Foxconn’s Billionaire Founder Urges Apple to Move Plants From China

By Debby Wu

The billionaire founder of Apple Inc.’s largest supplier asked the U.S. company to move part of its sprawling production chain from China to neighboring Taiwan.
“I am urging Apple to move to Taiwan,” said Terry Gou, the largest shareholder in Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., answering a question about whether Apple will shift production away from China. 

“I think it is very possible,” he said without elaborating.
The Trump administration’s threat to levy tariffs on some $300 billion of Chinese-made goods -- including phones and laptops -- has inflamed speculation that Apple will divert some capacity away from the world’s second largest economy. 

And Hon Hai is the largest of hundreds of Apple-suppliers with factories on the mainland, making most of the world’s iPhones from the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.
A significant shift of manufacturing from China to Taiwan -- which Beijing views as part of its territory -- may also exacerbate tensions between the two governments. 

Hon Hai, the main listed arm of the Foxconn Technology Group, is today the largest private employer in China, paying as many as a million mostly migrant laborers to put together everything from iPhones to HP laptops.
Gou, who stepped down as Hon Hai chairman Friday to focus on winning a party nomination to compete in the 2020 Taiwanese presidential elections, had run a company that depends on Apple for half its revenue. 

It’s unclear how much capacity Gou may have been referring to, nor how feasible a large-scale move -- for Hon Hai or any other Apple supplier -- may be.
The Taiwanese firms that assemble most of the world’s electronics are now expanding or exploring plants in Southeast Asia and elsewhere to escape punitive tariffs on U.S.-bound goods. 

But the vast majority of their capabilities remain rooted in China. 

The Nikkei reported this week that Apple asked its largest suppliers to consider the costs of shifting 15% to 30% of its output from China to Southeast Asia, but three major partners to the U.S. company later pushed back against that idea. 

Hon Hai itself has said Apple hasn’t requested such a move.

Rogue Nation

Looking Through the Eyes of China’s Surveillance State

By Paul Mozur

Paul Mozur, a New York Times reporter, tried on a pair of facial recognition glasses in a train station in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou. He said they were not exactly slick or all that functional.

ZHENGZHOU, China — They perch on poles and glare from streetlamps. 

Some hang barely visible in the ceiling of the subway, and others seem to stretch out on braced necks and peer into your eyes.
Surveillance cameras are everywhere in China.
I pass more than 200 on my 30-minute commute in Shanghai. 

After a while, they mostly blend into the background. 

But when spotting a new one, I wonder about them. 

Is anyone watching? Is a computer parsing the feed? Is it even on?

Trying to get to the bottom of these questions can be infuriating. 

Chinese people are often unwilling to talk about their run-ins with the police. 

And the authorities are usually under standing orders not to talk to foreign journalists about much of anything, let alone cutting-edge technologies that snoop on criminals.
So when I got the chance to see the world through the eyes of a police camera, it was oddly exhilarating. 

As it goes with reporting in China, often you just have to show up, camp out and hope for the best. 

In my case, patience and a hefty dose of luck paid off.
The opportunity arose during a reporting trip to the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou several months ago. 

A colleague and I had traveled there to try to learn about facial recognition glasses that the police had been experimenting with ahead of the big Chinese New Year holiday.
When we first got to the city’s train station, a police officer gleefully likened the specs to a pair in “Mission Impossible.” 

But then press officials rebuffed requests to try them. 

The glasses had been on display, but no longer, they said.
We roamed the cavernous train station, hoping to catch a glimpse of them while taking in the scenes. Often in China, the mundane contains a bit of the absurd.
On the second floor, the military was decamped to help with crowd control ahead of the holiday. Their green camouflage tents, pitched inside the building, stuck out inside the drab gray station. Outside the camp was a sign warning all who approached that they were entering a battlefield. 

Below, on the departures floor, janitors had attached mops to the front of motorized scooters, cleaning the large marble floors with the efficiency of a Zamboni.
Within a few hours, we spied Shan Jun, a deputy police chief, who was demonstrating the glasses amid the crowds of travelers heading home for the holiday. 

It turned out they were still on display for news media, just the state-run kind that Beijing controls.

A crosswalk in Xiangyang is monitored by cameras linked to facial recognition technology. An outdoor screen displays photos of jaywalkers alongside their names and national identification numbers.

We tagged along and caught a break. 

