Striking Honda workers at Foshan, image from a Sina.com article, now deleted

The latest Sinica podcast is up. Hosted by Kaiser Kuo with Kathleen McLaughlin, reporter for the Bureau of National Affairs and Global Post who has written extensively on electronics manufacturing trends in China, and Jonathan Watts, Asian environmental reporter for The Guardian, and yours truly.

Subject matter:

A spate of suicides leaves ten dead at the Shenzhen campus of Foxconn, the giant electronics manufacturer that makes many of the world's most popular consumer electronics. A rare strike paralyzes production at Honda Motors, shutting down all of the company's manufacturing lines in the country. In response, both companies offer substantial concessions to workers, causing many to ask if this marks the end of China's reign as the low-cost "workshop to the world"?

The podcast is available on Popup Chinese, where you can find podcasts, text lessons and language tools to learn Mandarin and Cantonese. You can listen to it on this page where there are also instructions to subscribe to Sinica on iTunes or directly download the MP3 file.

Articles referred to in the podcast are linked below.