Made in China Click - Short Edition

Before that, time

for this week's Click.

Just across the water

from Hong Kong, on the Chinese

mainland, lies a city at the heart

of the country's technological

revolution.

Welcome back to Shenzhen.

This is where stuff gets made.

When you think of China's electronic

scene, this might be

what you think of.

More than 70% of the world's mobile

phones are manufactured in China.

But all that industry

is taking its toll on the city.

As the buildings go up

to accommodate the influx

of businesses, the smog has come

down to remind everyone of the price

you pay for a rapidly

expanding industrial economy.

The middle-class here is also

consuming more power,

as well as demanding something else

- good quality home-grown products.

And Chinese brands are rising

to the challenge, with names

like ZTE, Xiaomi and Huawei even

breaking out of China and becoming

recognised and desired worldwide.

One such brand is OnePlus.

Now, despite only being four years

old, it's already turned out

a number of phones that have been

compared favourably to the top end

Samsungs and iPhones and this week

it unveiled a brand-new handset,

the 5T, with all the fanfare that

a big phone launch gets these days.

Are you all excited?

The secrecy that surrounds these

new phones' prelaunch is intense

and, let's be honest,

it's part of the hype.

Look, it's another black rectangle!

But as such it's really rare to get

a look behind the scenes

at the design, the manufacture

and the launch of a new device.

But in Shenzhen, two weeks

before the unveiling,

we were given exclusive access

to the inner workings

of the production line

on the run-up to D-Day.

Now I'm qualified to

serve you pastries.

They make loads of different types

of phones in this factory,

so to keep the 5T as secret

from all the other workers,

everything happens behind

the blue shroud of secrecy.

Are you ready?

Thank you.

Come in.

Welcome to production line 27.

The phone starts life as just a tiny

camera there and then it's gradually

assembled around this U

shaped production line,

which means by the time it gets

to the end it's a fully featured

phone, just about there.

This is the reason China has come to

dominate electronics manufacturing.

A ready supply of a disciplined,

relatively low-cost workforce.

Each person here has one unique job

which requires concentration,

speed and precision.

A single speck of dust caught

in the camera lens and the finish

phone will be rejected.

What I found most surprising

about this is it's all people.

I would have thought with this kind

of high precision job,

these phones would have been

built solely by machines,

but it's pretty much all humans.

Each line can produce more

than 90 phones an hour.

It's exhausting just watching this.

Fortunately, the staff get

a two-hour lunch break and also,

suddenly at 3pm...

BELL RINGS

This might look weird,

but having seen how intense this job

is and how much concentration

you need, this ten minute eye

break is invaluable.

I think if I was doing this job I'd

just want ten minutes to get my head

down and close my eyes

and reset my brain too.

Wow!

Now, these people are bringing

to life a design that has been

anguished over, squeezed

for efficiency and ultimately

compromised to keep costs down.

I'm meeting with one

of the designers to get

the inside track on how he's made

this black rectangle ever

so slightly different

from all the others.

For every new phone,

you come up with lots of different

designs, like this.

200.

Oh, my word!

Do you think we've

achieved peak design now?

In the end, these are all physics.

We are still making some choices,

some sacrifices, in favour

of the beauty of the exterior,

still a little bit.

Such as?

Well, such as, actually the best

place for this would be leaning

directly on the corner.

In our design, we have this angle

here, so that doesn't allow us

to put this directly here.

If you could get rid

of one part of the phone,

Back at the factory,

Simon would be horrified

by what happens to his design.

DRAMATIC SCREAMING

This is where an unlucky few phones

are pulled off the production line

to check extreme tolerance.

Elsewhere, other test phones

escape that big plunge,

but instead are dropped

5,000 times each.

Others have their charging

ports wiggled and buttons

pressed 10,000 times.

And then there's the tumble dryer.

Only when about 70% of the sample

phones start surviving this vigorous

testing will a build

be deemed successful.

For me this is a fascinating look

at how a phone is born and now that

it's being launched this small

preproduction line can expand,

once the company has an indication

of how many orders it will get.

And that's the secret.

Not to produce more

than you can sell.

So when OnePlus decided

to take on the big brands,

which can all afford to fail,

it decided to sell its first phone

by invitation only.

What was the thinking behind that?

'Cause I would have tried to make it

as available as possible.

So being a brand-new company and not

making such a complicated product

as a smartphone and being based

here, we didn't really

have the opportunity to test

the product in all the countries

where we sold it and adding

to that we didn't know how many

phones to make.

If you end up having too many phones

in your warehouse that you can't

sell, it's over.

With the launch over,

OnePlus will nervously await

the first reviews and, more

importantly, the advance orders.

And they will decide whether these

people will be joined by hundreds

more or not.

The UK's anti-bullying week

is now coming to an end,

but behind closed doors,

computer screens and even smart

phones, the bullying that some

encounter in the school playground

still lives on after-hours.

After I did come out,

I then received online anonymous

messages from an account

set up to message me,

telling me I should kill myself,

because obviously they didn't agree

with my sexuality.

It destroyed me because not only

was the bullying happening

at school, it had

followed me to my home.

It followed me to my room,

my safe space where I feel happy

and I am myself, I suddenly

couldn't be any more.

Thomas moved schools and went

on to become one of Facebook's

anti-bullying ambassadors,

a scheme funded by the social

network to train up pupils

to provide peer-to-peer support

within secondary schools.

It's really important to have

someone there because it's someone

they know they can come to as well.

And with the ambassadors

being their generation,

children are more likely to come

to us and know that they're

there for them.

Because we are their age,

we have similar interests

so they can come to us much easier.

But with so many different

places to communicate,

the problem is hard to police,

hard to monitor and hard to solve,

as those at the frontline of dealing

with cyber bullying attest.

Our concern is just how awful

the things are that people write.

It's very sad, but we do regularly

see those sorts of comments

about "everybody hates

you, go kill yourself".

Those sorts of things,

which I can't imagine would happen

in a face-to-face environment.

As the big and small players

try to overcome the issue,

one British company

has big ambitions.

They want to get their software

on every single child's device

before they use it

for the first time.

SafeToNet don't like to refer

to their software as parental

control because they feel that

could put people off.

Some of the functions, though,

could be considered that.

For example, monitoring the amount

of time that your children

are online and limiting that

however you see fit.

You can block devices and websites,

but it also is planning on upping

the game of what these sorts

of products can do by adding a bit

of artificial intelligence.

By later this year, it's going to be

aiming to track the behavioural

changes, so they can pre-empt any

bullying before it actually happens.

It aims to understand context,

providing triggered alerts

for parents, rather

than letting them actually spy.

One of the ways that we identify

when children are trending sad

and maybe even depressed

is they stop posting selfies

of themselves because they've lost

that self-confidence.

So our software is designed to be

able to pick up those trends

and recognised, again, there's

a change in behavioural patterns.

So we are identifying

cyber bullying, abuse,

aggression, sextortion,

grooming and other predatory risks.

Great if it works,

but of course it's all really

about human behaviour.

Culturally we obviously do

have an issue that young people

believe that you can

behave this way online.

We need to send a clear message,

you don't, and I think it takes

all of us to work together,

educators, parents and tech

companies, to make sure

children understand that.

So whilst none of the solutions may

be foolproof, maybe these ideas

together could make cyber bullying

a lesser problem in the future

than it is today.

That is it for the shortcut of Click

in China this week. The full-length

version is on the iPlayer right now.

I promise we will be back in this

fascinating country very, very soon.

In the meantime you can check us out

on social media. Thank you for

watching, and we will see you soon.