In late 2010 and early 2011, Apple's supply chain in China came under intense media scrutiny. “1 Million Workers. 90 Million iPhones. 17 Suicides. Who's to Blame?”Footnote ¹ This was the title of an investigation by Wired magazine, published after a tour of a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen. It references the “suicide express” that began in 2010 and asks difficult questions about user complicity in these deaths. By the time this article appeared, Foxconn was in full denial mode. The workers who had jumped to their deaths, or had been crippled for life, did so, the company claimed, not because of harsh working conditions, excessive overtime, or monotonous, repetitive assembly line tasks, but because they must have had preexisting psychological conditions. Foxconn urged better psychological screening. Nets were hung between buildings on factory grounds to catch future jumpers. All of this, of course, was for the “safety and well-being” of the million-plus Foxconn workers spread across endless factory complexes in almost every province in China.

Dying for an iPhone by Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai is a detailed unpacking and deconstruction of the tales that Foxconn and Apple spewed to the world. It is the first book-length study of the life-and-death struggles of the new generation of Chinese workers who left the countryside in the 2000s and earlier to find employment with Foxconn. The iPhone, the iPad, the old Power Mac G5 desktop, and the MacBook Pro—almost any electronic device you can think of has been touched, polished, assembled, and packaged by the hands of a Foxconn worker. Covering a period of almost a decade beginning in 2010, we are taken into the inner workings of the Foxconn machine. We learn about logics of state-capital cooperation, the assembly line innovations that made Foxconn a master of speed and efficiency, systems of worker recruitment, deceptive schemes to employ college interns, aluminum explosions, toxic poisoning, and struggles for compensation, justice, and fair labor.

In the summer of 2010, as the number of suicides increased, Chan, Selden, and Ngai began to work with researchers in China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong and made field visits to nine Chinese cities where Foxconn factories were located. This collaborative research continued throughout the decade. The authors and their team interviewed more and more workers. They collected journal writings, songs written by migrant workers, and migrant poetry. They shot video, documented protests, and met with managers and governments officials.

In twelve crisp and highly readable chapters, we are introduced to suicide survivor Tian Yu, to the history of Foxconn in Taiwan and its move into electronic manufacturing in China, to systems of labor discipline and techniques of worker monitoring and surveillance, and to stories, told in the workers’ own words, of the disciplining of everyday life, on the clock and off. We learn of the use of student interns, of the differential ways in which young men and women negotiated their loves and desires, and of the near-impossible business of marriage for a young worker. We learn as well of factory explosions, disabled workers, electrical shocks, neurological defects from toxins such as n-Hexane (used to wipe the screen of the iPad), of inadequate workers’ insurance, of struggles for compensation through the legal system, and of financially ruined families. By the end of the book, we are taken into the fantasy world of Donald Trump as he maneuvered in 2017 to convince Wisconsin governor Scott Walker to bring a Foxconn factory to Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. This project of land deals, tax breaks, and false employment promises is now considered a dismal failure.

Dying for an iPhone is one of the best examples we have—not only in China studies, but in fields beyond—of engaged scholarly activism based on collaborative teamwork. This book should be read for everything it tells us about the Apple-Foxconn relationship, state-capital relations in the electronics industry, the struggles of factory workers, and the brilliance and also the limits, as well as the tightened control, especially after 2015, of worker protests throughout the long 2000s. It should be studied as a model for how to do long-term collaborative research, which arguably has not been practiced enough in the study of contemporary China.

Finally, the book is addressed to all of us—to the consumers of Apple's machines. It is especially useful for a critical pedagogy of the tech industry. It forces us to ask our students, and ourselves, how we can be at once a consumer and user of Apple's magical, fetishistic devices and also commit energies to workers’ justice. Are we complicit in the life-and-death struggles detailed in this book? If so, how do we confront this complicity? This book will generate discussion and debate about this question and, in turn, open up possibilities for imagining alternatives to the digital utopianism that has enriched Apple and placed Foxconn as the center of global labor struggles.