The Hidden Human Cost of Western Hyperconsumerism
Image Description: A phone screen styled as an Instagram homepage features the words “The Hidden Human Cost” in bubbles in the Stories section. The first post shows someone holding a phone with a speech bubble that reads, “New iPhone for Christmas!” surrounded by silhouettes of shoppers. Below, a second post depicts assembly line workers alongside the headline: “Breaking News: Chinese factory workers die by suicide,” framed by silhouettes in agony and despair.
Many Americans associate the “Made in China” label with exploitative labor conditions, imagining distant factories or sweatshops where workers are exploited under an authoritarian regime. These assumptions often foster a sense of moral superiority, where U.S. consumers and politicians condemn China’s labor practices while ignoring how deeply Western hyperconsumerism drives and depends on the very conditions they criticize. Today, products like iPhones are designed to be upgraded and replaced at a rapid rate, fueling our culture of hyperconsumerism. Across the world, a weak and submissive Chinese workforce bears the cost of Western hyperconsumerism, overexploited by companies that physically overwork, drastically underpay, and psychologically humiliate them. The Chinese Communist Party’s unique model of development, which blends elements from neoliberal capitalism and East Asian state developmentalism, enables the exploitation of a cheap and submissive labor force.
When Deng Xiaoping came to power in the People’s Republic of China in the 1980s, he implemented market reform policies, legitimizing the state’s shift to capitalism — an economic system based on private ownership and profit-driven markets — with the Marxist theory that a “truly socialist society,” characterized by collective ownership of the means of production and the pursuit of egalitarian distribution, must be preceded by capitalism. Drawing from neoliberal capitalism, an economic model that prioritizes free markets, deregulation, and minimal government intervention, the CCP transitioned rural areas away from a state-controlled, collective economic system, instead promoting township and village enterprises, which encouraged local ownership, entrepreneurialism and open market competition. Simultaneously, they weakened the central state while privatizing and corporatizing state-owned enterprises. This led to both local regions and state-owned enterprises functioning as independent enterprises that competed against each other to attract investment. With this decollectivization came the marketization of labor, which replaced permanent employment — referred to as “iron rice bowls” — with contract employment, surrendering workers to the ups and downs of the market. Additionally, the CCP adopted the neoliberal capitalistic element of commodifying social welfare, which exacerbated the rapidly widening gap between the poor and rich. With the loss of permanent occupations and social services, a floating population emerged, composed of rural migrants who flooded cities searching for employment.
The CCP also adopted an open-door policy, which led to international integration and spatial differentiation, two additional elements of neoliberal capitalism. As part of his coastal development strategy, Premier Zhao Ziyang focused on attracting foreign trade and investment to China’s most economically developed regions along the Pacific, which led to uneven regional development, further illuminating growing class inequalities. Furthermore, as China entered the World Trade Organization, it increasingly oriented itself as an export-oriented economy, prioritizing international profits over domestic concerns about egalitarianism.
The loss of job security and social welfare, combined with increased class polarization and exploitation of laborers, led to social unrest across the working class. In 1989, they cooperated with democratic Marxist intellectuals, despite dissimilar frustrations with the government, to participate in demonstrations, which tragically culminated in the Tiananmen Massacre, a brutal military crackdown on peaceful demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
After this bloody crackdown, the CCP adjusted and refined its goals for the country, pushing for economic liberalization without political liberalization by implementing elements of East Asian state developmentalism, a model of economic development in which a strong, centralized state plays a leading and interventionist role to guide economic growth through strategic planning, targeted investment, and authoritarian policies to discipline labor and suppress labor protests. The CCP strategically blended this model with elements of neoliberal capitalism, such as market competition, privatization, and entrepreneurialism, to stimulate rapid economic growth while maintaining state control. The unique role the state plays in the economy enables the extreme exploitation of workers.
Since the Tiananmen Massacre, the CCP has taken on a more authoritarian role in the economy, a central characteristic of state developmentalism that has allowed it to control private corporations and local governments in ways that ultimately advance the country’s economy at the expense of an overexploited, cheap and submissive labor force. First, though China embraced neoliberalism by privatizing and corporatizing state-owned enterprises, the central state maintains strong state machinery, as it still controls the banking sector. This allows the state to leverage policy tools to ensure that businesses comply with government objectives, rendering the capitalist class so dependent on the CCP that it is unable to challenge it. For example, even China’s richest man Jack Ma was not immune to the power of the CCP, as his fallout with Xi Jinping triggered a thirty-two-month crackdown targeting and tightening control over the most influential Chinese private technology companies. Because the state controls the finance sector, it is able to be selective about the infrastructure it chooses to invest in. For example, the state played a central role in the rise of surveillance technology by sponsoring these kinds of initiatives. In turn, the surveillance economy has become deeply embedded in the technological systems underpinning China’s authoritarian system, increasing the CCP’s power by providing data accessible to the state through government-sponsored technology. The CCP’s intervention in the economy also occurs on the international level to promote domestic products and services. For example, by restricting the entry of US-based companies like Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google into the Chinese market, China preserves its domestic market, enabling homegrown alternatives like Baidu, Alibaba, iQiyi and Tencent to dominate.
