Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic growth

[Ray]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

NO sweat shop, No money.

No money, no honey.

No honey, China no more act funny.

Pits. Put in rightful place.

 

[bennedose]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

Because new generation Chinese don't want that sweat ship jobs any more, they got better position. On the other hand those indians, vietnamins are desperating asking for it.:thumb:

No need to change the subject. Does a discussion about China cause you so much disomfort that you need to immediately try and talk about any country other than China?

A sweatshop is a place where people earn very little from a lot of work. Thank you for openly admitting that the Chinese do have sweat shops but do not want them and that India and the Vietnamese do not have them That is exactly what we are saying.

China does not need sweat shops when it can have prison camps. Prison camps are not sweat shops because no one is paid. In 30 years you will be an old man and there will not be enough young Chinese to either run sweatshops or look after prison camps. I am sure you can import Pakistanis to do your work. There will be 400 million Pakistanis willing to move to China by then via your grand Karakoram highway and high speed trains.

 

[badguy2000]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

No need to change the subject. Does a discussion about China cause you so much disomfort that you need to immediately try and talk about any country other than China?

A sweatshop is a place where people earn very little from a lot of work. Thank you for openly admitting that the Chinese do have sweat shops but do not want them and that India and the Vietnamese do not have them That is exactly what we are saying.

China does not need sweat shops when it can have prison camps. Prison camps are not sweat shops because no one is paid. In 30 years you will be an old man and there will not be enough young Chinese to either run sweatshops or look after prison camps. I am sure you can import Pakistanis to do your work. There will be 400 million Pakistanis willing to move to China by then via your grand Karakoram highway and high speed trains.

all developed countries experienced "sweatshop" then they graduate from "sweatshop" to a new grade.

China is experiencing "sweatshop",,and CHina promises to graduate soon

 

[Ray]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

all developed countries experienced "sweatshop" then they graduate from "sweatshop" to a new grade.

China is experiencing "sweatshop",,and CHina promises to graduate soon

The Communist lull the people by such inane trivia dripping with 'concern' as 'promise'.

What promise?

Promises are bogus sentiments.

Action is the answer.

And what is do difficult about that in a totalitarian, dictatorial country like China?

 

[bennedose]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

all developed countries experienced "sweatshop" then they graduate from "sweatshop" to a new grade.

China is experiencing "sweatshop",,and CHina promises to graduate soon

Excellent. I hope China does graduate from its current sweatshop driven economy.

 

[amoy]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

Excellent. I hope China does graduate from its current sweatshop driven economy.

at least u can do a bit homework simply as follows
(1) search Chinese enterprises among Fortune 500 Companies 2012
(2) check market performance of Chinese firms listed in NY Stock Exchange / NASDAQ

as u're Indian naturally Indian corporations in the abv mentioned arenas can be put along for an easy fact-based comparison to get a feel (sectors / size / market value / world rankings etc.). if u wish Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies can b included in Chinese camp.

numbers r more eloquent than empty accusations like "sweat shop".

Sent from my 5910 using Tapatalk 2

 

[bennedose]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

at least u can do a bit homework simply as follows
(1) search Chinese enterprises among Fortune 500 Companies 2012
(2) check market performance of Chinese firms listed in NY Stock Exchange / NASDAQ

as u're Indian naturally Indian corporations in the abv mentioned arenas can be put along for an easy fact-based comparison to get a feel (sectors / size / market value / world rankings etc.). if u wish Taiwanese and Hong Kong companies can b included in Chinese camp.

numbers r more eloquent than empty accusations like "sweat shop".

Sent from my 5910 using Tapatalk 2

China has become the low tech manufacturing base for the entire world from sweatshops that undercut anything that anyone else could do and made full use of China's human capital in ways that the west would call "Human rights abuses". But pulling Chinese people out of poverty is not necessarily human rights abuse. This is not a mean achievement and is far more significant than the "My dik biggah" argument about Fortune 500. The western world has such a big impact on the eastern mind that I am being asked to admire China's presence in a "Fortune 500" that is respected by people in the west. That presence is nothing compared to the changes China has brought to the world by means of its sweatshops.

But they are sweatshops and China still has a spare 500 million people who can still be employed in those sweatshops. But it is getting more difficult to do that because those who have already become rich (your Fortune 500 list) are now so far ahead that problems like "rights" and "freedom" are appearing inside China. So it is damn right to say that the Chinese would like to exit sweatshop culture double quick. Or at least hide sweatshops if they continue to exist. Chinese have not become wealthy by magically vaulting over everyone else's heads into Fortune 500. Chinese people have paid in sweat for it - and there is no need to pretend that the Chinese economy is where it is because it has developed just like the western economies the Chinese are trying to emulate.

