“The mystery behind the eight suicides at the Foxconn factory”

By Yang Jibin & Liu Zhiyi

Editor’s note: A series of eight suicides have occurred in less than six months at Foxconn, the world’s largest OEM company. After the sixth suicide at the factory, Liu Zhiyi, an intern at Southern Weekly, went undercover as a temporary worker at the Foxconn factory for 28 days, while Southern Weekly journalists directly contacted a large number of current Foxconn workers, and interviewed Foxconn executives. 

The following report, however, focuses not on what outsiders believe to be the truth in these “sweatshop” factories, but rather the realities that industrial workers face in various regions across China.

At the pin insertion assembly line at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen’s Guanlan area, machines have seemingly held humans captive. In the words of Li Xiangqing, a worker at Foxconn: “We stand in front of the machine for eight hours a day like some kind of punishment, working nonstop. When something falls, we bend down to pick it up. We’d rather that things fall down all the time, so that we don’t need to keep on standing. Even lying down for a single minute would be unimaginable comfort.”

Every single day, these Foxconn workers go to their shifts, leave their shifts, sleep, then go to their shifts, leave their shifts, and sleep–their lives regulated like clockwork with little time of their own for socialising. Even people like Lu Xin, one of the workers who committed suicide who was well-known for his talents and social circles at Foxconn, would be socially limited to past classmates and school alumni. 

In his book Le Suicide, Émile Durkheim observes that suicide occurs more frequently in societies where isolation and alienation are commonplace since social groups provide a powerful safeguard against suicide.  

“The pin insertion machine I used had already injured three other people: an ordinary worker, a frontline junior manager, and our production line manager. Two of them were trying to adjust the machine while it was running and got their fingers pierced. This machine used to be very difficult to operate, but oddly enough, after it injured people, it managed to run for more than ten days without any issues. Our production line manager said that it was simply ‘possessed’ and ‘bloodthirsty,’” says Li Xiangqing.

Suicides are more than statistical numbers 

Although psychologists maintain that suicide rates at Foxconn are below national averages even after the spate of eight suicides, the unnatural demise of each young life cannot simply be reduced into cold, hard statistics.

Lu Xin jumped to his death at 4:30 in the morning of 6 May 2009, from the VIP guesthouse at Foxconn’s Longhua plant, the seventh such suicide at Foxconn’s facilities in Shenzhen within roughly three months. After the fear of “being chased” for three days, the optimistic, outgoing young man, who had just begun work in management at Foxconn that year, ended his life, even as his mother and younger brother were already travelling from Hunan to Shenzhen to meet him.

Everyone who knew Lu Xin said that he was optimistic and talented, and he had even sung in a talent competition produced by Hunan TV. 

The hallucination of “being chased” began during the Labour Day holiday in early May. Even Zeng Hongling, Lu Xin’s best friend who had been his schoolmate and work colleague, did not know the factors causing these hallucinations. Lu Xin was cremated at the crematorium in Longhua on the morning of 9 May; His father, who was crippled in a coal mine in 2006 while working to provide for Lu Xin’s university education, was not present.

Nobody knew what caused the first domino to fall in this series of suicides, but as Liu Kun, Foxconn’s director of media relations, noted at midday on 10 May: “This will definitely not be the last.”

Little did Liu Kun know that his predictions would come true just one day later. At roughly 19:00 on 11 May, Zhu Chenming, a 24-year-old woman from Xuchang in Henan Province who was a frontline worker at Foxconn’s Longhua plant, jumped from the ninth floor of her rented lodgings near the factory. Her parents had already come to be with her prior to her suicide. According to Foxconn’s reports, Zhu had already asked for leave on 30 April, and her suicide might have been related to a romantic relationship. As Émile Durkheim would have said: completely unrelated factors in life came together; no single factor was the sole reason behind her suicide.

Even though each suicide had its direct causes, which are beyond the scope of this report due to privacy reasons, all of the subjects in question shared one thing in common: they were all from a new generation of workers born in the 1980s and 1990s, who make up roughly 100 million, or 60 percent, of the 150 million workers who have migrated from farming villages, according to official data. In addition, data offered by Liu Kun shows that workers born in the 1980s and 1990s make up more than 85 percent of the entry-level workforce at Foxconn.

