workers and eagerness to bully them. In Longhua alone, there were once more than one thousand guards in 2010. During a survey of 1,736 Foxconn workers conducted in nine cit- ies and twelve facilities during summer 2010, 16.4 percent reported being subject to physical penalty by guards, or managers using guards to threaten them; 38.1 percent had experiences of being detained by guards or managers; 54.6 percent felt angry about the way they were managed.41 “If a guard sees something wrong with you,” a worker said, “he’d come and give you a couple slaps in the face. It was very common.”42

During the Atlantic slave trade, “violence cascaded downward, from captain and officers to sailors to the enslaved.”43 In a similar fashion, Foxconn organizes itself using a hierarchy of thirteen tiers, demand- ing employees to be obedient to their superiors.44 Workers are sealed within this structure, where they are normally expected to report to their supervisors only. If they feel they are being abused or threatened by guards, and they want to call the police by dialing 110 (the standard police hotline throughout China), they cannot reach the local police. Instead, they reach Foxconn guards. The company, like the feitorias, is an independent kingdom in itself. This institutional setup can be deemed as similar to slavery, for it “restrict[s] free movement or access to state authorities.”45

There are many horrifying accounts of Foxconn guards abusing work- ers, torturing, maiming, and killing them, which have spread like ghost stories. “There is an underground chamber where the guards dismember workers they killed. A friend told me he saw them taking body parts from there and tossing them into the sea.”46 “The guards were weirdly quiet last night after they went out to beat a worker named Liang Chao. They slept early without having some evening food, which was their

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routine. Then this Liang Chao became the ninth jumper.”47 It is hard to assess the validity of these accounts, whose psychological effect upon the workforce is, however, not to be underestimated. Sometimes there is ample evidence about the brutality of guards, as in the case of Ma Xiangqian, who was “suicided” (beizisha) in January 2010.48 Of the fifteen jumpers in 2010, Ma was the only one whose rea- son for death, according to police record, was “death due to fall from tall building” (gaozhui shenwang) rather than “death due to jump from high place” (tiaolou shenwang). Even though the police never announced Ma’s case as murder, his sister told reporters of Asia Weekly:

There are serious bruises on my brother’s chest. His forehead is scarred, skin broken next to his eyes. Bloodstains are visible on his chest, which is severely dented and black- purple in color. What’s more, the second autopsy found four nail holes through his scull. His medial calf has nail holes, too. Some silver- white metal pieces are inserted in his shoulder. A large wound is on his head. Six severe abrasions are found on his arms. A piece of meat is also missing on his wrist, now covered by a wrist band which I’ve never seen my brother wear before.49

These journalists saw photographic evidence of Ma’s injury, while reporters from another news organization were able to confirm instances of guard brutality among victims in three different Foxconn plants. There, workers referred to factory guards as jinyiwei, or brocade- clad guards, the imperial secret police of Ming Dynasty known in Chi- nese history for their vicious torture and interrogation techniques.50 This is how ordinary employees perceive those who run the twenty- first- century equivalence of the feitorias.

• • •

I had a surreal encounter in 2011 with one of the guards in Foxconn’s Guanlan facility in Shenzhen.51 Because I went with students who called me “Teacher Qiu,” a guard thought I must be one of the “teachers” super- vising Foxconn’s many “student interns” (a topic to be discussed in more detail in the next section). Well paid by schools sending students and labor- market intermediaries to work for Foxconn, these “teachers” didn’t really teach, except when their students became less obedient and

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wanted to leave the factory.52 Not infrequently these “teachers” need the guards to teach the disobedient students a lesson, not in class but in the back alleys. This well- built guard thought I was one of the “teachers.” He came to me. “Teacher Qiu, phone me if you need my help,” he said and offered me his mobile number. Looking at me straight in the eye, he added, “But no need to call me if it’s not big business.” He made the hand gesture for money, indicating clearly that by “big business” he meant some consid- erable amount of cash. Does that mean he was offering to hurt people seriously if I want to hire him? How seriously and how much would it cost? Astonished by his candor, I was speechless for a minute, as he started rambling about why he needs to “help” me. He said he was a seasoned migrant, almost killed during the 2009 Urumqi ethnic riots in China’s Muslim northwest. “From then on, I’ve decided all I want to do in this lifetime is to fucking enjoy myself: to eat well, drink well, and find good female company.” He boasted about his gang activities in another city, which kept him busy fighting every other day, and he won most of the fights—or so he said, perhaps to assure me of his abilities. For him, it was exciting, lucrative, although it meant he was too busy to find girls. “But this year in Foxconn, it’s not exciting at all because we cannot hit workers like before last year (2010, the year of Suicide Express). It’s so boring.” He complained, “Although I have free time now, more than enough time for girls, I find myself short of cash. This is why I need more business from you, Teacher Qiu!” Again, I have no ground to judge if he was exaggerating or lying, although it was clear he was trying his best to sell me a violent service, disciplining my students so long as I paid him well. Wearing the Foxconn guard uniform, he looked relaxed and confident, talking to me in broad daylight at a major intersection of the dormitory area, a sign that he probably took this as “normal business.” He was sincere in talking “busi- ness”—as if I had “powers attaching to the right of ownership” over “my” student interns. This was nothing more than an intriguing anecdote, which needs to be taken against the backdrop of a widespread complaint: when workers

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lost their personal items in the factory, the guards almost never care to investigate.53 Is it because they are too busy with their own “business”?