It is another matter that western economies were built in the 19th and 20th centuries by sweatshops in colonies. The US economy was an exception, it did not build its industries on sweatshops in colonies - but it has certainly benefited from sweatshops in China in the 20th century. I do agree that China has the capacity to move out of its sweatshop-export economy by boosting domestic consumption in the face of falling exports. What China does to close its sweatshops remains to be seen. "Sweatshop" may be a hurtful name - but it only means "Work, but low pay". That is certainly better than "No work. No pay". How is China is going to switch between these modes? Or even move onto "Low work, high pay" like the west?

 

[amoy]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

@bennedose I do encourage u to walk out of your comfort zone to get back with hard DATA for a FACT based discussion, such as the ratio of Indians living on $$ per day, and %% Indians precluded fm sweatshop jobs due to inadequate industrialization.

low tech manufacturing takes the lion's share in overall MFG and will continue to be indispensible in the whole value chain. the difference lies in some climbing up the ladder while some hardly setting out.

without knowing your own Indian ground realities your diagnosis of Chinese is just pulled out of thin air. as an Indian talking abt China outside of Indian context is beside the point.

Sent from my 5910 using Tapatalk 2

 

[Ray]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

How many sweat shops workers commit suicide in China and why?

Inspite of tight censorship of news in China that attempts to hide the other side of the Moon, Chinese sweatshop workers are prone to commit suicide.
Apple makes them work 34 hours of the 24!

Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod

When Apple boss Steve Jobs unveiled his latest creation this week, the event was given quasi-religious significance. At a ceremony in San Francisco, more than 5,000 supplicants paid homage to a man hailed by some as a visionary.

Tickets to the event cost £1,000 - and guests watched in awe as Jobs, in his trademark black turtleneck jumper and blue jeans (he wears the same outfit seven days a week), held up the new Apple iPhone in front of a giant computer-generated image of himself.

With Apple now the biggest computing company on the planet, the 55-year-old could have been forgiven for looking smug. His latest iPhone, like the models before, is expected to generate billions in sales.

And with sales of his new iPad hitting one million in the U.S. within 28 days of its launch - one was sold every three seconds - Jobs has been credited with changing the way we live, introducing gadgets that keep us permanently connected.

They've also fuelled a massive sub-industry in phone applications or 'apps' which do everything from turning your phone into a virtual spirit level to timing pregnant women's contractions.

Given up for adoption as a baby, Jobs also likes to pose as a man of the California 'counter-culture' era, who made his fortune after taking LSD during a 'spiritual journey' in India, returning as a devout, shaven-headed Buddhist.

From those humble, supposedly spiritual beginnings, he is now a business behemoth, eclipsing Bill Gates at Microsoft as the most powerful man in computing. Apple's income currently approaches £10billion a year.

'I wish him [Bill Gates] the best, I really do,' Jobs once smirked. 'I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.'

Yet, amid all the fanfare and celebrations this week, there was one sour, niggling note: reports of a spate of suicides at a secretive Chinese complex where Jobs's iPhone, iPod and iPad - Apple's new state-of-the-art slimline computer - are built and assembled.

With 11 workers taking their lives in sinister circumstances, Jobs acted swiftly to quell a potential public relations disaster.

Stressing that he found the deaths 'troubling' and that he was 'all over it', the billionaire brushed aside suggestions that the factory was a 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,' he said. 'For a factory, it's pretty nice.'

His definition of 'nice' is questionable and likely to have his American workers in uproar if such conditions were imposed upon them.

For, as Apple's leader was taking a bow on the world stage, the Mail was under cover inside this Chinese complex. And we encountered a strange, disturbing world where new recruits are drilled along military lines, ordered to stand for the company song and kept in barracks like battery hens - all for little more than £20 a week.

In what's been dubbed the 'i-Nightmare factory', the scandal focuses on two sprawling complexes near Shenzhen, two decades ago a small fishing port and now a city of 17 million people.

This is the epicentre of operations for Foxconn, China's biggest exporter, which makes products under licence for Apple using a 420,000-strong workforce in Shenzhen. They have 800,000 workers country-wide.

And as Jobs was speaking in San Francisco, new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally.

Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won't kill themselves. (why should people kill themselves? There must be good reasons. Could it be inhuman conditions?)

