Shortly before midnight on Sunday, a fight among assembly-line workers at the Apple supplier, Foxconn, escalated into a riot, involving some two thousand members of the staff, and perhaps the guards, that reportedly left forty people injured.
The state-news service said that five thousand police moved in to restore control. The plant, which has seventy-nine thousand workers in the coal-country city of Taiyuan, shut down. Reporters at the gates saw broken windows and paramilitary police with riot shields, helmets, and batons guarding the entrance, while a loudspeaker urged calm. After twenty-four hours, Foxconn reopened the plant Tuesday.
Though most of the iPhone assembly is done elsewhere, workers said that the iPhone was being made there, too, so the story leapt onto front pages. Anything attached to Apple gets more than its share of attention, but in this case, the Apple factor is far less interesting than what this instance of labor unrest suggests about the months ahead for China.
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