- Chinese factories respond to outbreaks in nearby areas by establishing a 'closed loop'.

An Apple store in China, in a file image.

Riot at China's largest iPhone plant after a month of covid restrictions

Workers at the main iPhone manufacturing plant in China, located in Zhengzhou (the center of the country), clashed with security personnel after almost a month of living under harsh restrictions due to a covid outbreak, according to images broadcast on various networks. social.

Workers at the Foxconn plant, a Taiwanese company that supplies the American company Apple and one of the main iPhone assemblers, left their residences at dawn pushing guards clad in PPE suits, according to the videos, reproduced on platforms such as Twitter, banned in China.

Some of the guards beat the workers as crowds of people tried to force their way through the barricades and protested over wages, food during the lockdown, or the accumulation of rubbish.

1/2 Latest from #Foxconn in #iPhone city in #Zhengzhou: Newly recruited workers fiercely fight with security guards as they try to storm out of the factory.
Reason: Foxconn tried to recruit about 100K new workers after a lot escaped a while ago. New workers were told they would pic.twitter.com/XsVzVT7N7r

— Jennifer Zeng 曾錚 (@jenniferzeng97) November 22, 2022

In October, images of workers with their belongings jumping over the factory fences and going to their places of origin on foot on the roads due to the partial stoppage of public transport in the city aroused the outrage of Chinese netizens.

Shortly before the employee exodus, the company had denied rumors that 20,000 of the approximately 350,000 workers at the plant had been infected with covid.

After the escape of the workers, Foxconn announced an increase in daily wages to attract employees and bonuses for those who had left to return, since according to the local press, the plant needs to hire some 10,000 workers to normalize the production chain.

Then, the workers were notified that they had to remain in quarantine for a week in hotels, and only then and after obtaining negative results in several PCR tests could they enter the facilities.

Since 2020, large factories in China, such as Foxconn's in Zhengzhou, have responded to outbreaks in nearby areas by establishing the 'closed loop', which isolates workers for long periods at the facilities to avoid contagion from abroad and maintain production, which has sometimes caused protests due to poor sanitary conditions or the lack of food.

China remains clinging to the 'zero covid' policy, which consists of isolating all those infected and their close contacts, strict border controls, mobility restrictions, and massive PCR test campaigns wherever a case is detected.

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