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Mass protests shake China
IN A sensational victory for Chinese workers and
international campaigners, ten young workers (the oldest is 23 years old) in
Guangdong province, jailed for protesting against pay cuts and medieval
conditions at shoe factories owned by Stella International, were freed on New
Year’s Eve.
At their trials in October and November, the ‘Stella Ten’
were sentenced to a combined 21 years in prison (three of the ten, minors,
received suspended sentences totalling six years). The ten were, according to
the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, "singled out as scapegoats
and sentenced to prison terms as a warning to others".
Five thousand workers, mostly migrants from China’s poor
interior, went on strike in April 2004 at two plants belonging to the
Taiwanese-owned company that makes shoes for global brands such as Reebok, Nike,
Timberland and New Balance. The average monthly wage of these workers was $55 –
less than the retail price of a pair of Reeboks. After deductions for meals,
dormitories and other items, workers were left with about $27! According to
media reports, the strikers went "briefly wild", trashing a cafeteria and a
computer room and overturning the bosses’ car. Months later, police picked out
ten ‘leaders’ who were charged with ‘intentional destruction’ of property. No
charges were pressed against company security guards who beat up some of the
workers.
Alongside other groups, the CWI and the website it launched
last year, chinaworker.org, organised a campaign of pressure on the Chinese
authorities. Joe Higgins, the Socialist Party (CWI Ireland) member of
parliament, helped publicise the Stella workers’ case internationally when he
pressed the Irish prime minister, Bertie Ahern – prior to his recent visit to
China – over workers’ rights. On 31 December the court in Dongguan city commuted
the prison terms to suspended sentences. This retreat is clearly political,
under orders from the highest levels of the officially ‘communist’ regime. It
underlines important shifts taking place within Chinese society and the Beijing
government.
According to a government report, 3.1 million people took
part in strikes, demonstrations and other forms of protest in the month of
September 2004. This included 520 demonstrations, 170 of which ‘turned violent’,
injuring a total of 200 policemen, and a week-long strike by 100,000 miners
demanding improved job security and accident compensation. By comparison, the
number involved in protests during the whole year of 1998 was 3.5 million.
Singapore’s Straits Times pointed out: "The recent riots in several Chinese
provinces could well be the harbinger of the widespread social unrest Beijing
fears most".
These movements have embraced all layers of society: workers
in the state and private sectors, unemployed and xia gang (laid-off) workers,
migrant workers and, not least, China’s vast peasantry.
In Henan and Jiangxi provinces, hundreds of thousands of
peasants demonstrated against over-taxation and land seizures. The peasants
blocked local government officials from carrying through land confiscation by
using "farm machinery, spears, and hunting rifles", according to the official
report. One passage, which must be causing sleepless nights at the leadership
compound in Beijing, revealed that in Anhui, Hubei, and Jiangxi provinces,
peasant committees put corrupt township and village officials on trial and
executed them, echoing the methods of Mao’s armies in the 1940s-50s.
On 28 October, between 50,000 and 100,000 peasants, joined
by local students, occupied the Pubugou hydroelectric dam project on the Dadu
River in Sichuan province. Carrying banners that demanded ‘Down with corrupt
officials’, the crowd overpowered police, turned off machinery and occupied the
site for several days in protest at their eviction from the fertile river basin
to barren, mountainous plots of land. Two villagers and two policemen were
reportedly killed in ensuing clashes. According to one report, injured policemen
could not be treated at nearby hospitals for fear of reprisals from the local
community. President Hu Jintao and his premier Wen Jiabao intervened directly in
the Pubugou conflict, stopping work on the dam and telling officials to "listen
to the wide-ranging opinions of the masses".
Beijing responded with the now familiar mix of concessions
(sacking the county party secretary and promising improved compensation) and
repression (martial law was imposed with the help of 10,000 PLA soldiers). This
was just one of five or six ‘major incidents’ during the final weeks of 2004. On
25 December, a crowd of up to 50,000 migrants in a suburb of Dongguan fought
with police, burning four police cars and overturning two ambulances, following
the death in police custody of one of their number.
