The Foxconn "iPhone Riot" Was Just One Of Hundreds in China Today

There’s no word yet on how many fights broke out over the new iPhone at shops around the world over the weekend between eager customers or Apple and Samsung fanboys, but violence has surfaced at one of the plants where the phone is made. What was originally reported as a “fight” now looks more like a “riot,” according to sources. And while it’s hard to ignore the plight of the workers who made the world’s gleaming new iPhones, the incident was, statistically speaking, just one of hundreds that happened yesterday alone.

On Monday, a reported 5,000 policemen were sent to break up a brawl in the dormitories of Foxconn’s plant in Taiyuan, a city of 4 million and the capital of Shanxi province, where most of China’s coal is produced. Foxconn released a statement on Monday saying that around 40 people had been taken to the hospital with injuries after a "personal dispute between several employees escalated into an incident involving some 2,000 workers… The cause of this dispute is under investigation…but it appears not to have been work-related." Reuters and others have said 2,000 people were involved in the fight-turned-riot. Allegedly, all hell broke loose after a guard hit a worker; investigations are underway.

The link between violence and the iPhone is irresistible to journalists, but frankly, this kind of event is not exceptional in a country where economic uncertainty has collided with frail labor standards, agressive production mandates, and few protections for workers. The country saw a record 180,000 “mass incidents” in 2010, according to a professor at Tsinghua University; a separate study in 2011 by two scholars from Nankai University in north China reported 90,000 such riots, protests, mass petitions and other acts of unrest in 2009. In 2008, China’s Public Security Ministry reported 120,000 mass incidents. That was a dramatic increase from 2007, when China had over 80,000 “mass incidents,” as they’re often called by officials, up from over 60,000 in 2006, according to an earlier report from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. In recent weeks, China’s protest streak has turned unusually but vehemently political, as thousands have taken to the streets to rally against Japan, China’s longtime rival currently locked in a dispute with Beijing for control over the Diaoyu islands.

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The electronics manufacturer and supplier that recently plucked some interns away from vocational schools to help build iPhones refused to say whether or not iPhone 5’s were being produced at this particular plant. Though, that lack of comment doesn’t seem to matter. Everyone already knows — thanks to some stealthy reporting — that Taiyuan is where the iPhone 5 backplates are being made during almost-mandatory overtime hours.

Whatever Apple and Foxconn’s labor standards and environmental code of conduct might say, Taiyuan’s facility is not a pretty scene, as described recently by an undercover reporter for the Shanghai Evening Post: “Whole building exudes the reek of garbage, mixed into a strong smell of sweat the fishy and instant noodles taste, filled with garbage thrown out … each dormitory door. Dorm 10 people on bunk beds, the ground is a mess.”

Worker outrage is nothing new. at Foxconn, nor its Taiyuan campus, where a strike took place in March.

What’s different this time. Geoffrey Crothall, a spokesman for the China Labor Bulletin, which is seeking collective bargaining for workers in Chinese factories, told the Times that workers in China were growing increasingly emboldened. "They're more willing to stand up for their rights, to stand up to injustice," he said – but damage to factory buildings and equipment still appeared to be unusual, occurring in fewer than 1 in 20 protests.

The riot’s gone now, and no one has died. If you were as bummed out as I was yesterday when every AT&T and Apple store you went to was completely out of iPhone 5’s, don’t worry: the factory closure won’t last long. The workers should be back in no time, carving out those awesome new iPhone 5 backplates come Tuesday. As electronic consumption levels pace along and the leaves change color in the northern hemisphere, now is no time to cease production. Especially at Foxconn, where CEO Terry Gou envisions the “uncommon concept to provide the lowest ‘total cost’ solution to increase the affordability of electronics products for all mankind.”

Meanwhile, young workers in China are struggling to earn enough money just to buy an iPhone, or other fruits of the global economy, just like their counterparts in other places around the world. "Young people today do not care as much as the students of 1989 about the fate of their country or their fellow citizens, or set much store by democracy, freedom and political ideals," Han Dongfang, a leader of the 1989 demonstration at Tiananmen Square, wrote in 2009. “Instead, they want to find a good, well-paid job, and dream of owning a car and buying a home as soon as possible… There is no inherent conflict between the pursuit of a comfortable life and the pursuit of democracy and freedom. Democracy is not just a matter of abstract political theory. A democratic system should be able to deliver a better life – decent pay, a good job, a nice car and a place of your own – as a matter of course. It should be a tool for realizing dreams. At the moment, how many of the 1.4 billion people living in China are really fulfilling their dreams? Never mind dreams – how many still lack life's basic necessities?”

Meanwhile, police in Beijing, Shanghai and other places in China that are not coal or manufacturing epicenters are preparing for another kind of riot: the kind that happens at the Apple Store whenever a new thing is released in this, Apple’s second biggest market.