• • •

Besides physical penalty and bullying, there are other practices echo- ing slavery in its classic barbarity. Factory Gossip (gongchang longmen- zhen) was an underground magazine edited by several Shenzhen work- ers, including Foxconn workers. Its seventh issue, published in April 2013, focused on the scandalous factory.54 One essay discussed the aftermath of the suicide tragedies in 2010, when Foxconn promised to increase salaries, set up care centers for workers, and transform their strict hierarchy into “humane flavor management system (renxinghua guanli tixi).” But “Where is the ‘humane flavor’?” the author asked. “How come I seldom smell it?”55

Another article cites a teenage worker who discussed Foxconn’s hir- ing process and how he felt about it. Altogether he had to go through seven steps, including a written exam, interview, and physical examina- tion. One of the steps was to check if the applicants had disabilities: “I felt I was stupid, being picked by others like an animal.”56

A separate interview conducted in another Foxconn plant revealed more details. The worker interviewed was asked, during the recruitment process, to remove all clothing on his upper body and then to extend and retract his arms to show he had no physical disability. To prove he was not deaf or dumb, he had to shout his name loudly. “I had this feeling at the time that I was a commodity on sale. The master [zhurenjia, or the Foxconn manager] was looking for those who are physically healthy and strong, those he could purchase paying the price of two horses, whereas others do not even deserve to become commodities.”57 Here the anal- ogy was palpable, although the worker did not mention the slave trade explicitly.

• • •

A common misunderstanding in public discussion was that Foxconn workers chose to stay, endure monotonous work and poor conditions there, which were in any case still better than elsewhere. Is this true? Can someone really choose to leave feitorias at will?

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Difficulty in quitting one’s job was a common problem among work- ers, especially when the factory is short on hands.58 This was the case of a factory girl I interviewed who had to go through a long and ardu- ous process to leave Foxconn in 2011.59 According to China’s labor law, workers do not need approval from the employer when they decide to quit. All they need is to inform the management. Yet the law was hidden from workers, who were instead required to obtain dozens of approvals. In her case, she had to approach more than three dozen supervisors, mostly strangers to her, and get a total number of thirty- eight signa- tures before Foxconn let her go. “Had I been a little less persistent,” she said, “I probably would have never left there. It was so hard to get hold of the managers because they were busy. It was even harder to find them in different buildings because, as an ordinary worker, I didn’t have the e- permit to enter. I had to wait many hours outside and sometimes could not get a single signature after a whole day waiting. It took me almost two months to gather the thirty- eight signatures.” This is but one method for the company to exercise control over workers, to keep them from leaving. Even though this is not done using shackles or chains, the result of reducing labor mobility and workers’ legal rights is similar in substance. In this case of preventing the worker from quitting, both deception and coercion were involved. She was deceived to think there was no other way out except following Foxconn’s rules. She was coerced because, otherwise, she would not have her wages back. Such measures of constraint “constitute control over a person in such a way as to significantly deprive that person of his or her individual liberty.”60

Enslavement occurs “with the intent of exploitation through the use, management, profit, transfer or disposal of that person.”61 These “practices similar to slavery” are most evident in the cases of “students interns [xuesheng gong]” at Foxconn. The aforementioned Foxconn guard mistook me for one of those “teachers” because every year so many interns were sent from vocational high schools to work on the assembly lines.62 Due to seasonality, the total number fluctuates. In 2010, for instance, Foxconn had between 76,000 and 150,000 student interns at any given time, making it by far the world’s largest internship program.63

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China’s 2010 education law stipulates that student interns cannot work for forty hours each week. Yet, in Foxconn Shenzhen, usually stu- dent interns had to work sixty hours each week.64 Most of the interns are in their late teens or early twenties, although underaged minors as young as fourteen were found in the Yantai plant, for which Foxconn has formally aplogized.65

I interviewed a dozen student interns from 2010 to 2012. Most of them came from Henan Province in Central China to the Longhua or Guanlan facility in Shenzhen, South China. At school, their majors were business management, English, education, accountancy, Chinese medi- cine. In Foxconn, nearly all of them did one thing: make iPhone cases. None of them had a labor contract.66

The work was repetive, boring, and had nothing to do with their stud- ies. No wonder most of them wanted to escape. It was most demand- ing for these teenagers who often had to stand there ten hours a day, maintaining the same body posture in order to work more effeciently. According to their male line- leaders, whom I interviewed, by the end of the first week, the constant standing and working would cause all female students to have sore legs so painful that they would cry. In the second week, the male students would be in tears.67 But they had to be there because completing internship was a graduation requirement. In 2012, Foxconn denied using forced student labor.68 Yet in 2013 the violations—of Chinese law as well as Foxconn’s internal regulation— were still found by a Financial Times report in Foxconn Yantai.69 Another 2014 report by Earl Brown, labor and employment law counsel at the AFL- CIO Solidarity Center, and his colleague Kyle DeCant, concluded that these vocational school internships “violate the International Labor Organization’s convention on forced labor” partly because the system “operate[s] under the menace of penalty by withholding diplomas when interns refuse to engage in their work assignments and by denying stu- dents access to complaint mechanisms.”70

Student interns provide “flexible, cheap, and obedient labor.”71 This was, more precisely, a situation of Foxconn’s borrowing or renting the labor power of the teenagers from their schools for the purpose of profit. The work was supposed to be educational, but the tasks had little to do with students’ major of study. They were there because they had no

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other choice; because they accepted that their schools “possess” their time, and now that their teachers order them to work in Foxconn, they became the factory’s possession as well. Such use of “student interns” qualifies as “practices similar to slavery” because, according to the Bellagio- Harvard Guidelines: “In evaluating the particular circumstances to determine whether slavery exists, ref- erence should be made to the substance and not simply to the form of the relationship in question.”72 “Evidence of profiting from the use of a person may include cases where a person is mortgaged, lent for profit, or used as collateral” (emphasis added).73

