Violent Clashes at iPhone Factory Show How Grim Covid Zero Has Become

Violence broke out this week at iPhone City, a sprawling Chinese manufacturing complex, in an illustration of just how grim conditions have become under the country’s Covid Zero policies. Much of the facility’s 200,000-person workforce has spent weeks living in trash-filled dormitories, subsisting on meager rations because management wanted to keep churning out Apple devices while squelching a Covid-19 outbreak. “It was total chaos,” one worker said of this week’s clashes. “I’d never expected things could go this bad.”