Early each summer, the bus began to fill with teenagers. Tang Mingfang, a 40-year-old office manager, watched as his shuttle from the workers’ dormitories to Foxconn Hengyang, an Amazon supplier factory in southern China, grew more crowded with kids brought in to assemble Kindle ebooks and Echo speakers for Christmas. By the peak of the production cycle, there were so many that Tang was unable to squeeze on to the bus. Sent by their vocational schools, the students arrived in their hundreds, as part of an arrangement with Foxconn, the Taiwanese manufacturing giant that operates the plant.
An exclusive assembler of many Apple and Amazon products, Foxconn is China’s biggest private employer, with more than 700,000 workers. But during Chinese factories’ busiest periods, it’s common to see students from age 16 being bussed in to meet the higher demand for products. Once they reached the Hengyang factory, their task was to put together electronic devices often for up to 10 hours per day. Not that the students had much choice. If they said no, their teachers could refuse to let them graduate.
Tang knew it was illegal for students to work overtime or nights. It also seemed unfair. While his generation of graduates had grown up expecting formal contracts for skilled work, these young students were getting a raw deal. Subjected to the intense discipline of the assembly line, their work was limited to mindlessly repeating the same minuscule movements every few seconds. And he disliked the harsh way the children were treated by the teachers who were responsible for them at the factory. A short, serious figure with youthfully round cheeks, Tang uses a single phrase to describe himself: “well behaved”. So, at first, he kept his reservations about what was going on private.
One day he heard from colleagues about a vocational schoolteacher berating a crying student at the plant. Assembly-line managers didn’t discipline the students directly, instead complaining to the teachers. This instructor had been yelling and pulling the boy by the ear. Tang thought of his own young son, about to start primary school. What if his teachers treated him like that? I wouldn’t accept it. I couldn’t accept it, Tang thought. In the spring of 2019, assuming he understood the possible consequences, he decided to speak out.
Tang was born in February 1979 in a rural area half a day’s journey from the Hengyang plant where he ended up working. His early years in Hunan province coincided with the boom brought about by the period of economic reform that took place after Mao Zedong’s death. Foreign investors like Foxconn started to set up factories in China. A decent student, Tang was encouraged by his teachers to study automotive machinery, a sector growing rapidly with the modernisation of Chinese farming. Tang followed their advice and became the first member of his family to go to college.
On graduation, he was offered a job at a small machinery repair shop in town but felt the pay was too low. So he headed for Shanghai, more than 800 miles away, where he started work in a car repair plant. Tang’s career would eventually take him to several different cities, yet he always felt slightly out of place, as if his village upbringing had failed to prepare him for the cut-and-thrust of life in these places.
At a car factory in the southern city of Shenzhen, he was offered a bribe of a month’s salary by one of the gangs in the factory to look the other way when they stole metal. Tang was afraid of getting caught up in the politics between rival gangs but didn’t know how to refuse. In the end, he confessed everything to the factory manager. The manager told him not to worry, but Tang felt too awkward to stay. Instead, he landed a job with Foxconn, whose main Chinese base is in Shenzhen.
It was 2006, the year before the first iPhone was released. As the holder of a vocational school degree, Tang was qualified to work in the management offices rather than the assembly lines. At Foxconn he met his wife, who also hailed from Hunan province. After the birth of their son, she left her factory job and returned to her hometown to take care of him. Tang saw them once or twice a year, not an unusual rhythm for a Chinese migrant worker, but he wanted to be closer. So, in 2016 he moved to Foxconn’s plant in Hengyang, dedicated to making Amazon products. His office faced on to a special gated section of the plant reserved for Amazon staff who were posted year-round to supervise it.
Tang enjoyed the relative luxury of being able to see his family more often. Every month he travelled to see his parents, or to his wife and son, by now a toddler. Like many Chinese mothers, his wife lived with her parents, who helped with childcare. Tang’s Foxconn income, plus her shifts at a local factory, made enough to keep them afloat, but no more than that. Still, he found his work as an inventory manager easy. Each week, he’d order the exact number of components necessary for production. Managing components in a just-in-time fashion made sense to Tang. It kept costs at a minimum and gave the factory the flexibility to respond to changes in demand. He couldn’t help noticing, however, that a similar method was increasingly being used to manage the factory’s workforce.
