In order to remind the Chinese government about its responsibility to provide for justice and support for the millions of former State-Owned Enterprise workers who lost their jobs in the haphazard restructuring process that took place at the end of the 1990’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, CLB wrote a submission for China’s upcoming human rights review to take place on February 9. China’s human rights record will be reviewed by the UN Human Rights Council in a process that is called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The main goal of the UPR is to improve the human rights situation in every UN member country by assessing a state’s human rights record according to universal criteria. (For more information about the UPR process, see here).
In order to “ensure the participation of all relevant stakeholders”, the UPR process allows for stakeholder submissions. Subsequently, all of the stakeholder submissions are examined by the UN and complied into a ten-page stakeholder summary, which can be found here. Forty-six stakeholders submitted submissions, including CLB.
The basis of our UPR submission drew upon the CLB research report “No Way Out: Worker Activism in China’s State-Owned Enterprise Reforms”, which detailed how the lives of millions of workers were thrown into turmoil during the wholesale, shock therapy-style privatization of China’s state owned enterprises in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The report, and our submission, discuss how channels for justice were systematically blocked, forcing millions to protest in the streets or, in some case, take extreme action. Without clear policy guidelines for how the restructuring would take place, and without adequate transparency, politically connected people bought state assets at bargain prices and widespread corruption flourished, while the formerly well-employed SOE workers lost their “iron rice bowl” and were left with no way out.
The Chinese government’s official submission can be found here (in Chinese).