The document, a copy of which has been obtained by the Mail, states that all employees (or their dependants) must promise not to sue the company as the result of 'any unexpected death or injury, including suicide or self torture'. B]why should people people have to give an undertaking that they nor their dependent sue the company? Why should there be 'any unexpected death or injury, including suicide or self torture'? Very odd to find chaps unexpectedly dying, getting hurt, committing suicide and then torturing themselves! [/B]

The owner of this massive, highly controlled iPad and iPhone factory has also decided to install something he's dubbed 'ai xin wang' - which translates literally as 'nets of a loving heart'

In reality, these 'loving hearts' are 10ft high wire fences on the roofs and 15ft wide nets at the base of all buildings. The human traps are to prevent people jumping to their deaths and smashing themselves on the pavements below. (Real funny having nets to prevent chaps jumping out! Why should people jump out in the first place?)

Alongside such physical impediments to suicide, hundreds of monks have been flown in to the plant to exorcise evil spirits. Shaven-headed and wearing long robes, groups of monks have been seen chanting and praying amid baffled, exhausted workers.

More than 2,000 social workers are also being recruited and emergency helplines set up. Anyone appearing mentally ill or stressed is being identified by a special 'spotters' team set up to keep tabs on the workforce.

Workers who fail to respond to the chanting monks or the entreaties of social workers are secretly shipped to Shenzhen Mental Health Centre, (Fantastic! Play ball or go to a mental institution! ) a private facility where there are several wards crammed with Foxconn employees.
With the complex at peak production, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the global demand for Apple phones and computers, a typical day begins with the Chinese national anthem being played over loudspeakers, with the words: 'Arise, arise, arise, millions of hearts with one mind.' (How charming! People driven to work by blaring national anthem! Is the anthem not something that should be played for sombre occasions and not be made mundane and routine?)

As part of this Orwellian control, the public address system constantly relays propaganda, such as how many products have been made; how a new basketball court has been built for the workers; and why workers should 'value efficiency every minute, every second'. (Typical Communist way of dysfunctional verbiage)

With other company slogans painted on workshop walls - including exhortations to 'achieve goals unless the sun no longer rises' and to 'gather all of the elite and Foxconn will get stronger and stronger' - (Again the same old verbiage that has no meaning.the employees work up to 15-hour shifts.


Down narrow, prison-like corridors, they sleep in cramped rooms in triple-decked bunk beds to save space, with simple bamboo mats for mattresses.
Despite summer temperatures hitting 35 degrees, with 90 per cent humidity, there is no air-conditioning. Workers say some dormitories house more than 40 people and are infested with ants and cockroaches, with the noise and stench making it difficult to sleep.

These workers answer to Terry Gou, an authoritarian figure whose contracts with Apple have helped make him, like his partner Jobs, one of the richest men in the world with a fortune estimated at £5.5billion.

While Jobs was away taking drugs in India, Gou - whose parents fled communist China to Taiwan - was starting Foxconn, employing ten workers to make television sets at his fledgling company.

But he quickly realised that there was a fortune to be made from China's booming population - a massive, cheap labour-force waiting to be exploited.
A workaholic, disciplinarian and perfectionist, Gou, 60, adopted a strict management style, inspired by his days in the private Taipei College of Maritime Technology followed by two years in the Taiwanese army.

New recruits at Foxconn are subjected to weeks of military-style drilling in order to build discipline. This is intended, as Gou puts it, to 'agglomerate them to act in unison and in concert' so that he can build a 'unique Foxconnian culture'.

As well as slogans on the walls, Gou orders staff to wear jackets bearing slogans such as: 'Together everyone achieves more.'

Strict discipline is enforced, with pay docked for any breaches under a bizarre points system. Points are deducted for crimes such as having long nails, being late, yawning, eating, sitting on the floor, talking or walking quickly. (Is this for real? Making humans into robots?)

During a week-long investigation, which involved dodging the security guards who constantly patrol the Foxconn complex and who beat up a Reuters photographer earlier this year, we spoke to dozens of workers on condition of anonymity.

On top of the living conditions, they all complained of intolerable pressure to hit targets for booming Apple sales, with managers exhorting what Gou calls his 'family' to work until they are ready to drop.

'There are just three points to your life when you work at Foxconn,' says Huang, 21, who finally quit last month because of the pressure. 'Going to work, coming-home from work and sleeping.' He added: 'You are totally isolated from the outside world. I walked the same path from dorm to factory and back to dorm. That was my world.

'There's no entertainment and no TV. There were 12 workers in my dorm, with some doing days, others nights and there was not a single person to talk to.'

