By: Jenny Chan (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
December 19, 2025
For a quarter of a century, Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus (APJJF) has crafted a space for researchers to analyze historical and contemporary developments in the Asia-Pacific and the world. I learned from APJJF writers with growing interest in the deepening integration of China into the global economy and the far-reaching impact of incorporation on the successive generations of Chinese rural migrant workers. Among the mentors who guided me during graduate school (2009 and 2014), I am deeply grateful to Mark Selden, a founding editor and long-term contributor to APJJF. I have come to salute him as Mark laoshi, conveying respect and affection for a teacher in Chinese, after he gently nudged me not to address him as Professor Selden every time in the email.
APJJF upholds the values of truth and justice. In 2010, when a spate of 18 young workers attempted suicides at Foxconn facilities in the Chinese Mainland, resulting in 14 deaths, the state media quickly stepped in to manage the production and dissemination of “news.” The installation of the so-called anti-suicide safety nets surrounding worker dormitories, the provision of clinical psychological services, and even the requirement of passing a newly-administered psychological test on work stress in job screening, to name only a few immediate corporate responses, were acclaimed by the government and Foxconn’s clients. But why did the tragedy happen in the first place? Who bore responsibility? How can employee suicides at the workplace level be prevented? When freedom of the press is severely restricted in an environment wherein the state and corporations share their primary interests in restoring production and “stability,” APJJF serves as an indispensable forum for the people to share their voice.
In the skillful hands of the APJJF editorial board, my co-authored essay entitled “Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital, and the State” was published in September 2010. We (Chan and Pun 2010) argued that the concentration of suicide cases points to something new and important, which begs for an explanation in the context of the company, the industry and the wider society. Between 2010 and the outbreak of the coronavirus at the end of 2019, I engaged with Foxconn workers through first-hand interviews as well as their shared poems, songs, open letters, photos and videos, supplemented by meetings with managers and government officials during multiple research trips to coastal and inland China. Thanks to the trust of Foxconn suicide survivors and their fellow workmates, our book, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers came out amid the global COVID-19 pandemic (Chan, Selden and Pun 2020). This was particularly important in 2020, when a Beijing-based academic publisher abruptly stopped the Chinese-language publication of our book in a blatant case of political censorship.
APJJF strives to present its readership with informed analyses. In an era of GenAI, reviewers and journal editors might fail to detect non-existent references, fake AI citations or ghost DOIs, a phenomenon labelled as AI hallucinations (see, for example, John 2025). Under these circumstances, an ethic of authorship, responsibility, morality and academic integrity is more fundamental than ever to knowledge production. I must extend my gratitude to the tireless efforts, insightful feedback and effective communications of APJJF to the professional community of Chinese and international studies in these fraught times.
APJJF offers the opportunity to authors to utilize theoretical and methodological rigor to challenge Beijing and global tech corporations to fulfill their responsibilities to protect workers in the context of transnational production. In my dissertation, I combined multi-sited ethnography with the analysis of documentary sources to provide an analytical framework of a “global factory regime” to explain the buyer–supplier power dynamic in transnational manufacturing. Big buyers (such as Apple) and big suppliers (such as Foxconn) are interdependent in outsourced electronics production, at a time when production pressure is shifting from global tech firms to contract manufacturers. From this perspective, the management systems on factory floors in China are not only shaped by authoritarian governance but also by the boom-and-bust purchasing practices of multinational corporations in global supply chains. The dialectics of domination and resistance are interwoven in the life and death struggles of Chinese migrant workers who produce our iPhones.
I study China’s rural-to-urban migration and changing state–society relations through the lens of globalization. On the ground, the proportion of temporary workers such as student interns (from vocational schools) and agency laborers (from staffing firms) in the manufacturing sector has exploded, creating a huge swath of “low-skilled” workers cum second-class citizens bereft of labor rights. For employers, hiring temporary workers can increase human resources flexibility and lower costs by reducing payments for job training and myriad benefits. In the last decade, tens of millions of manufacturing workers have fled factory jobs to enter the fast-growing gig labor market by delivering food and parcels. From one-click ordering to super-fast doorstep delivery, a new logistical world of human labor is in the making. The informalization of labor—in which digital platform workers are (mis)classified as “independent contractors”—is a cause for concern. Outside of the formal employment system, a precarious group of gig workers is rendered ever more dependent on family and friends for support, if they are available. Presently, platform corporations and their “scientific” algorithmic metrics presume male workers as the ideal workers, who, in desperate efforts to survive, will readily login to the apps anytime, stay online and continue to work for much of the day without caring for their children or other family members. One manifestation of this gendered substructure of staff appraisal is that women workers are invariably presumed to be inferior to their male counterparts and therefore less likely be recruited and retained. As algorithmic control intensifies, I contend that APJJF provides fertile ground for debate and progressive change.
How do we build an alternative, human-centered development underpinned by democratic governance and technological innovation? APJJF envisions interdisciplinary approaches and strong connectivity with academics and reformers seeking to eliminate class, gender and other forms of inequality. As a relatively new editorial board member, I endeavor to work with both early-career and experienced researchers in a spirit of mutual learning and co-creation of knowledge in the face of deep-seated geopolitical conflicts and local crises.
Teacher Mark: your encouragement, generosity, openness and inclusiveness have sustained me in a career initially at the University of Oxford and currently at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. (Photo by Ellen, December 2019.)
Dying for an iPhone 