• • •

Whereas workers had to go through humiliating processes to get hired and the factory made it extremely difficult for workers/interns to quit at will, it could not be easier for Foxconn to lay off employees when deemed necessary. In December 2009, due to market downturn, Foxconn fired forty thousand workers at once all over China. This was not too difficult because the company avoided having direct contractual relationship with workers by hiring from job- market intermediaries, a practice that was also found in Foxconn’s facilities in Turkey and the Czech Republic.74 Other workers were either “interns” or workforce “pro- vided” by state agencies in charge of labor export from inland provinces. These workers were conveniently rendered dispensable in the legal loop- hole because Foxconn did not directly hire them. As for those who had a signed contract with Foxconn, the company also found ways to reduce their monthly salary to 500 yuan, or $73, thus coercing them to quit their jobs “voluntarily.”75 Ironically, market demand recovered at the beginning of 2010, and Foxconn laid off too many “disposable” workers. The company then announced thirty thou- sand job vacancies on the website of China’s Ministry of Commerce in March 2010, less than four months after it fired forty thousand workers. “How could Foxconn hire and fire tens of thousands of workers at will?” analysts remarked. “How could Foxconn play with human resources in such an effortless way? What’s the trick?”76

The trick was simple: evade legal obligation to employees, who were rendered, often unknowingly, into the ultimate “flexible labor.” “This

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semi- militarized management system is really worse than real military systems,” said a Foxconn worker, “because they can get rid of you any- time they want.”77 In this case, “anytime” includes times of market slow- down as well as times of work injury or vocational disease when workers became costly liabilities to the company, when their bodies, no longer worth exploiting, are discarded as during the nightmare of the Middle Passage.

the Middle passage

A critical parallel between Foxconn and the slave trade system in history has to do with the extremely poor conditions of living the enslaved have to endure. The filthiness, stinking air, and insecurity could be found not only on slave ships making the notorious Middle Passage to cross the Atlantic but also in Foxconn dormitories at the beginning of the twenty- first century. Although feitorias were militarized enclosures, their hygiene was not the worst because the slaves had to be fed and protected from diseases so that they could be “tradable” anytime the slave ships arrived (which the feitorias’ rulers often did not know until the actual arrival). The worst conditions of living were, on the other hand, found onboard the slavers, especially its “lower deck,” when the ships journeyed to the New World.78

On the slave ships, the captain and crew usually stayed in upper deck or on deck, while the lower deck was used to store food, water, and trad- ing goods, including “human cargo.” Shackles prevented slaves from moving freely. Slaves were extremely densely packed, as depicted in the classic image of the slave ship, the Brooks, which “showed in gruesome, concrete detail that the slaver was itself a place of barbarity, indeed a huge, complex, technologically sophisticated instrument of torture” (see figure 3.1).79 As English politician William Wilberforce told the House of Commons in 1789 about horrible conditions in the lower deck: “So much misery condensed in so little room is more than the human imagination had ever before conceived.”80

Living conditions in Foxconn were better than the lower deck. At least workers are not physically locked up or chained down. But there are still similarities. First is the size and density. When undercover reporters

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visited Foxconn Longhua in 2006, they entered the Peace Dormitory Building to see nearly three hundred workers packed in one huge storage room. They slept on three- level bunk beds in a crowded space without air conditioning. According to a Foxconn worker, who lived there: “When I first walked in, I was truly shocked. It was summer time. The odor of sweat and dirty

fiGure 3.1 The slave ship Brooks and its plan of lower deck, 1788. Source: u.S. library of congress (digital iD: cph.3a34658).

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feet was suffocating.”81 The reporters noted: “The situation was appall- ing. Looking inside from the entrance, we saw a thick formation of bun- ker beds covering the entire dormitory. Although there were five win- dows and electric fans, we were still caught by strong unpleasant odor.”82

These observations resonate with the lower deck of a slaver, known in historical records as “hot, crowded, stinking.”83 The slaver usually trav- eled along the equator to go from West Africa to the Americas; the Fox- conn dormitories in Shenzhen were also located in the tropical zone of South China. Although Foxconn installed some electric ceiling fans, in general ventilation was probably not a whole lot better than the lower deck. Fortunately, when the twenty- university team visited Foxconn in 2010, they did not see similar dorm conditions of several hundred peo- ple sharing one gigantic room. The improvement was likely a result from media coverage in 2006 about the “iPod City.”84 However, smaller dormi- tories did not prevent tragedies of suicide, yet another grisly reminder that today’s world is still haunted by seventeenth- century slavery.

• • •

Physical condition being merely one indicator, as Patterson argued, slavery works more significantly through social isolation and “natal alienation.”85 This was precisely what Pun and Chan found in what they term Foxconn’s “dormitory labor regime,” which was tightly interwo- ven with the factory production regime.86 That is, in these dormitories, workers were intentionally shuffled and atomized so that friends, class- mates, and colleagues on the same production line would be separated while off duty. Even married couples working in the factory were put on day and night shifts separately. A wife, for instance, could only see her husband two or three times a month.87

Only after the Suicide Express of 2010 did Foxconn start to change its policy to atomize workers by allowing friends, classmates, or those on the same assembly line to become dorm mates. Until then, the dor- mitories were little more than spaces of strangers subjugated in a system of “total management,” designed to control workers around the clock so that their social ties can be severed to the maximum extent and their socializing activities reduced to the minimum.

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In the film 12 Years a Slave a heartbreaking scene is rendered when Eliza, a female slave, was separated from her children because they were sold to different owners. This was but one of countless instances when African slaves were forced to be parted, first from their families and relatives after capture, then over and again from their friends and ship- mates, before and after the Middle Passage. Of all these separations, a most important historical archive is the nar- ratives of Olaudah Equiano, a slave boy.88 After being snatched by raiders in central Nigeria, he was first pulled apart from his sister. Then he was sold multiple times, each time being uprooted from a new social environ- ment he was just getting accustomed to. Finally, he survived the Middle Passage, making friends among his shipmates, who gave him “the small comfort of being together.” But such “small comfort” was torn away once again when they reached the New World and had to go different ways.89

Separation and isolation are among the most quintessential experi- ences of being a dehumanized slave. This was true for African slaves cen- turies ago as much as it was for Chinese workers who had to live under the dormitory labor regime of Foxconn. Although there are notable dif- ferences in the degree and methods of coercion, the origin of such atomi- zation was the same: essentially, these are efforts to structure a worker’s life—not just work, but life in the holistic sense, 24/7, throughout the year—for the goal of profit maximization. Under such extremely exploitative logic, workers’ social lives are not only insignificant, they may even be seen as detrimental to productivity. Foxconn workers know it well: they are treated as machines that need no socializing. “Women are treated as men, and men as animals” was a com- mon saying among the workforce. The consequences were thus similar to the isolation of African and African American slaves from each other. Living in atomized social conditions prevents workers from fully relax- ing and recovering from their hard work; instead, it adds to their sense of insecurity, loneliness, and anxiety, undermining their psychological well- being.

