Deng Xiaoping said the price of getting market reforms going was to let some people get rich first. Three decades later, that has happened in China – and then some. Now, one way of closing the resulting income gap is to let some people do something else first: vote.

How would letting people vote help reduce inequality? Step forward Terry Gou, the Taiwanese chairman of Foxconn, the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of electronics. Foxconn will, from this year, allow its 1.2m workers to vote for what it says will be a genuinely representative union – this in a country where voting in TV talent shows is considered a dangerous democratic precedent. Foxconn’s employees will elect 18,000 representatives by 2014. To keep things honest, the process will be monitored by the Fair Labor Association, a US-based group.

Mr Gou’s intention may not be to give his workers the wage-bargaining power that often comes with a unionised labour force. More likely, he hopes to improve the company’s image, tarnished by a spate of suicides at his factories in 2010 and by allegations of poor conditions and use of underage workers. The company best known for making Apple’s iPhones and iPads also had to halt production last September following a brawl involving several hundred workers.