Labour mobility and immobility in China's EPZs

In 2010 at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, South China, just a short distance from Hong Kong, about 18 rural migrant workers between 17 and 25 years old attempted suicide, and 14 died as a result. Tian Yu, a 17-year-old woman from a village in Hubei province, was one of the survivors. She was the daughter of two migrant workers who emigrated in the 1990s to a Chinese coastal industrial district (Chan et al, 2020). Hired in February 2010, she worked at the Foxconn Longhua ‘campus’, which includes:

Within the campus in 2010, about 400,000 workers employed by Foxconn were employed by Apple and many other electronics multinational companies. Yu worked for a month. When her wage was due she realized that she did not receive it, made an enquiry to her line manager and then moved to another Foxconn factory. After a day spent looking for the right office, being left without any money, she felt overwhelmed and desperate and jumped from her dormitory building (Chan et al, 2020).

The Longhua campus is located in one of the first Chinese special economic zones, established in 1980 (Pepper, 1988), that became a laboratory where foreign investors moved large parts of operations (Andors, 1988) thanks to incentives and administrative privileges offered by the local and national authorities. In these factories, migrant women suffer a double devaluation of their work and skills due to both their rural origins and their gender (Murphy, 2004). As in other parts of the world, the extension of global production networks in Export Processing Zones (EPZs) stands on the unstable base of long working hours, strict production schedules, supervised accommodation in company dormitories (Pun and Smith, 2007), and low wages that barely allow individual workers to survive. The result is living conditions at the limits of endurance that lead to a chain of self-annihilation.