The One Device

by Brian Merchant

  Still, there are a handful of young men and women scribbling on forms as we go past, walk-in recruits like Xu once was. We turn left, past the center, and see another guarded entry station not far away. That is where we’d meet Zhao. But as we walk past the recruitment office, there is an entrance into a much larger, open space—no one is around, so we walk in.

  The welcome center is an expansive, green-floored auditorium lined with eighty or so flat metal benches. A blue temporary wall cuts the space in half; it resembles a giant high-school gymnasium set up for a motivational speaker. Zhao later confirms that this was where Foxconn held the introductory presentation to workers. Beyond it lies a web of cubicle-size spaces, some with plastic test tubes and containers, probably where prospective factory workers undergo their mandatory health checkups before starting their jobs. Posters on the wall tout the reach and influence of Foxconn and the number of countries it has offices in. Another informs readers via cheery cartoon figures of policemen and hidden cameras that they are being surveilled.

  The place was organized for mass-processing. Hundreds of recruits could be signed on at once here, dozens at a time given basic checkups or entrance interviews. We nose around until we reach a hall with two women behind the sort of plexiglass booths you see at the movie theater; they ask us what we were doing there, at which point we promptly leave.

  Down the road, at the access point, we call Zhao; he says he’d be there in an hour. These security guards look a little nicer than the last set, so we ask if we can have a tour. They smile and said no. Any tour would have to be approved by the executive staff; they couldn’t approve such a thing. We tell them we have a meeting with a floor manager, and they smile and repeat the same.

  When Zhao shows up—a trim, nicely dressed man in his mid-twenties, with kind lines on his face—the story is the same. Executive approval required. Zhao had worked at Foxconn for eight years and had been a manager for a number of them, but that wasn’t enough. No one goes in without the executive okay. There are too many secrets, the guards tell us. We could apply for approval online, although the process usually takes months. We spend nearly an hour trying to convince the security guards to let us in.

  Eventually, we give up and walk the perimeter of the sprawling plant with Zhao, who has to get back to work in a different part of the facility. I ask him, as a veteran Foxconn employee, does he think it is really as bad as we’ve heard? Are the stories true?

  “Everything you have heard is true,” he says with a slight shake of his head. For a man whose job we had just heard required publicly humiliating his underlings, he seems far too kind and easygoing; there is nothing stern about his disposition, no itchy chip on the shoulder so many middle managers seem to tote.

  “Then why work here?” I ask.

  “I have adapted.” He smiles and shrugs. “I do not scold my workers, like many managers do. I don’t want to give them a hard time.” He implies that his lenience might have prevented him from being promoted. I’m getting why Foxconn-hating Xu likes him. Zhao says he has just sort of settled into a career, though he doesn’t seem thrilled about it. “Besides,” he says, “I do not know what else I would do. I have been here so long.”

  After walking with Zhao along the perimeter for twenty minutes or so, we come to another entrance, another security checkpoint. There are apparently eight main ones and a handful of smaller ones. We say good-bye and watch him scan his card and disappear into the crowd.

  That’s when it hits me. I have to use the bathroom. Desperately. And that gives me an idea.

  There’s a bathroom in there, just a few hundred feet down a stairwell by the security point. I see the universal stick-man signage, and I gesture to it. This checkpoint is much smaller, much more informal—maybe an entryway for managers like Zhao? There’s only one guard, a young man who looks something beyond bored.

  Wang asks something a little pleadingly in Chinese. The guard slowly shakes his head no, looks at me. The strain on my face is very, very real. She asks again—he falters for a second, then another no.

  We’ll be right back, she insists, and now we’re clearly making him uncomfortable. Mostly me. He doesn’t want to deal with this.

  Come right back, he says.

  Of course, we don’t.

  Like I said, I can’t believe it. To my knowledge, no American journalist had been inside a Foxconn plant without permission and a tour guide, without a carefully curated visit to pre-selected parts of the factory to demonstrate to the media how okay things really are. I duck into that bathroom, my head spinning. I can barely nod at the bewildered-looking kid washing his hands who’s not even trying not to stare at me. I forget to go, slink out the door, and wave to Wang.

  We power-walk through a factory block, then another, and another, and before I know it, we’re at the end of the road, where a crumbling stone wall divides the factory grounds from the surrounding city. No one seems to be following us. Apartment high-rises, a handful of trees, and a gray horizon complete the view. We hang a right alongside the wall, moving farther into the grounds. My adrenaline is surging; I have no idea where we are going.

  Cinder blocks, gravel, and bricks are piled haphazardly around; a row of cones cordons off what looks like a spill. Blue trucks packed with shipping containers are parked here and there. Young men play a quiet pickup game of basketball in sweat-stained T-shirts. We move on, passing small streets that run inward and are lined with garages, workshops, and warehouse buildings. There’s an official-looking building facing the yard with a stone gargoyle perched on either side of the door. I take out my iPhone and shoot some pictures of the place where iPhones are made. The few people out here have started to stare.

