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Video: The Great Panda Escape
Caption This: Poster for joining the female fighter pilot force
Pencil This In: November 9-13
More sex in China: PDA police and condom confusion
A British newspaper called Mail on Sunday ran a critical report (not online) on Apple iPod factory conditions in China, including one in "Suzhou, Shanghai" (is that like Greenwich, London?). Wired picked up on this and had this to say:
According to the report (paraphrased here by Macworld UK), Foxconn's giant Longhua plant employs 200,000 workers, who work 15-hour days but are paid just $50 a month -- miserable even by China's standards. It claims they work and live in the plant, in dormitories housing 100 people, and outside visitors are forbidden.The report says another plant that makes Apple's iPod shuffle in Suzhou, Shanghai, employs mostly women, because they are more trustworthy. Another factory is secured by Chinese police officers, the paper said.
Workers at these factories earn more -- about $100 a month -- but are not housed by the company. The paper says rent and living costs eat up about half the worker's salaries.
It should be no surprise that Chinese factory workers are low paid but the report makes conditions sound positively Dickensian.
Here's basically the same information from The Guardian.
* We are not getting on our high horse. We are pretending to, just to piss off those people who hate it when others get on their high horses -- which is their own kind of high horse, if you think about it.
Photo from Roel's Flickr page.
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Bloody sweatshop is high horse? I don't think so when compared to this http://www5.tianya.cn/publicforum/Content/funinfo/1/207116.shtml.
"Super Nanny" found the message and deleted. The above link is no good now. I happened to keep the original IE window and find the embedded picture URL.
http://files.photojerk.com/chinaphoto/dalugongan.jpg
These pictures looked staged, and reminded me of the FLG propaganda drawings.
1) The Chinese Security Forces are not known to document events, ala abu ghraib, and;
2) Least of all, potentially incriminating events.
In particular, the 2nd and 3rd pictures with guy in the blue shirt with teh woman in the red shirt, and the later 2 pictures with the guy in a green "paramilitary" uniform looks like classic FLG propaganda.
HUA: well, my remark was pointed at those readers who tend to assail me for my political opinions. i've never been shy about expressing those opinions, even at the risk offending others or being called a self-hating Chinese; but i can do without the stupid comments that i get from people, because i try to ignore them but i usually can't. I get angry. And i am wary of turning Shanghaiist into a bully pulpit. I am free to say what i want on this site, but nevertheless there is a diverse group of contributors and readers, so i try to not sound like a broken record. I will keep posting such stuff as i think necessary though.
interesting pictures...could be falungong, though who knows. but if you consider the inconvenience that the Shanghai gov't pu people through for the SCO conference, you might think back on Kissinger and nixon's visit to xi hu in Hangzhou, where they didn't let the normal people in, and gave out radios to the people they did let in for the sake of maintaining a particular image. These are all manifestations, (some more cruel than others) of country where one party has a monopoly on politicla power.