Proletarian China: A century of working-class struggle
Proletarian China: A century of Chinese labour
Edited by Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace
Verso and Made in China Journal 2022
This book covers a century of working-class history in China. From the struggles of workers on the Beijing-Hankou railway in the 1920s to that of the Jasic factory workers in 2017-18, the book deals with a range of working-class battles over pay, conditions and union rights.
It also deals with government policies towards workers, both before and after the 1949 Chinese revolution.
Before 1949, workers faced repression from warlords and the Guomindang (GMD, Nationalist Party) regime. After 1949, the policies of the Communist Party government changed markedly in different periods.
In the early post-revolution years, state-owned enterprise (SOE) workers gained job security and social benefits. But during the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), unrealistic production targets meant unsafe working conditions.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong talked of workers' revolution, but then brought in the army to restore order. After Mao’s death, tens of millions of SOE workers lost their jobs while migrant workers from the countryside were exploited by transnational corporations. Then, after the global financial crisis caused mass sackings in private industry, there was a partial revival of the SOE sector.
The book is a collection of articles by different authors. Many of them deal with the situation of workers in particular workplaces and their struggles to improve their pay and conditions or defend job security and workplace rights from attacks by employers and the government.
While the book is mainly focussed on mainland China, there are also chapters on struggles in Hong Kong and Taiwan. There is a chapter on Xinjiang, where detained Muslim workers produce clothes for the world market, and where, according to Darren Byler, the Chinese government is building a “new iteration of racialised capitalism and contemporary settler colonialism”. [p. 710.]
Most of the articles are written by academics who have studied Chinese history and politics, but there are also some contemporary accounts of early workers struggles written by activists directly involved with them.
One example is a report by a student activist on a visit to a railway workshop at Changxindian near Beijing in 1920. The workers had invited students to help them set up a Labour School for Continuing Education.
The students, who had been radicalised in anti-imperialist protests against the Versailles treaty, which had given Japan control over the Chinese province of Shandong, realised the need to link up with workers, some of whom had also participated in the protests.
The CPC’s early years
Many of the students involved in making links with workers later participated in the formation of the Communist Party of China (CPC), which was established in 1921.
The CPC promoted the building of industrial unions and the creation of workers' schools. Lin Chun, in his chapter on the founding of the CPC, says that:
The CPC and the labour movement literally grew together as exemplified in a strike by 8,000 workers over humiliating treatment .... in the British-American Tobacco factories in Pudong near the Party's founding congress. Li Qihan, who worked with tobacco, machinery, textile and print workers, was dispatched to lead the victorious strike. [p. 62-63]
The CPC initiated the formation of the Chinese Trade Union Secretariat, which led a wave of strikes:
Most legendary were strikes by the seamen in Hong Kong, miners in Anyuan, and Kailuan, railroad workers along such arteries of communication as the Lanzhou-Lianyungang, Beijing-Fengtian and Beijing-Hankou railways, and textile and service workers in Shangdong and the Yangzi river delta. [p. 63]
In September 1922, the CPC led a strike at the Anyuan coal mine in Jiangxi province. Elizabeth Perry writes:
Launched in the name of the CPC-sponsored Anyuan Railway and Mining Workers Club, the dramatic five-day walkout by more than 13,000 miners and railroad workers succeeded in winning major concessions for the strikers: payment of back wages, improved working conditions, reform of the labour contract system, and a guarantee of recognition and financial support for their workers’ club. [p. 69]
In 1923, representatives of railway workers met in Zhengzhou to form the Beijing-Hankou Railway Federation of Trade Unions. Several delegates were arrested. Thirty thousand workers went on strike, but the protest was “drowned in blood”, according to the editors. [p. 74]
United Front
Following this defeat, the CPC was urged by Soviet advisers to seek an alliance with the GMD. Led at that time by Sun Yat-sen, the GMD appeared relatively progressive. Based in the south of China, it was in conflict with the northern warlords. Later, under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek, it was to turn on the CPC and massacre its members.