  We cut down one of the streets, past rusted, weather-streaked stalls. Some are filled with piles of raw materials, some stacked with cut metal, some held columns of empty pallets. A scratched-to-hell forklift sits wheel-less on blocks, emblazoned with graffiti. Once-white walls are a weather-beaten, erosive gray. It is, in other words, a lot like you’d imagine a shipping-and-receiving zone in any aging, city-size factory to be. A group of men on an elevated lift are drilling into the outside of a building, sending down showers of sparks. Half wear no safety gear. Debris spills out into the road, marked by a few red cones. Motorbikes and flatbeds dot the street.

  As we make our way inward, the buildings get taller. Like a lot of cities, it gets denser the closer you get to downtown. Warehouses and workshops give way to two-, three-story buildings, then to what looked like dormitory high-rises. We start passing more people, each wearing an ID card on a necklace, who mostly side-eye us as we hustle on. The road widens to accommodate pedestrians and bicyclists, then cars too, and pretty soon, the way opens up into a busy intersection and a road crammed with hundreds, maybe thousands of young people. It looks like an exhibition or a jobs fair of some kind, but we don’t stop to check it out. A couple of people stare at us, and a few hundred feet away, there is a security official directing traffic.

  The gravity and the risk of the intrusion start to sink in. This is, clearly, a rash decision, as China isn’t exactly known for its leniency toward journalists. There is no way we could ever hope to blend in, after all (there are no other lanky white Americans in sight). My translator, especially, could face harsh consequences if we are caught, but when I ask if we should turn back, she insists we push on.

  We wait until the guard turns his back to address oncoming traffic and then walk past, trying to join the crowd.

  Foxconn City really is a city.

  We keep walking, and soon, the streets are lined with well-tamed shrubbery and shops and restaurants of every stripe. There are twenty-four-hour banks, a huge cafeteria, an open-air market that looks temporary but is mobbed with people. And there are people everywhere. Walking, riding, smoking, absorbed in their phones, eating noodles out of takeout boxes on the side of a road. Wearing polo shirts, jeans, plaid button-ups, stylish T-shirts, lanyards swinging around their necks, carrying their ID
cards.

  The streets are clean, the buildings newer here. Cartoon cat mascots give a thumbs-up over a storefront. Coca-Cola-branded umbrellas cover smartphone-browsing employees on metal picnic tables. Shiny sedans are parked in clearly designated parking spots along the main drag. There is a 7-Eleven—a fully branded, fully stocked 7-Eleven identical to every store in the franchise you’ve ever stepped foot in. For some reason, that bowls me over. We see what looks like cybercafés and strange inflatable structures designed to advertise the shops.

  Together, it looks a bit like the university center of a college campus, just quieter. Given the sheer number of people, there is remarkably little noise. It’s hard not to project after hearing horror stories all morning, but Longhua does seem infected by a ghostly, stifling air.

  Maybe the most striking thing, beyond its size—it would take us nearly an hour to briskly walk across Longhua—is how radically different one end is from the other. It’s like a gentrified city in that regard. On the “outskirts,” let’s call it, there’s spilled chemicals, rusting facilities, and poorly overseen industrial labor. The closer you get to the “city center”—remember, this is a factory—the more the quality of life, or at least the amenities and the infrastructure, improves. In fact, one worker told us he did manual labor on the outskirts and believed he was paid less than the people who worked on consumer-electronics assembly lines.

  As we get deeper in, surrounded by more and more people, it actually feels like we’re getting noticed less. The barrage of stares mutate into disinterested glances. My working theory: The plant is so vast, security so tight, that if we are inside just walking around, we must have been allowed to do so. That, or nobody really gives a shit. We start trying to make our way to the G2 factory block, where Zhao had told us iPhones were made. After leaving “downtown” we begin seeing towering, monolithic factory blocks—C16, E7, and so on, many surrounded by crowds of workers.

  This is when it starts to feel truly impressive. Look, a lot of factories skew dystopian; they are, after all, places constructed with the sole purpose of maximizing the efficiency of human and machine labor. But Longhua is different by virtue of its sheer expanse alone—it is block after block of looming, multiple-story, gray, grime-coated cubes. It is factories all the way down, a million consumer electronics being threaded together in identically drab monoliths. You feel tiny among them, like a brief spit of organic matter between aircraft carrier–size engines of industry. It’s factories as far as you can see; there is simply nothing beautiful in sight.

  In fact, the only things designed to be aesthetically pleasing, designed to appeal to humans at all, are the corporate mascots and the trimmed hedges back near the food court, and that feels grim out here—in Longhua, you’re either in a strip mall or on the factory floor.

  Foxconn City is a culmination of one of the very earliest human innovations—mass production. Homo erectus, which emerged 1.7 million years ago, were the first species to widely adopt tools and the first to become proficient at making them in large quantities. Some enterprising erectus hunters figured out how to make hand axes by rapidly striking several flint cores at once, in a feat Stephen L. Sass, a historian of materials science, calls “an early version of mass production.”

  It would take a few thousand centuries before that impulse would mature into the modern-day assembly line.

