InsideGFW

In a period of five months, eleven employees of Foxconn have commited suicide. This is indeed a tragedy and Foxconn needs to do something about it to prevent future suicide attempts. But are these tragedies entirely Foxconn’s fault? Who is the true devil behind the mask?

Everybody knows that China is the world’s factory. Compared with the United States or Europe, factories are far less expensive to build and the labor supply is massive and cheap. This labor force is largely made up of the first generation of migrant workers and their grown up children. They were all born and grew up in the countryside, and have left their hometowns in search of better jobs in the city. They stay in the cities and work to make sure that their children can hope for a better life than that of a sweatshop laborer.

An unwritten rule in Foxconn appears to be “don’t recruit anyone over 28″ – 80% of its employees were born in the 80s and 90s. Unlike their father’s generation, they have been raised with the idea that education is the key to upward economic mobility. After spending their family’s entire savings on four years of university, what kind of job can they hope to obtain? They cannot get a job in state-run companies or the high tech industry, and because of sheer overwhelming competition and black-box trading becoming a civil servant is out of the question. They end up getting a job at Foxconn, which requires none of the skills they gained from school, but simply asks them to perform a job anybody could do, repeating the same motions day after day.

Why can’t they find a promising job with their degree? Why did they end up working at Foxconn? The education system in China is the biggest problem, and the government is the most at fault. The education system here is not designed to develop creativity or diversification, but instead is used for brainwashing and promoting the conservative political agenda. The only thing they teach that is up-to-date is Mao Deng San.* Now they are adding new stuff, such as harmonious theory and Hu’s Eight Honors and Eight Shames. What other classes are offered? Computer classes on Windows 2000, for example, or Office 2002, Basic and Visual Basic, and website design using Microsoft’s FrontPage…

Well, I think that unless schools start teaching students how to travel back in time, they will have an impossible time finding work using techniques from the 90s. This is what they get after three or four years of higher education: a useless diploma, debt, and a low paid job that barely requires a brain.

Image this: you get a position at Foxconn and work essentially as a robot on a production line, doing exactly the same thing every day for twelve hours, six or seven days a week. By the end of every month you receive a salary of 2,500rmb, more than half this amount coming from overtime. You don’t get a chance to make friends in the factory because you cannot talk to anyone while working the assembly line, and you work so much overtime that you’re left with no free time or energy for socialization after work. Day after day, month after month, you are doing same thing over and over, seemingly without end. You do not have friends, and your parents are too far away.

But most importantly, you know this is all you can hope to achieve. You are already extremely lucky to have this job. It is much better than working at a local factory, where workers must endure horrific pollution and dangerous working environments. So much better than those who stand in the middle of the intersection guiding traffic and pedestrians, working 12-hour days, 6 days a week for only 1200 RMB every month.

If not even a shred was left of your dreams or expectations, would you jump?!

Foxconn is really not as terrible as the media would have you think. Foxconn is an enormous Taiwanese manufacturer with 800,000 employees in China. It does not delay payment, it pays for insurance, everyone has a contract, and employees do not need to worry too much about safety and pollution. They are treated as human beings. You won’t be able to get the same deal in any other local factories in Shenzhen, and the workers know that. The 2,000 people lining up every day outside Foxconn looking for jobs are the strongest indication of this fact.

But why don’t we hear anything in the news about the other local factories, only Foxconn? Because usually those local factories have some kind of connection with the government, or have been opened by people that are in the system. Don’t mistake these news reports for a glorious accomplishment in free speech. Foxconn is just a Taiwanese company, and it is safe and politically acceptable for Chinese newspapers to attack it without worrying about government retaliation. The Chinese media are just a bunch of gutless hacks that don’t have the courage to do anything that could be considered real reporting. (Some reporters excluded.)

The only possible solution for this is a revolution on the industrial chain. We cannot be the world’s factory and base our economy on cheap labor and massive population any longer. We need creative companies like Apple, Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, not the short-sighted Shanzhai factories churning out copies. But this won’t be easy as China as a whole is already fatally ill. You can’t find creative people in China because the education system has already torn off all of their individual features. You can’t find a company or institution that will pay you to do any long-term research because everybody is focusing on how to make money quick. Everybody is already poisoned by the consumerism and cynicism that are set free by a government with means. We have together, hand in hand, exploited and ripped off these migrant workers. We are deadened and blind in a doomed kingdom that has been built on their blood and our apathies.

