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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (86)
COVID-19 has drastically changed human behaviors and posed a threat to globalism by spurring a resurgence of nationalism. Promoting prosocial behavior within and across borders is of paramount importance for global cooperation to combat pandemics. To examine both self-report and actual prosocial behavior, we conducted the first empirical test of gl...
Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers
Jenny CHAN, Mark SELDEN and PUN Ngai © 2020 (Haymarket Books and Pluto Press)
Book cover artwork (Korean edition 2021): Graphite replaces Space Gray as the iPhone Pro's darkest model in the lineup. Falling petals symbolize the loss of lives.
Pluto Press (June 2020)
Paperback I...
Existing studies on digital media and labor seldom pay attention to youth in vocational education (VE), nor do they consider the use of and attitudes towards digital media in connection with labor subjectivity. This research fills the gap by exploring how patterns of digital communication relate to each other in exerting influence on labor knowledg...
The Shenzhen Jasic struggle of 2018–2019 signals a turning point in migrant labour struggles in China since the mid-1990s, and it explicitly demonstrates a shift toward left politics, departing from a civil society framework which barely analyzes ideology and class politics, thus showing little potential to overcome class inequality. The Jasic stru...
Today, if China is a dreamland for global capital looking for new forms of accumulation on an unimaginable pace and scale, I argue that a new working class comprising rural migrants and urban workers is being created, and they now form the new political subjects for potential resistance and shape the future of the labor movement in China, as well a...
What is the human cost of our digital future? Based on undercover research, Dying for an iPhone reveals the shocking conditions endured by workers employed by Foxconn, the world’s leading manufacturer of Apple products.
Suicides, excessive overtime, hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migra...
Examining emotions within the studies of mobilities, recent literature has highlighted that migration is an inherently uncertain process shaped by hopes and dreams, as well as feelings of fear and anxiety. More than an individual pursuit for economic advancement or cultural assimilation, we find that migration is also a political project that inces...
In dialogue with the new gender ideology “egalitarian essentialism” which reveals uneven transformation of gender equity in public and private spheres, this study looks into the nuanced gender ideologies among Chinese youth, their antecedents and socio-psychological impacts on the young people. We apply latent class analysis to data on gender-role...
Despite the importance today of global production networks in linking the international division of labour between the Global North and the Global South, the workers in such networks receive relatively little attention from those interested in the sociology of work. This study applies Glucksmann’s concept of ‘socio-economic formations of labour’ to...
Given the increasing popularity of online game playing, the negative impacts of game addiction on both adolescents and adults attracted our attention. Previous studies based on the self-determination theory have examined the effects of the three basic psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness on problematic video game playing amo...
This article aims to provide insight into the employment relations in China-based multinational companies internationalising to Europe, a still relatively unexplored topic. We investigate the transfer of work and employment practices from Foxconn’s manufacturing headquarters in mainland China to its subsidiaries in Czechia and the factors that infl...
In contrast to the existing argument that the logic of capital has monetised almost every aspect of human relationships to the realm of exchange value, this article explores the social values that are practised by Chinese working-class youth as an alternative form of agency and everyday practice. Instead of understanding social values as a realm of...
In Europe, as elsewhere in the global North, the label “Made in China” has become synonymous with low wages, excessive overtime, and exploitative working conditions. Conventional literature on the international division of labor reifies the North–South divide in particular with respect to class formation and labor agency. Contrasting the working co...
Situating in the different social, political and cultural contexts of schooling in China, which is more embedded in mixed neoliberal value, authoritarian state control and collective morality, we use a somewhat different theoretical angle to understand the process of ‘learning to labour’ and the reproduction of working class at school and at work....
In refuting Guy Standing’s precariat as a class, we highlight that employment situation, worker identity and legal rights are mistakenly taken as theoretical components of class formation. Returning to theories of class we use Dahrendorf’s reading of Marx where three components of classes, the objective, the subjective and political struggle, are u...