Mr. Shan, who was affably holding court, gladly handed over the device to try.
One of the more dystopian tools of China’s burgeoning surveillance-industrial complex, it was not exactly slick or really all that functional. 

A small camera is mounted to a pair of sunglasses. 

The camera is then connected by wire to a minicomputer that looks and works a bit like an oversize smartphone. 

The device checks the images snapped by the camera against a database. 

In essence, it’s a moving version of the photo systems that some countries have at customs checkpoints.
With a bit of squinting and adjustment I found my right eye looking through a view finder like one on an old video camera. 

First I was instructed to aim it at a female officer. 

A small rectangle appeared around her head, and after a few seconds, the screen displayed her name and national identification number. 

I then repeated the process on Mr. Shan.
Emboldened, I tried the glasses out on a group standing about 20 feet away. 

For a moment, the glasses got a lock on a man’s face. 

But then the group noticed me, and the man blocked his face with his hand. 

The minicomputer failed to register a match before he moved. 

Seconds later, the people scattered.
Their reaction was somewhat surprising. 

Chinese people often report that they’re comfortable with government surveillance, and train stations are known to be closely watched. 

The logic often expressed is that those who are law abiding have nothing to fear.
The men fleeing from my techno-enhanced gaze clearly felt differently — and I assume they weren’t criminals on the lam.
Having a foreigner like me leering at them was certainly unusual. 

But later, as I watched the police continue to demonstrate the device, I noticed a similar pattern, if less exaggerated. 

The curious clustered to check out this brave new tech, but plenty of others strode quickly away, faces turned.
In some ways, a lack of information has conditioned such behavior. 

The abilities and intentions of the authorities here are rarely clear, and uncertainty is part of the point. The less people know, the more they need to use their imagination. 

China’s surveillance state is far from perfect, but if people don’t know where it excels and where it breaks down, there’s a better chance they’ll assume it’s working and behave.
Later, we learned that the press officer had initially rejected our request to see the glasses to avoid unmasking too much about the databases that powered it. 

Someone from Beijing, the press officer said, had called and said the exposure could show gaps in their new methods for tracking criminals.
With so much obscurity, many Chinese people see the authorities for what they are — erratic, unrestrained and now equipped with unpredictable new powers. 

The group in the train station was simply making a prudent choice and giving the police, their goofy electronic glasses and their strange foreign friend wide berth.
Many critics call China’s surveillance ambitions Orwellian, and they are. 

But for China today, the world imagined by Franz Kafka offers a closer vision: bureaucratic, unknowable and ruled by uncertainty as much as fear.

Apple aids and abets Big Brother in China

Lack of transparency in pulling New York Times app adds to Orwellian nature of move 
By Tom Mitchell in Beijing

Most people old enough to have watched the 1984 Super Bowl will not remember the two American football teams that played in it.
They will probably remember “The Commercial”.
In the annals of the NFL playoffs, it is almost as famous as “The Catch” — an improbable end zone grab by the San Francisco 49ers’ Dwight Clark in the 1982 NFC Championship game.
During a break in the third quarter of Super Bowl XVIII, as the Los Angeles Raiders were running up the score on the Washington Redskins, CBS broadcast an Apple advertisement for its new Macintosh computer.
Directed by Ridley Scott, the 60-second spot featured an athlete hurling a sledgehammer into a giant screen on which Big Brother was hypnotising the masses.
The screen explodes, symbolising Apple’s assault on what it regarded as the bland conformity of the emerging personal computer industry. 
Titled “1984” in honour of George Orwell’s novel of the same name, it is today regarded as one of the best television commercials of all time.
It is also sadly ironic in light of recent events in China, where Apple has decided to aid and abet Big Brother. 
Last week, Apple confirmed it had pulled the New York Times app from its online store in China, where the newspaper’s website has been blocked by censors since 2012.
The app was the only way China-based readers could access New York Times content, including articles translated into Mandarin, without having to use special software that is expensive for the average Chinese internet user and often unreliable.
At first glance, Apple had no choice but to comply with the Chinese government’s directive.
China’s smartphone market, the world’s largest, accounted for 20 per cent of its sales — or $8.8bn — in the third quarter of last year.
The California company’s supply chain is also deeply rooted in China.
When running at full tilt, an iPhone manufacturing facility operated by Foxconn in Zhengzhou, Henan province, can produce 1m handsets every two days.
The Chinese government’s leverage over Apple is enormous.
But so is Apple’s leverage over the Chinese government, should it be brave — and wise — enough to use it. 
At a time when Beijing is simultaneously attempting to spur slowing economic growth and halt capital outflows, it badly needs foreign investment and the jobs it creates. 
The iPhone manufacturing facility in Zhengzhou is a high-tech jewel in a relatively poor, inland province, otherwise blighted by twilight heavy industries and chronic pollution.
Foxconn also recently announced it would spend $8.8bn on a flat-panel display factory in the southern city of Guangzhou.
It may well be that Apple quietly fought the good fight before yielding to the authorities’ demand to pull an app that was allegedly “in violation of local regulations”.
But in confirming the decision, Apple could have at least specified what regulations the New York Times app had supposedly violated.
It did not and the lack of transparency surrounding the affair has only added to the Orwellian nature of Apple’s surrender. 
It is a disappointing outcome for a company whose remarkable run, from 1980s iconoclastic outsider to the world’s most valuable company 30 years later, began with such a bold statement.