Even with the news of deaths, life continues like clockwork at the Foxconn plants. Not far from where Lu Xin fell, vehicles with wheels as tall as a person still rumble past, and the doors of banks, cafés, eateries, and other shops still open for young people who rush past in the rain. On the factory floor, bright eyes still peek out from underneath white working caps, as workers continue to place resistors and coils onto computer motherboards as deftly as before. When they clock out at 17:30, the punch clock still shows a button-sized smiley face to each worker.

Over the past 22 years, Foxconn has rapidly become the world’s largest factory under the leadership of Taiwanese businessman Terry Gou, and it currently employs a workforce of more than 800,000 in cities across China. The company’s distinctive production model means that by the end of 2009, its Longhua campus alone housed more than 300,000 people, all crammed into less than 3 square kilometres of land in the north of Shenzhen. A city within a city, this industrial campus has a population that rivals many county-level cities in China. Simply calling it a “factory” does not do it justice. Foreign media have taken to calling Li Jinming, administrative manager of Foxconn Group’s China headquarters, the “mayor of Terry Gou’s Forbidden City.” 

According to the experts, Lu Xin and those who jumped before him—including Liu Zhijun, another alumnus of Xiangtan University like Lu Xin, as well as four others who died (of the eight workers who attempted suicide by jumping, Tian Yu and Rao Shuqin were seriously injured in their attempts)—are just part of a statistic. Although there has not been enough time to determine the reasons behind each suicide, they say, “We can say for certain that the suicide rate among Foxconn workers falls well below the national average.” In 2008, China saw a national average of 12 suicides per 100,000 people, while at Foxconn the figure is roughly 2 per 100,000. 

But the unnatural demise of each young life cannot simply be reduced into cold, hard statistics. 

Judging from investigations conducted by Southern Weekly reporters, in terms of work intensity, overtime hours, pay, and benefits, Foxconn is far from a sweatshop. At the door of Foxconn’s security office in Shenzhen’s Longhua Subdistrict, thousands of job applicants line up each day. After going through an eight-step process–which includes an initial inspection, filling out forms, a headshot, an exam, an ID check, and a physical checkup–they become Foxconn employees. The spate of suicides has not kept ever more young people from pouring in: on 13 April, right after the sixth suicide, more than 3,500 job applicants filed through, some even waiting in line more than seven hours, all the while chatting and laughing in eager anticipation. We can assume that the eight who committed suicide joined the Foxconn workforce in much the same fashion.

A fragmentary existence

In these cramped quarters, where roughly 150,000 people are squeezed into each square kilometre, everyone’s existence is a mere fragment. Even for a minor “celebrity” like Lu Xin, social circles at Foxconn are confined to a handful of classmates and school alumni.

When Lu Xin jumped to his death that early morning at 4:30, Li Xiangqing and his coworkers were at the late night shift at Foxconn’s H3 final production warehouse, 2 kilometres from the company’s Longhua campus, agonising through the most difficult hour of their shift. They would usually be sitting and staring in front of them at this time of the late-night shift, completely motionless except for occasionally rubbing their faces to keep awake.

Li Xiangqing came to work at Foxconn on 12 April, his second stint at the company. His first stint began in April 2008, and ended in July 2009 because he felt “bored staying so long at the same place”. Roughly 20 days later, Lu Xin came to Foxconn fresh from graduating with a degree in computer science from Xiangtan University. Wang Yang, Lu Xin’s homeroom teacher at Xiangtan University, recalls that before graduating, Lu Xin took and failed the civil service exam. When he found work at Foxconn, he thought that this was a heaven-sent stroke of good luck.

