Xu Lizhi threw himself from a Foxconn workers’ dormitory building in Shenzhen on 30 September. He was 24 years old, a migrant worker and a poet: neither line of work looks promising in China at the moment. In the 1980s ‘poet’ was a prestigious job-description, and did wonders for your love life. Now none of the papers would waste space on a poem, even as filler; if a self-advertised ‘poet’ turned up on a dating site there’d be no takers and plenty of eye-rolling: poets must be weird or poor, or both. Modern poetry was more or less buried, along with China’s golden 1980s, in the year we’re not suppose to mention.
Xu started working at Foxconn in 2010. He left in February this year and went to join his girlfriend in Suzhou. Six months later he was back in Shenzhen. He looked for work elsewhere in the city – what he really wanted was to be a librarian – but didn’t get any of the jobs he applied for. He returned to Foxconn on 29 September.
There have been 18 suicide attempts at Foxconn factories in the last five years. As the main manufacturer of Apple products, employing hundreds of thousands of people, the company’s image is sexy and cutting-edge. The factory compound in Shenzhen is clean and well managed; the recruitment fair always attracts a lot of young workers. The company’s chairman, Terry Gou (he’s from Taiwan), built it from nothing and liked to hire migrant workers without experience of assembly work: compliant twentysomethings with no great future and no land to cultivate at home. Full story...
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Xu started working at Foxconn in 2010. He left in February this year and went to join his girlfriend in Suzhou. Six months later he was back in Shenzhen. He looked for work elsewhere in the city – what he really wanted was to be a librarian – but didn’t get any of the jobs he applied for. He returned to Foxconn on 29 September.
There have been 18 suicide attempts at Foxconn factories in the last five years. As the main manufacturer of Apple products, employing hundreds of thousands of people, the company’s image is sexy and cutting-edge. The factory compound in Shenzhen is clean and well managed; the recruitment fair always attracts a lot of young workers. The company’s chairman, Terry Gou (he’s from Taiwan), built it from nothing and liked to hire migrant workers without experience of assembly work: compliant twentysomethings with no great future and no land to cultivate at home. Full story...
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