  Imagine another factory. This one measures one and a half miles wide by one mile long, spans sixteen million square feet of factory floor space, and includes ninety-three towering buildings. It has its own dedicated power plant. It employs over a hundred thousand workers who toil for nearly twelve hours a day. Those workers have migrated from rural regions all across the country in search of higher wages. In all, it’s a marvel of efficiency and production—it’s described as an “almost self-sufficient and self-contained industrial city.”

  No, it’s not run by Foxconn in the 2010s. It’s Henry Ford’s Rouge River complex in the 1930s. Even though Ford has been lionized as a hero of American industry, it’s still easy to underappreciate the impact of the assembly line, an innovation perhaps more revolutionary than the iPhone or the Model T it now churns out at scale. And like most other innovations, it too had its bits that were borrowed from someone else, workshopped, tested, and sold to investors.

  Ransom E. Olds (of Oldsmobile) had been running an assembly line for nearly a decade before Ford switched over to that mode of operation, though Ford’s system contained numerous advances. Ford’s biggest innovation, probably, was the supreme maximizing of efficiency. The distributed, station-based mode of production, in which each worker performs one specialized task ad infinitum, is what made complex machines like the automobile affordable and what makes the iPhone relatively affordable today. (It’s also what gives Apple such large profit margins.)

  But while we hold Ford and his mechanical assembly line up as a heroic example of American industriousness, it had roots in something much more organic—the slaughterhouse. The same Chicago slaughterhouses that incited national outrage after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle in 1906 were crucial to founding the operational system that produces the iPhone. Around that time, Ford’s chief engineer, William “Pa” Klann, toured the Swift and Company slaughterhouse in Chicago. There, he saw what Ford would later refer to as “disassembly” lines, in which a butcher lopped the same cut of meat off each carcass that was passed down to him.

  “If they can kill pigs and cows that way, we can build cars and build motors that way,” Klann said. Ford engineers also toured the Westinghouse Foundry, which manufactured airbrakes and used “a conveyor system as early as 1890 to move molds into position,” according to the historian David Hounshell. “We saw these conveyors in the Foundry and we thought, ‘Well, why can’t it work on our job?’” Klann recounted. The observation led to the now-infamous flow of production that would harness the power of repetition and machination, eventually allowing a Model T to roll off the line every twenty-four seconds by the 1930s.

  And that, basically, is what’s happening in China today, albeit with an even bigger labor force and an even more intricate, fine-tuned, and exhaustive labor operation. Consider this: Apple sold forty-eight million iPhones in the fourth quarter of 2015. Each and every one of those phones was assembled by hand, by a human being. Or, rather, by thousands of human beings. As of 2012, each iPhone required 141 steps and 24 labor hours to manufacture. It has likely risen since then. That means that, in a very conservative estimate, workers spent 1,152,000,000 hours screwing, gluing, soldering, and snapping iPhones together in a single three-month period. It’s probably a lot more, given that large quantities of phones—sometimes as many as half—are scrapped because they don’t meet quality standards.

  In our interviews, the magic number we kept hearing was seventeen hundred—laborers charged with manning a machine stamp or checking the screens for quality said that’s how many they were expected to oversee on a given workday, which averaged twelve hours. The same number came up for those tasked with cleaning them. Workers that were part of teams that tested the final phones said that, together, they were responsible for about three thousand phones a day. (Each earned around two thousand renminbi a month.) That adds up to more than two hundred iPhones per hour—over three a minute.

  That is a herculean feat of manufacturing. Foxconn is now the world’s biggest electronics-contracting company and the third-biggest technology company by revenue—its annual take is $131.8 billion—thanks largely to its iPhone orders. Specialized parts are still produced in other nations—processors come from the U.S., the chips and display panels come largely from Japan and Korea, the gyroscope comes from Italy, the batteries from Taiwan—but they’re inevitably shipped to China to be assembled into an incredibly complex product-line Voltron.

  And it’s the ability to tackle that complexity with ruthless efficiency that makes Foxconn and its competitors so enticing to American companies like Apple.

  In 2011, Presid
ent Obama held a dinner meeting with some of Silicon Valley’s top brass. Naturally, Steve Jobs was in attendance, and he was discussing overseas labor when Obama interrupted. He wanted to know what it would take to bring that work home. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” Jobs famously said. It wasn’t just that overseas labor was cheaper—which it was—it was also that the sheer size, industriousness, and flexibility of the workforce there was necessary to meet Apple’s manufacturing needs.

  In the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation into the so-called iEconomy, an unnamed Apple executive was quoted as saying that the real reason that Apple kept its operation overseas wasn’t the cheap labor; some analysts estimated that building the phones in the U.S. would raise labor costs by only ten dollars a phone. No, they stayed there because of the immense, skilled workforce and the interlocking ecosystem of affiliated industry that had grown in Shenzhen. Droves of workers could be summoned to quickly assemble a new prototype for testing or swiftly make laborious adjustments to a huge number of products that were about to be shipped. Parts could be rapidly obtained and shepherded onto a production line. If Apple had to make a last-minute change to the iPhone—say, an alteration in the aluminum casing, or a new cut for the touchscreen—in a heartbeat, Foxconn could summon thousands of workers and hundreds of industrial engineers to oversee them.

  The New York Times offered the following example:

  Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.