Labour of love
Rose Tang
The Hong Kong Standard
29 May 2004
`I try to avoid talking when I'm eating,'' Han Dongfang says over a bowl of solid noodles. This Shanxi noodle joint near his Radio Free Asia (RFA) office in Wan Chai has become Han's canteen since he discovered it a few months ago.
Han's half-hour programme on RFA consists of five minutes of commentary, 10 minutes of dialogue with workers and another 10 minutes with peasants. Of them, he says: ``It's like watching a kid grow. I walked all this way with them.''
Han's noodles, cut to pieces from fresh dough into the boiling water, are a delicacy only available from the inland province of Shanxi. The sauce is the quintessential northern Chinese fermented bean sauce mixed with chilli and minced pork.
He is in Hong Kong after a long, tough journey that began with an impoverished childhood in Shanxi and took him on a painful trip that is emblematic of China's recent past.
Since 1993, Han has broadcast a programme on Chinese labour issues on RFA. At the beginning, he only heard complaints of injustice and helplessness. Now, years later, some have taken action by going to court. Through a question-and-answer format, Han coaches his listeners to take the situation into their own hands, no matter how little trust they have in China's legal system.
``I couldn't make suggestions to them on radio. The best way is to guide them by asking questions,'' Han says. ``I always thought a radio voice is the most authoritative. So I try to bridge the gap with the listeners by engaging them in a chat. That's my radio style. The Chinese should smash the threat of power and build our own confidence.''
He samples the noodles. ``This sauce reminds me of university canteen food in Beijing,'' I recall. Han was born in Beijing in 1963. At the age of three, his mother took him and his baby sister back to Shanxi after divorcing her husband. The three had no access to rations because they had no local residency. In those days, residency meant everything from food, clothing and education to jobs.
It was in 1966, the Cultural Revolution had just started, and rural people had been starving for years since the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s. Han and his mother would scout the fields for potatoes, wheat and corn left over from harvests.
``Stealing food could be severely punished,'' Han recalls. The trickiest thing was to sneak past militia guarding the village. Han and his mother had to wait until dark to crawl back home with their spoils.
At the age of eight, Han moved back to Beijing with his mother and sister. His mother supported the family by working as a construction worker.
Han was frequently bullied by schoolmates who called him a country bumpkin. The turning point came when, at 14, he successfully beat up one of his tormentors. ``From then on, I realised fights were all about psychology, not about physical strength,'' he says.
Han volunteered to be drafted into the Armed Police Force in 1980 after he graduated from high school. He disliked exams and chose not to go on to university. After four years of serving the police, he worked as an electrician on a freight train travelling between Beijing and Guizhou province. His main responsibility was to make sure refrigerator compartments containing cold foodstuffs were at the right temperature.
Soon he was to feel the temperature of the nation. It was an afternoon in late April, 1989. Han was on a bus with his wife on the Avenue of Eternal Peace passing Tiananmen Square. They saw huge crowds gathered in the square. His wife asked him to get off with her to have a look.
One small step off the bus proved to be a great leap forward in his life. Han and his wife mingled with student protesters. By the time his wife's curiosity wore out and she was ready to go home, Han had already been deeply absorbed in heated political debates.
``I couldn't leave. She was the real `criminal'! It was my wife's curiosity that got me into the whole thing,'' says Han smiling. ``It was so fresh to hear the students. I had never heard of things such as democracy or press freedom,'' he recalls. ``These were all new words to describe things happening around me. I was so excited. It gave me a whole new angle with which to look at China.''
Over the following days Han returned to the square religiously. He even jumped on to the steps of the Monument to People's Heroes, where the protesters had gathered, to deliver his own short speeches.
One day in late April, students were engaged in scuffles with the soldiers in front of Xinhuamen, the gate of Zhongnanhai, the entrance to Chinese top leaders' headquarters on the edge of Tiananmen.
``By then, many people knew who I was. I was speaking a lot at the monument that day. So some people asked me to lead them to Xinhuamen to support the students,'' Han recalls. His profile was elevated even further when he managed to persuade students not to gate-crash the leadership compound.
