Kindergarten stabbings and now Foxconn suicides: what is causing China's fatal crazes?

What is happening to set off these fatal crazes in China? First there were those strange incidents in which people ran amok in kindergartens, knifing small children. I blogged on this last month. Now, as my colleague Malcolm Moore reports, there is a worrying chain of suicides by workers at factories in China run by the Taiwanese company Foxconn, a significant technology supplier for Apple; 11 attempts this year so far, with 9 fatalities.

Nine of these incidents took place at Foxconn’s Longhua factory, near Shenzhen on the Hong Kong border. Like the kindergarten stabbings, the incidents have taken the form of a gruesome series of copycat acts: all the suicides happened in the same manner, by jumping off the roof of a high building, and all the victims were under 25. One such incident is clearly acting as a trigger for others; but the trigger can only be primed by a pre-existing condition of despair. But how can this be, given that these large foreign-invested enterprises are providing much-needed employment, driving up wages and powering China’s impressive rate of development?

China’s attractiveness as a manufacturing centre lies not only in low labour costs; in any case, these are rising rapidly in the big coastal cities. It lies also in the virtual absence of regulation regarding treatment of workers – the government will ensure the absence of free trade unions and lend the full force of its repressive apparatus to the company’s management as enforcers. The Chinese are of course used to this – they are the world’s most docile workers, and I’m absolutely certain that some of them are undermining the minimum wage back here. But in Longhua, amazingly, China and the West appear to have combined to create a voluntary Gulag.

Workers flood in from the countryside, attracted by wages they could never have dreamed of at home and convinced that they can endure the harshest of conditions to earn them. They work 80-hour weeks and live in common dormitories, under constant surveillance to maintain “security”. Apple insists on extremely tight secrecy in all its operations; and two of the suicides have been linked to allegations (apparently wildly far-fetched) that workers were smuggling parts out of the factory.

It is clear that China provides a kind of proving ground for the ultimate in hyper-efficient industrial processes, eliminating that pesky human factor as far as possible. Human beings are regarded as parts in the machinery, which can be stressed until a fraction short of breaking point, with a certain casualty rate built into the planning. After all, there are plenty more where those young people came from. Just like the Gulag, and I’m not entirely sure how much difference is made by the undoubted fact that it is all voluntary.

With regards to working conditions, the deal is “If you don’t like the deal, you can eff off back to the paddy-field”. As this would involve the puncturing of a family’s dreams and intolerable loss of face, they stick it out. Until the last straw and the lonely walk off the ninth-floor dormitory roof. Enjoy your new iPad, and let’s hope the person who made it is still alive.