• • •

Among the most hideous crimes committed during the Middle Pas- sage was the disposal of slaves deemed as liabilities with little or no

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commercial value. Sometimes slaves were tossed into the ocean because the ship carried too much “human cargo” and was short on supply of water or food, as shown in another horrible scene depicted in Spielberg’s Amistad, or because the ship ran aground, as in the notorious case of the Zong.90 More often it was because the slaves were sick or injured, requir- ing medical care.91

As the Guidelines specify: “Disposal of a person following his or her exploitation may provide evidence of slavery.”92 This could also be observed in some of the most well- known cases involving injured work- ers at Foxconn. Zhang Tingzhen was a Foxconn technician who reportedly fell while fixing a lamp twelve feet off the ground on October 26, 2011.93 Within ten minutes, he was in a Foxconn vehicle. The nearest hospital was less than two miles away, and there was little traffic. But it took ninety min- utes for him to be hospitalized. The delay—which his families suspect was deliberate—almost killed him. After surgeries, Tingzhen survived but his left- brain had to be surgically removed. Having lost most of his ability to speak and think, he cannot work anymore. Tingzhen’s families expected Foxconn to accept its legal responsibili- ties. To their dismay, however, the company refused to do so because, although Tingzhen worked for Hongfujin, Foxconn’s main subsidiary in Shenzhen, the company insists that he belonged to the Foxconn plant in Huizhou, a city where Tingzhen never set foot in.94 But using Huizhou rather than Shenzhen standards, Foxconn could save roughly $55,000 in compensation. There were many points of suspicion as the family was stonewalled when they did their best to learn about what happened, obtain evidence from Foxconn, and seek justice. They doubt the authenticity of Ting- zhen’s signature on his labor contract with Foxconn Huizhou because it does not look like his handwriting. They asked Foxconn to show Ting- zhen’s personnel files, his factory ID, and the surveillance video when he was injured. However, despite court order, the company cold- bloodedly denied access to all crucial evidence.95

Yangcheng Evening News reported on one of the case’s court hearings and used a cartoon to illustrate the company’s arrogant indifference. It

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depicted a Foxconn manager speaking condescendingly to the injured worker: “Sorry, you do not have a de facto employment relationship with me” (see figure 3.2).96

“They have lost all the conscience under heaven!” said Tingzhen’s father, who had many brawls with Foxconn guards. When he reported to the police, he was laughed at. The police said, “You know what level of authorities they have connection to? You think they will care if I intervene?” Far from an isolated case, I have met similar victims of work injury at Foxconn elsewhere. Another example is Yang Dan, who joined Foxconn in 2009 and was exposed to benzene, among other prohibited poisonous chemicals there. In 2014 she was diagnosed with leukemia, but Foxconn has been trying to evade their responsibilities despite court orders.97 Several similar cases were depicted in the influential documentary film Who Pays the Price? The Human Costs of Electronics, produced by Harvard

fiGure 3. 2 Work-injury victim, Zhang Tingzhen, being stonewalled by hongfujin, foxconn’s main subsidiary in Shenzhen.

Source: yangcheng evening news, December 19, 2013.

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researcher Heather White and her colleague Lynn Zhang.98 The victims were from Foxconn as well as other electronics contract manufacturers making iPhone as well as Samsung products. Why is it so hard for employees with work injuries or occupational disease to receive basic care and compensation according to the mini- mum legal requirements of Chinese law? Some say it is the factory being too stingy; some say it is the local government being bought off; some say it is the workers being unskillful and their families too greedy. These claims may be partially applicable in different cases. But much more important, something larger is amiss: larger than the individ- ual, larger than the factory, larger than China, larger than this strange modern world- system of digital gadgets. As Yuezhi Zhao points out, a key step is to “re- root” and “re- historicize” our understandings in a much larger conceptual framework99—which, for our purposes here, is slavery.

Suicide prevention Nets

Suicides—more than four centuries ago on the slave ships, or in Foxconn neighborhoods in 2010—result from extreme existential despair. It was, at the same time, an ultimate act of defiance to free oneself from that despair while denying the “powers attaching to the right of ownership.” One criterion of slavery, according to the Guidelines, is that it “signifi- cantly deprive[s] that person of his or her individual liberty for a period of time which is, for that person, indeterminate” (emphasis added).100 Using this definition, one does not have to be controlled for the entire lifetime to become a victim of slavery or “practices similar to slavery.” It qualifies so long as one perceives that the enslavement will last for an unspecified period. This mental perception, created by systematic sup- pression, severe alienation, and a deep sense of disempowerment, leads to suicide. Occurring from time to time in the feitorias, suicide was much more commonplace during the Middle Passage, when life was so miserable and the future so indeterminate. Hunger strike was almost incessant onboard the slavers to such a degree that Rediker sighed, “The Atlantic slave trade was, in many senses, a four- hundred- year hunger strike.”101

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Meanwhile, slaves also chose to “cut their own throats, with hard- edged tools, sharp objects, or their own fingernails.”102

Another way of suicide was jumping overboard, which meant immi- nent death because many Africans were from the hinterlands and could not swim, and because the sailors discarded slaves—dead or alive—into the ocean such that sharks would follow the ships, anticipating. Yet the slaves threw themselves into the ocean anyway attempting to free them- selves from the unbearable miseries onboard, to refuse being treated like animals, to return to their home villages, as many of them believed.103 Such suicide jumps happened so often that it endangered the profit mar- gin of the trade in human cargo, to such an extent that the captains made a special request: “Netting, a fencelike assemblage of ropes, would be stretched by the crew around the ship to prevent slaves from jumping overboard.”104

