3.Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010; James Fallows, “Mr. China Comes to America,” The Atlantic, Dec. 2012.
4.For various statements of the number of employees at the Foxconn Shenzhen factories in 2010, see “Foxconn Hikes Salaries Again in South China Factory After Suicides,” CCTV Com English, Oct. 1, 2010; Bloomberg Businessweek, June 7, 2010, Sept. 13, 2010; New York Times, May 25, 2010; Pun Ngai, Migrant Labor in China: Post-Socialist Transformations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 101, 119. See also Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work,” New York Times, Jan. 21, 2012 (“unimaginable”).
5.Foxconn factories outside of China are generally much smaller, in some cases modest-sized assembly plants serving local markets, built to circumvent tariffs. Some Foxconn factories make parts or finished products for multiple clients, including Microsoft, IBM, Intel, Cisco, GE, Amazon, HP, Dell, Motorola, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba, Nintendo, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Acer, and Lenovo. Others serve just one client or even make only one product. Ngai, Migrant Labor, 105; Rutvica Andrijasevic and Devi Sacchetto, “Made in the EU: Foxconn in the Czech Republic,” WorkingUSA, Sept. 2014; Devi Sacchetto and Martin Cecchi, “On the Border: Foxconn in Mexico,” openDemocracy, Jan. 16, 2015, https://www.opendemocracy.net/devi-sacchetto-mart%C3%ACn-cecchi/on-border-foxconn-in-mexico; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; New York Times, Mar. 29, 2012; David Barboza, “China’s ‘iPhone City,’ Built on Billions in Perks,” New York Times, Dec. 29, 2016.
6.Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; New York Times, Dec. 11, 2013; “BBC Documentary Highlights Conditions at a Chinese iPhone Factory, But Is It All Apple’s Fault?” MacWorld, Dec. 19, 2014, http://www.macworld.com/article/2861381/bbc-documentary-highlights-conditions-at-a-chinese-iphone-factory-but-is-it-all-apples-fault.html.
7.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102; Boy Lüthje, Siqi Luo, and Hao Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl: Regimes of Production and Industrial Relations in China (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2013), 195, 198; Hao Ren, ed., China on Strike: Narratives of Workers’ Resistance, English edition edited by Zhongjin Li and Eli Friedman (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 11, 201–03; Jennifer Baichwal, Manufactured Landscapes (Foundry Films and National Film Board of Canada, 2006).
8.David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City,” New York Times, Dec. 24, 2004; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102.
9.New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Mar. 28, 2000; Nelson Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution: How Wal-Mart Created a Brave New World of Business (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 173; Richard P. Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors in East Asia: Emergent Trends in Global Supply Chains,” Competition & Change 12 (Mar. 2008), 74; “About PCG,” http://www.pouchen.com/index.php/en/about/locations, and “Yue Yuen Announces Audited Results for the Year 2015,” http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/news-pr/1147-2016-03-23-yue-yuen-announces-audited-results-for-the-year-2015 (both accessed June 3, 2016); International Trade Union Confederation, 2012 Annual Survey of Violations of Trade Union Rights—Vietnam, June 6, 2012, http://www.refworld.org/docid/4fd889193.html.
10.Some ten thousand Soviet technicians were posted to China to help with the industrialization drive, while nearly three times that many Chinese went to the Soviet Union for training. Carl Riskin, China’s Political Economy: The Quest for Development Since 1949 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 53–63, 74; Nicholas R. Lardy, “Economic Recovery and the 1st Five-Year Plan,” in Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14: The People’s Republic, part 1: The Emergence of Revolutionary China, 1949–1965 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 157–60, 177–78.
11.Riskin, China’s Political Economy, 64, 117–18, 125–27, 133, 139, 161–65; Kenneth Lieberthal, “The Great Leap Forward and the Split in the Yenan Leadership,” in MacFarquhar and Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14; Stephen Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution: Politics, Planning, and Management, 1949 to the Present (New York: Pantheon, 1977), 68–134. By the 1990s, Anshan had become China’s largest industrial enterprise, employing some 220,000 workers. “Anshan Iron and Steel Corporation,” in Lawrence R. Sullivan, Historical Dictionary of the People’s Republic of China, second edition (Plymouth, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 24–26. See, also, Cheng Tsu-yuan, Ashan Steel Factory in Communist China (Hong Kong: The Urban Research Institute, 1955).