*Mao,Deng, San- A nick name of 《毛 泽东思想和中国特色社会主义理论体系概论》, which is the only mandatory political course for university students. It’s formal name is 《毛泽东思想、邓小平理论和“三个代表”重要思想概论》. Which is too long that nobody is willing to say its full name. So they just call it 毛邓三. It is a class that contains Marxism, Maoism, Dengism, Jiangism, Huism and will contain Xiism in the future for sure…I hope not, those kids already have too much to memorize…

PS: Here is an interesting translated article from EastSouthWestNorth, talking about the same thing I am talking about (it will have the link to the Chinese site as well.)

More Pictures about local factories in China: Here, Here and Here. (Alex Hofford did a great job of shotting Chinese factories, however, I cant find them on his website, but only on a Chinese blogger’s blog…)

Last week on Wednesday, May 12, artist and activist Ai Weiwei posted a three and a half hour long recording “NianNian”, which made by 3,412 volunteers from Twitter listing the names of every student who died in the Sichuan earthquake. This list has been strongly guarded by the Chinese government due to the tragedy’s obvious connection to corrupt and inadequate school construction. Those of you who don’t know the cruel reality of China’s freedom of speech may have difficulty understanding just how brave these volunteers are for doing this.

Just a few days before the “NianNian” was released, Ai Weiwei invited all of the Twitter users to have dinner together in Hangzhou on May 7. One of the dinner organizer’s emails was hacked by the government on May 5, and all the RSVP information was revealed. The domestic security department of Hangzhou started sending requests to those who had RSVPed for that dinner to “have tea” with them. By 4:00 p.m. on May 7, more than 32 people had had conversions with the domestic security department and were threatened for planning to attend the dinner.

What the domestic security department didn’t know was that the “tea” action had gone live on Twitter under the tag #5/7tea. These real-time reports of the security department’s repeated interventions encouraged Twitter users from Shanghai, Dalian and other provinces to join the dinner party to show their support to Ai Weiwei, and to deliver a massage to the government that having dinner together and chatting is a basic human right.

After 5/7tea, it has become clearer and clearer that a new wave is appearing on the Internet in China. This is especially the case on Twitter, which, due to its decentralized nature and API policy, has become the frontline of China’s democracy and human rights movement. The theme of this new wave is this: do not be afraid to exercise your human rights, especially the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly; do not be afraid of the government and its domestic security department; plead, appeal, do everything in your power to ask for administrative review of the government for its illegal behavior, abuse of power, and so on.

The seeds of this fearless new wave first appeared on December 10, 2008 on the 60th anniversary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On that day, Charter 08 (named after Charter 77 issued by dissidents in Czechoslovakia) was published and signed by over 303 Chinese intellectuals and human rights activists to promote political reform and democratization in the People’s Republic of China. Hours before the online release of the Charter, police detained its author, Liu Xiaobo. He was later arrested on June 23, 2009 on charges of “suspicion of inciting the subversion of state power” and sentenced to eleven years in prison on December 25.

Despite the Chinese government’s tight-lipped approach to the Charter and the strict punishment of its draftsman, a great deal of Chinese from inside China and abroad signed the Charter. Many of them have been forced to “have tea” with domestic security officials, which is the first time “having tea” (he cha 喝茶) became a phrase describing the forceful “heart to heart” conversations with Chinese security. Now, with the majority of these politically active citizens online and using Twitter, details of this disgusting process have begun appearing live on the internet. People update their Twitter page on the way to the local security bureau, while talking with officers, or on a short break in the bathroom. They write blog posts immediately after returning home, receiving advice and sparking discussion online. A few have even begun attempts at educating their tea “partner” on democracy and human rights, sparking a competition over who can give the best speech to the heavily brainwashed security officers. When the mysterious mask is ripped off, together with the fear, the man behind is just a normal guy with basic human needs.

Following Charter 08, the Citizen Investigating Movement, and now the recent 5/7tea and NianNian, many are becoming more educated about human rights violations and Chinese security practices. With the new wave of political and social activism online, the human rights movement in China is growing and many are becoming bolder in exercising their right of free speech. The future is bright for sure, but the path is twisted and dangerous. We must keep moving forward.

