Advertisement
Review | Dying for an iPhone: investigating Apple, Foxconn and the brutal exploitation of Chinese workers
- New book examines the human consequences an American smartphone through a Taiwanese company and made by mainland Chinese workers
- With many working 29 days a month during which no talking or eating are allowed, some see suicide as the only way out
Reading Time:4 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
Dying for an iPhone
by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai
Haymarket Books and Pluto Press
4/5 stars
China is home to some of the world’s most devoted Apple fans. When company co-founder Steve Jobs died in 2011, flowers were piled up outside the Apple store in Beijing. A few weeks later, however, touts egged the same store when it implemented a system aimed at stopping people buying up Apple devices and reselling them at exorbitant prices.
The company’s iPhones are built in mainland China by Taiwanese multinational electronics manufacturer Foxconn. It has enormous factories in Shenzhen and across the mainland, from Jiangsu province to Sichuan.
Advertisement
The division of labour reaches an apotheosis at Foxconn, where this industrial principle has been institutionalised into a corporate system. Apple designs, Foxconn builds. Apple is the brain, Foxconn is the hands. But with outsourcing comes a plethora of issues that remain unresolved in the modern industrial system. When Foxconn workers started committing suicide, in 2010, it became clear that something was wrong.
Advertisement
Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and The Lives of China’s Workers, by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai, is the result of extensive undercover research in mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, as well as the authors’ conversations with Foxconnboss Terry Gou Tai-ming, Apple chief executive Tim Cook, industry watchdogs and corporate responsibility organisations.
Advertisement
Select Voice
Choose your listening speed
Get through articles 2x faster
1.25x
250 WPM
Slow
Average
Fast
1.25x