Military management

Professor Xiao Shuiyuan, of the China Association of Mental Health, says the fatalities show signs of the Werther effect, the term used to describe a series of copycat suicides after a widely publicized case, with the number of suicides increasing proportionally to the coverage.

The phenomenon was first noticed in the late 18th Century after the publication of Goethe's "The Sorrow of Young Werther," in which the young protagonist shoots himself after a series of personal setbacks.

"The effect is probably taking place in Foxconn, where young workers, mostly around their twenties, followed the previous suicidal falls to end their own mental or personal difficulties," he says.

Xiao, who helped to investigate some of the previous suicides in Foxconn, says it's possible that employees, burdened with work stress and psychological problems, simply copied deaths widely covered by the media.

Usually, workers share a dorm with staff doing other shifts as they belong to different units, so when a worker has a problem, no one notices, says Xiao.

Of Foxconn's 800,000 employees in China, 420,000 are based in Shenzhen, where they work different shifts and live in a massive factory complex.

Talking or answering phone calls are strictly banned during work time and workers are not allowed to leave production lines unless the line supervisor temporarily takes their place, says Foxconn employee Cheng Lin.

Some grass-roots managers are inflexible in their treatment of workers, adding to their stress, says Cheng.

The repetition of identical production procedures with little technical content for long hours every day, and the military-style management dehumanize workers, says industrial relations expert Liu Kaiming, of the Shenzhen-based Institute of Contemporary Observation (ICO).

"The compound has banks, supermarkets, restaurants, bookshops and other necessary facilities, but we spend most of our spare time sleeping and surfing the Internet, seldom going outside," says Foxconn worker Shen Qingping.