Some attentive readers may ask, if the slaves were in shackles and constrained in the lower deck, how could they jump overboard? The rea- son was profit. In order to maximize the sales of slaves, the crew had to minimize death rates among slaves during the Middle Passage. One method was to bring the slaves on deck, ask or force them to sing and dance, so that they could stretch their bodies and inhale fresh air. It was often in such a “singing and dancing” session when slaves jumped over- board into the ocean. Sometimes the slaves had to first free themselves from shackles; sometimes they jumped with their hands cuffed. Some were immediately drowned or killed by sharks, others brought back by the crew to face more torture and humiliation. The autobiography of Olaudah Equiano gave a vivid description: “One day, when we had a smooth sea and moderate wind, two of my wearied countrymen who were chained together (I was near them at the time), preferring death to such a life of misery, somehow made through the nettings and jumped into the sea: immediately another quite dejected fellow, who, on account of his illness, was suffered to be out of irons also followed their example.”105

The “suicide prevention net” was among the most mind- boggling inventions from the transatlantic slave trade. The real goal was not to protect slaves from themselves but to safeguard business revenue. Since the trade was abolished in the nineteenth century, anti- jumping nets

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had become obsolete, almost completely forgotten—until they sud- denly appeared again, atop Foxconn buildings where iPhones and iPads were made.

• • •

In summer 2010, Foxconn installed more than three million square meters of “prevention and protection nets” in its various facilities around China.106 As shown in figure 3.4, these were made either from steel netting and erected on the rooftops of tall buildings to prevent workers from jumping (the term for these was “sky net”) or from strong fabrics spread out like skirts in the lower parts of buildings in order to catch those jumping from windows (called “ground net”). All the stair- cases, windows, and balconies were also sealed using steel rods (“middle net”). From tall buildings nearby, these Foxconn anti- jumping nets look like fences of a vast concentration camp, floating mid- air.107

The emergence of suicide prevention nets is unprecedented in the entire history of industrial capitalism founded, supposedly, on a “free”

fiGure 3.3 Slave ship equipped with anti-jumping net as depicted by olaudah equiano, 1745–1797. Source: robert riggs, “aboard a Slave Ship,”

Life, September 3, 1956, p. 57.

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labor force. Terry Guo called the anti- jumping nets “a foolish solution, but a solution anyway.”108 However, from May to August 2010, workers continued to jump and commit suicide in at least four different Foxconn plants. In the last case, a female worker was indeed saved thanks to the “ground net” of her building.109

In August 2010, to reduce the scandalous effect of the nettings, Fox- conn announced it would dismantle all of them and rely on the “web of human hearts” instead, meaning it would give workers more social and psychological care. Walking around the Guanlan plant in spring 2016, I still saw anti- jumping nets atop tall Foxconn buildings, attesting the throwback from twenty- first- century to seventeenth- century slavery reducing humans to objects of possession by their “owners.”

• • •

Why did the suicides happen? Terry Guo and his associates pointed fingers at Chinese society and inappropriate media coverage. Above all, they emphasized the psychological problems of workers being too young, volatile, and egocentric.110 One would wonder, though: Why doesn’t Foxconn hire workers who are more mature? Why can’t the com- pany retain employees with more experience? Five years after the tragic

Sky Net topping up the roof 2–2.8 meters (6.6–9.2 feet)

Middle Net sealing up all windows, balconies, and staircases with steel rods

Ground Net extending 6 meters (19.7 feet) from the side of building

fiGure 3.4 a typical foxconn dormitory building with anti-jumping nets. Drawn by kwan kei heung.

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Suicide Express, young workers in their late teens and early twenties still account for the bulk of Foxconn’s workforce in China.111 Are they still in grave danger? Another claim was that the company’s compensation for employee death was so generous that the workers wanted to get it for their fami- lies.112 There were more reasons to blame the deceased, while the shrewd corporate brains probably forgot to ask themselves: Would an egocentric kid jump from the roof just to make his or her family rich? Does this act of altruism make sense if the worker indeed only cared about himself or herself? Guo famously declared that, although the number of jumping sui- cides might look high, it was actually not the case because his company has such a huge workforce. Quoting the psychologists he hired, Guo asserted Foxconn’s suicide rate was “in fact slightly below the lower mar- gin of national average.”113 Is this true? There are a few fallacies here. First, Foxconn’s number of suicides only included jumpers, which cannot be equated with the total number of suicide cases. Even in Hong Kong, a city more densely packed with tall buildings than Foxconn’s factory zone, jumpers usually only account for half of all completed suicides.114 Among attempted suicides, other meth- ods such as poisoning, cutting, or hanging are much more common. Back in 2007, there were reports about Foxconn workers hanging or poisoning themselves to death, but such cases were peculiarly absent from the 2010 Suicide Express figures—likely because they happened within the dormitory regime in ways that were much more private, hence more easily hidden from the public. Otherwise, the actual total number of suicides among Foxconn workers must have been significantly higher than the reported cases of jumping or falling. This should be common sense, although most reporters covering the tragic events failed to see the not- too- nuanced difference between “jumpers” and “suicides.” Second, national average was too crude an indicator. As in other coun- tries, suicide rates in China are considerably higher among senior citi- zens and in rural areas, but among young members of the urban work- force they tend to be much lower. A more sensible comparison should be with the suicide rates of young urbanites instead of the national average as a whole. This is especially the case because, if we examine the age of