Lu Xin and Li Xiangqing were mirror images of each other, judging from many aspects of their education and life experiences. Lu Xin was a university graduate, while Li Xiangqing graduated from a vocational secondary school. Lu had already died by suicide, while Li is always saying that he wants to kill himself. The two did not know each other. However, even if they did, they most likely would have simply called each other diaomao. On the factory floor and in the dormitories, diaomao (literally, “penis hair”) was how everyone referred to everyone else apart from themselves. Friendships between diaomao were almost unheard of. As an extreme example, when Ma Xiangqian died in the early morning of 23 January 2010 (deemed a “sudden death” by the police), his fellow dormmates didn’t even know his name. 

“What we saw every day were basically our own shadows, wearing the same work clothes, doing the same job,” says Liu Kun. He believes this is why workers tend not to befriend their colleagues. 

Amid the isolation, these workers go to their shifts, leave their shifts, and sleep; go to their shifts, leave their shifts, and sleep; repeating the same routine every single day, their lives regulated like clockwork with little time of their own time for socialising. “Unofficial societies” (in Li Jinming’s words) based around hometowns or schools were almost non-existent at Foxconn. “If anything stressful came up in work or life, there would be no one to talk to,” says Li Jinming. 

This resulted in a bizarre environment. In these cramped quarters, where roughly 150,000 people are squeezed into each square kilometre, everyone’s existence is a mere fragment. Even for a minor “celebrity” like Lu Xin (who had won second place singing a popular song at the talent competition for Foxconn newcomers at the end of 2009), social circles at Foxconn are confined to a handful of classmates and school alumni.

No welcoming party awaited diaomao newcomers at the dorm. The only way anyone would know that a diaomao had left, was if they returned to the dorm room after work and saw a bed had become empty. “We were all familiar strangers with each other,” says Li Jinming.

In his book Le Suicide, Émile Durkheim observes that suicide occurs more frequently in societies where isolation and alienation are commonplace, since social groups provide a powerful safeguard against suicide.  

Perhaps it was precisely because of this isolation that sex and love gained even more importance as a comfort for the soul (for one thing, some committed suicide by jumping because of romantic reasons). Any production line or dorm building with women was considered exceptional.

“I really wanted to jump off a building.” Li Xiangqing kicked at a metal shelf with the working boots he had just been issued. His girlfriend had just broken up with him, right after he began working at Foxconn. The harsh words he saw on his phone’s messaging app nearly made him cry, yet the machines beside him continued to run, and everyone else continued as if nothing happened. For the next few days, even the sight of couples walking on the street made him upset. 

At noon on 21 April, he uncharacteristically asked Fatty (his production line manager) for half a day’s leave, and went to the train station to take his girlfriend back home. He did not expect things to change so quickly. He didn’t even have enough money to get something for her to eat, and he even had to take some money from her so he could pay for his ticket back to the dorm. “I was so sorry I couldn’t do more for her. I had some money for her, but she didn’t take it either.” 

In such cramped surroundings, romance is a scarce commodity. In the words of Chen Hongfang, vice chairman of the Foxconn Workers’ Union, “There is no place to have a romantic relationship in the factory campus.” Moreover, no cinemas or public parks can be found in the entire Longhua and Guanlan Subdistricts. As Zeng Hongling recalls, even though Lu Xin was artistically talented, and often talked about love with Zeng, he never had a relationship since beginning work at Foxconn in August 2009.

Backroom internet cafés were one of the few ways these young men could deal with their urges: hidden under the guise of eateries or other storefronts, these places had employees who would lead the young men to computers loaded with porn, where they could “solve some of their problems” before their paydays. But, they said, “watching porn is so much worse than actually getting a woman.”

When they received their pay, they would have money to go to the brothels next to the dorms at the Guanlan campus. A tattered old national flag marked the alleyway, which led to a rundown building where prostitutes sat on benches on the ground floor. Their services cost 80–90 CNY, prices seemingly tailored to the wages of these workers. Both in sex and love, money was always a cruel obstacle.

“No money, no car, no house, would you love me if I had no money?” Li Xiangqing sings a song he learned from someone.

He continues in his Hubei accent, “Damn, I’m going to earn a fortune in the next ten years and drive my own car right up to her house! It’ll be a real BMW too, not the kind of stuff they have in the warehouse.”

