Shenzhen, the world's factory for consumer electronics, under pressure from rising costs
Shenzhen, the global famed city located in the South East of China, has risen to great heights of power due to the vast manufacturing plants, such as Foxconn, that churn out high end products for the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Dell and Sony to name but a few. In fact 90% of the world&rsquo;s consumer electronics are produced in the megacity. Foxconn&rsquo;s Shenzhen plant gets media attention not just because of its vast scale and brand-name clients, but also because of the numerous reports of atrocious working conditions it has engendered. The challenge for Shenzhen is changing, it is becoming less about cheap manufacturing and more about technological innovation
Mention Shenzhen to most people, and they'll probably think of the vast Foxconn manufacturing plant that churns out high-end phones, tablets, laptops, and gaming consoles for the likes of Apple, Microsoft, Dell, and Sony. The size of a small city —with an estimated half a million employees—Foxconn's Shenzhen plant gets media attention not just because of its vast scale and brand-name clients, but also because of the numerous reports of atrocious working conditions it has engendered, and the stories of employee suicides, protests, and even riots within the campus walls.

Davies focuses much of her work on how Western cities increasingly depend on vast global networks to survive, and she's a regular here—over the years she has gained a unique insight into what makes the city tick. Along with fellow 'speculative architect' Liam Young, she runs Unknown Fields , the infamous nomadic design studio that explores the hidden zones of production and distribution that keep the world running. Now, she's brought a small group of journalists and researchers—I'm one of them—to Shenzhen as part of an expedition to ride the global supply chain backwards to its source. We arrived here by container ship, and after two weeks of travelling we'll end up at rare earth mines and refineries in Inner Mongolia , to see firsthand how all that electronic crap is dug out of the ground.

"It's where all the electrical crap we buy comes from," Kate Davies, an academic and architect who studies extreme places, tells me as we walk through Shenzen's LED-lit streets. "[T]he cheap toys, that box of chargers and adapters that you have, that you've no idea what they're for anymore, the cemetery of old phones in your kitchen drawer… Shenzhen is one of those points on the planet where the world condenses in high density into one place, it's an artifact of the contemporary global supply network that weaves matter and displaces earth across the planet." And we're standing on ground zero as she speaks.

It might be the biggest and best-known, but Foxconn is only one of several hundred factories in and around Shenzhen. In fact, the megacity is responsible for producing an estimated 90 percent of the world's consumer electronics , the vast majority of which are far less glamorous than iPhones and PlayStations.

In many ways, Shenzhen is the birthplace of this vast, high-tech silk road. As China's pioneering Special Economic Zone (SEZ) it was the experiment that gave the nation its first economic miracle. It proved that foreign investment and outsourced manufacturing could be attracted on vast scales if the taxes and labor costs were low enough, that an undemocratic Communist state could contain and control zones of hyper-capitalism within its own borders, and that whole cities could be built from scratch to fill a gap in the global manufacturing market.

If they're lucky, they end up somewhere like TCL LCD Industrial Park , one of the world's biggest television manufacturing plants. It takes about an hour to get here from Shenzhen's financial center; the drive a glaring reminder that its futuristic, skyscraper-studded skyline doesn't represent the city as a whole. Neon-lit towers, high-end electronics stores, and designer label-filled shopping malls give way to a seemingly endless sprawl of brutalist housing blocks and generic, low-rise industrial units. Out here in the manufacturing suburbs, you're more likely to see signs for faceless factories than the familiar global brands, with laundry strewn balconies and retrofitted air conditioners replacing the better-known sleek glass building facades.

Shenzhen was recently declared China's third largest city, after Shanghai and Beijing. But before it was given SEZ status in 1979 Shenzhen was a fishing port with a population of 300,000. Now it's home to over 15 million—almost twice the population of NYC—and it continues to swell, constantly drawing workers from China's countryside : the children of subsistence farmers hoping to carve out a better life for themselves in the city.

Here at LCD Industrial Park, they mainly assemble TVs, at a rate of 160 an hour, from components made in other Shenzhen factories—such as their $4 billion China Star LCD panel manufacturing plant, which their US website proudly boasts "costs 75 times more than Brangelina's 35 bedroom castle in France."

TCL LCD Industrial Park is a fraction of the size of Foxconn, but it's still industrial manufacturing on a scale that has become alien to most of us in the West. This one facility has an incredible 10,000 employees, with 3,000 of them living in onsite dormitories. TCL is perhaps best known in the US as the manufacturer of the popular Roku streaming media players, but the company also makes 18 million TVs a year, as well as refrigerators, washers, dryers, air conditioners, and Blu-ray players, all labeled under a number of different brands.

We get a glimpse of the factory floor as we walk past the windows looking down on one of the production lines. Photography is strictly prohibited. "If you get caught taking photos, maybe I will get punished," Katherine tells us. It's hard to really understand what's going on, but the production line appears semi-automated; there's a dozen or so young workers wearing t-shirts with QR codes on their backs interacting with various machinery.

From the The LCD Industrial Park visitors center—one of the only locations on site we're permitted to go—mainly consists of a Kubrick-white, blue neon-lit museum dedicated to the history of televisions. "In 2004 TCL bought Thompson," our Chinese TCL spokesperson who goes only by Katherine, explains proudly, as she guides us around the glass cases full of antique TVs, "and Thompson owned the USA's first TV company, RCA. Thus, TCL now owns the history of television."

Futuristic vertical conveyor belts lift TV panels from some unseen space beneath the floor. It's clean, well lit, and the ceilings are high. The workers here are given at least two months training before they start, depending on where they're placed. They work a minimum of one eight hour shift a day, but can do a second if they want—Katherine assures us this is optional—for six days a week. In return, they get paid, on average, about 3,000 yuan, or roughly $484, a month.

"If production line employees work hard enough," Katherine tells us, "then they can be promoted to work higher up in the company."

"Is that how you started here?" asks Davies, "On the production line?"

Katherine turns on a white leather stiletto that perfectly matches the jacket she wears over her pink lycra dress. Addressing her namesake with what seems initially to be disgusted surprise, a wry smile breaks across her face.

"No," she laughs. "Of course not."

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