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the deceased in table 3.1, it is clear that, except for a twenty- eight- year- old victim, all the other fourteen were no more than twenty- five years old, the best time of life. Six of them were teenagers. Most important, according to The Economist, China’s suicide rates had declined dramatically since the late 1990s.115 Paul Yip, a renowned suicide researcher, praised China: “No country has ever achieved such a rapid decline in suicides.”116 Yet, even in the 1990s when a spike of national suicide rates was recorded, there was no such Suicide Express in any Chinese factory. Should national statistics be referenced, would 2010 be the least likely to have become such a tragic year? Or perhaps it is instead the case that, rather than “slightly below the lower margin of national average,” as Terry Guo claimed, Foxconn’s suicide rates were indeed an anomaly in the context of China’s national trends? Liu Huashan, an independent psychology professor, provided an alternative estimation.117 First he calculated that the average suicide rate among Chinese university students (a more comparable demographic group than the national population as a whole) is between 2 and 4 per 100,000 people each year. But in May 2010 alone, six people killed them- selves in Foxconn Longhua. Extrapolating this figure, he concluded that the annual rate of suicides would be 24 per 100,000 for Foxconn as a whole. In other words, Foxconn’s suicide rate, even using jumping cases only, would be six to twelve times higher than the average rate among college students. One may see this comparison as inappropriate because college stu- dents are understandably less pressured and better taken care of than factory workers. That is perhaps correct. However, while a smaller dif- ference may be within the acceptable range, this margin of six to twelve times higher is simply too wide to be normal. Otherwise, if Foxconn’s 2010 suicide rate is “close to the lower margin of national average,” does it mean the company should be rewarded before and after 2010 for its suicide rates being truly exceptionally low? What about other other fac- tories in China, including other Taiwanese- owned factories, whose sui- cide rates are far below Foxconn’s? Why did others never even consider erecting “anti- jumping nets,” following practices of enslavement that was only “normal” during the Middle Passage?

• • •

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It is unfair, though, to blame Foxconn as the only culprit. Although the company does stand out with its military- style management system, unparalleled size, and unique installation of suicide prevention nets, researchers have also traced the harshness of its system to pressures from Apple Inc.118

The problem of employee suicide is notable in other companies of the IT industry. Huawei, China’s leading telecom brand, had three instances of jumping suicides between August 2007 and February 2008.119 Sam- sung, the preeminent Korean corporation, also lost two workers who leaped to their deaths in January 2011.120 These were far fewer than Fox- conn’s Suicide Express, when fifteen workers committed suicides in five months. But for some reason, employees of the global digital industries, of Appconn as a whole, indeed seem to be more suicidal compared to most other sectors. A similarly gruesome case would be the string of thirty- five suicides at France Telecom / Orange over the two years from 2008 through 2009, and another “suicide epidemic” involving ten Orange staff from January to March 2014.121 These tragedies involved a variety of suicide methods, such as stabbing and poisoning, not just jumping. Under public pressure, the French authorities under Sarkozy intervened, and the company’s president and CEO, Didier Lombard, had to resign in 2010. In 2012, he “was placed under formal investigation for psychological harassment” that caused the suicides.122 Even though the case was closed in Janu- ary 2015 without indicting Lombard, the accusations against him “may return to court.”123

Comparatively speaking, what did China do? How did the Communist Party of the People’s Republic compare vis- á- vis the supposedly right- wing politicians in France? Foxconn enjoys decidedly more impunity in China than France Telecom did in France. There is a geopolitical reason behind the political and economic dynamics of Taiwan- Mainland China interactions, which will be discussed in chapter 5. There is also a reason with regard to the global system: while the “sui- cide epidemic” of France Telecom peaked during 2008–2009, Foxconn’s Suicide Express went out of control in early 2010. Could this timing be more than coincidental? Analyzing France Telecom suicides in a Dur- kheimian framework, Sara Waters contends that the root reasons are

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to be found in finance capitalism.124 This can in part explain why the Foxconn suicides and the France Telecom tragedies happened around the same time. It also makes one wonder: Would the companies be less fatal if Foxconn or France Telecom / Orange were not listed on the stock market? Before the Global Financial Crisis, hospitals in Longhua were filled with Foxconn workers who “merely” lost fingers or fingertips at work. They outnumbered hospital beds and had to sleep in the corridors. But 2010, the year of suicides, was the post- crisis year when Appconn, including all major global IT players, pushed hard to maximize profit in order to make up losses in the 2008–9 recession. Boom- bust- boom: the pressure fell on Foxconn, which then passed it downward through its military- style management system to buquanxu workers at the very bottom of the hierarchy. The term buquanxu origi- nates from the Taiwanese army: it’s the lowest rank. Most jumpers in 2010 belonged to this rank, including Tian Yu, probably the most famous of Foxconn survivors who once attempted suicide.

A testimony of tian Yu

Why on earth did so many workers choose to end their lives? Answers to this question should preferably come from the victims themselves because the social meanings of suicides “must be constructed by the individuals committing them and by others involved through their interactions with each other.”125 Sadly, most of the suicidal workers have passed away. Although some left behind words that were released by Foxconn to confirm the company’s claims about the reasons of suicides (for example, psychological illness or the company’s high compensation for employee death),126 these were little more than an exceedingly partial and selective snapshot of reality. Fortunately, there is one such survivor, an exceptional window through which invaluable insights can be gained on the social and men- tal world of Foxconn workers who attempted to take their own lives. Her name is Tian Yu, the fourth and the youngest among reported cases of the Foxconn Suicide Express (table 3.1). She was seventeen when she jumped on March 17, 2010, from the fourth floor of her dormitory

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building, which is in fact six stories from ground level because the first two stories are used as warehouse. After twelve days in coma, she mirac- ulously woke up—although, due to severe spine injury, she will have to spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. My research team was lucky to find and talk to her in the hospital, keeping in touch with her and her family. There are admittedly only limited grounds to take Tian Yu’s experi- ence as representative of all the other deceased. However, at least her case suffices to dismiss the company’s blaming of workers’ individual vulnerabilities as the main cause of tragedy, to show how Foxconn’s management system was the main culprit due to its “institutions and practices similar to slavery.”