Ma Xiangqian, 18, who killed himself earlier this year after just three months at Foxconn, was too scared to give up his job, despite the pressure, knowing poverty awaited as thousands compete for a single post.

He slowly cracked. First, he was 'fined' from his wages for breaking two tools by accident. After being exhorted to work harder, he was eventually taken off the production line and forced to wash toilets for several weeks as punishment.

He told his sister he was 'ashamed' of the way he was being treated. On January 23, he was found in a pool of blood at the foot of his dormitory block. His sister, who also worked at Foxconn, was told he had fainted and was recovering in hospital. ([/COLOROImagine the state of brainwashing that is undertaken by dinning propaganda, day in day out, till one accepts the robotic life and failing being a robot, wrecks the mental balance])

In reality, her brother was already in the morgue. She was then told that Ma was a victim of unexplained 'sudden death'.

After she took the highly unusual step of protesting and demanding a post mortem, Foxconn officials later changed the cause of death to 'falling from a great height'.
Like Jobs, Gou dismisses claims that working conditions at the complex are to blame, saying the spate of suicides were due to ' personal' reasons' such as broken relationships.

To the fury of his dead employees' relatives, Gou also claimed that some people had killed themselves for the money - saying they wanted Foxconn's 'generous compensation' for their families.

That is not the view of Yao Ruoqin, one of three known survivors of Apple suicide attempts. We found her at a Shenzhen hospital, although her name was not on official ward records.

'Terry Gou couldn't care less about me,' she said, recovering from broken hips and a damaged liver after jumping from the seventh floor at Foxconn.

Two other survivors we found at a local hospital - one called Tian Yu, 17, who has been paralysed from the waist down - refused to speak, saying Foxconn had threatened to stop paying their medical bills if they went public.

Appearing to confirm claims of overwork, another worker, Yan Li, 27, collapsed and died last week from exhaustion, according to SACOM, (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior), a Hong Kong pressure group that is monitoring the situation.

Yan collapsed having worked continuously for 34 hours. He was on the night shift for a month and had worked overtime every night, according to his wife.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one line manager told us that there is constant pressure among all workers. 'We must meet the quota every day at the maximum quality,' said the man. 'There are several layers of management with the pressure coming from above.'

Qing Tong, 28, a former manager at Foxconn, has written a book detailing her experiences at the company, saying all traces of individual personality among workers must be erased to achieve Gou's mantra that 'time is money and efficiency is life'.

After details of the Chinese suicides leaked out, and Jobs promised he was 'all over it', his Chinese partner announced that his workers would receive a generous-sounding 30 per cent pay rise, raising the basic wage from £90 to £120 a month.

Yet human r ights groups denounced this as a public relations sham, saying that the legal minimum wage was being raised by the Chinese authorities in any case.

Lu Bing Dong, 22, helps produce 21,000 iPhones daily in his workshop alone. 'The pay rise is actually stopping us making more money because now they are strictly controlling overtime,' he says.

'Foxconn are very smart - they say it's a pay rise, but we actually earn less. It's meaningless. They will increase the daily quotas [of products made] to make up for lost time.'

As we left the sprawling Foxconn complex, workers were putting cages on one dormitory block with balconies - yet another measure to keep workers from killing themselves.

'It looks even more like a prison now,' said a weary Lu, 27, returning from a 15-hour shift.

One can't help wondering how Steve Jobs, the billionaire Buddhist, manages to square Foxconn's activities with his belief in karma - that what you do in this life will be repaid in the next...



Revealed: Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod | Mail Online

 

[nimo_cn]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

@bennedose I do encourage u to walk out of your comfort zone to get back with hard DATA for a FACT based discussion, such as the ratio of Indians living on $$ per day, and %% Indians precluded fm sweatshop jobs due to inadequate industrialization.

low tech manufacturing takes the lion's share in overall MFG and will continue to be indispensible in the whole value chain. the difference lies in some climbing up the ladder while some hardly setting out.

without knowing your own Indian ground realities your diagnosis of Chinese is just pulled out of thin air. as an Indian talking abt China outside of Indian context is beside the point.

Sent from my 5910 using Tapatalk 2

two things i have learned about Indians here

1) sensational words like sweatshop make a better argument than statistics. most indian posters are of humanities background, they dont understand the power of numbers.

2) they like talking about China as Indians, but outside of the Indian context, that is why they refuse to bring India into threads related to China.

Sent from my HUAWEI T8951 using Tapatalk 2

 

[nimo_cn]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

How many sweat shops workers commit suicide in China and why?

