“They were 16 years old, on the loose in one of China's most chaotic boomtowns, raising themselves with no adults in sight . . . They missed their mothers. But they were also having the time of their lives.”

Factory Girls, Leslie T. Chang

Not everybody is having the time of their life. This week, a 19-year-old worker at the Foxconn electronics plant near the sprawling factory city of Shenzhen in southern China became the fourth employee in two weeks, and the ninth this year, to leap to his death. Two more failed in the attempt. The spate of suicides, coupled with an undercover investigation into conditions at the Foxconn plant by Southern Weekly, a Guangzhou-based newspaper, has shone a spotlight into the darker crevices of China's factory system. Last week, nine professors of social science wrote an open letter to Foxconn in which they questioned the very sustainability of China's role as the workshop of the world.