A letter from the founder of Foxconn, the world’s largest iPhone assembler, played a major role in persuading China’s Communist Party leadership to accelerate plans to dismantle the country’s quixotic “Zero COVID” policies, The Wall Street Journal reports citing “people familiar with the matter.”
Keith Zhai and Yang Jie for The Wall Street Journal:
In the letter to Chinese leaders, Foxconn Technology Group founder Terry Gou warned that strict Covid controls would threaten China’s central position in global supply chains and demanded more transparency into restrictions on the company’s workers, the people said. Mr. Gou sent the letter a little more than a month ago as Foxconn’s factory in the city of Zhengzhou was rocked by turmoil over Covid restrictions.
Chinese health officials and government advisers seized on Mr. Gou’s letter to bolster the case that the government needed to speed up its efforts to ease its tough Covid-19 controls, people familiar with the matter said. The eruption weeks later of nationwide protests gave policy advisers further ammunition to press the case for relaxing measures, two of the people said.
The turmoil has added fuel to plans by Apple to shift some of its production from China, long the dominant country in the supply chain that built the world’s most valuable company.
MacDailyNews Take: A letter is nice, but ’twas the protests that really turned things in China.
The real power in China, and everywhere else, ultimately lies in the hands of the people, not in government bureaucrats. – MacDailyNews, December 7, 2022
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