12.Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 144–47, 158–59.
13.Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 135–42.
14.While there was a push during the Cultural Revolution for the despecialization of factories, there apparently was not an effort to despecialize the work of individual workers in the production process, even as they were given expanded roles in management and other aspects of factory function. Andors, China’s Industrial Revolution, 160–240.
15.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 11, 15.
16.Henry Yuhuai He, Dictionary of the Political Thought of the People’s Republic of China (London: Routledge, 2015), 287; Michael J. Enright, Edith E. Scott, and Ka-mun Chang, Regional Powerhouse: The Greater Pearl River Delta and the Rise of China (Singapore: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 6, 36–38.
17.Pun Ngai, Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1, 7.
18.Gabriel Kolko, Vietnam: Anatomy of a Peace (London: Routledge, 1997); The World Bank, “Vietnam, Overview,” Apr. 11, 2016, http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/vietnam/overview; Nguyen Thi Tue Anh, Luu Minh Duc, and Trinh Doc Chieu, “The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry,” Learning to Compete Working Paper No. 19, Brookings Institution (accessed Aug. 13, 2016), https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/L2C_WP19_Nguyen-Luu-and-Trinh-1.pdf.
19.Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 6, 12, 16, 36, 38–39, 67–68, 74, 98, 101–02, 117.
20.Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 75, 98, 108; Andrew Ross, Fast Boat to China: Corporate Flight and the Consequences of Free Trade—Lessons from Shanghai (New York: Pantheon, 2006), 24–26; Bloomberg Businessweek, Sept. 13, 2010.
21.Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 47.
22.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 2, 20–21, 25, 32, 76–78.
23.The Guardian, July 31, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/31/china-reform-hukou-migrant-workers; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 4-5; Ngai, Made in China, 36, 43–46.
24.For an interesting portrait of life in a state-owned factory during the 1980s, see Lijoa Zhang, “Socialism Is Great!” A Worker’s Memoir of the New China (New York: Atlas & Co., 2008). See, also, Ching Kwan Lee, Against the Law: Labor Protests in China’s Rustbelt and Sunbelt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 35–36; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 57.
25.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 35, 93, 128–29; “Workers Strike at China Footwear Plant Over Welfare Payments,” Wall Street Journal, Apr. 16, 2014, http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304626304579505451938007332; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 186.
26.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 31. For an in-depth comparison of systems of manufacturing in China, see Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl.
27.The wages and benefit contributions of export factories in high-cost regions would not have been enough to support locally-living families and the services provided to them, the cost of “social reproduction.” Enright, Scott, and Chang, Regional Powerhouse, 192, 250; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 32–35.
28.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 83–104, 123; Hong Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control: A Case Study of Three Electronics Factories in China,” International Labor and Working-Class History 73 (Spring 2008), 92; Anita Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault: The Exploitation of Labor in a Globalizing Economy (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2001), 12; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 7, 184.
29.For a fine, painful portrait of a migrant worker family and th
eir trips back home, see the documentary film Last Train Home, directed by Lixin Fan (EyeSteel Films, 2009). Ngai, Migrant Labor, 30–32; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 85, 98–99; U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, “The Employment Situation—May 2014,” http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_06062014.pdf (accessed July 16, 2016); Michael Bristow, “China’s holiday rush begins early,” BBC News, Jan. 7, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7813267.stm; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 16; New York Times, Jan. 26, 2017.
30.As in China, in Vietnam migrant workers form a large part of the workforce in foreign-owned factories, especially near Ho Chi Minh City. See Anita Chan, “Introduction,” in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 4.