Inspite of tight censorship of news in China that attempts to hide the other side of the Moon, Chinese sweatshop workers are prone to commit suicide.
Apple makes them work 34 hours of the 24!

Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod

When Apple boss Steve Jobs unveiled his latest creation this week, the event was given quasi-religious significance. At a ceremony in San Francisco, more than 5,000 supplicants paid homage to a man hailed by some as a visionary.

Tickets to the event cost £1,000 - and guests watched in awe as Jobs, in his trademark black turtleneck jumper and blue jeans (he wears the same outfit seven days a week), held up the new Apple iPhone in front of a giant computer-generated image of himself.

With Apple now the biggest computing company on the planet, the 55-year-old could have been forgiven for looking smug. His latest iPhone, like the models before, is expected to generate billions in sales.

And with sales of his new iPad hitting one million in the U.S. within 28 days of its launch - one was sold every three seconds - Jobs has been credited with changing the way we live, introducing gadgets that keep us permanently connected.

They've also fuelled a massive sub-industry in phone applications or 'apps' which do everything from turning your phone into a virtual spirit level to timing pregnant women's contractions.

Given up for adoption as a baby, Jobs also likes to pose as a man of the California 'counter-culture' era, who made his fortune after taking LSD during a 'spiritual journey' in India, returning as a devout, shaven-headed Buddhist.

From those humble, supposedly spiritual beginnings, he is now a business behemoth, eclipsing Bill Gates at Microsoft as the most powerful man in computing. Apple's income currently approaches £10billion a year.

'I wish him [Bill Gates] the best, I really do,' Jobs once smirked. 'I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.'

Yet, amid all the fanfare and celebrations this week, there was one sour, niggling note: reports of a spate of suicides at a secretive Chinese complex where Jobs's iPhone, iPod and iPad - Apple's new state-of-the-art slimline computer - are built and assembled.

With 11 workers taking their lives in sinister circumstances, Jobs acted swiftly to quell a potential public relations disaster.

Stressing that he found the deaths 'troubling' and that he was 'all over it', the billionaire brushed aside suggestions that the factory was a 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,' he said. 'For a factory, it's pretty nice.'

His definition of 'nice' is questionable and likely to have his American workers in uproar if such conditions were imposed upon them.

For, as Apple's leader was taking a bow on the world stage, the Mail was under cover inside this Chinese complex. And we encountered a strange, disturbing world where new recruits are drilled along military lines, ordered to stand for the company song and kept in barracks like battery hens - all for little more than £20 a week.

In what's been dubbed the 'i-Nightmare factory', the scandal focuses on two sprawling complexes near Shenzhen, two decades ago a small fishing port and now a city of 17 million people.

This is the epicentre of operations for Foxconn, China's biggest exporter, which makes products under licence for Apple using a 420,000-strong workforce in Shenzhen. They have 800,000 workers country-wide.

And as Jobs was speaking in San Francisco, new measures were being secretly introduced at Foxconn to prevent the suicide scandal from worsening and damaging Apple sales globally.

Astonishingly, this involves forcing all Foxconn employees to sign a new legally binding document promising that they won't kill themselves. (why should people kill themselves? There must be good reasons. Could it be inhuman conditions?)

The document, a copy of which has been obtained by the Mail, states that all employees (or their dependants) must promise not to sue the company as the result of 'any unexpected death or injury, including suicide or self torture'. B]why should people people have to give an undertaking that they nor their dependent sue the company? Why should there be 'any unexpected death or injury, including suicide or self torture'? Very odd to find chaps unexpectedly dying, getting hurt, committing suicide and then torturing themselves! [/B]

The owner of this massive, highly controlled iPad and iPhone factory has also decided to install something he's dubbed 'ai xin wang' - which translates literally as 'nets of a loving heart'

In reality, these 'loving hearts' are 10ft high wire fences on the roofs and 15ft wide nets at the base of all buildings. The human traps are to prevent people jumping to their deaths and smashing themselves on the pavements below. (Real funny having nets to prevent chaps jumping out! Why should people jump out in the first place?)

Alongside such physical impediments to suicide, hundreds of monks have been flown in to the plant to exorcise evil spirits. Shaven-headed and wearing long robes, groups of monks have been seen chanting and praying amid baffled, exhausted workers.

More than 2,000 social workers are also being recruited and emergency helplines set up. Anyone appearing mentally ill or stressed is being identified by a special 'spotters' team set up to keep tabs on the workforce.