By this point in the mid-2010s, as China’s wages crept upwards, factories were looking for new ways to cut costs. They realised they could save on salaries if they only hired temporary workers for the summer and autumn rush, letting them go when production dropped after Christmas. What’s more, they could save money year-round by not paying social insurance, medical insurance or pensions to casualised workers without full contracts. The arrangement created a population of precarious migrant workers going from factory to factory, sometimes staying only a few days at a time in each.
Chinese labour law puts a ceiling on the proportion of the workplace that any company can casualise, stipulating that more than 90 per cent must be long-term staff. But labour inspections are rare and disciplinary action even rarer, particularly against the companies that contribute significantly to local tax revenues. Tang and his office mates would discuss the increasing number of agency workers, who did similar work to contract staff, but on inferior terms. In the high season, workforce numbers at Hengyang Foxconn swelled to 10,000. In the low season, when just regular contract staff like Tang remained, there were only 2,000. More and more student “interns” were also arriving to fill gaps in the summer production cycle.
Tang and his colleagues put it down to the factory’s success in winning more orders from Amazon and the pressure this created to produce more rapidly. Sometimes it felt to them as if everyone on the assembly line was a casual worker.
Tang’s job also had lulls in activity, and he filled these quiet spells with reading. He’d always been an avid consumer of news, with an interest in politics and economics. His colleagues called him Tang Baidu, after the Chinese search engine, due to his encyclopedic knowledge of current events.
He first found out someone was investigating the Foxconn factory’s hiring practices in news reports reposted on Chinese social media platforms. In June 2018, the New York-based China Labor Watch, a non-profit that specialises in undercover investigations of Chinese factories, published a story on Hengyang Foxconn together with The Observer newspaper in the UK. The report alleged that casual agency workers made up more than 40 per cent of the plant’s workforce, four times the legal maximum. At the time, Amazon stated that it had “immediately requested corrective action” and was “committed to ensuring these issues are resolved”.
In the fallout from the report, Tang’s manager predicted there would be big changes to procurement. Tang believed him. But as the summer went on and student interns and agency workers arrived like clockwork, he realised his managers’ promises had been empty, “like heavy thunder with few drops of rain”. Tang felt like management was flouting the rules.
Endeavouring to back up his hunch, Tang browsed the factory’s internal computer network, which was accessible to all staff members. He read the human resources division’s reports on the number of casual workers recruited and targets for the coming period. Tang was fascinated by these figures, which showed the vast changes in the factory’s make-up. Then came the incident with the teacher and the crying child — he knew he could no longer stay quiet. When he returned to work after the Chinese new year holidays in early 2019, Tang emailed China Labor Watch and told them that Hengyang Foxconn was still infringing labour regulations. Briefly he wondered what would happen. He had a vague awareness that whistleblowers like Edward Snowden had received widespread praise in the Chinese media for disclosures about US surveillance.
In May, the Labor Watch founder Li Qiang wrote to Tang saying he was considering sending undercover investigators back to the plant but needed more evidence. That was easy for Tang. He sent screenshots of the human resources reports, creating a picture of consistent lawbreaking. He sent a table of “partner schools”, the numbers of students they had already sent and the number the factory wanted. In total, the factory hoped to have 1,200 students from six schools that September.
Another memo identified a labour shortage due to high demand for certain Amazon smart speakers and noted that “the local government will intervene and help negotiate with Hengyang Technician College to provide 600 interns”. The memo also suggested allowing the number of agency workers to rise above the legal limit and noted it would be “better to reach an agreement [on this] with clients”. Lastly, Tang found a security guard’s report about the student who had been disciplined and sent that too. At worst, he thought he might be fired, but he was prepared to accept that. The job was slow-paced and paid only Rmb5,000 a month (about £560). With his experience, he was sure he could find something better.
In August 2019, China Labor Watch and The Guardian published a new exposé. Again, Amazon announced it was “addressing this with Foxconn at the most senior level” and sent specialist teams to investigate. Foxconn fired the head of the factory and the head of human resources. But it was also searching for the source of the leak. A week after the article was published, the local police station sent an officer, accompanied by two Foxconn managers, to pick Tang up for questioning.
