In a truely bizarre turn of events, the company at the centre of the iSweatshop scandal reported worldwide some weeks ago, has taken legal action against 2 journalists from a Chinese business newspaper.  The company, Foxconn, is looking for 30 million yuan in compensation and it has been revealed that it successfully applied to a Shenzhen court to have all the assets of the two journalists, including their cars and apartments, frozen.

This all stems from the apparently ultimately fraudulent stories a few weeks back that workers in factories in China were churning out Apple iPods under incredibly tough conditions, working non-stop for 12 hours a day for only 1,000 yuan a month.  The allegations were first published in the Daily Mail in Britain but were subsequently picked up by mainland media outlets, along with hundreds of other publications around the world.

The story was reported in dozens of newspapers on the mainland, so why has Foxconn gone after these two journalists in such a particularly vicious manner?  And why has it taken the journalists themselves to court and not the newspaper who printed the accusations.   The Non-violent Resistance blog claims that Foxconn scoured the mainland media looking for soft targets and picked these two journalists in particular because they did not have formal full time contracts with the China Business Daily.  They were therefore considered stringers for the newspaper who can be held personally liable for what they write under Chinese law.  The implication, then, is that Foxconn decided to make their campaign as brutal and personal as possible, using their undoubted financial might and dodgy legal tactics to send a message to the rest of the mainland media.

Foxconn apparently has a history of this kind of behaviour, having gone after a Taiwanese journalist in 2004, demanding NT$30million in compensation for a negative story. They eventually withdrew the claim after the Association of Taiwanese Journalists gathered a petition of more than 10,000 signatures (using the slogan: don’t think the next little shrimp won’t be you!")

This story is bound to run and run.  Taiwanese companies do tend to have a quite negative reputation on the mainland, and this affront to national pride is unlikely to be well received.  Chinese netizens are already expressing their ire at both Foxconn and the court in Shenzhen that agreed to freeze the assets of the journalists.  Non-violent Resistance Blog points out that the journalists involved have started a blog, with one post alone receiving 1670 comments as of today.