The call came from a Veteran Affairs Bureau of the People's Liberation Army in the same province as the plant. Output at the Foxconn factory has been hit by a local Covid outbreak. In an open letter posted on messaging app WeChat, the bureau said that veterans were always under the command of the Communist Party and should "show up where there's a need". It urged them to "answer the government's call" and "take part in the resumption of production". Foxconn, whose headquarters are in Taiwan, has many factories in China. The plant in Zhengzhou, a city with a population of about 10 million, employs more than 200,000 workers and produces 70% of iphones globally about 500,000 a day. China's Covid wave earlier this year has forced the temporary closure of a few Foxconn factories. In order to maintain production, the Zhengzhou factory has been put under a "Covid bubble" since the beginning of 2022. Any staff who test positive are sent to quarantine centres within the factory, but this has not prevented the workers from being infected. A few cases were found inside the factory in October - at the same time the city of Zhengzhou announced a lockdown in some districts. The actual number of infections in Foxconn was not released. The outbreak triggered panic inside the factory. Videos shared on social media showed a large number of workers jumping fences outside the plant in an attempt to flee.
Many Foxconn staff walked miles along a road because there was no public transport available.
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Foxconn production has since been interrupted. Research group TrendForce found just over two-thirds of the production lines in the factory were under operation. China's state-affiliated media Global Times estimated there was a need for 10,000 extra workers at the factory. Online news site NetEast reported that Foxconn has asked the local government to send at least one person from each village to the factory, but the BBC cannot verify this claim. Foxconn is the biggest employer in Zhengzhou and a top export company. By September 2022, it had exported more than 261bn yuan (£30.9bn) worth of products.
However in the last week, Zhengzhou, the capital of China's Henan province, reported 167 locally transmitted infections - up from 97 the week before, according to Reuters news agency. The city of about 10 million people was partially locked down as a result, as China continues to use strict lockdown measures to deal with Covid. Foxconn, which acts as a supplier to US-based Apple, has hundreds of thousands of workers at its Zhengzhou complex and has not provided an official count of how many are infected. The Taiwan-based company claimed on Sunday that it would not stop workers from leaving. The government agreed to resume dine-in meals to improve the convenience and satisfaction of employees' lives," Foxconn said in a statement on Sunday. Under China's strict zero-Covid policy, cities are given powers to act swiftly to quell any outbreaks of the virus. This includes anything from full-scale lockdowns to regular testing and travel restrictions. Many had hoped President Xi would drop the legislation before the end of the year but at the recent 20th Communist Party congress, he made clear this was unlikely to happen anytime soon.
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