Formalised in January 1924, this alliance was known as the United Front. It was an uneasy alliance, but in the opinion of the editors it enabled “important steps forward for the Chinese labour movement.” [p. 87]
In 1925 there was a strike wave in Japanese-owned cotton mills in Shanghai. A Japanese foreman killed a worker. Later British police fired on a demonstration of workers and supporters, killing at least ten. The strike spread to involve 200,000 workers. The eventual settlement offered only modest gains for the strikers, but the strike made the CPC-led Shanghai General Labor Union the “recognised representative of labour in the city”, according to Perry. [p. 72]
During the Shanghai general strike, solidarity strikes occurred around the country. The most notable was the Canton-Hong Kong strike, which continued after the Shanghai strike ended. The Hong Kong strike committee put out a set of demands, including freedom of speech and association, the right to strike, equality under the law, universal suffrage, eight hour workday and a minimum wage.
The strike against British interests in Hong Kong and Guangzhou (Canton) continued into early 1927. It was called off because of the priority given to the Northern Expedition. This was a military offensive by the GMD, with the support of the CPC, against the Northern warlords.
As the GMD army approached Shanghai, the CPC led an uprising against the warlord who controlled the city. But soon after the army entered Shanghai, it combined with gangsters to carry out a massacre of Communists and worker militants.
Mao concluded from this that the CPC needed to build its own armed force. The CPC turned its attention to the countryside and the peasantry.
It established the Hailufeng soviet, where land rent and debts were abolished. [p. 127] The Hailufeng soviet was crushed in 1928, but the CPC continued to work in rural areas and build a peasant-based army.
In the cities, Communist-led unions were replaced by gangster-controlled yellow unions. Despite this, there were some strikes over economic issues. In particular, there were strikes over the rice allowance, a payment given to workers if the price of rice went above a certain level. In 1930 there was a wave of strikes over the allowance. Underground Communist activists took advantage of the discontent to promote strikes or slowdowns.
Japanese invasion
During the 1930s Japan invaded China. Once again there was an uneasy alliance between the GMD and the CPC, known as the Second United Front, to resist the invasion.
During this period the CPC was allowed to publish a newspaper in Chongqing, the GMD’s wartime capital (although there was a wave of repression against distributors and readers in 1941). After the defeat of Japan, the United Front broke down and the paper was banned in 1947.
The paper included reports from factory workers about their conditions. It became a forum for workers’ grievances. Joshua Howard comments: “Many of the issues that workers raised in their letters had an impact on the social policies and political campaigns of the Communist regime in the early 1950s.” [p. 166]
In 1948 there was a strike by women workers in a cotton mill in Shanghai. The workers occupied the factory. The police attacked, killing three workers and injuring 500. Nevertheless, the workers won some of their demands.
At that time the CPC was severely repressed. Despite this, the CPC had a presence in the textile mills. Some of its members had jobs as teachers in evening classes run by the Young Women’s Christian Association, while others had joined or set up social groups for workers who had come to Shanghai from particular localities. CPC members made contact with many textile workers and participated in the strike.
The 1949 revolution
In 1949, Mao’s peasant army entered Beijing and other cities. Initially, not much changed for most workers. Mao’s program of New Democracy included "a set of policies intended to foster and develop capitalist industry while protecting workers’ interests.” [p. 196]
But implementation of pro-worker policies was uneven.
In general, workers in high priority industries like steel and machine building won substantial benefits and even some degree of control over their working conditions, while changes came more slowly for workers in construction and textiles, especially in smaller cities and in the private and collective sectors of the economy. [p. 196]
In some workplaces, supervisors used violence against workers. In August 1951 a young woman worker died after being beaten by a male supervisor in a silk mill in Wuxi. This prompted the local CPC leadership to intervene. Robert Cliver writes:
Recognising the need for action, in September 1951 Party leaders launched the Democratic Reform Campaign in Wuxi's silk filatures, specifically targeting the feudal management system, along with counterrevolutionaries and agents of the defeated Nationalist Party among the filatures' supervisors. The campaign elicited a flood of complaints and accusations about the brutal mistreatment of women workers at the hands of male supervisors, as well as many other inequities that had remained unchanged in the factory regime since 1949... [p. 195]
Party cadres carefully controlled the process, first meeting with workers in small groups to identify the worst offenders, then organising mass struggle meetings at which women were encouraged to voice their accusations, and ultimately punishing the perpetrators. [p. 201]
Similar events happened throughout China. Cliver describes it as a “form of controlled class struggle.” [p. 201]
The Democratic Reform Campaign was the first in a series of mass campaigns launched by the CPC. It was followed by the “3 Antis” campaign, targeting corrupt government officials, and the “5 Antis” campaign, targeting illegal activities by capitalists. The latter helped prepare the ground for the nationalisation of all urban industry during the ’50s.
