“This American Life,” the public-radio show, has retracted a China piece that it says it never should’ve run. (Disclosure: I’m doing an unrelated piece for “This American Life” that’s scheduled to be broadcast later this year.) The retracted story was by a monologist named Mike Daisey, who described journeying to the gates of Foxconn, the Apple supplier in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. He said he interviewed hundreds of workers, finding girls who were twelve and thirteen years old and others whose “hands shake uncontrollably” from chemicals used to clean iPhone screens. He said he visited other factories and saw surveillance cameras over the beds in dorm rooms, some kind of “sci-fi, dystopian, ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘1984’ bull[BLEEP].” And in the end, he winds his warning around to us, the consumers: “They’re making your crap that way today.”
But Daisey lied. He made up things about his trip, and the show’s attempts at fact-checking failed to uncover them. It all fell apart when Rob Schmitz, a seasoned reporter who is the China correspondent for the public-radio program “Marketplace,” got suspicious and tracked down the translator who’d worked with Daisey. It’s worth a listen, but, in short, Schmitz discovers that Daisey made up scenes, never took notes, conflated workers, never visited a dorm room, and so on. Watching it unravel from Beijing makes me wonder: What does the debacle say about how we all look at China? Why were so many people so eager to believe it?
When the original piece ran, I (and a lot of reporters in China) thought it sounded off. We complained to each other about the breathlessness and the clichés—the “Blade Runner” comparison is the hoariest line about Chinese cities—but Rob Schmitz actually took the time to follow up, for which he should be applauded.
Several places in the narrative sounded fishy to anyone who has spent much time here: 1) the gun-toting guards (maybe, but not at the factories I’ve seen; in China, guns usually belong to soldiers or armored-car drivers); 2) driving down a highway exit that ended with rebar jutting out into thin air (local taxi drivers usually know which exits aren’t finished); 3) meeting workers who said they were twelve and thirteen years old (even if they were underage, they were probably too smart to blab about it in front of the gun-toting guards); 4) workers who were such innocents that they’d never considered what they would change about the factories until Daisey asked them (where do I start?); and, perhaps most of all, 5) his description of going to the factory gates and talking to workers as a radical innovation in journalism. When he told journalists in Hong Kong about his plan, he said in his piece, they replied: “That’s not really how we usually do things in China.”
That was a howler. Going to the factory gates is exactly what reporters do in China. But when I heard it, a part of me was embarrassed by the prospect that maybe Daisey had found stuff that we in China had not. Lots of people had reported over the years on underage workers and harsh conditions, but very often the stories require complicated qualifications, debates about the efforts that factories take to guard against hiring underage workers (and—more qualifications—about the ones who slip through anyway). But, I concluded, weird things happen in China all the time. Even driving down the highway exit was sort of plausible. And, more seriously, I feared that maybe Daisey had approached the subject with such fresh outrage and investigative vigor that he had been able to find what so many over here had not.
Part of Daisey’s conceit was that he presented himself as a clear-eyed naïf: he would show up at the factory gate in a Hawaiian shirt (that part was true, by the way) and ask people simple questions that exposed uncomfortable truths. But, in a curious way, Daisey’s undoing was that he turned out to be naïve in a way that he didn’t understand. He thought that China was so exotic and far away that it was uncheckable; that it was okay to take “a few shortcuts in my passion to be heard,” as he put it in his follow-up interview. (That’s a cliché too, of course, borrowed from every fabulist since Janet Cooke.)
But China, it turns out, is not so far away. Daisey’s fiction was predicated on the notion that China is essentially unknowable, that reporters never go to factory gates, that highways exit to nowhere. And he might have gotten away with it twenty years ago. But these days, it’s no longer so far away at all. It’s close enough to make an iPhone today and have it on a U.S. store shelf next week. And it’s closer in another important way as well—in overestimating his own ability, Daisey underestimated a lot of other people. He didn’t realize that podcasts are often followed by listeners with real knowledge on his subject: American expats who probably rely even more on podcasts than other people because it’s so difficult to get books and magazines and radio stories over here.
His story was initially a success because it satisfied so many of our casual assumptions about China and Apple. On some level, anybody who thinks it through has suspected that iPhone prices are a bit too good to be true, and that’s why pressure is building on Apple to do better. In that sense, despite the botched show and Daisey’s lies, his fiction has a wisp of truth to it: They’re making your crap that way today. Well, no, but sort of.
The mea culpa from Ira Glass on “This American Life” ends with a conversation about Apple in China with Charles Duhigg, who co-wrote an investigative story in the Times with David Barboza. It explores what Duhigg calls “two buckets” of issues—harsh conditions and life-threatening conditions—and he does a good job of explaining the ins and outs. He also talks about the diversity of opinions among Apple sources, based on many interviews with staff, former and current. The stories by Duhigg and his colleagues have been complicated and excellent. At the end of his interview, Duhigg talks, in effect, to all of us—the Apple consumers—about the problem of working conditions: “If you made different choices, if you demanded different conditions, if you demanded that other people enjoy the same work protections that you yourself enjoy, then those conditions would be different overseas.”
Listening to this, it occurred to me that it’s exactly the point that Mike Daisey set out—and failed—to document. The Times succeeded, and in a way that rings true in China.
Above: Applicants wait for interviews outside the Foxconn Qinghu recruitment center in Shenzhen. Photograph: ChinaFotoPress/Getty.
