Foxconn suicide express

Abstract

With a workforce of more than one million in mainland China alone, the Taiwanese Foxconn Technology Group is a major contractor for Apple and other leading multinational corporations. In 2010, when it was reported that eighteen workers had attempted suicide at company facilities in China, resulting in fourteen deaths, it made visible the conditions of overwork and desperation and elicited international condemnation. All of the victims hailed from the Chinese countryside and were in the prime of youth—representative of what scholars had then just begun calling the ‘second generation of migrant workers’. Taking place roughly at the same time as the mobilisation of temporary workers at the Honda plant in Nanhai, the media spotlight on the ‘Foxconn Suicide Express’ once again revealed the structural torsion within Chinese society caused by the combined activities of international capital and the Chinese state.