‘Utopia or dystopia – to where will the “digital revolution” lead human society?’ is a question that remains unanswered. Negotiating between two opposing standpoints, this article, looking at a form of trans-border activism originally driven by suicides and protests of Foxconn workers who produce iPhones, iPads, and many other i-gadgets for the wor...
Outside the lab, there is no high-tech, only implementation of discipline.
Execution is the integration of speed, accuracy, and precision.
Value efficiency every minute, every second.
Achieve goals or the sun will no longer rise.
The devil is in the details.
Growth, thy name is suffering.
- Terry Gou, CEO of Foxconn
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Fox...
What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional c...
This chapter attempts to engage in the debate of circular migration in a global context by looking at the internal migration of Chinese workers from the rural to urban areas in general and the lived experience of the low and semi-skilled migrant workers at the industrial workplace, in particular at the Foxconn Technology Group. In this sense, this...
To enrich the discussion of global labor, between 2010 and 2016, we studied Apple’s value chain, Foxconn’s mode of labor control, and Chinese workers’ struggles. Through our fieldwork in China we also examined Apple’s and Foxconn’s responses to the spate of worker suicides, workers’ resistance, the activism of scholar and student groups, and transn...
Jan Drahokoupil (ETUI), Rutvica Andrijasevic (Univ Bristol, UK) and Devi Sacchetto (Univ. Padua, Italy)
This book investigates restructuring in the electronics industry and in particular the impact of a ‘Chinese’ labour regime on work and employment practices in the electronics assembly in Europe. It studies Foxconn, the world largest electronics...
Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun and Mark Selden. 2016. “Apple, Foxconn, and China’s New Working Class.” Pp. 173-89 in Achieving Workers’ Rights in the Global Economy, edited by Richard P. Appelbaum and Nelson Lichtenstein. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
In the summer of 2010, Taiwanese-based Foxconn Technology Group—the world's largest electronics manufacturer—utilized the labor of 150,000 student interns from vocational schools at its facilities all over China. Foxconn is one of many global firms utilizing student intern labor. Far from being freely chosen, student internships are organized by th...
The fact that in 2010 eighteen young workers attempted suicide at Foxconn production facilities in China has attracted worldwide attention. Drawing on research conducted in Foxconn factories in three regions of China—the Pearl River Delta, the Yangtze River Delta, and West China—the authors trace the development of the Foxconn Technology Group as a...
Jenny Chan, Ngai Pun and Mark Selden. 2015. “Apple’s iPad City: Subcontracting Exploitation to China.” Pp. 76-97 in Handbook of the International Political Economy of Production, edited by Kees van der Pijl. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Ngai PUN, Jenny CHAN and Mark SELDEN. 2015. Morire per un iPhone (Dying for an iPhone). Translated in Italian by Ferruccio Gambino and Giorgio Grappi; edited by Ferruccio Gambino and Devi Sacchetto. Milan: Jaca Books. 269 pages. ISBN: 978-88-16-41246-0
潘毅 (PUN Ngai)、陳慧玲 (Jenny CHAN)、馬克．塞爾登 (Mark SELDEN)。2015。《蘋果背後的生與死──生產線上的富士康工人》。劉昕亭 譯。香港︰中華書局。xv, 238頁. ISBN: 978-988-8310-74-6
Ngai PUN, Jenny CHAN and Mark SELDEN. 2014. Morir por un iPhone (Dying for an iPhone). Translated in Spanish by Florencia Olivera; edited by Andrés Ruggeri. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ediciones Continente S.R.L. 220 pages. ISBN: 978-950-754-501-6
Competitiveness today requires being able to operate at a global scale. The financial crisis invigorated this requirement, posing new challenges to the economic viability of conventional companies and demanding alternative organizational forms of production. Although a wealth of research has focused on capitalist companies, little attention has bee...