Workers who fail to respond to the chanting monks or the entreaties of social workers are secretly shipped to Shenzhen Mental Health Centre, (Fantastic! Play ball or go to a mental institution! ) a private facility where there are several wards crammed with Foxconn employees.
With the complex at peak production, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week to meet the global demand for Apple phones and computers, a typical day begins with the Chinese national anthem being played over loudspeakers, with the words: 'Arise, arise, arise, millions of hearts with one mind.' (How charming! People driven to work by blaring national anthem! Is the anthem not something that should be played for sombre occasions and not be made mundane and routine?)

As part of this Orwellian control, the public address system constantly relays propaganda, such as how many products have been made; how a new basketball court has been built for the workers; and why workers should 'value efficiency every minute, every second'. (Typical Communist way of dysfunctional verbiage)

With other company slogans painted on workshop walls - including exhortations to 'achieve goals unless the sun no longer rises' and to 'gather all of the elite and Foxconn will get stronger and stronger' - (Again the same old verbiage that has no meaning.the employees work up to 15-hour shifts.


Down narrow, prison-like corridors, they sleep in cramped rooms in triple-decked bunk beds to save space, with simple bamboo mats for mattresses.
Despite summer temperatures hitting 35 degrees, with 90 per cent humidity, there is no air-conditioning. Workers say some dormitories house more than 40 people and are infested with ants and cockroaches, with the noise and stench making it difficult to sleep.

These workers answer to Terry Gou, an authoritarian figure whose contracts with Apple have helped make him, like his partner Jobs, one of the richest men in the world with a fortune estimated at £5.5billion.

While Jobs was away taking drugs in India, Gou - whose parents fled communist China to Taiwan - was starting Foxconn, employing ten workers to make television sets at his fledgling company.

But he quickly realised that there was a fortune to be made from China's booming population - a massive, cheap labour-force waiting to be exploited.
A workaholic, disciplinarian and perfectionist, Gou, 60, adopted a strict management style, inspired by his days in the private Taipei College of Maritime Technology followed by two years in the Taiwanese army.

New recruits at Foxconn are subjected to weeks of military-style drilling in order to build discipline. This is intended, as Gou puts it, to 'agglomerate them to act in unison and in concert' so that he can build a 'unique Foxconnian culture'.

As well as slogans on the walls, Gou orders staff to wear jackets bearing slogans such as: 'Together everyone achieves more.'

Strict discipline is enforced, with pay docked for any breaches under a bizarre points system. Points are deducted for crimes such as having long nails, being late, yawning, eating, sitting on the floor, talking or walking quickly. (Is this for real? Making humans into robots?)

During a week-long investigation, which involved dodging the security guards who constantly patrol the Foxconn complex and who beat up a Reuters photographer earlier this year, we spoke to dozens of workers on condition of anonymity.

On top of the living conditions, they all complained of intolerable pressure to hit targets for booming Apple sales, with managers exhorting what Gou calls his 'family' to work until they are ready to drop.

'There are just three points to your life when you work at Foxconn,' says Huang, 21, who finally quit last month because of the pressure. 'Going to work, coming-home from work and sleeping.' He added: 'You are totally isolated from the outside world. I walked the same path from dorm to factory and back to dorm. That was my world.

'There's no entertainment and no TV. There were 12 workers in my dorm, with some doing days, others nights and there was not a single person to talk to.'

Ma Xiangqian, 18, who killed himself earlier this year after just three months at Foxconn, was too scared to give up his job, despite the pressure, knowing poverty awaited as thousands compete for a single post.

He slowly cracked. First, he was 'fined' from his wages for breaking two tools by accident. After being exhorted to work harder, he was eventually taken off the production line and forced to wash toilets for several weeks as punishment.

He told his sister he was 'ashamed' of the way he was being treated. On January 23, he was found in a pool of blood at the foot of his dormitory block. His sister, who also worked at Foxconn, was told he had fainted and was recovering in hospital. ([/COLOROImagine the state of brainwashing that is undertaken by dinning propaganda, day in day out, till one accepts the robotic life and failing being a robot, wrecks the mental balance])

In reality, her brother was already in the morgue. She was then told that Ma was a victim of unexplained 'sudden death'.

After she took the highly unusual step of protesting and demanding a post mortem, Foxconn officials later changed the cause of death to 'falling from a great height'.
Like Jobs, Gou dismisses claims that working conditions at the complex are to blame, saying the spate of suicides were due to ' personal' reasons' such as broken relationships.

To the fury of his dead employees' relatives, Gou also claimed that some people had killed themselves for the money - saying they wanted Foxconn's 'generous compensation' for their families.