The real turning point for him came when he returned to his Shanxi hometown to visit his father at the end of April. He asked his father what would happen if he became involved in the movement.
``That's the government's business,'' his father said. ``You should come back home, at least here you can have two children.''
Han returned to Beijing in early May but he did not return to work. By then the hunger strike was in full swing in Tiananmen.
``I didn't have a clear idea what I was going to do. My mind was exploding. I thought, what the hell, I have already set my feet deeply in the movement,'' he says.
Han and a few fellow workers at the picket line formed the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation. The idea was to participate in the movement as an independent trade union body instead of simply supporting students on picket lines.
Han was elected as spokesman. His job was to meet the media. ``That created the impression that I was the most important and I was the leader,'' he says. ``It wasn't true. It was a collective leadership. I had to correct the journalists all the time, asking them not to see me as a leader,'' he recalls humbly.
The night of June 3, Han was asleep as the situation escalated.
At first the stern warnings sounded like authorities were just crying wolf. Indeed, rumours about a possible military assault had been circulating for weeks.
``I had been an armed policeman myself,'' he says. ``I knew I wouldn't fire if I were a soldier then.''
Around 11pm Han stumbled out of his tent half asleep, the sky was alive with whizzing bullets. He couldn't believe his eyes. ``I was speechless. I just didn't know want to say. I went back to the tent and sat there. My mind was blank.''
He was forcefully carried out of the square by a dozen young people who surrounded him in case he was hit by stray bullets. He had wanted to stay but protesters insisted on protecting China's trade union leader. One of them said to him: ``We don't know how many people will die tonight. Blood will flow like a river. But you cannot die - you will be China's Lech Walesa.''
Says Han: ``What that young man said to me is like a rock pressing against my heart. I can't even breathe whenever I think of it today. I was an electrician who got into a movement with a muddled head. Then there were the bullets and I heard those words. It was a very strange moment.''
Han took his bicycle and left Beijing, hiding in watermelon fields and villages on the outskirts of the capital for several days. Then he saw his name and photo pop up in China's most-wanted list on national television.
At that moment, Han thought of his election speech about his willingness to die or go to prison for China's democracy. He didn't want to swallow his words or to disappoint his fellow fighters. He started back to Beijing.
``It was a road of no return,'' he says. ``I felt like heading towards death.''
Without returning home to see his wife, he cycled around the square several times before turning up at the Beijing police headquarters. The guard thought he was a visitor and asked him to register his name. It was not until a plainclothes policeman recognised him from previous meetings that the police realised Han was turning himself in.
Han was immediately thrown into jail. The first two weeks were non-stop interrogations about why he turned himself in. He was so sleep-deprived that all he wished for was a good night's sleep before a quick death. But he refused to admit that he had committed any crimes.
``I was holding on for every minute [of the interrogation] trying not to confess.''
He shared a cell with two thieves, vomiting after every ``meal'' of buns, pickles and cabbage. He asked to see a doctor but was instead ``invited'' to acupuncture treatment - the prison's euphemism for torture.
``The correctional officers just wanted to destroy my dignity and spirit,'' he says.
Soon he was transferred to another cell, a 14-square-metre room with 20 inmates - some coughing blood. They were all infected with either tuberculosis or hepatitis. He was the only healthy one, and suddenly he realised the real purpose of the transfer.
``The only thing I was trying to do was breathe.''
Nine months later, he caught tuberculosis. By the time he was released on medical parole and sent to the United States for treatment in September, 1992, his right lung was rotten. It was removed but doctors were uncertain if he would survive.
Barely three months after the operation, Han returned to China via Hong Kong, leaving his wife and baby son behind in Boston.
Police stormed into his hotel room in Guangzhou as he was waiting to fly to Beijing. The police took him to the Lo Wu border and pushed him across the bridge over the Shenzhen River. He held on to the railing of the bridge refusing to budge. Policemen kicked, bludgeoned, and eventually lifted him up, throwing him back to the Hong Kong side. The police chief abused him loudly.
``People like you don't deserve to be Chinese!'' he shouted.
``We shall see!'' Han replied and jumped off the bridge.
