This year, as every year, China Labour Bulletin mourns all those who died in the brutal government crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement on this day 20 years ago, and our hearts go out to the bereaved families, all of whom have paid a bitter price for their loved-ones’ fateful efforts to bring China peacefully out of autocracy. Many of the bereaved families, turning pain into strength, have continued to campaign for vindication of the dead and for an official apology from the government for two decades now. We, together with people of good will across China and around the world, salute their valiant efforts and reiterate our firm belief that, eventually, justice will prevail.
CLB Director, Han Dongfang a key figure in the pro-democracy movement 20 years ago, has written a personal commentary to commemorate the anniversary, Keeping the Flame Alive, which expresses the hope that China’s current generation of civil rights defenders and workers can realize the dreams of the Tiananmen Square protesters two decades ago, but without further bloodshed.
Every year on June 4, CLB publishes an updated list of worker activists imprisoned for their actions in defending the rights and interests of their fellow workers. While below, we examine the legacy of Tiananmen, and what it means for the people of China today.
THE authorities’ snuffing out of popular aspirations and demands for political change in June 1989 did not, of course, resolve any of the underlying problems in Chinese society. It simply drove them underground and allowed them to fester. Terror works, if applied resolutely enough, and so the country has maintained an impressive veneer of social calm for much of the past two decades. But several of the main social and political problems raised by the students and workers in Tiananmen Square – official corruption, lack of freedom of association, and absence of democracy – have all basically been frozen in time for the past 20 years, with little discernable improvement. Indeed, thanks to the combination of a free-market economic system and a lack of public accountability for government officials, the scale and extent of corruption are running at an all-time high.
But what has changed, especially over the past five years or so, is the nature and tenor of popular protest and the general level of the public’s demands for rights in China. Whereas 20 years ago, with the exception of the Tiananmen movement itself, there were very few workers’ strikes, protests by rural people or campaigns by urban residents against local government malpractice, today all these are happening, in cities and villages around the country, on a daily basis.
Collectively, this groundswell of locally based rights campaigns by ordinary citizens has been dubbed the weiquan, or rights defence, movement, and it represents the first time in China that the wider struggle for human rights has developed a real grassroots constituency. But what has massively boosted the significance and impact of this new movement is, increasingly, the direct involvement of millions of ordinary workers, especially the 130 million-strong migrant labour workforce. Over the past five years or so, the relentless exploitation of workers – through low wages, excessive working hours and unsafe factory conditions – both by private entrepreneurs and by many state employers, has triggered a rising wave of strikes, collective public protests and even violent incidents by workers around the country. Many of these incidents have involved thousands of workers, but still workers are not permitted, legally, to form their own trade unions or, in practice, to collectively negotiate with employers on the terms and conditions of their labour. Unless and until they can do so, social pressure and public anger will continue to rise.
What China most needs now, 20 years after the forcible imposition of a false social and political calm, is to learn how to conduct – and to set up real, workable channels for – a sustained process of social dialogue and reconciliation. The best way to achieve this would be for the government to implement real political democracy, although the current prospects of that happening are seemingly negligible. However, a great deal can and should be done in this direction; its overall cost would be minor and the social benefits incalculable. The country’s workers, for example, should be granted collective rights under the law, and they should be allowed and encouraged to engage in free collective bargaining with their employers, in order to ensure fair treatment and a safe working environment. Rural communities should be given a meaningful say in how, or if, their land is used for development purposes, and they should be given a fair and just stake in the economic proceeds. And urban residents should be protected from arbitrary eviction and relocation at the hands of venal local officials working hand-in-glove with property developers. In short, all these and many other disadvantaged groups in society should be given a collective voice and allowed to organize peacefully so they can articulate their needs and wishes, while those in power – whether it be the government or local private employers – should enter into a sustained process of free and respectful dialogue with each of with them, with a view to finding solutions that are both durable and mutually acceptable. Only then will the Chinese government’s much sought-after “harmonious society” start to become a plausible reality.
In conclusion: it is clear from China’s ever growing weiquan movement that the martyrs of June 4 did not die in vain. The flowers that adorn their graves have been well-tended and, despite the efforts of some in power to eradicate them, are now spreading to all corners of the country. These flowers, symbolizing peace, dialogue, democracy and national dignity, are assuming new shapes and colours, and are of a hardier variety and better suited to the much-changed environment of today. But they are the same species as before, and their fragrance is undiminished.