These events have shaken the Beijing regime, which is split
over how to deal with the growing unrest. Hu, Wen and the ‘fourth generation’
leadership are struggling to portray themselves as more humane than their
predecessors. They fear that a bloody crackdown – as in Tiananmen Square in 1989
– could trigger an explosion in the same way as the Russian tsar’s massacre of
workers on 9 January 1905 triggered the first Russian revolution. At this stage,
therefore, concessions are on the order of the day. The regime is promoting its
softer appendages, encouraging greater press freedom (but not to report on
strikes) and ordering the state-controlled trade unions to step up recruitment
among tens of millions of non-union, private-sector workers.
The situation of China’s 140 million migrant workers – the
backbone of the manufacturing industry – is particularly explosive, as the
Stella strikes showed. These workers, who send a big part of their wages home to
the countryside, suffer racist discrimination, second-class status in regard to
social benefits and legal rights, and continual police harassment. This explains
why so many major incidents are triggered by police brutality.
Guangdong province – where one in four inhabitants are
migrants – has been rocked by strikes in recent months. On 7 November, 1,000
workers at Shanlin Technology Appliance Factory in Guangzhou struck for higher
overtime pay. The regime-controlled Xinhua news agency reported that the company
settled the next day, raising overtime pay rates by one third and granting two
days off per month. On 12 November, workers at an electronics factory in Shenzen
took the two Hong Kong owners hostage for three days following a two-month wait
for their wages. Police took no action other than warning the workers not to
harm the couple. On 23 November, hundreds of workers at the Durable electronics
plant in Shenzen went on strike over plans to move the factory to Zhuhai with
the loss of 3,000 jobs.
A study by the labour ministry last September found that
monthly wages in the Pearl River Delta – Guangdong’s economic powerhouse – had
risen by just 68 yuan in the previous twelve years. If rising prices are
factored in, real wages have stagnated or dropped. But as a Korean businessman
based in the province said: "Two things have changed in the past year or so.
Profit margins have narrowed. But also the eyes of migrant workers have opened".
The increasing militancy of Chinese workers has been fuelled
by rapid economic growth. On the one hand, bosses have tried to cut wages and
speed up production to offset soaring prices for oil and other raw materials. On
the other hand, export-orientated provinces like Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang
are experiencing labour shortages for the first time, which has given workers
extra muscle. The once typical queues of migrant job seekers outside factories
have dried up, leading local governments to raise minimum wage rates (though
these are ignored in two thirds of workplaces) and send teams of recruitment
scouts to inland provinces.
This challenges contemporary capitalist myths about the
‘docility’ of Chinese workers and the ‘stability’ of China as a place to make
profits. As the Washington Post recently warned, these developments raise
"questions about China’s long-term future as world headquarters for low-paid
outsourcing".
Another sign of the changing times was the degree of leeway
afforded to the Stella workers’ defence lawyer, Gao Zhisheng, during their
trial. Gao compared workers’ conditions today with those under Chiang Kai-shek
in the 1930s: "What distinguishes the present situation, however, is that in
those days the Communist Party stood alongside the workers in their fight
against capitalist exploitation, whereas today the Communist Party is fighting
shoulder-to-shoulder with the cold-blooded capitalists in their struggle against
the workers".
His statement from the trial was circulated in the
dormitories among Stella’s 42,000 workers. Despite the landmark victory for the
Stella Ten, China still has more union activists in prison than any other
country. More information can be found on the chinaworker website, in
particular, on the cases of Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang (the ‘Liaoyang Two’),
jailed for leading huge workers’ protests in 2002. Given the rapidly changing
situation in China, it is vital that CWI members, especially trade unionists,
step up the pressure on the Beijing regime for their release.
Laurence Coates
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