All-China Federation of Trade Union Vice-Chairman Sun Chunlan’s comments that the union should be on guard against “foreign and domestic hostile forces that seek to use some enterprises experiencing difficulties to infiltrate and harm migrant worker ranks” have sparked controversy and have been widely questioned on the blogosphere by many incredulous netizens. (See here and here for background information).
CLB’s Chinese website editor Cai Chongguo points out in an editorial that the comments are very damaging because:
1) The comments encourage a new politicization of workplace disputes between capital and labour. Many years ago, the authorities would automatically see any workers strike or protest in stark political terms, and they would quickly suppress the protest. As time has gone on, however, the government and ACFTU has increasingly seen protests and strikes as events that occur due to specific and concrete conditions at a factory, such as, unpaid wages or unsafe working conditions. The authorities have increasingly dealt with these issues in a more progressive manner, since they realize that their root causes aren’t about political systems or ideological doctrines. But Sun’s remarks could give officials new license to view things through a more overtly political and paranoid lens.
2) The ACFTU’s role has slowly been shifting in favor of management and government prerogatives, but now may even be shifted in favour of what the security apparatus wants. This is a worrying trend. As CLB’s most recent Chinese language report notes, the ACFTU is already overburdened with a cornucopia of diverse tasks, from showing films to migrant worker to providing education to their children, from giving money in times of need to signing collective contracts on workers’ behalf. Obviously, any country needs to have an efficient and effective security and police force. However, a trade union clearly isn’t cut out for that role.
3) Sun’s Cultural Revolution-style rhetoric may discourage NGO’s, migrant worker organization, and lawyers from taking a bold stance in defense of workers in need.
Meanwhile, many other blog posts also called the comments into question. On one such blog post on Sina.com, which has received 50,000 views and more than 500 comments, a netizen satires the comments and the ACFTU, and concludes by predicting that there will inevitably be some “mass incidents” when migrant workers, who having gone to the city are now more cognizant of their rights and won’t be as tame and docile as before, return back to their hometowns and villages. When that happens, the ACFTU’s comments will serve to say, “don’t blame us! These incidents happened because of the bad role domestic and foreign hostile forces play, not because we show no interest in migrant workers in out daily work and that we’re indifferent and have no organization to speak of.” The blog post continues, by saying that the ACFTU is actually, “…worthy of pity. Since they don’t actually represent workers interests, but rather just wipe the ass of other government departments, as soon as something goes wrong, they’re made to be the scapegoat.”
CLB hopes that such stinging criticism will be unwarranted, and such pessimism about “mass incidents” is unfounded. As Han Dongfang has pointed out, in today’s China, one government official doesn’t necessarily speak for the entire government. And furthermore, rural unrest is perhaps less likely than many have assumed, since unemployed migrant workers, once concentrated in urban areas, will scatter across the country back to their hometowns. This diffusion, combined with their lack of organization, are factors that would tend to discourage the creation of a massive amounts of “mass incidents”.