In a recent episode of a Chinese reality show Only You (非你莫属), where job seekers compete for jobs through live job interviews, Chinese TV viewers had a glimpse of Foxconn’s “military-style management” and what it could do to the employees through the first-person account of a mid-level manager working for the company. The 30-year old interviewee, named Zhang Fei, started working for Foxconn’s factory in Shenzhen as an entry-level employee after he finished technical high school, making 330 yuan ($52) a month. After twelve years working for the company, he is now an IT manager in charge of a team of fifty employees who are responsible for the entire network, communication facilities and security system for the factory.

Zhang Fei, an Foxconn employee, defends his company after his account of an incident of physical penalty that lead to his blacking out (click image for video in Chinese)

On the show, Zhang revealed that he once fell unconscious in the Foxconn compound. He told the audience what happened:

It was arranged that we were going to be “loaned” to another company that day. Usually, we were supposed to get up at six in the morning for a morning drill. This time, we didn’t know whether we were still supposed to participate in the drill, so we stood at the opening of the staircase, wondering what to do. Then the training officer saw us and pointed out that we didn’t participate in the drill as we were supposed to. [I thought] I had a good reason, so I tried to explain to him, but at this point, he said that [he must] penalize me and asked me to go running up and down the stairs. [I think] the military-style management doesn’t allow any excuse. Whatever the boss asks you to do, you must do it. … [I went] up the staircase on this side and came down on the other side. There were six floors all together. I ran for more than an hour, almost two hours, waiting for an order, that is, the order to stop, but it didn’t come. So I was thinking, as long as I didn’t have the order to stop, I must keep running. It turned out that the training officer might have carelessly forgotten about me. When finally somebody told me to stop, I suddenly passed out on the stairs. At that moment, I felt numb all over. It felt like that your face, your eyes, your brain, and every part of your entire body were numb.

What’s even more shocking is, Zhang did not see this treatment as abuse. Instead, he kept defending the company. Before he told his story, he already were saying that “it wasn’t the company’s fault… [but] maybe because I did something wrong.” When the host said after hearing his story, “I don’t think you were at fault,” Zhang responded, with a strong conviction:

This is the military-style management. From the team’s perspective, [if] you don’t perform as you are instructed to, if you don’t operated as you are instructed to, it surely is your fault. As an employee, you must [see this situation] from the team’s perspective rather than the individual’s perspective, because these are two different view points. When you stand on your ground as an individual, you will think that you’re always right, but when you look at it from the team’s perspective, you’ll realize that this may be your problem.

Zhang wants to leave Foxconn and become a career trainer, helping young people who have just joined the workforce become a competitive employee and plan their future. Here’s what he said to his “trainee” in a mock training session on the show:

Every new employee coming into a company must first form a spirit of teamwork that fits yourself. First of all, you must learn to listen [to your supervisor] and know how to behave properly. This is the most basic requirement. I’m not entitled to say “no” to the boss, so I can only obey. So obeying orders is the foremost requirement.

A “boss” on the show pointed out that Zhang’s management style and expectations from employees would work well in manufacturing industry. He said that with Zhang’s experience, he was in demand and would easily find a company that’d hire him. That’s true. The fact is, in reality, military-style management that controls almost every minute of a worker’s life so as to eliminate every trait of individuality has been adopted by many factories in China, not just Foxconn. This dehumanizing rigid control of workers, unfortunately, is where productivity comes from. It is what has brought astronomic profits to companies like Foxconn and put it ahead of other companies on the international market (read about Apple’s example in NYT).

The scariest thing about this dehumanizing culture of the manufacturing industry in China is that it doesn’t only exploits workers, it also changes them, like Zhang, who, working his way up from a lowest-ranking worker to a mid-level manager, has been completely molded into the system, with heart and soul. Having contributed to Foxconn’s big boss Terry Gou’s $5.5 billion, Zhang is now willing, actually, eager to promote Foxconn’s ideology that legitimizes dehumanizing exploitation and its huge human cost in pursuit for profits. Perhaps after all, that’s what capitalism requires in order to grow–the capital must not only control the workers’ bodies, but also their minds. And that’s what’s behind Foxconn’s, and Apples’, success.