The CCP has also leveraged its prior decentralization efforts (an element of neoliberal capitalism) to keep local governments in competition with each other for investment, indirectly facilitating an environment for worker exploitation by encouraging local government officials to prioritize a capitalistic mindset of boosting GDP growth over workers’ rights. For example, local governments were instrumental in facilitating China’s cheap and compliant labor force for Foxconn by competing to get the company to establish factories in their territories through generous offers of land, infrastructure, and labor supply, since hosting Foxconn would increase GDP growth in their regions.
China’s heavily export-driven economy, a result of the neoliberal push to pursue global expansion, further exacerbates the exploitative labor conditions in Chinese factories through direct and indirect demands from Western businesses and consumers. According to Dr. Ngai from the University of Hong Kong and Dr. Chan from Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Foxconn’s clientele includes giant corporations such as Apple, HP and Intel, and the rampant hyperconsumerism of the West leads to high demand, driving these companies to “pressure Foxconn so that they can compete against each other on price, quality, and delivery.” Due to the hierarchical, militaristic corporate culture of Foxconn, the work pressure ultimately falls onto the low-skilled assembly line workers.
Because the central state, along with local governments, is so driven by what Dr. Meisner from the University of Wisconsin-Madison terms “socialism with Chinese characteristics” — an empty title for China’s increasingly capitalistic economic system — they do not really care about workers’ rights. Though labor laws exist, they are rarely enforced. For example, upon receiving backlash when 18 migrant workers attempted suicide due to Foxconn’s workplace conditions and shame-based corporate culture, the company responded by installing safety nets around the dormitories, instead of addressing workers’ complaints. Additionally, corporations collaborate with local governments to use several legal loopholes to exploit workers. For example, Dr. Ngai and Dr. Chan found that a number of students who worked at Foxconn were required to do so as a part of their vocational training. As “interns,” they were excluded from Labor Law protections because their connection to the company was not officially defined to be employment, enabling Foxconn to further exploit these student workers. Dr. Ngai and Dr. Chan also reported that though Foxconn mentions written “agreements” that their workers have signed for overtime, they are meaningless because these workers are not protected from being fired if they refuse overtime hours. Similarly, Foxconn claims that standing workers have ten-minute breaks every two hours, but Dr. Ngai and Dr. Chan found that this was not true in practice.
Another reason why Chinese labor is so cheap and submissive is because of the country’s discriminatory hukou system. By treating those with rural household registrations as second-class citizens, the system enforces deep social divisions and class inequalities among workers. This institutionalized marginalization further disadvantages low-skilled migrant workers, making them weaker and therefore even more susceptible to exploitation.
Beyond the indirect exploitation of low-skilled Chinese laborers through local governments and domestic and international corporations, the central state also directly controls the working class through authoritarian policies, an element of state developmentalism that they justify with nationalism. The CCP cites the nationalist objectives of maintaining a favorable environment to attract foreign investment and promote capital accumulation to justify its authoritarian policies that tightly control labor, suppress labor protests, and weaken civil society. As a result, citizens do not have the right to form independent unions or to strike. Instead, there is only one union called the “All China Federation of Trade Unions,” which is ultimately useless because it is controlled by the CCP.
The advancement of today’s technology helps the CCP take its authoritarian policies to the next level. For example, the CCP appeals to nationalist goals of creating a harmonious socialist society to legitimize its implementation of a social credit system that tracks citizens’ backgrounds, movements, behaviors, and habits. Similarly, digital surveillance and data mining have enabled the CCP to prevent collective action before it even gains momentum. This mass surveillance enables the CCP to increase its authoritarian power while simultaneously expanding the economy by exporting this technology. Ultimately, the Chinese model of economic development, which incorporates elements from neoliberal capitalism and state developmentalism, combined with an export-driven economy dependent on Western hyperconsumerism, enables and perpetuates the exploitation of weak, submissive, and cheap workers.
Although China and the U.S. often portray each other as rivals, with the U.S. condemning China’s exploitative labor practices from a position of moral superiority, this whataboutism obscures the reality that they work together to keep workers vulnerable and perpetuate exploitation. Recognizing this connection challenges us to reexamine our consumption habits and the global consequences they carry. With that awareness, we can start making more ethical, thoughtful decisions and hold corporations and governments accountable for the human cost behind the products they produce.