Such campaigns were initially directed mainly against people holding prominent positions, such as managers, officials and capitalists. But they could also be directed against ordinary workers accused of petty theft, etc. Campaigns were also used as a way to pressure people to work harder. Jake Werner says that: “...the campaign form was increasingly employed to tighten labour discipline and ratchet up labour intensity.” [p. 229]
Worker participation
During the early 1950s, Chinese industrial workers gained benefits including health insurance, medical care, literacy education, child care and improvements in working conditions.
Forms of worker's participation were established. In private companies these were known as “labour-capital consultative conferences”. [p. 199] In state-owned enterprises they were called “factory management committees”. [p .222]
By 1956, urban industry had been completely nationalised. According to Chen Feng, “A substantial proportion of industrial workers benefited from the new system, which provided them with access to housing, education and health care, as well as lifetime employment.” [p. 276]
But these conditions applied only to permanent workers. Many temporary workers were dismissed, often being forced to return to their home villages. This was a major reason for protests in the 1950s.
There were also disputes over wages, safety and other issues. According to the editors,
many workers saw their conditions deteriorate....in this period, management’s despotic power over the working class, alongside a maladroit reform of the wage system in the second semester of 1956, heavily hit the material interests of the workers, leading to a wave of strikes. [p. 265]
Pressure to meet output targets led to excessive workloads and unsafe conditions.
The strike wave led to a debate within the party over the right to strike. Initially Mao was supportive. In early 1957 there was a short-lived period of relatively open discussion, with Mao saying “Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.” However, this was followed by a wave of repression in the second half of the year.
This affected the union movement: at least 22 leading cadres of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) were purged, including the editor of the Workers Daily. After this, the union federation lost all relevance and was dissolved a few years later, during the Cultural Revolution. Though later revived, it remained ineffective.
The Great Leap Forward
The Great Leap Forward (GLF), launched in 1958, set unrealistic targets for the rapid expansion of production. This led to increased deaths from industrial accidents.
An example is the coal mining industry. In the early 1950s, the government introduced safety policies that reduced death rates. But the pressure to increase production undermined these policies, particularly during the GLF.
According to Tom Wright,
The number of workers killed in Chinese coal mines increased from around 600 in the mid-1950s to more than 6,000 in 1960. [p. 305]
This included 650 miners killed in a massive explosion at the Laobaidong mine in May 1960.
There was a revival of concern for safety in the early 1960s, but the Cultural Revolution undermined safety institutions. China’s coal mines remained unsafe in the following decades, though since 2003 safety has greatly improved.
Rural areas
During the GLF (1958-60) there was a rapid transition to extremely large rural collectives, known as communes, involving thousands of farmers. At the same time, excessive production targets were imposed. According to Jonathan Unger,
Huge quantities of grain were shipped off to the cities and onward abroad as exports while rural officials competed to exaggerate the size of local harvest yields. The consequence of all this was a collapse in rural production during 1959 and 1960 and a plunge into starvation in many parts of the countryside. [p. 338]
Following this disaster, the collectives were re-organised. Production was put in the hands of teams containing between 15-40 households who collectively owned a block of land.
This system was very successful. The production team not only organised the growing of crops, but provided a range of services to its members. Unger writes:
In many villages, by the late 1960s or 1970s, almost free health care and elementary schooling were being provided through production team revenues — reaching much of rural China for the first time in history. Production teams also paid for the sustenance of orphans, widows, and the childless elderly. In much of rural China, mortality rates declined dramatically and the length of villagers’ lives began to approach that in developed nations. [p. 339]
But Unger argues that the production teams were undermined by the “top-down” nature of the Chinese political system. The national leaders were “unwilling to give the production team members enough leeway in figuring out what crops to grow or enough say on how their own teams and villages were run.” [p. 340]
For example, the government insisted that most of the land be used for growing grain rather than vegetables or fruit trees or animal husbandry. This caused discontent, reducing farmers’ support for collective agriculture.
