Why my interest? I taught Maths (in English) in Zhengzhou for a couple of years and constantly wondered where my students could find employment, so I recently searched online and found these articles about the iPhone assembly plant there. Some things I learnt: assembling iPhones is boringly repetitive, basically just install the same one screw all day, so workers only last about a year; the impetus came from Terry Gou, the Taiwanese billionaire founder of Foxconn; and, in the past, to be purchased by the Chinese, such "foreign goods" had to be shipped to Hong Kong, then turned around and imported back into China, whereas Foxconn negotiated virtual export/import at the touch of a button. The iPhone story, by putting my former Zhengzhou students in the "centre" of the US, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong tensions, made those tensions more "engaging" for me.
And yes, I am concerned about the plight of the Uighurs. I think the repression of that group is directly linked to the 2014 knife killings at Kunming railway station, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack. Immediately after that attack, metal detecters were set up at railway stations in Zhengzhou. And I noticed some Muslim businesses disappearing from the streets.
Why my interest? I taught Maths (in English) in Zhengzhou for a couple of years and constantly wondered where my students could find employment, so I recently searched online and found these articles about the iPhone assembly plant there. Some things I learnt: assembling iPhones is boringly repetitive, basically just install the same one screw all day, so workers only last about a year; the impetus came from Terry Gou, the Taiwanese billionaire founder of Foxconn; and, in the past, to be purchased by the Chinese, such "foreign goods" had to be shipped to Hong Kong, then turned around and imported back into China, whereas Foxconn negotiated virtual export/import at the touch of a button. The iPhone story, by putting my former Zhengzhou students in the "centre" of the US, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong tensions, made those tensions more "engaging" for me.
And yes, I am concerned about the plight of the Uighurs. I think the repression of that group is directly linked to the 2014 knife killings at Kunming railway station, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack. Immediately after that attack, metal detecters were set up at railway stations in Zhengzhou. And I noticed some Muslim businesses disappearing from the streets.