Students 'forced' to work at Foxconn

Beijing - In a striking development, up to 100,000 vocational school students in Henan province have been ordered to leave for Shenzhen over the weekend for a three-month internship at Foxconn, the world's largest contract electronics manufacturer, which has halted employment in the southern industrial hub after a string of employee suicides.

An unnamed official from the provincial employment promotion office told Henan Daily on Thursday that the project would boost local employment and aid the industrial upgrade in Henan, China's most populous province.

But for 17-year-old Lin Feng (not his real name) and thousands of other vocational students, the only option aside from joining the scandal-plagued manufacturing giant is to drop out of school.