At the station, after what he describes as hours of physical and verbal abuse, Tang agreed to sign a confession. Then, for the next month, he was told to show up at his offices as normal every day, except he was taken to a conference room where the factory security could keep an eye on him. There, he watched the rest of office life go by as usual. On one occasion, he says he saw a member of the Amazon staff rifling through the drawers of his old desk. He doesn’t know why. Eventually, Tang was taken into police custody and charged with stealing trade secrets. For the next nine months, he awaited trial in a detention centre.
Under Chinese competition law, the complainant has to show proof that their business operations were hurt by the theft of trade secrets. Foxconn said that, as a result of Tang’s disclosures, it had incurred costs of Rmb1.4mn (about £150,000) in August from having to raise its salaries. In court, Tang’s lawyer argued Foxconn’s losses resulted from correcting its illegal behaviour, meaning that his case fell under the whistleblowing exemption in Chinese law. He argued that the documents Tang had access to were widely available internally and not trade secrets. But the judges did not wish to discuss Foxconn’s illegal behaviour during the trial at all, Tang recalls. And on July 1 2020, he was formally sentenced to two years in jail for leaking business secrets.
“Life has a few important turns where, if you take the right step, you’re on a solid path,” Tang told me a few months after his release from prison in 2021 at an industrial park near Shenzhen where he was looking for work. “I tripped up on every one of those steps.”
During the two years he served in pre-trial detention and then in jail, Tang had to work hard. Alongside the other inmates he folded the gold and silver paper ingots to be sold in the temples on Mount Heng, Hunan’s famous tourist site. He also assembled plastic flower arrangements for sale — one labelled “rose” stuck in his mind as particularly pretty, and had a Walmart sticker on it, he recalls. (Exporting prison-made goods is illegal under Chinese and international trade law. Walmart did not comment.) Prisoners were provided with food three times a day, but “dogs would refuse to eat it”, Tang said.
In jail, he met men who had seen more of life. Some were much younger, but he felt he had something to learn from them. He thought many were wise far beyond their formal education.
After his release, Tang wrote down some of their stories. The tales covered dozens of pages. There was the wealthy executive who got into a fight with a local police chief, igniting a small-town drama that became national news. The young man who got embroiled in a peer-to-peer lending scandal with his girlfriend. The men who had been in and out of jail ever since leaving school, one of whom had made astounding sums smuggling goods from Myanmar. In many of the stories, Tang saw miscarriages of justice and the ways that random misfortune could ruin a life.
He began to reflect on his own unworldliness. On whether he had been too naive about the value of honesty when dealing with the gangs in the car parts factory. Now he questioned whether he had been too naive about blowing the whistle on Foxconn. He had made the decision without thinking too much about his future. In the immediate aftermath of the evidence Tang had uncovered, Foxconn admitted to the problem and vowed to fix it. But in 2022, Tang was told by Labor Watch’s Li, who had continued sending undercover investigators into Hengyang, that there was still use of forced student labour and casual labour above the legal maximum. It seemed to Tang that nothing had changed.
During Tang’s time in jail, his father died of a stroke, but he couldn’t attend the funeral. That was the moment when he stopped being able to keep his detention a secret from his wider family, his childhood friends and neighbours. He didn’t know exactly what they were saying, since he was only allowed a five-minute phone call with his wife every month, but he knew how word travelled back home. He couldn’t earn money to support his wife while he was inside. He knew she had suffered because of him and feared her patience would wear thin. She told him he had become a different person since being in jail.
Members of his extended family were also affected: Tang’s nieces and nephews worried about being penalised when applying for government jobs because they had an uncle with a criminal history. His sister-in-law complained that he’d jeopardised her children’s future. Not long after he left jail, his sister, who he was close to, died from a long-term illness. He felt guilty that he had not been with her as her condition deteriorated.
He increasingly felt he had to prove to himself and to his family that his decision had been worthwhile. He wanted Amazon and Foxconn to apologise. He wanted his guilty verdict overturned, so he could look for proper work again and “wipe away the stain” from his family. And he wanted to make sure Hengyang Foxconn really stopped using forced student labour.