31.In addition to the Peter Charlesworth photography of workers making Reebok shoes, see, for example, Dong Hung Group, “Shoe Manufacturers in Vietnam” (2012), http://www.donghungfootwear.com/en/phong-su-ve-dong-hung-group.html, which includes factory photographs and a video showing the processes used for making sneakers. See, also, Tom Vanderbilt, The Sneaker Book: Anatomy of an Industry and an Icon (New York: New Press, 1998), 78–80.
32.For EUPA, see the documentary film Factory City (Discovery Channel, 2009). Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou”; Alfred Marshall, Principles of Economics ([1890] London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1920), 8th ed., IV.XI.7, http://www.econlib.org/library/Marshall/marP25.html#Bk.IV,Ch.XI (accessed Sept. 22, 2014); Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 25.
33.For Appelbaum’s analysis, on which I lean heavily, see Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors.”
34.The classic discussion of the importance of the link between manufacturing and distribution is Alfred D. Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). See also, Nelson Lichtenstein, “The Return of Merchant Capitalism,” International Labor and Working-Class History 81 (2012), 8–27; http://www.clarksusa.com/us/about-clarks/heritage (accessed July 19, 2016).
35.Joshua B. Freeman, American Empire, 1945–2000: The Rise of a Global Empire, the Democratic Revolution at Home (New York: Viking, 2012), 343–54.
36.Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 8–25, 76–88.
37.Boy Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing: Global Production and the International Division of Labor in the Age of the Internet,” Industry and Innovation 9 (3) (Dec. 2002), 227–47.
38.There is a large literature on changes in retailing. In addition to Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors,” particularly useful works include Charles Fishman, The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World’s Most Powerful Company Really Works—and How It’s Transforming the American Economy (New York: Penguin, 2006); Lichtenstein, The Retail Revolution; and Xue Hong, “Outsourcing in China: Walmart and Chinese Manufacturers,” in Anita Chan, ed., Walmart in China (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).
39.For a pioneering critical look at modern branding, see Naomi Klein, No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 1999). Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 230 (Nishimura quote); Marcelo Prince and Willa Plank, “A Short History of Apple’s Manufacturing in the U.S.,” The Wall Street Journal, Dec. 6, 2012, http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2012/12/06/a-short-history-of-apples-manufacturing-in-the-u-s/; Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Cook Kicks Off ‘Made in USA’ Push with Mac Pro,” Dec. 19, 2013, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-18/apple-s-cook-kicks-off-made-in-usa-push-with-mac-pro; G. Clay Whittaker, “Why Trump’s Idea to Move Apple Product Manufacturing to the U.S. Makes No Sense,” Popular Science, Jan. 26, 2016, http://www.popsci.com/why-trumps-idea-to-move-apple-product-manufacturing-to-us-makes-no-sense; Klein, No Logo, 198–99.
40.Vanderbilt, Sneaker Book, 90–99; New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997; Klein, No Logo, 197–98, 365–79; Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, “As Apple Grew, American Workers Left Behind,” Nov. 16, 2011, http://americawhatwentwrong.org/story/as-apple-grew-american-workers-left-behind/; David Pogue, “What Cameras Inside Foxconn Found,” Feb. 23, 2012, http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/23/what-cameras-inside-foxconn-found/.
41.Lüthje, “Electronics Contract Manufacturing,” 231, 234, 236–37; Boy Lüthje, Stefanie Hürtgen, Peter Pawlicki, and Martina Sproll, From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen: Global Production and Work in the IT Industry (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 69–149; Appelbaum, “Giant Transnational Contractors,” 71–72.
42.For the container revolution, see Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).
43.David Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Oliver Wainwright, “Santa’s Real Workshop: The Town in China That Makes the World’s Christmas Decorations,” The Guardian, Dec. 19, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2014/dec/19/santas-real-workshop-the-town-in-china-that-makes-the-worlds-christmas-decorations.
44.Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 169; Wall Street Journal, July 22, 2014; Adam Starariano and Peter Burrows, “Apple’s Supply-Chain Secret? Hoard Lasers,” Bloomberg Businessweek, Nov. 3, 2011, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-11-03/apples-supply-chain-secret-hoard-lasers; and Adam Lashinsky, “Apple: The Genius Behind Steve,” Fortune, Nov. 24, 2008, http://fortune.com/2008/11/24/apple-the-genius-behind-steve/ (Cook quote).
