I am always surprised by things in China, but this day was at the more-surprising-than-usual end of the spectrum. In the days to come, I will share a series of photos I was able to take on the campus. I will start now, before completing my article, with just a few that set the general mood.

There are some things you might expect to see. For instance, here is part of a circuit-board assembly plant (brand logos carefully avoided). Anyone who has been in Chinese electronics factories has seen things like this:

And here is a typical giant factory building in which assembly lines like this one operate:

If you look carefully just above the blue shipping containers, you'll see some of the famous "suicide nets" that Foxconn installed several years ago. More to come on this subject.

But there was a lot that I, at least, had no way of expecting. Just a sample, beginning with an employee cyber-cafe:

These are the young people building your smartphones and computers. Or, this kind of scene at lunch hour, with a bunch of employees clustering around a HD big-screen TV being offered at special discount. This is a main street on the campus near a central cafeteria and many shops, banks, coffee bars, and so on.

Or this -- the "staff care" center, which is supposed to help resolve various personal or social problems. It turns out that most of the Foxconn workers sitting and reading -- actual papers! -- were not looking for help but were just taking advantage of the seats and the air-conditioning while on their lunch break.

Similarly, a young woman taking advantage of a security-department scooter as a place to sit and read during a break:

Or a group of workers waiting for a shuttle from one part of the site to another after their shift.

I am not yet going to characterize what I saw, and I am not pretending to know more than I do. This was a few hours out of one day. But what I saw once inside the gate was very different from the picture that "Foxconn" had always conjured up in my mind. I'll plan to post a series of photos day by day until I've conveyed the range of what I saw. If scenes like these conform closely to how you had imagined Foxconn to look, congrats on your insight. They surprised me.

