How Apple Helped Train A Generation Of Chinese Tech Workers

Forbes

a day ago

Apple played a role in making China a tech manufacturing powerhouse.
During the Mao Zedong era in China, the government took hundreds of thousands of youth from urban areas and sent them to farms and fields as part of Mao's reeducation process. Officials labeled these young people the "sent down" generation and forced them to leave their homes and work in peasant environments. The government denied an entire generation the chance to pursue higher education and earn better wages.
(An interesting side note is that the current Chinese president, Xi Jinping, was one of those "sent down" but was able to leave and go to college as he got older.)
After Mao died, new leadership saw the folly of the Maoist doctrine and led by new Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, he and his allies made reforms and gradually led China away from a command economy and Maoist dogma and opened it up to foreign investments and technology. He also introduced its vast labor force to the global market, transforming China into one of the fastest-growing economies. This transformation took place from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s.
However, Apple eventually played a major role in helping China develop a tech-trained labor force, which allowed China to become even more capable of building a manufacturing infrastructure of trained workers to operate these factories.
When I first began traveling to Taiwan and China in the 1980s, China was still considered a closed country. In fact, I could not fly to China directly from Taiwan and would have to go to a neutral country like Korea or Malaysia to travel from Taipei to sites I was to visit near Shenzen, China.
However, many Taiwanese manufacturers were already eager to build factories in China even before it opened up. In 1988, when China was still in the early stages of creating special trade zones, I had dinner with one of the top executives of Acer, a prominent, fast-growing PC vendor. Its Taiwan factories were running 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Acer and a Taipei-based competitor, Foxconn, who made PCs for HP and others, were also running near capacity and lusted after the chance to build new factories in China.
By the mid 1990s, China's new trade zones were fully operational, and the country allowed even Taiwanese manufacturers to enter to help it grow its own manufacturing base.
Apple accelerated its manufacturing goals in this environment through its partner, Foxconn. Together, they built a world-class operation and trained well over 1 million Chinese youth to make their products over time.
Foxconn built actual campuses around the manufacturing facilities, with dorms, cafeterias, and even specialty convenience stores.
What is interesting in this scenario is that these factories offered many youths who were still working in the fields a chance to improve. They were recruited and trained to help build Apple products. Apple provided these youth with a dedicated trade school to help them learn to make tech products, especially iPhones.
Not long after one of the first campuses opened, a component supplier invited me to the facility. Although security prevented me from entering the campus, I spoke with several trained workers at an offsite location. They gave me a firsthand account of how authorities had forced them to work on farms and how they were now learning trade skills to improve their lives.
They explained that, at best, working in the fields, they could make $20-22 USD a month. Now, working in the factory they were making about $100 USD a week. And their room and board were free. By U.S. standards, this may not look like much, but to them, and given the low costs of Chinese goods, these earnings were a godsend. These two workers said they had money to send back to their families and still have money for snacks, clothes and other items that in the past they could only dream about.
Although there was much controversy about these working environments and conditions, these kids were glad to have jobs and earn more money than they could ever earn working in the fields. More importantly, they could see a future that did not include working in the fields again.
The policies that Deng Xiaoping and his allies implemented after Mao—opening China to foreign investment and technology—played the most crucial role in transforming the country into the world's leading manufacturer of all kinds of goods.
But its clear that Apple played a role as well, by creating a trade school-like tech education that helped China build up a workforce capable of managing and working in the thousands of factories in the land of the Red Dragon.
Disclosure: Apple and HP subscribe to Creative Strategies research reports along with many other high tech companies around the world.