Recent news reported that China Unicom is going to release a new RMB36 3G Plan in May that will be cheaper than its previous plans and China Mobile’s RMB39 monthly plan. It is also planning to cut its iPhone plan from a general RMB6,999 to RMB5,880 which shows it’s eager to catch up with the other two competitors China Mobile and China Telecom. Despite the big turn off in sales that the Chinese version of iPhone doesn’t have a WiFi mode, China Unicom is trying to use this new 3G Plan markdown to appeal to a greater number of users using different parallel imported cellphones including iPhones that support WCDMA and WiFi to subscribeto its 3G standard.

Compared to China Union’s future RMB36 3G Plan with 150 MB data usage, China Mobile’s RMB38 Plan has been released for almost five months and contains a 500 MB data usage package and a very cheap long-distance call rate (as low as RMB0.1-0.2 per minute). Although it has the biggest 2G and 3G user base in China and cheaper call rates, China Mobile still faces the problem of a limited selection of terminal handsets. Due to China Mobile’s network TD-CDMA, the special standard in China and lack of confidantes in the TD-CDMA market, many international mobile manufacturers have difficulties providing a suitable terminal device. If China Mobile wants to keep its leading position in this fierce 3G battle, it must find a way to provide multiple options to consumers by lobbing factories to support its standard.

According to the data published from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), in the end of April, China Telecom had the second biggest subscriber base of 30.8% in this intense 3G competition, only slightly lagging behind first-placed China Mobile (42.5%) and ahead of China Unicom (26.7%). In an effort to attract non-subscribers, China Telecom recently started providing many special offers to its massive former line-in & ADSL broadband users to switch to its EV-DO 3G standard by including a free upgrade from 512K to 2M broadband, a cheap 3G family package together with line-in, ADSL broadband and a 3G cellphone…etc

This data proves that China Telecom is getting the biggest 3G subscriber increase rate and its user base has increased in the last six months. If China Telecom continues to step forward, there is a big chance that it may replace China Mobile to be the next winner of China’s Telecommunications market.

1. Once, a Communist Party newspaper journalist went to a poor remote village to interview the villagers. He found a poor old man and asked, “Have there been any big changes in your life these years?” “Oh yes, big change!” said the old man. “In the old China, our lives were worse than those of cows and horses.” “And how about now?” the journalist asked optimistically. “Well, now we are just like them,” replied the old man.

2. The Vice President of the Urban Construction Bureau of Xin City, Liaoning province, was killed in his office after being stabbed seven times. After hearing the news, a netizen commented: “Kindergarten Kids sent a message of congratulation: Uncles and Aunts, you finally found the right person!”

3. From the perspective of the killing power of weapons, the world’s first ranked Weapon of Massive Destruction (WMD) is Chairman Mao.

4. The Chief of the Shenzhen Public Security Bureau said:”Without getting rid of all the unemployed people, Shenzhen will not have peace.” A Twitter user comments: “Don’t worry guys, the Chief just can’t stand his wife anymore.”

5. Hundreds of Chenguan from Pinddingshan Henan province driving their government cars all the way to Beijing due to default in payments. A netizen commented, “Those who have dogs, but don’t feed them are just as guilty as those who torture animals.”

6. Yes, we have more tanks than potatos, more rockets than sausages, but we can’t eat rockets every day, fire a nuclear bomb for Spring Festival.

7. Such a nice shaped ass crack*, such silky long legs* yet the dick* shrinks.

#Groin in Chinese is gu gou股沟, a nick name for gu ge谷歌, which is Google.

#leg in Chinese is tui腿, very similar to tui推 that is short for Twitter推特.

#dang裆 in Chinese is the place where a normal man’s dick should be located, which is the homophone of dang党, the Communist Party.

8. Some rumours say that Facebook is going to be imported to China, but what should the Chinese name of it be? How about just call it “shu书” (book)? As long as you enter China, you are losing face.

9. Some oversea Chinese supporters of the PRC government enthusiastically back up the phrase “Only distance creates beauty.”

10. Wen Jiabao visited Beijing University on the 4th of May, many students invited the Prime Minster to come back again next month!

11. Where can you find Chinese people’s old friends? If they are not in the People’s Great Hall in Beijing, they must be on the dock in the International Court of Justice in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands.