By Eva Cheng
On August 22 in the village of Beixiang, Guangdong province, more than 1000 angry farmers assaulted the local party secretary, destroyed several police vehicles and rampaged through the local government offices after officials ignored their complaints that they'd been underpaid 30% for the grain sold to the state.
"The farmers threw sticks and stones at the party secretary, almost burying him under a pile of stones", a police officer was quoted by Hong Kong media as saying, adding that many police were injured as well.
Several hundred armed police were sent in to put down the riot, and about 30 farmers were arrested. But shortly after, the party secretary agreed that the farmers would be compensated for the shortfall.
Two days later, about 300 workers of a Taiwanese-owned company in Nanhai, also in Guangdong, staged a sit-in outside the Labour Bureau office to demand three months of unpaid wages, totalling 300,000 yuan (about A$50,000). The mainly women workers, who worked 10-16 hour days with no days off, were being paid at only half the normal rate for manual workers in the region.
They demanded that the officials intervene and left peacefully after a police "request". According to Han Dongfang, leader of an illegal independent union in Beijing until the government barred him from re-entering China several years ago, now based in Hong Kong, labour unrest of this kind has been common in Nanhai in recent months due to bosses delaying the payment of wages.
In March, thousands of silk workers in Nanchong city, Sichuan province, took their factory manager hostage and marched 10 kilometres before parading him through town and demanding six months of unpaid wages.
Other disgruntled workers joined in, swelling the crowd to 20,000 and besieging the city hall for 30 hours. The workers were promised payment before they dispersed, and the money came through quickly.
Last September, 30 workers from a textile factory in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, rallied at the city hall demanding 10 months of unpaid wages. They were supported by hundreds more.
Even though Beijing often covers up such protests, its Ministry of Labour has revealed a dramatic 73% rise in labour disputes to 33,000 cases in 1995 and a similar jump again last year.
Foreign-owned factories
Most protests were the result of workers' super-exploitation in foreign-owned factories — poor wages, withheld bonuses, long working hours and unsafe working conditions — but a rising number of protests concern unpaid wages at state firms.
Despite the promulgation, in January 1995, of a labour law ostensibly to improve workers' conditions, it has not been strictly enforced, especially in rural and township enterprises and smaller joint ventures, where some of the worst conditions can be found.
The estimated 160 million "migrant workers" — former farmers, often from the poorer regions — were excluded from any protection at all.
Beijing has been keen to enforce restrictions on strike activities that are not under the control of the government-controlled All China Federation of Trade Unions. But this seems not to have dissuaded destitute workers from taking action.
In the unprecedented strike wave of 1994, the result of restructuring which destroyed basic welfare and job, the state was more ready to pay workers off.
Three years on, things have not improved. The state-controlled Workers' Daily, on August 21, published an article about the plight of nearly 1000 workers laid off in Harbin in the northern province of Heilongjiang.
Some 69% received nothing from their employers, while the remainder were given varying subsistence payments. Fifty-eight per cent relied on family assistance, while most of the rest made ends meet by borrowing or living off savings.
Some couldn't make it: a destitute unemployed father in Qingdao recently poisoned his entire family. Others revolted. More have a cause to do so as Beijing allows more state firms to go broke: some 5128 went bankrupt in 1995-1996, up from 1625 in 1994 and 1385 in 1988-1993.
Previous wave]
In the 1994-95 strike wave, thousands of workers at the Three Gorges hydro-electric project in Sichuan province struck in March 1994 against dangerous working conditions and low pay. In April, 6900 workers in the Japanese-owned Mabuchi Motor and 2400 in a Japanese household appliance plant in Dalian economic zone in north-eastern China struck and won increased wages.
On May 1, 1994, 100,000 workers took to the streets in Heilongjiang to demand a decent livelihood. On May 14, more than 2000 workers in the Wei Wang Electronic Data factory in the southern special economic zone of Zhuhai protested against low wages and the violation of labour laws. On May 29, 20,000 coal miners in Xuangyashan, Heilongjiang, went on strike.
In June 1994, thousands of workers in Urumchi, Xinjiang, struck. Some 2000 rail, machinery and iron and steel workers in Baoji city, Shaanxi province, struck against forced redundancies and cuts in medical benefits, and more than 4000 cadres in Inner Mongolia petitioned Beijing for greater subsidies as well as against corruption and inflation.
Four months later, 4000 workers at a Korean-owned plant in Qingdao struck over unpaid overtime. A month later, several thousands in Zhengzhou, capital of Henan province, marched to reclaim unpaid wages of several months, and workers at Shaoyang, Hunan province, also struck, prompting Beijing to intervene.
Sweatshops
Many workers were reacting to the Dickensian conditions in China's 170,000 foreign-owned sweatshops. A series of disastrous fires, chemical explosions and factory collapses in 1993-94, most of which occurred in the southern special economic zone of Shenzhen and which Beijing admitted were caused by a gross disregard of safety enforcements, killed hundreds of workers.
In an outrageous example, a six-storey plant collapsed in June 1994 on hundreds of workers who were forced by their bosses back into the badly fire-damaged building to rescue materials and machines. At least 52 were confirmed dead, 160 injured and 200 missing. The rescue operation lasted only 75 hours after which the remains of the plant — with workers still buried inside — were blown up.
Even the semi-official China News Agency (CNA) has admitted a widespread disregard of basic labour rights. Forced overtime without pay (including on Sundays) and the liberal fining of workers on all sorts of pretexts are the norm.
Also serious are the infringement of personal freedoms and dignity. A 1994 CNA report revealed: a Fujian female worker was severely beaten for stealing two pairs of shoes and confined to a cage in a humiliating public parade; a Tianjin firm tightly scrutinised toilet visits, imposing fines for visits exceeding five minutes; a group of female workers at a Shanghai jewellery plant were stripped naked and body searched when products went missing.
Poor air quality, chemical poisoning and the locking up of workers behind sealed windows and fire escapes during and after work were also often reported.
More than 3600 workers died from industrial accidents in 1992-93. In the first six months of this year, 6117 lost their lives.
Rural unrest also has been reported in reaction to widespread extortion by corrupt officials. Beijing decreed a halt to such practices after 10,000 farmers in five counties in Sichuan revolted in June 1993. But repeated warnings from Beijing since then about such practices, and the Beixiang protest last month, indicate that extortions have not stopped.
The most organised expression of workers' revolt was the formation in Beijing, in 1992, of the Free Labour Unions of China, in 1994, the Organising Committee for the League for Protection of the Rights of the Working People and in Shenzhen, 1994, the Workers' Forum.
All were small formations with one or two dozen activists. Their key leaders were locked away without trial in labour camps after a brief period of open organisation.