AGE: 25
OCCUPATION: Factory worker
BIRTHPLACE: Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province, China
INTERVIEWED IN: Shenzhen, China
As with Li Wen, we meet Sung Huang through SACOM in 2011, this time on a trip to Shenzhen from Hong Kong. At a restaurant in Shenzhen’s Longhua District, we sit with Sung and two of his friends (also in their early twenties) as they slouch in their chairs, smoke cigarettes, and inventory the long list of moves from city to city each has made in search of stable work.
Sung and his friends have stories similar to those of many young Chinese workers we meet: he grew up in the countryside with his grandparents while his parents worked in a major manufacturing center hundreds of miles away. With little opportunity for work in rural China, Sung made the trip to join his parents in the town of Hangzhou, one of China’s designated special economic zones free from import and export taxes and many of China’s national labor regulations. Life for rural Chinese in urban manufacturing zones can be transient at best. National residency laws designed to limit urban sprawl make settling down in cities like Hangzhou virtually impossible for migrant workers. Many live in company-sponsored dormitories during the week and travel hundreds of miles to their home villages on the weekends. The stress of this sort of instability on young families can be enormous. Sung found he couldn’t get along with parents who had been absent for much of his childhood, and he ran away at sixteen and began supporting himself.
Names have been changed to protect the identity of the narrator.
I HAVE MANY SPIRITS
I have a lot of stories to tell, because I have many spirits. I have a lot of job experience, and I’ve tried a few occupations.
I was brought up in Jiangxi Province by my grandparents. Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, not too far from where I grew up, is world famous for its porcelain, especially porcelain dishes.1 But my village is very common, and my family lived a common agricultural life. At home it was me, my younger sisters, and my grandparents. We didn’t see my parents very often, since they worked factory jobs hundreds of miles away.
I went to junior high, but I didn’t make it past the third year there. I wasn’t very obedient, and I decided I couldn’t learn much from the school. At that time, my parents were working in Hangzhou, and when I quit school I went to Hangzhou to stay with them.2 But I got into some arguments with my parents, and we didn’t have a very good relationship. So I ran away from my parents’ home, all alone and with only 100 yuan.3 I found a job for myself in Hangzhou, and then after a month had passed, I got in touch with my family to let them know I was okay.
My first job was in security. This was in 2005, when I was sixteen. But I used the ID card of someone who was eighteen, because you had to be eighteen to have that job. A lot of people use fake ID cards to get jobs. I don’t think my boss knew it was not my ID. If he did they wouldn’t have hired me.
I worked in a residential community for the owners of some apartments. Once, there was a thief who tried to steal some parts from a car. He’d got the hood open, but then we caught him. Four other security guards beat him up and then sent him to the police. But I didn’t join the beating, because I was too young, and the other guards kept me away.
I worked there for only two months. I was getting paid only 800 yuan per month.4 I was paid for my food and housing, too, but still, I didn’t think there would be any opportunities for career development, so I quit and found a new job.
I HAD A FAKE CERTIFICATE MADE
I went to work at the paper factory where my parents worked in Hangzhou. I was using someone else’s ID again. Those factories find new workers simply by introductions made by people already working there. If you know someone who works there, then it is easy to get in. The jobs there are labor intensive. They are exhausting, but you can get better pay.
I worked eight hours a day for the factory. We had three shifts, because the machines don’t stop. The machines go twenty-four hours a day. At that time I was in the packaging department, where we packed the paper for shipping. I did not enjoy it, because it was so exhausting. But I was getting paid almost twice as much as when I was a security guard.
I worked there for more than half a year. My parents worked there too, so they were able to monitor me more strictly. And I did what I could to learn to drive the forklifts, which were operated by more skilled workers. I wasn’t supposed to drive them and the factory wouldn’t let me have that job. Still, I learned as much as I could and then quit that job after I felt I’d learned enough about how to operate the forklift. I thought I could get a better job.
I found a job operating a forklift in another paper factory in Hangzhou. You need a certificate for forklifts, so I had a fake certificate made. There are advertisements for making fake certificates everywhere, so it was very easy to get one. For smaller factories, it’s not easy to check whether a certificate like that is fake or not. And besides, what they care about is your ability to operate the forklift. They really don’t care about the certificate, as long as you have one.