As an idea or philosophy, Communism died in the West when the mature form of capitalism didn’t succumb to a communist revolution. As the result of the transfer of capital, with the support of militarism and class conflicts in the Third World, socialist revolutions arrived there in the 20th century. This is the history of communism, the first wave,...
A startling 18 young workers attempted suicide at Foxconn production facilities in China in the year of 2010, attracting worldwide attention. This article looks at the historical development of Foxconn Technology Group as a case to demonstrate the advent of rapid capital expansion in China and its impacts on the lives of Chinese workers. It also pr...
What are the implications for global public sociology and labor studies when more than a score of Foxconn workers jump to their death and when a wave of protests, riots and strikes occur in their wake? This article documents the formation of a cross-border sociological intervention project and illustrates how sociological research fueled regional c...
Apple's commercial triumph rests in part on the outsourcing of its consumer electronics production to Asia. Drawing on extensive fieldwork at China's leading exporter—the Taiwanese-owned Foxconn—the power dynamics of the buyer-driven supply chain are analysed in the context of the national terrains that mediate or even accentuate global pressures....
China's capitalist transformation offers us a non-Western perspective to understand the contradictions of transnational capital mobility, the working people's lives, and the changing role of the state. This economic and social transformation continues to require the acceleration of a specific proletarianization-successive generations of rural migra...
In 2010, a startling 18 young migrant workers attempted suicide at Foxconn Technology Group production facilities in China. This article looks into the development of the Foxconn Corporation to understand the advent of capital expansion and its impact on frontline workers’ lives in China. It also provides an account of how the state facilitates Fox...
The thirty years since Women on the Line has witnessed great achievement in the literature of gender and work both in the West and Global South. There was a booming literature since the 1970s and 1980s in the fields of sociology, anthropology, women studies, and cultural studies-most of them excellent works that touch upon sophisticated debates on...
From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization: Markets, Workers, and the State in a Changing China. Edited by KuruvillaSarosh, LeeChing Kwan and GallagherMary E.. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. vi + 233 pp. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-5024-2 - Volume 209 - Pun Ngai
The emergence of China as a ‘world's factory’ in the new millennium was accompanied by the rise of a new working class which was composed of more than 200 million peasant-workers. As internal migrant labourers, these peasant-workers were deprived of citizenship rights to reside in the city and lacked basic labour rights and protections. In order to...
A startling 13 young workers attempted or committed suicide at the two Foxconn production facilities in southern China between January and May 2010. We can interpret their acts as protest against a global labor regime that is widely practiced in China. Their defiant deaths demand that society reflect upon the costs of a state-promoted development m...
As a result of its open-door policies and 30 years of reform, China has become the “world’s factory” and given rise to a new working class of rural migrant workers. This process has underlain a path of (semi-)proletarianization of Chinese peasant-workers: now the second generation is experiencing dagong, working for a boss, in industrialized towns...
The financial crisis of 2008 brought many changes to the world economy with China seeming to stand out as one of the countries best able to weather the storm. There is a general belief that this is because China has a strong state which has reshaped the role of China in the new international division of labour and has the ability to resume its econ...
Thirty years after China's Reform and Opening, China has become not only the world's workshop, but also the world's largest construction site. In large and small construction sites throughout the country, 40 million "peasant workers" are building world-class metropolises such as Beijing and Shanghai, creating China's economic miracle of rapid growt...
The financial crisis of 2008 brought the world economy into a new stage. While the western capitalist countries suffered seriously, China seems to stand out as one of the few countries that could resist the economic tsunami. There is a general belief that this ability arises from China’s strong state which has reshaped the role of China in the new...
This article attempts to analyze the logic of labor reproduction of migrant workers and its significance to political economics from the point of view of relationships between industrial capital and labor (re-)production, using the main model of the labor reproduction of urban Chinese migrant workers as an example—the dormitory labor regime. In par...
