"BYD, “Slave-gate” and the soul search about China’s cutthroat industrial model" 6 January 2025

In a December 2024 report by Brazil’s Public Labor Prosecutor’s Office (MPT), the investigators described the conditions of Chinese workers, hired by a BYD sub-contractor Jinjiang Group to construct is new production facility in Bahia state, as “slavery-like.”...

While BYD’s Brazilian operation, as well as China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, pledged compliance with Brazilian laws and regulations, the company’s Chinese spokesperson stroke a starkly different tone on social media. Li Yunfei, BYD’s director for public relations, pointed to “hostile foreign forces” behind the scandal...Li also retweeted a Weibo post by Jinjiang Group, which claimed the incident was due to a “cultural misunderstanding” during MPT’s raid...

If there is any element of a “cultural misunderstanding” involved, the incident has revealed a much deeper one on the Chinese side...For a country obsessed with speed and growth, hardship is a ticket to prosperity. And it is not implausible that many workers would accept poor conditions in exchange for higher pay...

The internet’s highly generalized discussions on China’s hardship-progress tradeoff tend to overlook the very specific sufferings of Chinese laborers dispatched far and wide to work on projects across the world. Accounts by the workers themselves, kept by online archives visited by few, document a world of coercion and abuse lightyears away from the “high hardship...withheld payment is also a common experience...delayed wage payment is used as a form of control... Confiscated passports serve the same purpose...from Serbia to Turkey to the Democratic Republic of Congo, workers reported passports being taken as soon as they landed...

Cramped and unsanitary dormitories are hardly the focus of such personal accounts as living in makeshift sheds are indeed taken for granted by the workers who are accustomed to hard conditions back home. Their grievances are often with the more severe infringements on their rights, such as the lack of healthcare and work safety protection. For some workers, handicapping injuries were left unattended. More draconian forms of freedom restriction, such as forced encampment, are experienced by others...

The collective misery in the archives receives very few column inches in China’s broader public sphere, where sensitive labor rights issues are heavily suppressed...While Chinese online conversation about the BYD case lacks substance on the labor issue, it nevertheless creates an opening for a broader introspection about the China model that is being exported overseas through BYD and other companies...

At the policy level, the government has started to intervene out of a growing recognition that a model disproportionately rewards industrial champions while sacrificing the ones that fuel their success (suppliers and workers) no longer works as a viable, long-term strategy...

The BYD case helps resurface Chinese society’s aspiration for shared prosperity, not the kind of industrial growth whose only winners seem to be a few leading firms and inflation-fighting foreign nations (which do not appreciate the cheap products anyway). It is too early to tell if scandals like this will accelerate meaningful reforms to China’s porous labor law enforcement, which will deeply impact how Chinese companies, currently so accustomed to their cheap, overworked employees, behave around the world...