Hong Kong police grabbed him and took him to the Hong Kong side. Han struggled and said to them: ``Let me return to my own country. I don't want to stay in a British colony!''
During the following two months, Han tried unsuccessfully to return to China four times. He deliberately overstayed his one-month tourism visa (he was a Chinese passport holder then) in order to be deported back to China. But every month the Hong Kong immigration director wrote to him and automatically renewed his visa.
He finally realised he had to face reality. ``I didn't have to prove how bad the Chinese government was by being thrown out of China.''
He chose to stay in Hong Kong because of its proximity to China and was looking forward to the 1997 handover so he could become a legitimate citizen within the Chinese territory. In 1993, Han established the China Labour Bulletin, a monthly publication, with two friends. They gathered information from reading and analysing Chinese and Hong Kong media. He wanted to inform the world of Chinese workers' conditions and to educate Chinese workers about the independent trade union movement.
Over the past eight years, Han says he has seen China's labour conditions deteriorate. In the late 1990s, layoffs were the biggest issue for workers. That escalated into employers owing staff salaries, stripping them of health insurance and delaying payment of pension funds.
Now the hottest issues are the occupation of peasants' lands by local governments, forceful removal of city residents to make way for new building projects, and the skyrocketing number of mining and other industrial accidents. And the problems have spread from workers, peasants, teachers and officials, to employees of foreign-owned enterprises.
The whole country is riddled with labour unrest except in Beijing and Shanghai, according to Han.
What's the worst and most heart-wrenching problem in China since 1989?
``The collapse of moral standards,'' says Han. ``And the government has forced this to happen. Those who care about China have been arrested, convicted and beaten up. Instead, the government encourages people to make money by any possible means.''
Han believes China is on the brink of economic disaster and social chaos. ``But I don't want to bring the dark side to my listeners,'' he says.
Having not set foot on the mainland for 12 years, Han paints a picture of it in his mind with sounds and voices. He pictures his callers' faces, gestures, and even the furniture in their homes to help him establish the scene.
In order to make a five-minute programme, Han sometimes makes up to 80 phone calls to hear all sides of the story, including the government and employers.
``Very often I call local government officials asking them about a labour dispute in their area. They often say `Which one? We have several such cases going on every day!'''
He says he always tells the officials his real name and does not expect them to remember him from 1989.
Facing the recent spate of resignations of Hong Kong radio show hosts, Han is optimistic about his career here.
``Hong Kong is much better than the mainland. I am happy and satisfied here. I don't think the situation in Hong Kong will ever get so bad that I have to escape.''
Han says he has never been threatened or even approached by any Chinese agents or officials here, let alone been censored by RFA. He lives a quiet life with his wife and three sons in a village on Lamma Island.
Maybe the Chinese government should feel thankful that he's persuading workers not to engage in revolution and instead take their cases to court.
``We don't encourage them to form any organisations. We don't encourage them to engage in any illegal activities,'' says Han.
``Is China a social time bomb? Are you preparing to return to China to become Lech Walesa?'' I ask.
``I never wanted to be Walesa. I have been working hard to prevent it [social upheaval] from happening ... but I do despair at times,'' he admits, saying that sometimes he bangs his head against the wall in the studio after hearing stories of tragic injustice. But he never allows the despair on air.
``If you feel hopeless, then how can you bring them hope?''
Han encourages workers to file their cases as class-action complaints to the government rather than taking to the streets.
``If more and more people do this, then we have hope.''
As well, the China Labour Bulletin has acquired more funds through the Brussels-based International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, allowing it to offer legal advice and hire lawyers to help workers settle their disputes.
Han now has a formidable knowledge of China's laws and policies. He admits he has not learned much from Western or even Hong Kong's political and legal systems. He gained his knowledge from listening and working on labour dispute cases in China.
``I am not an analyst doing research,'' he says. ``It's about finding the truth.''
Can he handle the stress? He admits religion has helped him to decompress. He converted to Christianity when he was receiving treatment in the US. His wife followed suit months later.
``All my life has been pre-arranged by God. I just try my best in what I do. God has the plans,'' he said.
Then what does he believe are God's plans for China?
``I don't know. I just want to carry on my contract by doing what I'm meant to do.''