“The stuff in the warehouse” refers to the pallet trucks commonly seen in the warehouses. Most of them have issues and are hard to use; the one in the best condition was nicknamed “the BMW”, while the others were merely “Toyotas”, “Geelys”, or “Suzuki Altos.”

“The bloodthirsty pin insertion machine”

Red is, without a doubt, the colour most associated with ill fortune here at the factory, in stark contrast with cultural norms in China. A red slip issued to employees means that they are fired and will never be rehired; a red notice on a crate of products means that the whole shipment needs to be redone. Most importantly, red is the colour of injury or death. 

For both Lu Xin and Li Xiangqing, money is the itch that has never been remedied. Lu Xin’s university tuition and his father’s injury mean that his family still owes debts in the hundreds of thousands of CNY. As Zeng Hongling recalls, when Lu Xin received his first paycheck of 1,800 CNY, he sent 1,500 CNY back home, leaving only 300 CNY for himself. In Li Xiangqing’s case, however, money signifies the romantic relationship he nags about every single day.

Money also became the common driving force as they applied for overtime work. Such is the paradox: Workers in China are proactively asking to work overtime for the capitalists, to the point that they need to curry favour with their production line managers and team leaders to ensure that they get overtime work.

Compared to other positions, the H3 warehouse job was easy to the point of being dull. The “BMW” now served as a dummy for Li Xiangqing to practise his self-taught martial arts moves, as he swung his fists around the pallet truck’s hydraulic handle.

On the office desk In the F5 semi-finished product warehouse stood an exquisite-looking vase, cut from plastic water bottles. A plant of some sort was kept in the vase, its two leaves—one larger than the other—forming the only hint of green in a warehouse otherwise filled with long, dark-coloured objects. In the drawer of the desk was a half-empty bottle of cheap floral-scented perfume, which the workers would rub on their temples to keep themselves awake and repel mosquitoes. 

For new hires in April at the H3 warehouse, the daily walk to work consisted of a march from the south gate to the north gate through the entire campus. Along the way stood row upon row of neatly arranged, nondescript buildings, the only difference between them being the letters and numbers designating each building. Banyan, coconut, and palm trees native to the subtropical climate stood in between the structures, their green tops covered in soot. 

Even during the busiest and most tiring times of the year, these workers would act like a bunch of weary-eyed children. Whenever they had a moment to spare, they would head to open spaces outside to “race” their “BMWs,” “Toyotas,” “Geelys,” or “Altos”—they would stand on the pallet trucks and slide forwards as if riding motorbikes. If caught by security, they would receive a severe infraction on their official record, but they did so nonetheless.

Red is, without a doubt, the colour most associated with ill fortune here at the factory, in stark contrast with cultural norms in China. A red slip issued to employees means that they are fired and will never be rehired; a red notice on a crate of products means that the whole shipment needs to be redone. Most importantly, red is the colour of injury or death.

“The pin insertion machine I used had already injured three other people: an ordinary worker, a frontline junior manager, and our production line manager. Two of them were trying to adjust the machine while it was running and got their fingers pierced. This machine used to be very difficult to operate, but oddly enough, after it injured people, it managed to run for more than ten days without any issues. Our production line manager said that it was simply ‘possessed’ and “bloodthirsty,’” says Li Xiangqing.

Supernatural tales like this circulated around the factory. Li Xiangqing’s job at Foxconn’s Guanlan plant was to drive pins through plastic circuit boards. If a single pin went out of alignment by just a little, the holes on the boards would end up slightly larger, and the entire batch of product would need to be written off and redone if QA (quality assessment) discovered the fault. Sometimes workers simply felt “off” when operating the machines, and on days like this, even female workers would pick up metal bars lying around and beat on the machines. Strangely enough, work would progress smoothly after they vented their steam like this—whether they fixed the machines or themselves is anyone’s guess.

On the evening of 25 April, an accident occurred in the H3 finished product warehouse: a forklift drove onto a worker’s foot. Luckily, the worker had safety shoes on, so their foot was not fractured, and others say that they were even able to walk away on their own.

