People like to divide time into before and after. There’s before and after the birth of Christ, before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall and – my personal favourite – before and after the invention of Cup Noodle. We may just have crossed a new threshold: before and after Foxconn.

It is six months since Foxconn, a huge electronics contract manufacturer, made international headlines after a series of suicides at its sprawling factory complex in southern China. Although the company pointed out that suicide rates were actually lower inside its walled city-cum-factory – which has shops, restaurants and dormitories in addition to mind-numbing production lines – the Taiwanese company could not shake off the implication that it was exploiting a cheap and alienated labour force.

Foxconn, which employs 800,000 Chinese workers, offered a 30 per cent wage increase. That helped ease the bad publicity on itself as well as on some of its more famous customers: the likes of Apple, Dell and Hewlett-Packard, whose electronic gadgetry is churned out by Foxconn workers. The 30 per cent rise coincided with 20 per cent-plus pay increases for factory workers at other companies in several Chinese provinces.