• • •

Tian Yu was born in rural Hubei in Central China. Although her par- ents went out as seasonal migrant labor when she was young, she grew up a happy girl in a caring family (care from grandparents and from par- ents when they were home) with the company of her siblings as well as classmates, among whom she made good friends. Growing plants was her hobby. She also liked to laugh while socializing with her peers.127 There was no sign whatsoever of her being psychologically challenged before she left for Foxconn Shenzhen at the beginning of 2010. Tian Yu’s story has been told many times in Chinese media, schol- arly publications (including my own), and my short documentary film Deconstructing Foxconn, produced in 2010 for SACOM and the twenty- university investigation team.128 When my research team interviewed Tian Yu in summer 2010, she was still a minor. Her parents encouraged her to talk to us, but she was somewhat reluctant. Over the years, the family declined many more interview requests so that Tian Yu could forget the traumatic experience. The following testimony was, however, from 2013 when she had become a twenty- year- old young adult. She told the filmmaker Tu Qiao that she was ready to share what actually happened to her. The inter- view became the basis of a full- length Chinese- language documentary Fly to Ascend,129 and the following quotations are lifted directly from this interview.

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Some additional background information: Tian Yu left home around the time of the Chinese New Year. She took a train ride of about nine hundred miles to become an ordinary worker in iDPBG, Foxconn’s spe- cial unit for making Apple products. Her job assignment as an “outside- checker” (waijianyuan) was to scrutinize the external appearance of glass screens, to assess if they were scratched, tainted, or irregular. Working under glaring lights that hurt her eyes, Tian Yu has to repeat a single mechanical body movement twenty- eight hundred times a day—at least that was the design of the assembly line.

The first day they took me to the assembly line. We had a look and would be on the shop floor the next day. The Full Technician [quanji- anyuan] gave a brief explanation about the job, and you were put on the assembly line. As I was a newbie, he said, “If you have questions, ask others nearby.” But others were all busy working, how did they have time [to talk] to you? In the beginning I worked slowly. For each backlogged pile [of screens], I shouldn’t be the only one held accountable because there were two outside checkers. But every time they accused me for work- ing slowly, and I couldn’t do anything. When we started working each shift, the line leader would give an admonitory speech. He would say he did not only reprimand me, he would do that to us all. All of us on that assembly line stood there, listening to his rebuke. For once, a disqualified product was checked by the other checker, who approved it. As she was not sure, she double- checked with the Full Technician, who said okay. So it passed the check. But in the end, at the checkpoint of IPQC, it was not passed. But the line leader said it was my responsibility. . . . He often scolded me, probably because I was more obedient. I never cried (after being wronged). At the end of day, after working night shift, I was so exhausted and really sleepy upon taking a shower. How could I have time to cry or even think about it? As a newbie, I was timid. Fresh from school, I did not have much social experience. I would not know how to argue (with the line leader). I did not think about confronting him. I never had that thought. I was too obedient.

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Human beings for sure couldn’t compete with a machine. You take a screen from the line, check it, and put it back. How can human match the speed of a machine? I kept wondering. On the assembly line if those people in the front work quickly, those after them must follow the speed and make a lot of items. You know, when the assembly line starts moving, you literally work non- stop.

As for the whole factory beyond her assembly line, Tian Yu was most struck by the massive hiring at Foxconn. While the company often pres- ents these hiring sprees as evidence of workers being so eager to work for them, Tian Yu, looking from the inside, saw this as the very opposite: the real reason was because workers were so eager to leave the factory after they get a taste of the assembly line and Foxconn’s merciless man- agement system. Tian Yu also confirmed that the company was indeed keeping workers from leaving by asking them to get approvals and, in so doing, infringing on workers’ legal rights of free movement.

They [Foxconn] hire constantly, very much so. In the only month when I was there, another group of new workers were hired after me. Then yet another group came. So many people were hired. I don’t know whether it was because too many people had left before the Chinese New Year or what other reason. If they [workers] couldn’t get approval to quit, they left anyway without receiving the monthly pay. They were bored, exhausted and did not want to do it any longer.

Immediately before Tian Yu talked about her attempted suicide, she talked about her social life in Foxconn being highly estranged, lonely, and helpless. The record of her dormitory shows that she had seven roommates. None of them came from Hubei, her home province. None of them worked in her unit iDPBG. These eight people belonged to seven different units of the factory.130 Such a management system atomizes workers in ways that echo Patterson’s sociological analysis of slavery and its “social death.” Tian Yu continues:

Before entering the factory, I thought I could make friends, like at school, where classmates [would be] hanging out together, where we could chat freely, even make fun of each other. Something like that,

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so close and natural. And then I went to a strange new city, without school buddies. It was like, though living in the same dorm room, we [workers] didn’t bind. There was no exchange among our hearts. Once in the factory, there wasn’t such talk. I don’t know why, there wasn’t such special [opportunity to talk to fellow workers]. It might be because I didn’t know how to talk to them. We were not familiar. We were like familiar strangers. In the end, I was broke. With my cell phone lost, and I wanted to ask why I couldn’t get my salary. After all, I had worked for a month there, but nobody told me how to collect my pay. I asked the line leader. He [didn’t seem to care] and told me the pay bank card was in Guanlan. I was a newbie indeed, knowing nothing, just a rookie. I didn’t know if he was truthful or not. I thought he, as a line leader, was not likely to lie to me. So I believed him and stupidly took the bus [to Guanlan.] There, at Guanlan, I didn’t have any idea how to get my salary. I simply ran from one building to another, getting nothing in the end. Nobody cared. There wasn’t a way, completely no way. You were full of grief. And when you were back, you again went from one department to another. And I didn’t know. I felt strongly, with so many things adding together, and I collapsed. When I came back, it was really late, with dorm lights all off and others asleep. I lied down, feeling so . . . frustrated and infuriated. I lied there thinking, I didn’t know what I was going to do. I really didn’t think of going to work. Not at all. So the next morning, I did the ir- rational thing. Anyway I myself wasn’t even aware of all these [matters]. At that moment, my brain went blank, real blank. I didn’t know what to do. To call my father—that thought really didn’t cross my mind. To have a meal—how can I think of that? Anyway, there was no sense . . . then I woke up and found myself in ICU (intensive care unit).