After that second paper factory in Hangzhou, I worked as a salesman in the city, but that was only for about two weeks. Then I came to Shenzhen5 and went to work as a security guard for a factory for three months before traveling north, following some leads on more permanent work. I ended up in Wenzhou,6 and I had another security job where I was more like a temporary policeman, working for the city’s administrative offices. I worked there for more than a year. At that time there was a policy that after working as a temporary police officer for ten years, you could become an official policeman. I didn’t stay there though. I was arrogant, and I made some mistakes, some serious mistakes.
For us security guards, when we caught someone, we might first beat him up before arresting him or taking him to jail. This is a common practice among police and security guards in China. One time, three other temporary officers and I were trying to catch some bicycle thieves. We were wearing our plain clothes, and we followed behind one guy we thought was a thief for a whole day. He probably noticed us following him, so he didn’t do anything on the first day.
We were angry about it, because for every thief we caught, we were given a bonus. We had followed that thief for a while, but because he didn’t do anything, we couldn’t get any bonus. So we were angry at him.
And then, the next day, around two or three in the afternoon, we caught up to him with a stolen bike on the street and gave him a heavy beating. One of the other guys kicked the thief, and he rolled under a rack of umbrellas, completely unconscious. We took him into the station. Then that night, sometime after midnight, our supervisor called us to the police station and asked us about what had happened. He told us that the thief had died.
Three of my colleagues, the ones who did most of the beating, are still in jail and haven’t gone to trial yet. I had to leave the job.
FOUR DAYS OFF IN A MONTH
So after I lost my job as a security officer, I returned south in 2008. My next job was at Foxconn in Shenzhen. I started there around the end of 2008. I’d heard about Foxconn from some friends, so I tried to get a job there. I didn’t know much about the company, but I’d heard that the treatment there was relatively good.
When I started, I was working ten hours a day. Eight hours was the normal working day, but I worked two hours of overtime every day. And if you worked Saturday or Sunday, you got paid overtime for that.
The basic salary for working Monday to Friday was 900 yuan, but we usually worked on Saturday and would have only Sunday off. So we would have four days off in a month and get paid 1,500 to 1,800 yuan for the month, with meals and housing included, because of the overtime.7 Which is barely enough to live on.
Foxconn is a little more strict than the other factories. Things at other factories are a little more relaxed, but at Foxconn the work is more demanding. At that time I was living in the dorms in the factory. Ten people share one dormitory, about twenty square meters, and there’s one bathroom for each dormitory. People sleep on bunk beds.
I was working in the molding department at that time, stamping sheets of metal into shape for different products. We had to do different things, including operating the machines, sometimes packing, and maybe some cleaning up. I learned to operate the machines.
But I started working there during the financial crisis, and after I’d been working there for about a month, the factory started to lay off people, and I was laid off too. I had met someone at Foxconn who became my girlfriend, but after I was laid off I went back by myself to Hangzhou and found a job operating forklifts at another paper factory. I worked there for about three months.
I FELT LIKE I COULDN’T BREATHE
And then after three months, when the financial crisis was over, I went back to Foxconn. This second time at Foxconn I was producing mobile phones for Nokia, spraying paint on the shells of the mobile phones.
We wore dust-free uniforms, which covered our whole bodies and our heads, and we wore masks. There was only a slit for our eyes. That suit was so uncomfortable, and with the mask I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
When we got the product into our department, we put it onto the line and there was a machine that would spray the paint over the phone automatically. After that it would go to a high-temperature area for stabilizing the paint, and then we would take out the product and see if it was okay.
I worked at Foxconn for three months, and again I lived in the dorms during that time. I left because I was going home to become engaged to my girlfriend. For the engagement, we needed to meet each other’s parents, to ask them to be present at the ceremony. We were from the same area, and it just made more sense for us to quit Foxconn and go home to announce our engagement, because we couldn’t invite all those people and make them travel all the way to Shenzhen. We met some of each other’s relatives and had dinner together.
