Covid Chaos

Labor protests at China’s main iPhone production facility highlight Apple’s risks in the country

- Peter Elstrom, Gao Yuan and Betty Hou

Xiao Han was just wrapping up the weeklong quarantine that marked the beginning of his latest stint working at the sprawling manufacturing complex in Zhengzhou, China, known as iPhone City, when violence erupted there. A large part of the 200,000-person workforce had already spent weeks living in forced isolation in trash-filled dormitories, subsisting on meager rations because management wanted to keep churning out Apple Inc. devices while squelching a Covid-19 outbreak. On Nov. 23 hundreds of workers, angry to learn they might not get the extra pay they'd been promised, pushed past the security staff guarding their living quarters, setting off a physical confrontation with riot police.

"It was total chaos. I'd never expected things could go this bad," says Xiao, who adds that some of his co-workers were injured in the clash. He describes a situation that had grown intolerable even before the violence. The 30-year-old was part of a wave of workers who abandoned iPhone City in October as conditions deteriorated. But he returned in mid-November, lured by bonuses intended to convince exhausted workers that things were improving. The violence showed how inadequate that effort was and also exposed the increasing futility of China's Covid strategy. Widespread protests over the government's approach to the pandemic broke out in late November, following a fatal fire in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang.

Throughout the pandemic, the Chinese Communist Party has shown a willingness to go to extremes in its efforts to combat Covid, locking down whole cities to stem infections. At the same time, it's pushed companies such as Foxconn Technology Group and Tesla Inc. to cut off their facilities from the outside world so they could continue to operate without interruption.