Whistle-Blowing AIDS Doctor Reflects on Roots of Epidemic in China

By LUO SILING

Dr. Gao Yaojie, who helped expose H.I.V.-tainted blood sales in Henan Province, in her apartment in New York last month.

In October, the pioneering Chinese AIDS fighter Gao Yaojie disclosed her wish to be cremated after death: “Please scatter my ashes in the Yellow River.”
But Dr. Gao, 88, a retired gynecologist who uncovered a major H.I.V. outbreak in central China in the late 1990s, also had a more pointed message: “I do not want what I have achieved in this life to become a tool for others to gain fame and profit.”
What she has achieved is considerable.
In 1996, she was called in to examine a female patient with mysterious symptoms at a hospital in Zhengzhou, Henan Province.
The woman had become infected with H.I.V., the virus that causes AIDS, through a blood transfusion obtained from a blood bank.
Dr. Gao started her investigations and discovered an unsanitary blood collection and sales network, abetted by local officials, that had spread tainted blood throughout the region.
Many residents were selling their blood, which was pooled with blood from other donors.
After plasma was extracted, the rest of the pooled blood, now often carrying H.I.V. or other infections, was reinjected into donors, so they could give more frequently.
Dr. Gao’s work to expose the epidemic and help its victims won her international acclaim but harassment at home.
Her movements were increasingly restricted, her phone was tapped, and she was stalked when she ventured outdoors.
In 2009, she decided to leave China.
“It was because I want to tell the truth to the world,” she wrote in her memoir.
In 2010, she was appointed a visiting scholar at Columbia University in New York, and she continues to live nearby. (Her husband, also a physician, died in 2006.)
She has written several books on AIDS as well as a collection of poetry.
In an interview before World AIDS Day on Thursday, Dr. Gao talked about her life in the United States and what she considers the still-untold truth about the AIDS epidemic in China.

Why did you release the statement about your wishes after death?
In 2005, as my husband was struggling with throat cancer, we thought about water burial.
Being buried in the ground was out of the question, because in Henan, the lease on a grave is only good for 20 years.
Afterward, you have to pay more to keep it.
I would like my son to carry out the water burial for me.
When he was 11, he was jailed for three years for being connected to me. [During the Cultural Revolution, Dr. Gao was denounced as being from a “landlord” family.]
After he was rehabilitated, he went on to university and became a professor.
Now that I’ve gone abroad, he’s become worried that the Gao clan might charge him with filial impiety if he “threw his mother into the water.”
So I wrote this statement.
After I die, my son will take my ashes and scatter them in the Yellow River.
Actually, that isn’t the chief problem.
It’s the fact that some people have used my name for their own advantage.
Some have used my name to raise money without my knowledge.

In 2009, you came to the United States and said you would tell the world the truth behind the AIDS epidemic in China. What is that truth?

People campaigning for AIDS awareness at a section of the Great Wall, in Tianjin, in September.