Cultural Revolution
In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which initially involved students but then spread to the working class. Joel Andreas writes:
Between autumn 1966 and the spring of 1969, workers organised huge rallies, marches, factory occupations, sieges and street battles involving tens of millions of people… Workers across the country divided into rebel and conservative factions: the rebels were inspired by Mao Zedong’s call to challenge local Communist Party authorities, while the conservatives defended those authorities. [p. 406]
Andreas asks whether the rebels were simply following Mao or acting independently. He says the answer must be “nuanced”.
On the one hand, the rebel movement was inspired by Mao, it could not have existed without his support and rebel workers generally did their best to follow his lead. On the other hand, the rebels were self-organised, they effectively challenged factory and municipal party authorities and they forcefully raised demands for popular participation. [p. 406]
Although the rebels generally followed Mao’s lead, there were times when they did not:
There were a number of accounts, for instance, of workers’ efforts to raise economic demands, which took place in the early weeks of the workers' movement, before Mao denounced “economism”. Many workers attempted to win improved conditions and welfare in their own work units and temporary workers organised a remarkable national movement to demand permanent status. [p. 407]
Eventually however Mao suppressed those rebels who did not follow his instructions. He “called on the military to dispatch small teams of officers to factories to oversee the formation of ‘revolutionary committees’ comprising these officers, veteran Party cadres and ‘mass representatives’ — that is, leaders of the rebel groups.” [p. 409] Those rebels who resisted were repressed.
Abandoning collective farming
Mao died in 1976. By 1978 a new leadership headed by Deng Xiaoping had taken control. The new leadership began to implement market-oriented policies. It replaced collective agriculture by household farming.
Unger says that the farmers were unhappy with “commands from above” under the collective system.
However, the farmers did not abandon collective agriculture and revert to household-based farming on their own. Orders to do so came from above in the early 1980s. [p. 458]
Under the new system, the land remained property of the production team, but was allocated to households based on the number of family members. In many cases, land was periodically reallocated as the number of family members changed, but the government is now discouraging this practice. It has begun encouraging agribusiness.
Pressures have been exerted on villager small groups to lease all their land to a large-scale farmer or corporation — sometimes on contracts lasting several decades. [p. 465]
Meanwhile increasing numbers of young people have left the villages to work in the cities:
The number of migrant workers from the countryside has now swelled to more than 200 million. [p. 462]
Family members were separated:
Practically all of the young villagers who sought work elsewhere in China after the disbandment of collective agriculture moved without their families, because China’s system of household registration (hukou) erected legal barriers to migration. [p. 463]
Initially most factories hired young women, often dismissing them when they were 24 years old. Men often worked in construction. But as the demand for factory workers increased, women with children were recruited. Often both husbands and wives worked in the city leaving their children in the care of their grandparents in their village.
1989
By 1989, after a decade of market reforms, the editors say there was “a growing sense of uneasiness caused by the incipient dismantling of the welfare system, widespread management corruption and inflation.” [p. 495] When students protested in Tiananmen Square, workers joined them. They also established independent unions.
According to Yueran Zhang,
workers not only mobilised on a massive scale but also developed an independent political agenda and strategic outlook that was somewhat at odds with what the students had in mind. [p. 496]
When the government declared martial law and sent troops into the city, workers built barricades. But they also brought food and water to the soldiers and talked to them, convincing them to stop their march.
During the struggle to obstruct the military, workers started to realise the power of their spontaneous organisation and action. A huge wave of self-organising ensued. [p. 498]
New workers organisations mushroomed. Zhang compares the situation to Petrograd in 1917. The radicalisation of the workers terrified the party leaders. Zhang says that “workers faced much more severe repression than students both during and after the massacre”. [p. 499]
According to Zhang, the main source of working class discontent was the
expansion of managerial power over the operation of state-owned factories… As staff and workers' congresses were systematically disempowered and deactivated, workers lost their limited power over decision-making in factories and directly experienced managerial despotism at the point of production...
With workers feeling oppressed, mistreated, stripped of their dignity, and facing increasing power inequalities, they aspired to democracy first and foremost in the workplace. [p. 500]
Workers had a different conception of democracy than the students:
Democracy as defined by the workers entailed the replacement of bureaucracy with workers’ self-management, and the first step towards this goal was to establish democratic and independent workplace organisations.... In sharp contrast, the democratic ideal articulated by intellectuals and students comprised a set of supposedly universal liberal values. [p. 501]
After the movement was crushed, workers were treated much more harshly than students:
....except for a few leaders, students were let go, whereas workers were violently prosecuted on a much wider scale. [p. 503]
During the 1990s, many students who had participated in the 1989 protest became part of the middle class, while many workers lost their jobs.
Whereas the economic reforms of the 1990s greatly benefited intellectuals and students, they almost completely destroyed the urban working class. As the majority of state-owned enterprises were restructured, downsized, and privatised, workers lost their jobs or faced much worse working conditions and meagre benefits and protections. [p. 504]
SEZs and migrant workers
Special Economic Zones (SEZs) are areas where foreign investors are given incentives to establish factories employing low-paid Chinese workers. They predominantly employ migrant workers from the countryside.
The first SEZ was established in Shenzhen in 1980. Foreign investors came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan, but they were often supplying clothing, footwear or toys to be sold by big Western companies.
Anita Chan writes of the “extremely long working hours, repetitive tasks, a poor environment, abusive treatment, toxic air, and industrial injuries.” [p. 508] She also writes of “slave-like working conditions” in the early 1990s. [p. 506]
The working conditions attracted international attention in 1993, when a fire in the Zhili toy factory killed 87 workers. Labour NGOs (non-government organisations concerned with workers’ rights) in Hong Kong developed a code of conduct for the toy industry. Unions and other activists campaigned to shame the transnational corporations that benefited from the super-exploitation of Chinese workers.
Labour law
In 1994, the Chinese government adopted a labour law for the first time. According to Sarah Biddulph, the law was adopted in response to “increasing labour unrest and a series of workplace disasters that occurred in 1993.” [p. 514)
The law made individual contracts “the cornerstone of the labour relationship.” [p. 518] It specified workers must be paid at least the minimum wage, a standard 44 hour week with overtime pay if working beyond that, paid holidays and parental leave, etc.
However, many workers were excluded from these protections. Biddulph says:
Enactment of the legal concept of ‘labour relationship’ has effectively excluded large swathes of the Chinese workforce, leaving aside migrant workers, rural labourers, members of the armed forces, government officials, domestic workers, students on training programs, independent contractors and retirees. [p. 520]
Deficiencies in the law contributed to “widespread worker unrest”, including over non-payment of migrant workers’ wages. [p. 524] The government responded with the introduction of new laws in 2007-8. Although the new legislation was “more worker-friendly”, [p. 524], it did not change the basic structure of the law, which remains based on individual contracts.
Labour NGOs
Beginning in the 1990s, activists began setting up organisations giving advice to workers on their legal rights. Early examples were the China Working Women’s Network in Shenzhen and the Female Migrant Workers’ Club in Beijing. According to Jude Howell, these groups faced “periods of government harassment and suspicion.” [p. 527]
Conditions for labour NGOs improved in the early 2000s. China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, which led to greater international scrutiny. A new leadership came to power in China (Hu Jintao as party secretary in 2002, and Wen Jiabao as premier in 2003) with a rhetoric of “people-centred development”. Hong Kong NGOs helped establish labour NGOs in China.
NGOs provided services, legal advice and advocacy. They monitored codes of conduct for transnational corporations. The focus was on individual rights, not collective struggle.
However, Xi Jinping, who became party leader in 2012, adopted a more repressive attitude. In 2015 there was a wave of arrests:
… security agencies made a sweep of rights-based organisations and activists, including rights lawyers, feminists, dissidents, critical academics, and labour activists. [p. 532]
Meanwhile, workers continue to strike and protest.
The violation of labour laws and poor conditions of work continue to vex workers, who carry on striking, protesting, or voting with their feet. [p. 533]
Attempts to create independent unions
There have been several attempts at creating unions independent of the sole officially permitted union federation, the ACFTU.
A section of the 1989 pro-democracy movement developed an orientation to the working class. Some tried to imitate Poland’s Solidarity. One example was the Free Labour Union of China, formed in 1991.
According to Kevin Lin,
the FLUC focused on the deteriorating conditions of state-sector workers as market reforms undermined their welfare. [p. 537]
In 1992 they published a pamphlet criticising the economic reforms, and saying that the CPC was no longer the party of the working class.
Another group, the League for the Protection of the Rights of Working People, did not openly challenge the CPC but called for the restoration of the right to strike.
A third group, the Federation of Hired Hand Workers, focused on the conditions of migrant workers.
But regardless of whether or not they explicitly criticised the CPC, these groups were seen as a threat. Lin reports:
The leaders and key participants in these groups were rounded up within a year or two, and many were handed harsh sentences. [p. 542]
In subsequent decades, there were many outbreaks of rebellion, but these did not result in the creation of independent unions.
Huge layoffs in SOEs
During the second half of the ’90s, there was a huge wave of lay-offs in state-owned and collective enterprises.
According to William Hurst, by the end of 1998, the number of laid-off workers had increased to “at least 30 million”. [p. 548] Dorothy Solinger cites an internal report saying that the number of unemployed was close to sixty million by 2001. [p. 557]
At the 1997 CPC congress, general secretary Jiang Zemin advocated “cutting workers to increase efficiency”. [cited by Hurst, p. 547] Lay-offs of SOE workers had been occurring since the ’80s, but previously they were kept hidden. Now they were openly encouraged.
Firms received quotas for what percentage of staff should be laid-off and sometimes had to scramble to meet them, shedding workers they actually needed to maximise efficient production. [p. 549]
Smaller SOEs were privatised. Workers were sacked, then invited to re-apply for their old jobs, often with lower pay, worse conditions and no job security.
The 2008 global economic crisis led to a change of policy. China’s private sector was severely affected by the global crisis. Thirty million workers lost their jobs. [p. 592]
To revive the economy, the government had to revitalise the state sector.
Indeed, the massive fiscal stimulus the central government injected into the economy had a principal effect of showering credit and investment on SOEs, rendering workers still employed in them a new kind of blue-collar aristocracy. Wages and working conditions improved markedly, where they had been declining precipitously for most of the previous twenty-five years. [p. 551]
However, by this stage more than 60% of state-sector jobs had already gone.
Worker resistance
Job losses created huge discontent. According to Solinger,
an internal report of the Ministry of Public Security claimed that 30,000 mass incidents occurred in the first nine months of 2000. The figure included protests of all kinds, but a great many of them were over issues of job loss and unpaid wages and pensions. [p. 557-558]
One example was a strike in the city of Liaoyang in March 2002. For more than a week, tens of thousands of workers marched through city streets. They came from twenty state-owned factories that went bankrupt.
They demanded payment of back wages, pensions and unemployment allowances owed to them for months or years. They also demanded the removal of the head of the local government. They accused both the local government and enterprise management of corruption.
In response to the protests, the Chinese government adopted a “carrot and stick” approach. According to Ching Kwan Lee, “officials rushed to offer workers most of the money they were owed”. Some corrupt local officials were arrested, demoted or removed. But at the same time,
the local news media condemned the protest leaders as troublemakers who “colluded with hostile foreign forces”. [p. 565-566]
Two worker leaders were given prison terms of four to seven years.
In the longer term, worker protests such as the Liaoyang strike forced the government to show more concern for people’s welfare. Ching Kwan Lee writes, “labour unrest....generated pressure for social policy changes.” [p. 566]
Labor contract law
In 2002 Hu Jintao took over as CPC leader. He spoke of creating a “harmonious society”. One aspect was improving conditions for workers.
In 2008 three new laws were adopted: the Labour Contract Law, the Employment Promotion Law and the Labour Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law.
The LCL provided that workers must be given written contracts. It was meant to improve job security. It did improve the situation for some workers, but not all.
According to Mary Gallagher,
The strengthened employment security regulations of the LCL have enhanced the workplace conditions for formal standard workers, while those caught in precarious and unstable employment are bereft of these protections. [p. 588]
The increasing numbers of digital platform workers are classified as individual contractors and have no protection.
Nanhai Honda strike
On March 17, 2010, workers at the Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing Company in the Nanhai district in Foshan city, Guangdong province, went on strike. The mobilisation involved 1800 workers and lasted 27 days.
According to Chris Chan and Elaine Hui,
The strikers listed 108 demands, but consistently named two as the major issues: a wage increase of 800 yuan for all workers, and democratic reform of the trade unions, as the existing union did little to represent the workers' interests. [p. 618]
The workers won pay rises of 500 yuan for regular workers and 600 for the interns who made up 80% of the workforce. There was no real progress on democratising the union.
The Honda strike inspired a wave of strikes throughout China’s vehicle industry.
Foxconn suicides
In May 2010 a group of activists in Hong Kong drew attention to the high incidence of suicides among workers at Foxconn plants in China. By December 2010 the number of known cases had risen to 14 dead and four others injured while attempting suicide. All were young rural migrant workers.
Foxconn is a Taiwanese company that produces electronic devices, such as computers and phones, in China for international corporations such as Apple.
Jenny Chan argues that
workers’ depression, and suicide in extreme cases, is connected to their working and living conditions in the broader context of the international political economy. Foxconn’s management regime — including its heavy reliance on young workers, low-cost and just-in-time assembly, and “flexible” wage and working hours policy — is a response to the high-pressure purchasing practices of global corporations. [p. 629]
An ever-shorter production cycle, accelerated finishing times and compulsory overtime requirements placed intense pressure on Foxconn assembly-line workers. New workers in particular were reprimanded for working “too slowly” regardless of their efforts to keep up with the “standard work pace”. [p. 630]
Foxconn is able to impose these harsh conditions because of the ineffectiveness of the official trade union:
The toothless role of Foxconn’s trade union mirrors nationwide trends of managerial control over employees and the absence of substantive worker representation at the workplace level. [p. 631]
Nevertheless, some of Foxconn’s one million Chinese workers have fought back.
Worker-led strikes and protests at numerous Foxconn sites were part of a pattern of growing labour unrest across coastal and inland China. [p. 632]
In some cases the workers have been aided by “support structures provided by NGOs, progressive student groups and human rights lawyers”.
Labour NGOs under attack
An increasing number of workers took their cases to arbitration committees and courts, resulting in long delays in hearing cases. Many workers and some NGO activists were dissatisfied with this individualistic approach.
Some NGOs, particularly in Guangdong province, began encouraging workers to organise, elect representatives and engage in collective bargaining with employers, demanding not only their legal rights but also improved pay and conditions.
According to Chloe Froissart and Ivan Franceschini,
Between 2011 and 2015, workers obtained hundreds of billions of yuan in wages, layoff compensation, social insurance and housing fund contributions and other benefits through collective bargaining. [p. 689]
However, the government, headed since 2013 by Xi, took repressive measures against some of these labour NGOs.
In December 2015, the police detained a couple of dozen labour activists in Guangdong, eventually charging five of them. In January 2019, authorities arrested another five labour NGO activists who in the past had played some role in promoting collective bargaining.
Jasic struggle
In early 2017 workers at the Jasic welding equipment manufacturing company in Shenzhen began a struggle that lasted more than a year and attracted nationwide and international attention and solidarity.
According to Manfred Elfstrom, the workers suffered
managerial physical and verbal abuse, the company’s constant redefinition of rest days, extensive fines for work rule infractions, and underpayment of social insurance premiums and housing allowances. [p. 694]
The workers took their complaints to the local labour bureau and won some concessions. But the company refused to return money already deducted from workers’ pay.
In 2018 workers launched a unionisation drive. Leading activists were attacked by thugs and roughly escorted from the plant. When they returned, police detained and beat them.
On July 27 that year, after a night time rally, police arrested 30 protesters. When protesters gathered to demand their release, at least 12 more were arrested.
Information about the case circulated among leftists on the Chinese internet. A Jasic Workers Solidarity Group was formed. Students came from other cities including Beijing to support the Jasic workers.
On August 26, 2018, police stormed an apartment shared by student supporters of the Jasic workers and arrested about 40 people.
By early 2019 the movement had largely been suppressed. But this experience shows the potential to build a broad movement of workers and their allies that challenges capitalist exploitation.