45.In 2004, Foxconn employed five thousand engineers in Shenzhen alone. Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 191.
46.Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 188–89; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone.
47.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 102–03; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 88–89.
48.Lüthje, Luo, and Zhang, Beyond the Iron Rice Bowl, 197; http://www.yueyuen.com/index.php/en/about-us-6/equipments (accessed Dec. 20, 2016); Dean, “The Forbidden City of Terry Gou”; lecture by Pun Ngai, Joseph S. Murphy Institute, City University of New York, Feb. 23, 2016.
49.Barboza, “In Roaring China, Sweaters Are West of Socks City”; Lu Zhang, Inside China’s Automobile Factories: The Politics of Labor and Worker Resistance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 8, 23, 60; interview with Qian Xiaoyan (First Secretary, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the U.S.A.), New York, Apr. 16, 2015; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 115–19. For Vietnamese government policy, see Nguyen Thi Tue Anh, Luu Minh Duc, and Trinh Doc Chieu, “The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry,” 14–24.
50.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 66, 72, 78; Ngai, Made in China, 2–3, 55–56, 65–73; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 96.
51.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 86, 101; Emily Feng, “Skyscrapers’ Rise in China Marks Fall of Immigrant Enclaves,” New York Times, July 19, 2016; Ross, Fast Boat to China, 164–65; Richard Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein, “A New World of Retail Supremacy: Supply Chains and Workers’ Chains in the Age of Wal-Mart,” International Labor and Working-Class History 70 (2006), 109.
52.Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 97.
53.Ngai, Made in China, 32; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 5–9, 27.
54.Ngai, Migrant Labor, 120–23, 128–29; Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 174; Duhigg and Bradsher, “How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work”; Wall Street Journal, Dec. 18, 2012. See also Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 184–87.
55.Charles Duhigg and David Barboza, “The iEconomy; In China, the Human Costs That Are Built Into an iPad,” New York Times, Jan. 26, 2012; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ren, ed., China on Strike, 7, 184; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 89, 92. For comparison, see William Dodd, A Narrative of the Experien
ce and Sufferings of William Dodd, A Factory Cripple, Written by Himself, reprinted in James R. Simmons, Jr., ed., Factory Lives: Four Nineteenth-Century Working-Class Autobiographies (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Editions, 2007).
56.Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 10, 12, 23, 46–81; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 91–92; Ngai et al., “Apple, Foxconn, and Chinese Workers’ Struggles,” 172–74; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 ([1867] New York: International Publishers, 1967), 424; Jee Young Kim, “How Does Enterprise Ownership Matter? Labour Conditions in Fashion and Footwear Factories in Southern Vietnam,” in Chan, ed., Labour in Vietnam, 288; Ngai, Made in China, 80, 97.
57.“The poetry and brief life of a Foxconn worker: Xu Lizhi (1990–2014)” (accessed Aug. 4, 2016), libcom.org, https://libcom.org/blog/xulizhi-foxconn-suicide-poetry.
58.Serious as these problems are, large plants generally have better health and safety equipment and records than smaller parts suppliers with fewer resources and less subject to international scrutiny. Under pressure from Nike, conditions in the factory in Vietnam were improved and more use was made of less toxic water-based solvents. New York Times, Nov. 8, 1997, Apr. 28, 2000; Chen, China’s Workers Under Assault, 82–97; Duhigg and Barboza, “The iEconomy”; Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 187.
59.Some Chinese factories consciously mix workers from different regions on production lines, to undercut worker solidarity. Others, usually smaller, recruit workers from particular regions or even villages, so that hometown bonds extend into the workplace and dormitories. Ngai, Chan, and Selden, Dying for an iPhone; Ngai, Migrant Labor, 129–30; Lüthje et al., From Silicon Valley to Shenzhen, 190; Xue, “Local Strategies of Labor Control,” 93, 97–98.
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