“I found this company you work for is indeed very powerful. You worked there for twelve years, and now you’re brainwashed completely,” the host of the show said to Zhang, half-jokingly, after Zhang defended Foxconn. He was right, and that situation is unlikely to change any time soon.

Since October 6, on popular Chinese social media sites like Weibo (the Chinese equivalent of Twitter) and kaixin001.com (a Chinese version of Facebook), a grainy smartphone photo has been widely shared. It shows chrysanthemum bouquets leaning against a glass wall, propping up black- and-white photos of Steve Jobs. In front of the flowers sit a dozen scattered apples, all missing a bite. The accompanying text reads, “Shanghai. Nanjing Road. Countless Apples. Mourning a Genius.”

The shrine was set up outside of an Apple store in Shanghai for the late former CEO of Apple Inc., Steve Jobs, and it is just one drop of Chinese Apple fans’ outpouring grief rarely seen in China. Within two weeks after his death, 93 million postings appeared on Jobs’s tribute page on Weibo, the most on any single subject in the most popular Chinese social media’s two-year history. “Your products changed the world and your thinking influenced a generation,” one posting reads, and countless awe-struck remarks like this are still circulating on the Internet weeks after Jobs’s death.

Without a doubt, China has caught Applemania. It is Apple’s second largest market behind the US and the fastest growing one. The members of its rising middle class are hunger for Apple products, and their appetite is huge. For the fiscal year ended September 24, Apple’s sales in China rose to $13 billion from $3 billion. As CEO Tim Cook said, “China—the sky’s the limit there.”

However, this appetite is not without a price, perhaps more so to Chinese workers who assemble Apple’s slick gadgets than anybody else. Since 2009, numerous reports such as “iSlave Behind the iPhone” by NGOs, activists and media have exposed the harsh working and living conditions for workers working for Apple’s suppliers in China. The most notorious among them is Foxconn, Apple’s largest contractor. In the first six months of 2010, thirteen Foxconn workers threw themselves out of the company’s tall buildings. The suicides happened so frequently that the company was nicknamed by Chinese netizens “suicide express.”

Foxconn is not the only Apple contractor that is extremely exploitive. According to a report by 36 environmental and activist groups, “The Other Side of Apple,” a number of Apple’s contractors have occupational safety issues, environmental protection issues and labor issues. One of the cases involved the use of a toxic chemical to clean the touch screens for Apple products that got many workers sick.

Apple, while making billions of dollars each year, has turned a blind eye to these issues. After the series suicides in Foxconn, Apple conducted an investigation under the public pressure. It concluded that there were “a number of areas of improvement,” and the ways in which Foxconn attempted to improve the situation were to put safety nets around its buildings, ask the worker to sign an agreement promising they will not commit suicide upon employment, and install care hotline for workers that does not work.

What’s sad is that the suicides and cases of abuses and health hazards all happened in Apple’s plants when Chinese Apple fans flock to the Apple stores for the newest iPhones and iPads. And while hipsters in Beijing sought after the $2000 iPhone 4GS on the gray market before its official release, the workers working for Apple’s suppliers may never be able to own any of the trendy gadgets they made. Making about $5 a day, a worker would have to spend about four months of her wages to buy an iPhone.

There is a stark difference between two worlds. While media and consumers hail Jobs for his “innovation” and “vision” in one world, they conveniently turn away from the real lives—not the abstract branding concepts—in another world, lives that have actually created Apple’s wealth.

But Applemania is not new. It is the quintessence of the old consumerism, now more than ever spreading across the globe. It is easier for us to hate Wal-Mart than Apple, because we adore iPhones and iPads and despise the “shoddy goods” that are “made in China,” although they are made in factories perhaps just miles away from each other. This fetish for Apple gadgets, here in the US and in China, is at the root of our double standards for corporate responsibility.

“Although every suicide is tragic, Foxconn’s rate is well below the China average (which is false). We are all over this,” Jobs wrote in an email in response to a Chinese Apple device user’s demand “Apple can do better!” This is hardly the same demigod worshiped by Apple fans in China, or anywhere. Or is it?