
The Changing Face of Shenzhen, the World's Gadget Factory - _delirium
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/beyond-foxconn-inside-shenzhen-the-worlds-gadget-factory
======
L_Rahman
I was in Shenzhen and Xiamen for 2 weeks in April, and am headed back there in
a month.

This time I'll actually be living on-site at one of our partner manufacturer's
factory towns. It's difficult to wrap your head around the sheer scale of what
has happened.

The factory town I'll be living in is 2 hours from the nearest city. Until the
founder decided to build a factory there it was a tiny tropical village with
population in the 100s. The air is clean. The weather in April a balmy 72F.

Today, it is home to 10000+ workers who all work for the manufacturer. Some
live in company housing, but most have homes with their families in the
surrounding villages. There are basketball courts, tennis courts and a running
track that circles the compound.

The facility is vertically integrated - one building die casts metal molds,
another uses them to injection mold plastic. They meet another truck from the
PCB building and all get together at the assembly line.

The assembly line itself is a pressure positive facility - the air pressure
inside is slightly higher than the atmospheric pressure so that air with
impurities never gets in.

I was there for around 8 hours and I spent it in a daze. The kind of physical
product development you could do with the kind of resources available there
are otherworldly. I can't wait to be back.

~~~
6t6t6
What you explain is amazingly similar to what happened in Europe 100 years
ago:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town)

------
Animats
The US used to have Trenton, NJ, which still has a huge illuminated sign
"Trenton Makes, The World Takes".[1] This is about as meaningful today as
"South San Francisco, the Industrial City", which can be seen on US 101
northbound approaching SF.

The US has factories which look like Shentzen factories. Here's one.[2] It's
run by Flextronics. More typical in the US are huge factories without many
people doing direct labor.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Trenton_Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Trenton_Bridge)
[2]
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/06/jobs...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/12/06/jobs-
report-november/3881983/)

~~~
rayiner
And maybe a sign of warning to China: today Trenton is a polluted, rusted out
husk of its former self.

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OnlineCourage
Blatantly false numbers in this article calls into question anything that the
journalist said. Really sad, terrible fact-checking in this one. The
population of SZ in 1979 was 30,000 not 300,000...that's an order of magnitude
difference...you're talking about a tiny fishing village with no
infrastructure becoming a world bastion of manufacturing. It's not hundreds of
factories besides Foxconn, it's THOUSANDS. Did the author even go to Shenzhen?
Back in the, "good old days," of 2007 when China was really cheap, wages were
$7 per hour...you could rip on Shenzhen and compare wages to western
countries...now it's up to over $20/day in a lot of places from what I have
seen...scarily close to American minimum wage. If you want that $7/day wage
you've got to go to inland China. I really don't think this author did his
research, the article reads like it was rushed through and it seems like they
just read a bunch of outdated articles on the topic and regurgitated them
under the vice brand.

~~~
guelo
Just a nitpick with your comment but American minimum wage is $58/day and it's
higher in most states. The median American assembly line worker makes $88/day.
China isn't that close yet.

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1971genocide
As a engineering student I have been very frustrated about this.

One of the main reasons why I think engineering is failing in the west is the
deep separation between the math and actual production.

Software is an exception and this is why the US churns out world class
software engineers.

But I think rather and throwing more billions into teachers and saddling
students with more debt it would be be much better if the mid-level technical
jobs existed to allow mid-level engineers to learn from experience rather than
excel purely symbolicly ( in maths )

~~~
Taniwha
I call BS - I design in the west and manufacture in Schenzhen (and Shanghai) -
you're only separated from the manufacturing if you refuse to get a passport
and travel - it's a small world these days and the people a day away are
friendly

The big truth here is in one of the last paragraphs of the article - Shenzhen
(and China) is going through an accelerated industrial revolution - they're
making many of the same mistakes the west made (don't forget the killer smogs
of the 50s in London), and learning from them - Shenzhen has simply banned the
2-strokes scooters ubiquitous throughout Asia, replacing them with electric
ones, petrol powered taxis incur a 3 kwai tax over the blue electric ones ....

~~~
hkmurakami
To be fair that's often not a viable expense on a student budget.

~~~
Taniwha
compared to what you'd likely spend for a build in the US vs in China you'll
still likely come out ahead, I'd argue that if you can't afford to go you
likely can't afford your project

~~~
hkmurakami
Isn't the contention "it _would_ have been possibly affordable / reasonable if
mid-tier manufacturing were still locally available in the United States"?

~~~
eitally
It is, you just don't know about it I guess. I spent the past 15 years working
for Sanmina, another global high-tech manufacturer like the aforementioned
Flextronics. Just within the US we had facilities in CA (Fremont, Livermore,
Newark, Costa Mesa), AL (Huntsville, Guntersville), NH (Manchester, Derry), WA
(Bothell), SC (Fort Mill), NC (RTP), TX (Allen, Carrollton, El Paso), CO
(Louisville, Colorado Springs), AZ (Phoenix), UT (SLC) and more. These are
factories building everything from simple injection molded plastics or PCBAs
to stuff like MRI machines and military avionics. In the San Jose area we
helped do DFM on Bloom Boxes for Bloom Energy, and designed & build massive
storage arrays for Netflix.

Just because most people don't know about US manufacturing doesn't mean it's
not still around, and in fact has hit recent peaks as the economy has
recovered after the global recession (we'll see what happens now that
economies are wavering again).

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redcalx
Recently I've been buying small electrical parts for hobby projects (e.g.
little rf transmitters and receivers), mostly finding stuff on amazon and
ebay. Most of those parts arrive with an origin address in Shengzen, usually
something along the lines of:

unit {big number}, building {big number}, sector {big number}...

Just based on these addresses I'd formed a mental picture of some dystopian
industrial megacity.

~~~
kjs3
I'm glad I'm not the only one who's doing the same thing (more microcontroller
stuff), made the same observation and got the same image.

~~~
redcalx
Do you rate Arduino boards are are you using something else?

~~~
kjs3
Arduino is a toy, with strange design tradeoffs I can only guess at (ethernet
on USB???). I don't own a single one, but I think it's great that lot's of
people are doing lots of interesting things with them. It just doesn't meet my
needs and considering how many other options you have at the same price point
I don't see the point.

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zhte415
The facilities seem rather cold. Aside from one guy in a T-shirt, everyone is
wearing jackets or wollen tops, tanktops, or both. It is currently tropical
summertime in Shenzhen.

~~~
aquarin
I saw some of the photos some time ago in a different article and now
recognized them. It seems they are from different place/time or for some
reason workers want to show the nice jackets they have.

Google reverse image search show they collected images from different places.
If I remember corectly this was the article :
[http://www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/blog/?author=2](http://www.unknownfieldsdivision.com/blog/?author=2)
it is from Summer 2014.

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curiousjorge
looks like these workers will be jobless when the robots begin to replace them
or the outsourcing hub moves to even a cheaper labor source, perhaps even
Africa in the future.

I think if China could transform these very workers into consumers, it would
be unstoppable.

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gozo
"It’s impossible to shake the sense that the young workers here lack not just
a sense of control and self determination, but also a certain carefree
innocence many of their Western counterparts take for granted."

It surely isn't an easy life [0], but what always gets to me is the old people
who are poor. At least the young has hope, especially in anomalous city like
Shenzhen. Who knows what is going to happen in 5 or 20 years. It might even
show itself to be one of the best places in the world to be born right now.

[0]
[http://www.pbs.org/pov/lasttrainhome/full.php](http://www.pbs.org/pov/lasttrainhome/full.php)

