It was Sunday when Dong Wanwan decided to quit his job at the world’s largest iPhone factory and walk home.
It was Sunday when Dong Wanwan decided to quit his job at the world’s largest iPhone factory and walk home.
The 20-year-old has been working for the past three months on the production line in Foxconn Technology Group’s factory in Zhengzhou, one of tens of thousands of people working together Apple Inc. iPhones will be sent around the world. It’s a coveted job that ranks among the country’s highest-paid gigs.
After that, Covid began to spread in the production site. The factory has entered a “closed loop”, separating the huge complex from the outside world. Garbage piled up in the hallway. Food is harder to find. Much Who infected said they were forced to eat bread to make spells.
That’s when Dong gathered her 19-year-old brother and embarked on a journey where they walked about 40 kilometers (25 miles), with their luggage towed, to get home. The trip to a small town southeast of Zhengzhou took almost nine hours.
“Foxconn really messed up, I don’t think a lot of people want to come back. I know I won’t,” said Dong Bloomberg News.
In Xi Jinping’s China, millions live with the fear of being caught up in a sudden shutdown and forced to fend for themselves – a nightmare scenario that has become more common this year as members of Streets from Shanghai to Chengdu had to be shut down to contain the virus. It makes no difference in Foxconn’s vast workforce, a team of around 200,000 forced to share cramped dormitories with up to 11 other people.
Something happened over the weekend, when hundreds, if not thousands, of workers walked, hitchhiked or dipped into their savings to escape the Covid outbreak. Their collective challenge was caught in video and the photos are overflowing social media In Chinarevealed the amount of Covid Zero, a policy that ended the world’s second largest divisions economy and global supply chains. While it is still largely common to avoid the scale of deaths seen in places like WE, against the emerging strategy. Video of workers walking home along highways with their luggage has received hundreds of likes on Douyin, China’s version TikTok.
For Dong, the experience is much more substantive.
It started when she went into quarantine after reporting a cold in late October. She had a fever of 39.5 degrees Celsius (103.1 degrees Fahrenheit) and couldn’t get out of bed. Dong tried calling staff hotlines, then nearby hospitals. None of her calls went through.
Even a messaging group for Foxconn employees set up on WeChat – the WhatsApp-like platform that most Chinese religiously use as a real-time forum – has gone silent despite numerous prayers. assist. If it weren’t for Dong’s line supervisor, who asked her colleagues to send her food and medicine, she would have run out of stock.
Sympathetic outsiders
That experience sealed her decision. Dong departed for a small town near Kaifeng, to the southeast, at 8 a.m. on Sunday, beginning a nine-hour trek through the open plains of Zhengzhou.
Dong received a lot of help along the way. Although Zhengzhou is under effective lockdown, sympathetic residents, who have announced the campaign on social media, have left bottled water and snacks by the main highways. Those acts of kindness, detailed in Douyin, lifted her spirits. She and her brother even managed to climb into the back of an open truck in a stretch.
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Dong gets help in part because these desperate experiences are becoming commonplace across China, creating a platform of resentment. While the strict measures have kept the official Covid death toll in China below 6,000, they are taking a heavy economic cost, fueling discontent and isolating the country from the rest of the world. rest of the world.
As the virus mutated into more contagious variants, stopping its spread became a Sisyphean mission: China reported 2,675 new local Covid cases on Sunday, more than 802 from the previous day, marking the largest increase in the number of infections nationwide since August 10.
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Many China watchers expect Mr. Xi to signal a turnaround from what has become a signed policy when he takes to the podium to speak at the Communist Party congress on October 16. There, he defended the zero-tolerance strategy as a life-saving strategy and suggested not taking action when it was likely to end.
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It is not clear how many workers have left Foxconn in the past few days. Dong said conversations among her colleagues amounted to thousands, although that could not be immediately verified. The company has been trying to minimize the possibility of disruptions, raise wages and arrange for redundancies from other Chinese factories if assembly lines in Zhengzhou come to a halt. The company has repeatedly emphasized employees as their top priority.
Dong said she doesn’t know much about it, focusing instead on her journey.
That, she said, helped the local government get involved. It was 4 p.m., when the brothers finally reached a special gathering point that officials had set up to help transport the departing Foxconn workers back to surrounding towns.
Mr. Dong estimated there were about 500 people waiting for the bus. From there, they were sent to an isolation facility converted from an elementary school, where they eventually made it to their hometown, though still subject to China’s Covid rules.
“I was completely exhausted from walking, I had a big blister filled with blood,” she said.