For others, however, injuries are a cause for envy. “Damn, that’s good luck, you get paid for a work-related injury. If it was me, I’d take at least a whole month of leave before I come back to work,” says Wang Kezhu from Anhui Province.

The news of death doesn’t seem to affect these people at all. “So another one died at Foxconn,” Li Xiangqing reads the news out loud from his phone as he slaps his leg. “Foxconn was already famous, and now it’s even more famous. You’ve heard about the six who’ve jumped, right?”

As Zeng Hongling remembers, Lu Xin used to think that he would never consider suicide. When mentioning the six people who attempted suicide by jumping, Lu Xing thought, “They were so foolish, I’d never do anything as foolish as this.”

Lu Xin was a new employee in a management position, who sat at a desk in an office, but ordinary workers had to work in environments with constant high temperatures and noise. Although ordinary workers received compensation for the environments they had to endure, all hoped to switch to safer jobs. This would mostly depend on luck. If they ended up with an unsatisfactory position, they would have to quit, reapply, and try their luck again.

At the pin insertion assembly line at the Foxconn plant in Guanlan, machines have seemingly held humans captive. In the words of Li Xiangqing, a worker at Foxconn, “We stand in front of the machine for eight hours a day like some kind of punishment, working nonstop. When something falls, we bend down to pick it up. We’d rather that things fall down all the time, so that we don’t need to keep on standing. Even lying down for a single minute would be unimaginable comfort.”

Li Jialong, from Guangxi Autonomous Region, keeps a paper flower folded from a 10-cent bill beneath the photo on his work badge. In his words, someone dropped the flower and he “found” it. Beside his work badge hangs a nail clipper and a small plastic box, in which are two earplugs he uses at work, given to him by another worker who had quit. Li Jialong works at a position crushing materials; if it weren’t for the two earplugs made out of orange plastic, he would end up dazed and unable to move after each shift. 

As soon as the male workers emerge from the factory doors, the sound of cigarette lighters is heard almost immediately. Their workday officially ends here, as they all light up their cigarettes at the same time.

Youthful years with no purpose

In his diary, Lu Xin wrote: I feel so lost since I took a wrong turn on the very first step of my life…

Even Zeng Hongling, who was close friends with the now-deceased Lu Xin, could not figure out why such an outgoing person became so unwell.

Lu Xin’s last online journal entry was posted at 17:35 on 26 October 2009. In this post on his personal page, we see how heavy future uncertainties weighed on this young man from Xiangtan, who loved huskies and was a fan of the Taiwanese model Lin Chi-ling: 

“I’ve given up on a career in public service to develop the western regions of the country, which I wanted to do the most. I entered this company because I need the money, but somehow managed to miss a position in research and development. I’m in manufacturing, which pays decently well, but I’m wasting my life and my future… I regret my decision…  I feel so lost since I took a wrong turn on the very first step of my life…”

Lu Xin reminisced about his childhood in a song he wrote: “The winds brush past a hint of shyness, taking away the colours of my childhood.”

Li Xiangqing also has memories of his childhood as he lies on the wooden planks in the warehouse: as the leader of his “pack,” he would go foraging for food, stealing peanuts and corn to roast and eat in a cave.

According to some sociologists and psychologists, young workers like Lu Xin and Li Xiangqing who were born after 1985 share these traits: they are more individualistic, more accustomed to the culture of urban consumption, and have less economic burden. Compared to the first generation of workers who migrated out of farming villages, this younger generation enjoys better working and living conditions, but they also endure a starker rural-urban divide, more severe income inequalities, and stronger ostracism in society.

This new generation of migrant workers in China has become especially drawn to death this summer, perhaps as a subconscious reaction to their circumstances. On 5 May, three 20-something youngsters met in a street park in Taizhou City, Zhejiang Province, to commit suicide with poison; two of them died. 

Li Jinming first came to Mainland China in 1993 and has now managed two generations of workers. From his perspective in management, the first generation of migrant workers from farming villages was more diligent and more easily satisfied, while the younger generation “is more concerned with quickly earning a profit”. During our interview, Li Jinming recounted how his generation grew up in Taiwan farming villages and rose up the ranks to become managers at the top level.

