Roughed Up

February 23, 2010

“The police arrived, the guards apologized, and the reporter left without filing charges. Then the policeman told the reporter, ‘You’re free to do what you want, but this is Foxconn and they have a special status here. Please understand.'” So wrote Michael Grothaus for an RSS feed in a piece about “A Reuters employee who was investigating Apple’s legendary secrecy visited Foxconn’s walled city-like facility in Guanlan, China, and was reportedly roughed up by security.”

iPod

Well, yea. The competition is fierce in China for lucrative contracts.  If Foxconn has a contract with Apple and that company loses the contract amounting to millions if not billions of American dollars, it makes sense that their security would be tough on any suspected industrial, high-tech spy. Their jobs even with low pay and long hours are better than no job and poverty. Why put up with a snoop?

If the Foxconn security didn’t take the job seriously, Apple might take their business to another country. How many people would have lost their jobs if that happened?

holding a cup of hot coffee

Consider that China has one lawyer for every 13,000 people compared to the United States, The Litigation Nation, with more lawyers than any other country—one for every two-hundred and sixty-five people and spilling hot coffee on yourself is grounds for going to court.

See Doing Business in China

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. 

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