Shortly before midnight on Sunday, a fight among assembly-line workers at the Apple supplier, Foxconn, escalated into a riot, involving some two thousand members of the staff, and perhaps the guards, that reportedly left forty people injured.

The state-news service said that five thousand police moved in to restore control. The plant, which has seventy-nine thousand workers in the coal-country city of Taiyuan, shut down. Reporters at the gates saw broken windows and paramilitary police with riot shields, helmets, and batons guarding the entrance, while a loudspeaker urged calm. After twenty-four hours, Foxconn reopened the plant Tuesday.

Though most of the iPhone assembly is done elsewhere, workers said that the iPhone was being made there, too, so the story leapt onto front pages. Anything attached to Apple gets more than its share of attention, but in this case, the Apple factor is far less interesting than what this instance of labor unrest suggests about the months ahead for China.

The melee has been chalked up to several possible causes: Foxconn says it “appears not to have been work-related” though that’s a bit of a semantic dodge when the workers live together in dormitories and rarely have reason to leave the workplace. Online reports—which should be treated with skepticism until better sources turn up—suggest that it was triggered by guards who beat up a worker. In either case, as one worker put it to the Times, “I think the real reason is they were frustrated with life.”

If Chinese factory workers are feeling frustrated with life, that is likely to get worse before it gets better, as the economy faces a volatile period captured in an August story in Southern Weekend headlined “The First Layoff in the Last Ten Years.”

The riot at Foxconn—or any of the other five hundred “mass incidents” that China records on an average day—has implications far beyond Apple. Labor activists say that they are happening more often this year than last. A little over a week ago, six thousand workers at a Flextronics Technology factory in Shanghai went on strike for severance pay. In June, it was a hundred workers in a mini-uproar at another Foxconn plant. They are no longer simply calling for better wages. “Many of the protests this year appear to be related to the country’s economic slowdown, as employees demand the payment of overdue wages from financially struggling companies, or insist on compensation when money-losing factories in coastal provinces are closed and moved to lower-cost cities in the interior,” as the Times put it.

The economic slowdown puts a twist into the Apple-in-China saga that has been unfolding over several years. When the performer Mike Daisey, earlier this year, was found to have lied about conditions at Foxconn—in order to punch up his sweatshop story—his mistake was not only lying; he also misunderstood the contours of the story. Chinese factory workers are not the naïfs he imagined; they are, in fact, more aware every day of their rights and are frustrated by the absence of institutions through which to lobby for them. Ever since a rash of suicides at its plants, Foxconn and Apple worked with fair-labor advisors to cut employees’ hours and improve conditions. There was abundant room to improve: by most accounts, twenty workers were living in a three-bedroom apartment; the meal allowance was sixty-five cents in 2010, and a twenty-two-year-old college graduate at the Chengdu plant was earning twenty-two dollars a day.

But the deeper problem is about institutions. Day by day, Chinese workers expect better conditions and greater guarantees that when companies go bust, the employees will not. And, yet, China permits no independent trade unions or free collective bargaining. Complaint and mediation procedures are weak. China today still has, more or less, the same Party-sponsored national trade union it has had for sixty years, even as the economy and the population have transformed. If Beijing is to avoid more riots in the months and years ahead, it needs to stop seeing this as an Apple problem and start seeing it as a China problem.

Photograph: Stringer/China/Reuters.