That is not the view of Yao Ruoqin, one of three known survivors of Apple suicide attempts. We found her at a Shenzhen hospital, although her name was not on official ward records.

'Terry Gou couldn't care less about me,' she said, recovering from broken hips and a damaged liver after jumping from the seventh floor at Foxconn.

Two other survivors we found at a local hospital - one called Tian Yu, 17, who has been paralysed from the waist down - refused to speak, saying Foxconn had threatened to stop paying their medical bills if they went public.

Appearing to confirm claims of overwork, another worker, Yan Li, 27, collapsed and died last week from exhaustion, according to SACOM, (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior), a Hong Kong pressure group that is monitoring the situation.

Yan collapsed having worked continuously for 34 hours. He was on the night shift for a month and had worked overtime every night, according to his wife.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one line manager told us that there is constant pressure among all workers. 'We must meet the quota every day at the maximum quality,' said the man. 'There are several layers of management with the pressure coming from above.'

Qing Tong, 28, a former manager at Foxconn, has written a book detailing her experiences at the company, saying all traces of individual personality among workers must be erased to achieve Gou's mantra that 'time is money and efficiency is life'.

After details of the Chinese suicides leaked out, and Jobs promised he was 'all over it', his Chinese partner announced that his workers would receive a generous-sounding 30 per cent pay rise, raising the basic wage from £90 to £120 a month.

Yet human r ights groups denounced this as a public relations sham, saying that the legal minimum wage was being raised by the Chinese authorities in any case.

Lu Bing Dong, 22, helps produce 21,000 iPhones daily in his workshop alone. 'The pay rise is actually stopping us making more money because now they are strictly controlling overtime,' he says.

'Foxconn are very smart - they say it's a pay rise, but we actually earn less. It's meaningless. They will increase the daily quotas [of products made] to make up for lost time.'

As we left the sprawling Foxconn complex, workers were putting cages on one dormitory block with balconies - yet another measure to keep workers from killing themselves.

'It looks even more like a prison now,' said a weary Lu, 27, returning from a 15-hour shift.

One can't help wondering how Steve Jobs, the billionaire Buddhist, manages to square Foxconn's activities with his belief in karma - that what you do in this life will be repaid in the next...



Revealed: Inside the Chinese suicide sweatshop where workers toil in 34-hour shifts to make your iPod | Mail Online

how many bankrupted Indian peasants commited suicide each year?

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[Ray]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

how many bankrupted Indian peasants commited suicide each year?

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Peasants are labour at sweatshop?

Do you understand what is a sweatshop?

Typical Chinese.

Trying to digress since the Chinese are up a gum tree with nothing to say.

It is like changing the topic to - like changing to ask why the Chinese are so cramped by insecurity complex that they want
to double eyelid themselves& have breast implants?!

 

[ice berg]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

Peasants are labour at sweatshop?

Do you understand what is a sweatshop?

Typical Chinese.

Trying to digress since the Chinese are up a gum tree with nothing to say.

It is like changing the topic to - like changing to ask why the Chinese are so cramped by insecurity complex that they want
to double eyelid themselves& have breast implants?!

I got tons of pictures and articles of the "non existent" indian sweatshop. Just say then, Ray.

 

[no smoking]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

NO sweat shop, No money.

No money, no honey.

No honey, China no more act funny.

Pits. Put in rightful place.

Thank you, Ray!
Sometimes, I just suspect that you are Chinese.
When India is struggling with deficit, you don't give a damn about your homeland problem. Instead, you are concerned of China's future without sweat shop.
Thank you.

 

[no smoking]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

No need to change the subject. Does a discussion about China cause you so much disomfort that you need to immediately try and talk about any country other than China?

Well, for the matter of fact, I just simply answer Ray's question. Maybe, you should read it through before jump in.

A sweatshop is a place where people earn very little from a lot of work. Thank you for openly admitting that the Chinese do have sweat shops but do not want them and that India and the Vietnamese do not have them That is exactly what we are saying.

It is no shame to have sweat shop in anyone's homeland! It is even not shame to admit that you guys just want it so much since most of your workers' incomes are far less than Chinese.

Regarding the question if India or vietnamese do not have them, please check the following:

36 child labourers rescued from sweatshops in Seelampur, Usmanpur

China does not need sweat shops when it can have prison camps. Prison camps are not sweat shops because no one is paid. In 30 years you will be an old man and there will not be enough young Chinese to either run sweatshops or look after prison camps. I am sure you can import Pakistanis to do your work. There will be 400 million Pakistanis willing to move to China by then via your grand Karakoram highway and high speed trains.