I didn’t plan to go back to Foxconn. I was thinking I would go over to where one of my relatives was living in Hangzhou. He was working at a factory making lightbulbs. You can make 4,000 to 5,000 yuan a month there.8 It’s a small workshop. There are a lot of small workshops in that area. And I did go there, but I couldn’t manage because the temperature inside the shop was really high, forty to fifty degrees Celsius.9 I couldn’t stand it.
After I quit the small workshop I found a factory nearby and went to work in the personnel department. The factory was not very big, and the job was not very demanding. But the salary was only about 2,000 yuan a month.10
I worked for about two and a half months, and then I went back to Foxconn in May 2010, because I didn’t think there was anything that I could get going for myself over there in Hangzhou. And for my girlfriend. She had worked in that lightbulb factory with me at that time, and I was thinking of her, because the temperature in the factory was too high and she could not handle it, either. Foxconn was much better because there was air conditioning. This is a better place for her to work as a common worker. Me, I think I can find a job anywhere.
So we both came back to Foxconn at the same time, and now we are living outside the dormitories, in our own apartment. You don’t have to live in the dormitory. You get paid more when you live outside the dormitory, about 150 yuan per month more.11 Living outside feels more free and more comfortable, but I lived in the dormitory before in order to save more money. The allowance for one person living outside the dormitory doesn’t cover the whole rent, which is about 300 yuan a month.12
THE FIRST PRIORITY IS SPEED
Now I’m working in the storage department. On the production line they use certain materials for their jobs. They report to our department and tell us what they need, and we do the purchasing. We keep the materials in the storage area, and when they need those things, they will come to us and we distribute the materials to them.
The working hours are the same as they’ve always been, but this is a much easier job than the others at Foxconn.
At Foxconn, the first priority is speed, the speed of manufacturing. It’s only after that they care about the quality. But I feel like a normal factory would care about the quality. Because the client is the goal, but what the clients would care about would be the quality of the product. I don’t think the clients would care much about the efficiency. But at Foxconn they think that the efficiency is more important, because they want to complete the orders that the clients make as soon as possible. They may not care very much about the quality.
But I don’t think that affects the workers much. What the workers care about is that they get their salary for the job. I don’t think they care much about the quality of the products.
THE MANAGEMENT IS LIKE A MACHINE
I have heard about the suicides. These are things that happen around us, but I don’t know much about it. I don’t have much to say about it.
It’s like people say: the management at Foxconn is like a machine—no matter whether the instructions they give workers are reasonable or not, the workers have to obey them. I don’t have high hopes for Foxconn’s prospects. I think they will close down because the management is so poor. For example, friends of mine working in the department that produces screens for cell phones, they have to produce a thousand pieces, every day, in good condition. However, I learned that maybe half of them are not good quality. They are not up to standard. But this is not reported honestly to the upper management. Maybe out of five hundred bad products, only fifty of them will be reported.
The front-tier manager, the line leader in their department, is responsible for reporting to the upper management, but he doesn’t do it honestly. Only the line workers know about that. I think this is a big waste.
But the leaders on every level of the line, they all lie to the upper levels. Because when you are being honest, you get punished. This is very common at Foxconn.
I don’t plan to work at Foxconn for a long time. I’m thinking of going into business for myself. But so far I don’t have a very clear idea of what I might do. I haven’t yet thought of something that would have good prospects for me. Maybe I’ll try something in the IT sector. I would like to be a technician. I would like to be someone with skills.
1 Jiangxi is a large province in Southeast China with forty-five million inhabitants. A mountainous and forested region, Jiangxi has an agricultural economy but is also known as the leading porcelain-producing province in China.
2 Hangzhou is a major Chinese city with approximately twenty million residents in the metropolitan area. It lies along the Yangtze River Delta in Zhejiang Province, and is around three hundred miles east of Jiangxi.
3 100 yuan = US$15.
4 800 yuan = US$120.
5 Hangzhou and Shenzhen are about eight hundred miles apart.
6 Wenzhou is a city of over nearly eight million about 750 miles north of Shenzhen. It is known as one of China’s leading exporters of wholesale electronics equipment.
7 900 yuan = US$135. 1,800 yuan = US$270.
8 4,000 to 5,000 yuan = US$600 to $750.
9 104 to 122 degrees Fahrenheit.
10 2,000 yuan = US$300.
11 150 yuan = US$22.
12 300 yuan = US$45.