When Tian Yu repeated that her brain “went blank, real blank,” she was describing precisely a state of mind when one’s liberty was deprived “for a period of time which is, for that person, indeterminate,” quoting from the Bellagio- Harvard Guidelines.131

After Tian Yu spent a few months in a Shenzhen hospital, Foxconn hastily gave the family a lump sum of $29,000 as “humanitarian com- pensation.” In exchange, the Tian family had to agree that the company

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was no longer responsible and shall not be subject to negative media exposure. “It was like the way we buy or sell a commodity,” said Tian Yu’s father.132 As such, it concludes yet another tragedy at Foxconn.

Concluding remarks

This chapter, “Manufacturing iSlaves,” is the first prototype of twenty- first- century slavery in the context of digital media industry. I have examined herein the conditions of work and life in the world’s larg- est electronics manufacturer, Foxconn, including a brief history of the company; its suppressive factory regime from the guards to the “anti- jumping nets”; its harsh working conditions, from its semi- military management system to excessively long overtime hours; and the subse- quent alienation and “social death” of workers. Evidence from primary and secondary sources, from fieldwork and interviews, and from Fox- conn workers themselves, are rather consistent in exposing the under- belly of not only Foxconn but also Appconn, including the global gadgets production system as a whole. Despite the huge scale of Foxconn, its labor predicaments are indicative of an even larger regime gone wrong. As Patterson argued, slavery as a global institution was “firmly estab- lished in all the great early centers of human civilization and, far from declining, actually increased in significance with the growth of all the epochs and cultures that modern Western peoples consider watersheds in their historical development.”133 The recent turn to a new epoch of digital media, powered by Chinese manufacturing iSlaves in such deplor- able conditions as exist at Foxconn, is yet another instance in this long shadow of slavery, cast from history to modernity. Structurally speaking, Foxconn today is comparable to that of the feitorias centuries ago, serving the role of concentrating and export- ing labor power from the periphery to the core regions of the capitalist world economy. As Barbara Solow noted, “The mere existence of impe- rialism or colonialism does not explain how the metropolis exploited the periphery, as some would have it: It was the coerced labor of African slaves that allowed Europe to benefit so greatly from its conquests in the New World. When we assess the distribution of those benefits, we find that although the race went to the swift, the glittering prize was ham- mered out by African hands.”134

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Manufacturing iSlaves

Undeniably there are numerous differences between the production regimes of the seventeenth and the twenty- first centuries, changing from African to Chinese hands, from sugar plantations to electronic assembly lines, from West India Company to Foxconn, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But at the very least, the comparative exercise explicating this new analytical category of manufacturing iSlaves should be taken as an attempt at several clarifications that are metaphorical as well as practical, historical as well as contemporary. First, we have to dismiss the claims that our iPads, computers, and smartphones simply represent progress; that digital media is all about intangible content and immaterial wealth; and that it is okay for Fox- conn to exploit its workers in China, while consumers the world over pay cheaper prices for these gadgets. Seen from historical and legal stand- points, this is absolutely not acceptable because the social and moral cost is simply too high. Second, it is fundamental to recognize that all the gadgets have to be produced as part and parcel of our “modern material world,”135 that every single one of them comes into being with concrete social and environ- mental costs.136 Can there really be a cyberspace if all our computers (one particular type of material objects) disappear? How can Facebook and Twitter operate if we discard our smartphones? Will the global knowl- edge economy continue to exist without these physical objects: servers, fiber optics, and satellites? Much of the cost invested in this planetary communication infra- structure cannot be measured in monetary terms alone: there is liberty and dignity, justice and social ties. Without a full consideration of the cost at large, the crude logic of profit maximization, of putting a price tag on everything, is leading to slavery- like institutions and practices, which are not only ongoing but deteriorating. In this chapter, we see at Foxconn a full range of “the powers attach- ing to the right of ownership,” including possession, use, transfer, profit, and disposal of ordinary workers, of student interns, of injured employ- ees. Here, we see plights reminiscent of the Middle Passage—even though the sufferings are far from identical—as well as epic tragedies like the Foxconn Suicide Express, when the obsolete practice of “protect- ing” the owners’ “human cargo” using “anti- jumping nets” was revived after centuries in oblivion.

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ChApter 3

In retrospect, this unprecedented string of suicides at Foxconn was so much more than individual attempts to relieve pain, so much more than personal insanity, as the company would like us to believe. The suicides can also be interpreted as a subliminal collective endeavor to expose the unbearable conditions that manufacturing iSlaves have to endure. They constitute a defiant act of resistance, too. Let me close this chapter with two direct quotations from Foxconn employees themselves, both shedding additional light on the de facto conditions of iSlavery. First, a reflection from Factory Gossip, the under- ground workers’ magazine commenting on Foxconn’s deceptive outlook and its brutal, arbitrary, and often absolute power of management.137

I suddenly realize that Foxconn is like an imperial palace. The buildings look so grand and beautiful from outside, behind the high walls of en- closure. Talk about high salaries is blown out of proportion. But inside, the security is so tight and the hierarchy so dominant. Employees are like slaves and palace maids. The line managers and slaves often die in the hands of eunuchs without ever knowing what happened. The rare case of survival depends, entirely, on good luck!

When Durkheim famously attributed suicides to anomie, he meant precisely a chaotic and unpredictable social existence of absolute disem- powerment.138 The above paragraph narrates such a state of work and life within Foxconn; so does another blog entry, put online in the midst of the Suicide Express. This is a poem revealing workers’ emotions, how they see themselves, how they view the meaning of life, and how they understand the unfolding of the tragic events inside the massive factory:139

Only death proves we were alive, Perhaps to Foxconn employees, Or similar workers [called peasant- workers in China], Only death proves we were alive, Only desperation proves we are.

Authored by an anonymous Foxconn worker, this poetic blog entry mysteriously vanished three days after it appeared online.