Via BoingBoing. Bunnie Huang blogs about his encounters and experiences with Chinese Mainland manufacturing culture. Here's a live link to his blog category Made in China.
Reminiscent of Neal Stephenson. Factory complexes big enough to have their own border control and freeway exits, for instance.
Foxconn is where all of the iPods and iPhones are made. It’s a huge facility, apparently with over 250,000 employees, and it has its own special free trade status. The entire facility is walled off and you apparently need to have your passport and clear customs to get into the facility…just short of the nuclear-powered robotic dogs from the nation-corporation franchulates of Snowcrash.
Sounds like Boeing here near Seattle. The Everett plant not only has a freeway offramp, Boeing was billed to build a second, now completed one.
Boeing also has gate security and ID badges, and you can wind up with a certain amount of customs-like security if you work in an area with sensitive documents.
It's not particularly relevant to Bunnie Huang's business interests right now but the key point about all this gigantism and where it's leading the PRC is right there in one of the back posts. He's already starting to think about an exit strategy, "I need to make sure Chumby has some kind of contingency plan just in case we can’t get chumbys made in China anymore due to political unrest." What's the exit strategy for the province when everybody heads to the next hot low cost manufacturer because things have gone wrong somehow in Shenzen?
It could be because of disease, blown environment (water, air) wages rising too high, bribes becoming too much, etc. etc. etc. The point is that when you have a 250k employer and they drop out, you have immense hurt radiating out from that. It can destabilize the entire province for years. Think Pittsburgh, Detroit, any number of rust belt areas writ large. But the PRC doesn't have other areas of the economy that it can fall back on. Manufacturing is what they do, the great workforce absorber that counterbalances the state owned firms that are both monstrously large and lose money hand over fist.
It's all tightrope work without a net.
Good point. Remember that they called the 1930s period "The Great Depression" because it was a nicer-sounding thing than what they used to call these sorts of "adjustments" back in the 19th century... "The Panic of 'XX".
I suspect there will be tides in this globalization thing, and we don't have tables...
And just recently from TIME online, a report on the successful young professionals in the PRC that I call Chuppies...
It is very much an open question if the "haves" can keep what has traditionally been called "The Mandate of Heaven."