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- Half of the world's iPhones are made at a sprawling factory complex in Zhengzhou, China that employs as many as 350,000 people and has spawned a mini city residents call "iPhone City."
- Thousands of residents' livelihoods rely on the success of Apple and Foxconn, though they don't even work at the companies.
- We spent the day with a 31-year-old woman whose entire life has been shaped by Foxconn and Apple, having worked at the Foxconn's Shenzhen factory in her 20s and then moved to Zhengzhou to open her own business catering to factory workers.
- She told us that the lives of ex-factory workers like herself, who open businesses when they save enough money, is often harder than that of the factory workers. Her life is better now than when she was growing up, but she sees little opportunity to escape the grinding lifestyle she currently lives.
Liu Fei, a 31-year-old Chinese woman, lives just outside the gates of the biggest iPhone factory in the world, the Foxconn Zhengzhou Science Park.
Liu's livelihood depends on the factory's prosperity — and, in effect, Apple's — despite the fact that neither the factory nor Apple will ever pay her a cent.
The factory, run by the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn, employs about 350,000 people during the busy summer months before the fall release of a new iPhone. At its peak, the factory produces 500,000 phones a day or up to 350 a minute — about half of the world's iPhones. More often, it has a workforce of about half that, or less.
Though the factory is nominally located in Zhengzhou, a city of 9.5 million people, the factory is actually more than 20 miles outside downtown, separated by freeways, suburbs, and dirt scrublands.In the years since the factory opened, an entire city has sprouted up to serve Foxconn’s workforce.
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A decade ago, the area had only dirt and fields of corn and wheat. In 2010, the government bought out local farmers, and the factory was up and running within the year.
Much of this newly sprouted city, which residents and factory workers have dubbed “iPhone City,” sits in the alleyways below the 10 or 12-story dormitory buildings, where workers live eight to a room.
Below, a migrating workforce of entrepreneurs and vendors has set up shop below to make a living cooking street food, offering massages, or selling socks or other knicknacks.
Most of the vendors in iPhone City, Liu said, are former factory workers like herself. Liu is one of the luckiest. She has a large restaurant in a makeshift district just outside the factory’s gate. It’s relatively clean and spacious. It could probably serve 40 or 50 people during breakfast or dinner, when day shift and night shift workers converge before or after their shift.
“We don’t make special food here. We just make whatever is cheap and will fill the workers up,” Liu, whose name has been changed to protect her identity and business, told Business Insider on a recent afternoon that we spent in the city.
Liu's entire life has been shaped by an American company whose products she will likely never own. Here's how:
SEE ALSO: Inside 'iPhone City,' the massive Chinese factory town where half of the world's iPhones are produced
Liu was 18 years old when she and her husband decided to leave their hometown to work at Foxconn's then-flagship factory complex in Shenzhen.
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Liu was 18 years old when she and her husband decided to leave their lao jia, or hometown.
Liu is from a small village called Qian Hou in Henan, long one of China’s most impoverished provinces.
In 2008, The New York Times described the province as one untouched by China's boom, where people are too poor to heat their homes in winter or have running water, and mobile phones are an "impossible luxury."
Three years earlier, the two moved to Shenzhen, the electronics manufacturing capital of the world, and got jobs at Foxconn’s flagship factory in the Longhua Science and Technology Park, a 15-factory complex employing hundreds of thousands of workers amidst a campus that was its own mini-city.
Apple and Foxconn's fortunes and prosperity have become increasingly intertwined since 2005, when Liu started working at Foxconn's Shenzhen factory.
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In 2005, Foxconn was growing into its status as the world’s largest contract electronics manufacturer. The company had contracts with major electronics companies like Dell, Sony, and, most importantly, Apple.
At the time, Apple’s best selling product was the iPod.
The couple worked at the Longhua factory for five years. Over that time, Foxconn and Apple’s relationship deepened and so too did the companies’ fortunes become intertwined. In 2005, Foxconn’s revenue totaled $21.54 billion. In 2007, the year Apple introduced the iPhone, the company’s revenue jumped to $38.11 billion. In 2010, it nearly doubled to $79.38 billion.
Foxconn’s reliance on Apple has increased with revenue growth. In 2009, Apple products accounted for around 25% of Foxconn’s revenue. By 2012, it was up to 60%. It has hovered between 50-60% in the years since and, while revenue grew to $110.79 billion in 2012, it has hovered between $130-$140 billion in the years since.
Today, Foxconn is by far the country's largest private employer, with 1.3 million employees in mainland China. Apple claims it supports 4.8 million jobs in China.
Foxconn has faced accusations of labor abuses, poor working conditions, and harsh penalties for workers who make mistakes throughout its recent history. Investigations of working conditions at Foxconn during Liu’s time (2005-2010) found workers to be both underpaid and overworked.
The Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations (SOMO) reported in 2005 that the average worker works 27 days per month for 10-11 hours per day and earns 1000 RMB ($157) per month, including overtime. In 2008, SOMO found that workers had to work compulsory overtime leading to 70-hour work weeks on average.
There was a wave of suicides among Foxconn workers in 2010 and 2011, prompting Apple and Foxconn to make changes at the factories.
When Foxconn opened its massive factory complex in Zhengzhou, it started a massive migration of Henanese returning to their home province. Liu was one of them.
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When most people think about the economic impact of a large company, it usually stops at the jobs at the factory or the office park and the tax revenue. But Foxconn’s immense labor needs have the ability to shift an entire population to a new place.
As Liu Miao, the head of a private recruiting center in Zhengzhou, told The Times in 2016 of Foxconn's labor needs, "Every city's department of labor and ministry of human resources is involved" in sourcing workers from the province.
In the case of the Foxconn Zhengzhou Science Park, it had the effect of bringing home a migratory workforce.
In 2010, Liu and her husband decided to leave the Longhua factory when they heard that Foxconn was setting up a factory complex, even bigger than the one they worked at, on the outskirts of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan.
They packed up their life and headed home. As happens whenever Foxconn or another manufacturer opens up a factory in China, hundreds of thousands migrated for the work. Many, like Liu and her husband, were Henanese returning home.
One night in iPhone City, we had dinner with a table of Foxconn workers eating and drinking beer at an outdoor restaurant. All four — whose ages ranged from 22 to 40 — were Henanese who returned to the province after working in factories in other parts of the country.
They emphasized that, in a workforce ranging from 120,000 to 350,000, there is bound to be diversity, but most of their coworkers were Henanese who moved to Zhengzhou to be closer to home.
"People like to work at this factory because you are close to your family if you are from Henan," Liu said. "You get Sundays off and you can go home and visit your family. That’s the perk."
Many people who work at factories farther from their hometown see their families only twice a year, on Chinese New Year's and National Day.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider![]()
A decade ago, the area had only dirt and fields of corn and wheat. In 2010, the government 
However, there are some great elements to the story, as well. 
