Manufacturing Suicide: The Politics of a World Factory

Abstract

This article examines how global value chains (GVCs) have shaped a world factory regime, based on the case study of the Foxconn group in Shenzhen, China. We identify three features that characterize a world factory regime: the GVCs’ impacts, the fragmented structure of corporate governance, and workplace despotism, and propose a concept of “global fragmented despotism” to explain changing labor conditions, workers’ suicides and resistance uncovered in Foxconn since 2010.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the anonymous interviewees, who may still exist or work at Foxconn. We benefited from the help and comments from Pun Ngai, Jenny Chan, May Szeto, YC Chen, Parry Leung, Daniel Yang, Xiaogang Wu, Huilin Lu, Zhong Hua, Jieh-min Wu, Jay Chen, Szu-chien Hsu, Mingsho Ho, and Chris Tilly, as well as the participants of the Labor Movement Session at the 2014 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their excellent suggestions. Rico Yang provided valuable research assistance.

Notes

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. was founded by its Chairman Terry Gou near Taipei in 1974 as a manufacturer of electrical components. In 1988, the Foxconn Technology Group was created as a subcompany in Longhua, Shenzhen, and moved to the Science and Technology Park in 1996. It has become a major subcontractor for Dell, Nokia, HP, and other global brands since the beginning of the 2000 s. As the largest private employer in the world, Foxconn hired almost 1.3 million workers in 2013. In this paper, we use the term “Foxconn” to refer to firms in which the Hon Hai group invested heavily. Foxconn has been recognized as a typical world factory in China.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thung-hong Lin

Thung-hong Lin is an associate research fellow and joint appointment associate professor at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, and National Tsinghua University. He is interested in social stratification, sociology of disasters, and labor studies.

Yi-ling Lin

Yi-ling Lin contributed to the fieldwork and writing of this paper. She is now a research assistant at Academia Sinica.

Wei-lin Tseng

Wei-lin Tseng’s master thesis studied the Foxconn workers and contributed to the concept and fieldwork of this paper. She worked for the Economic Daily News as a journalist and is now a freelancer. (She is finding a job now. Thus the short-bio has to be revised later.)