• China wants retired military staff to help boost production at the world’s largest iPhone factory in Zhengzhou.
• Output at the Foxconn factory has been hit by a local Covid outbreak.
• Foxconn is the biggest employer in Zhengzhou and a top export company.

The People’s Liberation Army’s Veteran Affairs Bureau in the same province as the facility made the call.

An area-wide Covid outbreak has impacted Foxconn’s output.

The bureau claimed that veterans should “turn up where there is a need” and that they were always under the control of the Communist Party in an open letter published on the messaging platform WeChat.

They were exhorted to “answer the government’s call” and “participate in the restart of production.”

With its headquarters in Taiwan, Foxconn also operates numerous plants in China.

More than 200,000 people are employed at the Zhengzhou facility, which creates roughly 500,000 iPhones per day and has a population of about 10 million.

A few Foxconn facilities were forced to temporarily close as a result of China’s Covid wave earlier this year.

The Zhengzhou factory has been placed under a “Covid bubble” since the start of 2022 in order to preserve output.

The factory has quarantine centres for those employees who test positive, but this hasn’t stopped the sick employees from spreading the disease.

In October, a few instances were discovered inside the factory, and at the same time, Zhengzhou declared a lockdown in specific areas. It was not made public how many diseases there were at Foxconn.

Panic broke out in the factory due to the epidemic. Social media users posted videos of numerous employees scaling fences outside the plant in an effort to escape.

Because there was no public transportation, many Foxconn employees walked kilometers along a road.
Since then, Foxconn’s production has been halted. Just over two-thirds of the factory’s production lines, according to research firm TrendForce, were in use.

According to the state-run Global Times newspaper in China, the factory required 10,000 more employees.

A person from each village should be sent to the factory, according to the sources, but this assertion has not yet been independently verified.

The largest employer in Zhengzhou and a significant exporter is Foxconn. It exported goods valued at more than 261 billion yuan (£30.9 billion) by September 2022.

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