No, we don't need Pakistanese to work for us since we can hire plenty of young Indians. Cheers!:thumb:

 

[nimo_cn]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

Peasants are labour at sweatshop?

Do you understand what is a sweatshop?

Typical Chinese.

Trying to digress since the Chinese are up a gum tree with nothing to say.

It is like changing the topic to - like changing to ask why the Chinese are so cramped by insecurity complex that they want
to double eyelid themselves& have breast implants?!

Suicides by Indian peasants are not suicides?

Typical Indian, always believe they are special, even their definitions of suicide.

Do you understand what is a suicide?

Why is suicide in China worth discussing, while suicide in India not?

Why are Indian peasants killing themselves like there is no tomorrow?

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[bennedose]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

two things i have learned about Indians here

1) sensational words like sweatshop make a better argument than statistics. most indian posters are of humanities background, they dont understand the power of numbers.

2) they like talking about China as Indians, but outside of the Indian context, that is why they refuse to bring India into threads related to China.

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For people who talk about "logic" the conclusions reached are laughable.

There is absolutely no evidence to judge what background most Indians come from unless they admit it.

The desperate attempts by Chinese posters to change the subject to India when we are talking about China is a standard ploy to avoid the subject of problems in China. How many of you are paid by the Chicom government to do that on here. I bet at least one of you is on the Chicom payroll

As an experiment, I will start a thread about China where I say only good things about China and curse India every now and again. i expect that all Chiese posters will be perfectly happy and only add to the laughter and joy and not try and change the subject. And the Chicom payroll troll withearn a few brownies from his tinpot employers

If DFI is a great place to learn about Indians, then it is an equally great place to learn about the Chinese. All Chinese get so uncomfortable when someone says something negative about Chhina that the must immediately try and change the subject to India

 

[bennedose]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

Check the last five posts by Chinese posters. Every single one of them is an attempt to change the subject from China to India. Ho hum. So what's new?

 

[Ray]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

Suicides by Indian peasants are not suicides?

Typical Indian, always believe they are special, even their definitions of suicide.

Do you understand what is a suicide?

Why is suicide in China worth discussing, while suicide in India not?

Why are Indian peasants killing themselves like there is no tomorrow?

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Typical Chinese way of sidestepping embarrassing issues.

Common sense would indicate that suicides of sweatshops and suicides of farmers have no common psychological denominator.

Given the far fetched logic and stretchable imagination that has been displayed, I am surprised that you have not equated China's sweatshop suicides & other psychological issues with suicides of, what is called in China, 'Left over women' . Or, for that matter, equating sweatshop suicides with a common lovers tiff suicide!

They all are suicides, right?

But, is the motivation and environment same?

Are we discussion suicide or working conditions of sweatshops encouraging suicides?

I am afraid, your 'pretzeling' the issue does not wash.

Now, think of some more of equally ridiculous weaves & feints!

Further, if we are discussing China, must you bring up issues of other nation that are totally unrelated?

Next, you will I bring up issues of Shanghaied African child soldiers with the Chinese sweatshop conditions,

 

[J20!]

Re: Without changing the system, Xi cannot guarantee the economic gr

No need to change the subject. Does a discussion about China cause you so much disomfort that you need to immediately try and talk about any country other than China?

A sweatshop is a place where people earn very little from a lot of work. Thank you for openly admitting that the Chinese do have sweat shops but do not want them and that India and the Vietnamese do not have them That is exactly what we are saying.

China does not need sweat shops when it can have prison camps. Prison camps are not sweat shops because no one is paid. In 30 years you will be an old man and there will not be enough young Chinese to either run sweatshops or look after prison camps. I am sure you can import Pakistanis to do your work. There will be 400 million Pakistanis willing to move to China by then via your grand Karakoram highway and high speed trains.

I think you live in the past. The 90's most especially. India, Bangladesh and Vietnam took the "sweat shop" world title from China years ago.

Maybe you should check a few peer reviewed sources once in a while. Even China's migrant workers enjoy better working conditions and salaries than Indian labour.

Its called MOVING UP THE VALUE CHAIN. China doesn't have the abundance of cheap labour it had in the 90's and early 2000's. Thus a need to transition from mass produce, labour intensive low end products to high end industry products to target the very large and still growing Chinese middle class population. A transition implemented by Korea before us, and Japan before them.

That's the whole point of Xi and Li's reforms, to create an economic environment conducive to that.

But I'm expecting reasonable debate from someone more interested in nationalistic oneupsmanship than actual facts on the ground, so I'll leave it at that.