The root of AIDS in China was the plasma market, which was introduced not only in Henan but in other provinces as well.
Henan was severely affected, however.
From the late 1980s to early 1990s, the plasma market took off in several parts of Henan.
Then Liu Quanxi became director of the Henan Health Department and strongly pushed the policy, which encouraged farmers to sell their blood.
From 1992 to 1998, as a result of the administration of [the provincial party secretary] Li Changchun, blood-selling became an established “industry.”
In a few years, blood stations had spread everywhere in Henan.
Only about 230 of them were licensed.
There were countless illegal ones.
The places with the most blood stations then are the places with the most severe AIDS problem now. From 1998 to 2004, under [now Premier] Li Keqiang, who succeeded Li Changchun in Henan, the AIDS incubation period, which is five to eight years, passed, and a great number of people infected with H.I.V. began showing AIDS symptoms and died.
AIDS not only killed individuals but destroyed countless families.
This was a man-made catastrophe. 
Yet the people responsible for it have never been brought to account, nor have they uttered a single word of apology.
I am very angry now.
Why?
In 2004, the government, which had begun to acknowledge the existence of the AIDS epidemic, sent medical teams to 38 “AIDS villages” in Henan.
Yet there were so many other people in Henan who did not get the needed treatment, not to mention those in other provinces.
In 2004, the Chinese government began to register AIDS patients and put out this policy: Those with symptoms would get 200 renminbi each month.
Those who didn’t yet show symptoms would get 150 renminbi.
This came with a condition, however, which was that one must write “sexual transmission” under “cause of infection,” because the authorities had ordered that “blood transmission” not appear in the questionnaire.
They hid the truth from the public. 
They wouldn’t let the victims say it was blood transmission, only homosexual activity or drug use or prostitution.
Since the officials suppressed information about the epidemic while cracking down on anyone who tried to report the facts or go to Beijing to file petitions, the epidemic wasn’t contained in time but kept getting worse.
On Dec. 18, 2003, Vice Premier Wu Yi met with me and we spent three hours discussing the problem.
She said, “Someone told me that the main routes of AIDS infection in China are drug use and sex.”
I said, “That’s a lie. If you don’t believe me I can call a rickshaw and pull you there myself so you can see what’s happening.”
She finally believed me, but soon the toadies were around her again and telling her homosexuality and sex were the main causes.

Have official attitudes changed under Xi Jinping?
It must be said that the government indirectly admits the existence of the plasma disaster.
I have two pieces of evidence: One is Xi Jinping’s wife, Peng Liyuan.
In September 2015, in her speech at the United Nations, Peng mentioned a 5-year-old orphan named Gao Jun.
He is now 15 and is from Anhui Province.
His parents were infected with H.I.V. from selling blood.
He was the first person affected by the epidemic Peng had come into contact with after she became the [Health Ministry’s] ambassador for H.I.V./AIDS prevention [in 2006].
The other evidence is from December 2015, when the AIDS orphans project of Du Cong’s Chi Heng Foundation was awarded the China Charity Award by the Ministry of Civil Affairs.
Du Cong, who had came to China’s rural areas in 2002 for a work project, started to help orphans after seeing the situation in the AIDS villages.
So far, the foundation has raised about 200 million renminbi [$29 million] and helped more than 20,000 people, including more than 600 orphans.
On the other hand, the Central Committee’s Leading Group for Inspection Work sent a team to Henan in 2014 for a two-month investigation.
The first day that they stayed at the Yellow River Hotel in Zhengzhou, more than 300 plasma market victims gathered in front of the hotel to submit their complaints.
But they were warded off by officials and the police.

Is the blood disaster under control now?
In 1995, Henan Province began closing some blood-collecting stations.
However, illegal blood stations are still active.
Last year, I read four news reports about illegal blood stations, three in Beijing, one in Nanjing.
Of course, there must be some illegal blood stations that have not been detected.
And I think the spread of H.I.V. is not totally under control.
Last year, I read a report about a woman who was infected with H.I.V. through a blood transfusion during surgery in Tongxu County, in Henan, which indicates there are still problems with blood donors.
Unfortunately, the victims are farmers, and most of them are illiterate.
They don’t know what happened to them.
They don’t know how to speak up for themselves.
They think this happened because of an unavoidable fate.
In recent years, they have begun petitioning for their rights, but their situation is still very bad.

How is your life in America?
Because I can’t speak English, I don’t go out that often.
Every month I pay $2,000 for my apartment.
The money comes from funds Professor Andrew Nathan [of Columbia University] raised for me.
Since I didn’t work in the United States in my younger days or pay taxes, I feel rather uncomfortable asking the government for assistance.
But in fact I am being taken care of by the United States.
Every month I get $87 worth of food stamps.
All my renumerations and award money goes to buying copies of my books and donating them.
For some time, I’ve had high blood pressure and blood clots in my left leg.
In the past three years, I’ve hardly been able to walk.
A caretaker is with me 24 hours a day.
My life in the United States is busy.
I receive at least six letters a day.
And I have many visitors.