While Tang was in jail, a lawyer named Liu Siyao from Yingke Law Firm in Shenzhen had published an analysis, arguing that he should not have been charged. Liu emphasised that Foxconn’s losses resulted from its own violations of labour law. She argued that Foxconn’s desire to “punish” Tang was apparent. “Although the affected company is a well-known one, we believe that . . . the court still needs to maintain objectivity. It’s regrettable that the court didn’t logically address the defendant’s arguments, leading to a judgment that is difficult to have faith in,” she concluded. When asked for comment, Foxconn referred back to its statement from June 2021 that it “respects the judicial verdict” on Tang’s case. “Penalties and improvements regarding the Hengyang campus were made public in 2019,” the company added.
When Tang was released, the first thing he did was go home, where he burnt joss paper at his father’s tombstone and wept. “I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said. “Don’t worry about me.” He then turned to preparing his appeal but found no lawyers willing to take on his case; they were even cautious about writing to him on WeChat. Instead, they sent voice messages — assumed to be harder for the censors to surveil — telling him that his case was too difficult. He asked a journalist, who said it was politically sensitive for them to question court judgments.
Tang understood their reticence; he didn’t want to get them in trouble either. In China’s criminal system, which has a 99 per cent conviction rate, it takes a lot of courage for any lawyer to challenge a court’s decision. There is no meaningful division of power in China’s political and penal systems, with the public prosecutor, police and courts ultimately answering to the Chinese Communist party. Tang suspected that the political influence of Foxconn locally meant that no domestic lawyer would take on his case. “It can be difficult institutionally to overturn the lower court’s judgment as it involves calling out their mistakes — and here possibly accusing the police of abuse — as well as touching on issues of state compensation,” said Jeremy Daum, a senior fellow at the Paul Tsai China Center at Yale Law School.
Still seeking redress, Tang took up Li’s suggestion to write an open letter to Amazon’s executive chairman Jeff Bezos, which China Labor Watch published online in January 2022. In it, Tang laid out his story and the sense of injustice he felt:
My father always taught me that I should be a good person, and because I followed my heart and believed that justice should be served, I reported the serious violations at Hengyang Foxconn. Yet my imprisonment has caused such great harm to me and my family! After I was released from prison on September 10 2021, my wife could not understand or accept what I had done, and to this day she has not forgiven me.
He received no reply. When approached by the FT, Amazon said that it “complies with the laws and regulations in all jurisdictions in which it operates and expects suppliers to adhere to our Supply Chain Standards”.
Under US law, proving that a multinational is liable for its overseas human rights abuses is generally an extremely lengthy and difficult process. But in 2022, Tang started speaking to a consortium of human rights lawyers, including the New York-based attorney Aaron Halegua. The lawyers are considering making claims in the US, as well as in France and Germany, which have laws that require companies to monitor, not just respond to, human rights risks and abuses in their supply chains. “It has always been difficult, albeit not impossible, to hold US companies legally accountable for their own and their suppliers’ actions abroad,” said Halegua. “However, the facts of Mr Tang’s case raise very serious questions about Amazon’s role that must be further investigated.”
Amazon is currently heading into its busiest time for sales. Earlier this year, it introduced a new line-up of Echo smart speakers, which are produced in Foxconn Hengyang. The company boasts of a 35 per cent increase in 2022 in the use of the Alexa personal assistant technology embedded in its speakers. It expects net sales of $160bn in the final quarter of this year.
Tang feels the anxiety of not knowing whether he will find vindication. “I constantly live in uncertainty,” he said. Sometimes friends ask him to get involved in their ventures, but he feels he has unfinished business. He keeps up correspondence with his lawyers, and is back following the news, particularly about Foxconn and Amazon.
Most of the time he works, or looks for work. After his release, Tang crashed on an old friend’s floor near Shenzhen. Every factory position required a series of background checks. With a criminal record, it was difficult to find management-level roles like the one he had before.
Instead, Tang has become one of the casualised workers he saw arriving on the Foxconn assembly lines. Because the larger factories run the most thorough background checks, he works for smaller workshops. Every few months, he moves between the south coast and the east coast, looking for work and wondering if he would make the same decision again.
Yuan Yang is the FT’s Europe-China correspondent. She is currently on extended leave. Additional reporting by Nian Liu
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