Contract Manufacturing | 龍華, 深圳 — The Connector Plant That Trained Its Own Competitor

In late May 1988 eight men from Taiwan had their photograph taken on a street in Shenzhen. The company's own archive dates the print 88.5.25. 郭台銘 was thirty-seven, and Hon Hai had been making computer connectors in 土城 for seven years. The plant that followed was called 深圳海洋精密電腦接插件廠, and 接插件 is the whole point: it made connectors, the same product as home. Foxconn dates its mainland business to 6 June 1988. The first intake was recruited out of the 潮汕 countryside, and the accounts put it at roughly a hundred and fifty people. One of them was 王來春, twenty-one, from a farming family in 汕頭, who had left school after junior high. She stayed about ten years and rose to 課長, section chief, which was the ceiling for a mainland employee at the time, with thousands of people under her. At the end of the 1990s she and her brother 王來勝 bought a Hong Kong company called 立訊, and in 2004 she founded 立訊精密 in Shenzhen to make connectors and cables. Luxshare now supplies Apple, bids against Foxconn for the same work, and has at times been worth more on the market than the company that trained her. 龍華科技園 broke ground in 1996 and became the group's global manufacturing headquarters. In 2010, eighteen workers across Foxconn's mainland plants were recorded as having attempted suicide, and fourteen died, most of them here. The company hung nets between the dormitory blocks, opened round-the-clock counselling centres, added psychological screening to hiring, and in June raised wages by about a third. Apple joined the Fair Labor Association in January 2012. The FLA surveyed more than 35,000 workers at 龍華, 觀瀾 and 成都, documented working weeks well past sixty hours and unpaid overtime, and set 360 remedial items. In the campus exhibition hall a glass case holds two beige desktop shells, labelled as the first Compaq chassis and the first Dell chassis Foxconn built, in 1998. Ten years after the connector plant opened, the company had stopped supplying parts for the machine and started making the machine. The cover photograph is the south third gate of 龍華園區, taken from the public road. The iPhone assembly that made this campus famous is now centred on 鄭州. Photo: Lhzss8, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons