By HAN DONGFANG, Director of China Labour Bulletin
Published in the Wall Street Journal on 3 May 2005
Another spring, another wave of demonstrations in China. As anti-Japanese protests captured international headlines last month, the scenes of people taking their dissent to the streets reminded me of that fateful spring in 1989 when millions of Chinese, including me, rallied for a pro-democracy movement that was later crushed in the June 4 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
These protests, anti-Japanese or pro-democracy, have one thing in common: They illustrate how abnormal Chinese society is, a society where citizens' dissenting views are consistently suppressed and where people have no normal channels to voice grievances. Eventually, they burst forth as large-scale, angry public protests.
The anti-Japanese protests are the tip of the iceberg. Indeed, rising levels of social unrest are a hallmark of today's China. Recently, for example, thousands of people rioted in Huaxi village in Zhejiang province to protest against life-threatening levels of pollution from nearby chemical factories. There were no negotiations between villagers, local government and factory owners. Instead, a head-on collision ensued between the villagers and large squads of anti-riot police, exacerbating the situation still further.
Why are such social conflicts proliferating? Because genuine grass-roots representation does not exist in China. Ordinary citizens have no organizations to fight for their rights when their basic interests are under threat, and they are too afraid to negotiate their cases directly with those in power. A year ago, thousands of workers staged rowdy protests at the Taiwanese-owned Stella shoe factories in Guangdong, in protest against excessive working hours, low pay and poor food. In a several-hour outburst of collective anger, they smashed factory equipment and canteen facilities and overturned cars. They did so because they had no elected trade union to represent them, and so the company had felt under no pressure to negotiate or improve conditions.
In common with most protest incidents in China nowadays, the Stella workers were protesting to defend their own immediate interests and because they and their families are hurting economically -- not for the more abstract ideals that were the focus of the 1989 pro-democracy demonstrations. In this sense, the current unrest is much more systemically rooted than that of 15 years ago. Unless the government begins to allow ordinary Chinese people to have an organized and independent voice of their own in society, such protests are bound to become ever more frequent and dangerous.
Last November, one of China's worst mining disasters also triggered violent demonstrations. Several hundred bereaved family members stormed the offices of the mine and the local government after 166 miners were killed in a gas explosion in Chenjiashan coal mine in Shaanxi province. Some family members told me that the propaganda chief of the provincial government was beaten up by protesters because he had barred reporters from interviewing dead miners' families. Armed police set up roadblocks near the accident site and surrounded the families' homes, to prevent them from expressing their anger outside the mining company offices.
China Labor Bulletin, an independent non-governmental labor rights organization based in Hong Kong, contacted more than 20 of the bereaved families and advised them on legal rights and remedies open to them, including seeking compensation through the courts. With their support, we hired lawyers to undertake a class-action lawsuit. One independent-minded judge, handing down a punitive compensation judgment against the mine owners, would do more to stem the continuing carnage in China's coal-mining industry than any number of unenforced central government edicts.
Here, as in countless similar cases in China today, workers' bargaining power and collective solidarity are the key, and ordinary Chinese people are learning this lesson in growing numbers.
There are so many deep social problems in China. Since the late 1980s, I have witnessed and heard countless stories of heartbreaking injustice. The numbers of the excluded and downtrodden in society are multiplying. Across China, peasants are having their land forcefully requisitioned by rural cadres to build economic development zones; many workers suffer from avoidable workplace injuries and occupational diseases; state-owned enterprises, foreign firms and private companies owe their employees huge amounts of back-pay in violation of the Labor Law of the People's Republic of China. All these are conflicts that could easily give rise to major public confrontation.
China is currently a social time bomb, slowly ticking. No one knows when some random incident or crisis might inadvertently serve to trigger the explosion. But once it happens, all thought of "building a harmonious and stable society" -- the Communist government's latest slogan -- will be too late. China needs civil society urgently. Workers, peasants, and all other ordinary Chinese need their own representative organizations to defend and look after their basic rights and interests. Only the emergence of a genuine, functioning civil society in China can suffice to avert the looming crisis.
5 May 2005