Heading east on Donghuan Second Road, where Foxconn’s Longhua campus is located, one sees six or seven fortune tellers squatting by the road every day. According to one of them, who spoke to our reporter with a Hubei accent, most of their clients are young Foxconn workers who spend 10 CNY to have their palms read: “We see 20 or 30 of them every day.”

Heading out from the south gate towards the Jiarun dormitories, one finds a lottery seller. The booth is always full of people, even though no one has ever seemed to strike it lucky at this particular seller. On the evening of 6 May, even though the booth had already closed for the day, a worker was still staring at the sign reading “closed, no more sales”. 

Heading north from the flowerbed and water fountain at the centre of the campus, a small but well-stocked bookstore lies on the left. One often sees a female worker among the MBA coursework books, trying to study maths. “I’m just here to look around,” she says shyly, “if I manage to get into an MBA program then I can earn a higher degree.” Although the numbers on her workbook are too small to read from a distance, the words printed in blue ink on the margins stand out: “Knowledge can change fortunes.”

A small plaza is located about a kilometre south of the southern gate of Foxconn’s Longhua campus, where high-end smartphones made by Foxconn are sold. Foxconn workers often come here to look at these phones: “These were all made by us.” However, the workers themselves can only afford cheap knockoffs that cost 400 or 500 CNY.

Heading out from the main gate of the Guanlan campus, a shopping mall lies directly past a road bridge. On the fourth floor of the mall, the karaoke bar costs 1 CNY per song, and the billiards tables cost 5 CNY for each game. This is where young workers often come to hang out at night. 

Heading downhill from the Red Sun Dance Hall, and going past two apartment blocks, one sees a roller-skating rink. From the group of workers gathering there, the police take away a few shirtless men, who are said to have MDMA pills on them. After the police leave, the deafening music resumes.

What about life now, and life in the future? 

Gao Haiwei, from Hebei Province, carves a bowling ball from a coconut he found. Since he comes from Hebei, he says, his “roots” lie in Beijing, even if this means the most remote parts of the city: his older brother has a house and a family in Shunyi County, on the eastern fringes of Beijing.

Wang Kezhu says that more knowledge will lead to better work, so he tried to enrol in an English training course. He quickly dropped out: “It was impossible, I couldn’t understand anything.” 

Li Xiangqing’s dream is to earn money and not worry about women. “My woman will follow me wherever I go, when I work she’ll watch by my side and feed me.” 

As for the deceased Lu Xin, he once dreamed of being a singer, and then he dreamed of becoming a civil servant. On 2 May, however, his mood suddenly changed. Normally not one to drink, Lu Xin unexpectedly asked Zeng Hongling and his friends to join him for a few rounds that day. He told Zeng Hongling that he was “too stressed by work” and “wasn’t able to sleep”. 

By 22:00 on 5 May, Lu Xin began to show signs of unprecedented anxiety, repeatedly lamenting that he “failed his filial duties” since he couldn’t give his parents enough money, and saying that he “would not live past the night”. As his irrational fears began to grow, at roughly 23:00 Foxconn management put him in a guest house normally reserved for Taiwanese executives.

Zeng Hongling and his friends had long informed Lu Xin’s family about his delirium.  Earlier on 5 May, Lu Xin had phoned his mother in the morning, telling her everything was fine and she did not need to come. 

But just a few hours later, at 4:30 on 6 May, when Lu Xin’s mother and younger brother were already on the train, and were just some four hours away from Shenzhen, Lu Xin arose after tossing about sleeplessly in bed for a few hours, He stepped past one of his friends, saying that he wanted to see the view outside. Just a few seconds later, with his friend right by his side, Lu Xin jumped from the balcony. 

His best friend Wang Jun (not his real name) tried to catch him, but the only thing he was able to grab onto was the company-issued white sleeve worn as part of their work clothes.

(At the request of the interviewee, Wang Jun is a pseudonym)