The repositioning of China as a ‘ world workshop’ rests upon the nurturing of a new Chinese working class. This article focuses on questions of collective action of migrant workers who are now the major force of a new working class that actively strives to alter its fate through labour struggles. By studying the collective actions of migrant worker...
This tribute to the resilience of China's migrant workers is by an academic who lived and worked among them in Shenzhen for seven months, sharing their screams and dreams. It touchingly portrays the plight of young migrant workers, many of them women, who have been caught in the grip of capital's unscrupulous willingness to sacrifice anything in th...
This paper analyses the characteristics of the dormitory labour regime in China's post‐socialist period and the collusion of this regime in the process of the ‘Wal‐Martization’ of global toy production. This collusion has shaped labour relations and CSR labour practices in China. This paper focuses on three factories, located in the industrial zone...
Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own.
This paper argues that neoliberalization in the form of privatization has increased rapidly in the post-1997 crisis period in Hong Kong as the government struggles to rebuild and reinvigorate the pro-corporate business environment. We use case studies to illustrate the glocalization of the neoliberal project as a process of "creative destruction,"...
This article discusses the dormitory labor system, a specific Chinese labor system through which the lives of Chinese women migrant workers are shaped by the international division of labor. This dormitory labor system is a gendered form of labor use that underlies the boom of export-oriented industrial production in China, which has been further b...
Globalization of capital accumulation and transnational production highlight a shifting paradigm in labour process theory, which requires a theorization on the spatial politics of production.The shift from Taylorism and Fordism (mass production and welfare-state interventions) to flexible accumulation (flexible production, casual labour, deregulati...
The paper uses research into industrial dormitories in Southern China to examine the role performed by employer-controlled accommodation in the management of human resources. The current rapid industrialization in China has been fuelled by the over 100 million internal migrants who move around the country on an annual basis and are housed in indust...
This book provides a detailed comparative account of the development of citizenship and civil society in Hong Kong from its time as a British colony to its current status as a special autonomous region of China. © 2004 editorial matter and selection, Agnes S.Ku and Ngai Pun. All rights reserved.
Neo-liberal economic globalization and acceleration in information and communication technologies have strengthened the competitiveness of transnational corporations by making it easier for them to stretch their global commodity chains to developing countries. Such control from a distance threatens national states' capacity to regulate TNCs and the...
With China’s access to World Trade Organization in November 2001, global competitions and local just-in-time productions became even more intense. Millions of migrant workers, in particular the young girls, are recruited by the transnational corporations in urban cities to race against the time of increasingly short turnover between the placement...
In spite of the increase in transnational codes of conduct and legal mobilisation of labour, despotic labour regimes in China are still prevalent. Globalisation and 'race to the bottom' production strategies adopted by transnational corporations militate against the improvement of labour relations in China. The goal of this study is to provide a fr...
Public Culture 14.2 (2002) 341-347
a survivor of a factory fire in China
Fire, pain, and memory flashed into Xiaoming's life story, highlighting a social trauma that runs through the lives of dagongmei, migrant working daughters, in this time of restructuring for China's state socialist system. Reform-era China is imaged through a lens focused squa...
positions: east asia cultures critique 8.2 (2000) 531-555
A scream pitched itself through the darkness of the night. It came, as usual, in the last hours of night, at about four. Yan had had that same nightmare, and she again fell to shrieking. I was awakened by the ghostlike voice, to find it passing away, and the deep silence of the night reigned...
The majority of the work-force in Chinas special economic zones and in other newly industrialized districts are dagongmei (working girls) coming mainly from rural areas. This article focuses on these female peasant-workers and on a shift in their identities in light of Chinas attempt to enter the capitalist world economy. As women as peasants and a...
Projects
Project (1)
Developed in collaboration with Dr Devi Sacchetto from University of Padua, Italy, the project investigates the global firms and the raise of China, and studies the ways in which ‘Chinese’ modes of production and management are impacting on work and employment relations in Europe. The project speaks to the academic community but also to practitioners such as policy makers, trade unions and NGOs.
