Labor activists detect change amid China repression
Reuters
13 January 2005
Repression is still the rule in China's response to surging labor unrest, but some Chinese journalists and lawyers are pushing to expand workers' and farmers' rights, two leading activists said on Thursday.
China's roaring economy has created many winners, but the numerous losers have no safety net in a "Market-Leninist" state, run by a Communist Party that has embraced capitalism, said Robin Munro, a veteran Hong Kong-based rights activist.
China is the United States' third biggest trading partner and its growth and stability have an increasing impact on the world economy.
"Independent union organizing is severely criminalized in China, repression against worker activists continues and basically the workers have no one to speak up for them," Munro, research and communications director of the China Labour Bulletin, said at a news conference.
Unrest sparked by official corruption, worker abuse and unpaid wages and pensions is so frequent that China's state-run media no longer ignore it. The party mouthpiece Outlook magazine reported recently that three million people staged 58,000 protests across China in 2003.
"You have such widespread worker unrest now in China, (for) the government, it's its greatest fear," said Munro. He said Beijing fears free unions would infect China with the 1980s "Polish disease" of labor-led democratization.
'TASTE THE SUFFERING'
Munro and Han Dongfan, a prominent labor protester in the ill-fated 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement now exiled in Hong Kong, painted a qualified hopeful picture of civil society in a China Han said was "changing faster and faster".
"There's a limited degree of tolerance emerging in certain parts of the country for certain types of civil rights," said Munro. "It's very spotty and I don't want to appear too starry-eyed about this," he added.
The China Labour Bulletin pursues an "aggressive rule of law strategy" to help workers with grievances hook up with Chinese lawyers to defend themselves under China's oft-flouted labor laws, Munro said.
A recent court victory in which shoe factory workers in Guangdong province appealed jail sentences for a protest over unpaid wages was the result of a "very productive synergy" between Chinese lawyers prepared to tackle sensitive rights cases and journalists willing to publicize abuses, he said.
Han, who spent 22 months in jail for setting up China's first independent union in 1989 and was expelled to Hong Kong in 1993, runs a radio call-in show on the U.S.-funded Radio Free Asia channel that reaches many parts of mainland China.
The 41-year-old former electrician is renowned for working telephones to break news of abuses or horrific mining accidents in remote parts of China. Han said he can "taste the suffering" and sometimes ends up in tears after calls to rural China.
Chinese officials recently met Han in Hong Kong and showed surprising respect for his work - "evidence that the Chinese government is not one piece of metal, it's really changing and different people are having different thoughts", he said.