Han Dongfang
On 19 May 1989, the flag of the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation (BWAF) was first raised in Tiananmen Square. It was the first independent trade union group to have emerged in China since the Communist Party's assumption of power in 1949. At the time of the BWAF's formation, hundreds of thousands of protestors had been demonstrating in the capital for more than a month and the protests had spread to most other provinces.
I served as the BWAF's spokesman, and I remember that at that time we raised only general demands for democracy, including freedom of association and freedom of speech. We made no specific demands for workers' rights as such. In retrospect, I realize that it was those more general demands that the central government was most afraid of.
Before 1949, the main purpose of the Communist Party-led labour movement in China had been to assist in the political conquest of the country, and it did little in the way of actually fighting for workers' rights. In May 1989, the BWAF had no political goals: we saw ourselves mainly as worker participants in the wider struggle for democracy, and so we focused on freedom of association and freedom of speech.
But with huge pro-democracy protests taking place across the country at that time, government leaders must have reacted to the news of the establishment of an independent trade union in Beijing with much anxiety. They remembered all too well the role played by their own labour movement 40 years earlier in overthrowing the KMT government in 1949. Because of such fears, the BWAF was allowed to exist for only 15 days, and on June 4 the tanks and the army were sent in to crush the Tiananmen movement completely. Even today, no one knows how many workers and students died in the crackdown.
Terror works – the Chinese Communist Party survived the political crisis of May-June 1989. Later that year, the Berlin Wall was torn down and the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe fell one by one. Two years later, the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. China's leadership continues to believe that the Communist Party's rule would have collapsed had they not decisively crushed the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. But if we revisit the history of the last 17 years and see where China is now headed, it is clear that continued repression cannot shore up the Party's rule indefinitely.
For the first decade or so after June 1989, Chinese workers remained, for the most part, intimidated and silenced. As the economic privatization and restructuring program got underway and as the job security of millions was thrown into question, they had no means of exercising their legally provided right to negotiate with their employers over such things as redundancy compensation or (for those lucky enough to stay in work) their terms of re-employment. Most workers could only watch in dismay as their families' living standards plummeted.
Worse still, after the June 4 crackdown, local government officials became even bolder in cracking down on any actions taken by workers and other ordinary people to protest against the increasingly rampant corruption in government circles. Although those at the top may have realized that they were digging their own graves by allowing such corrupt activities to continue unchecked, their fear of any form of worker protest or organization was apparently even greater.
But then, in the mid to late 1990s, came the massive program of state-owned enterprise reform. According to government statistics, around 30 million workers from state-owned enterprises –some 60 percent of the total SOE workforce – were laid off during the seven-year period from 1998 to 2005. Most of these workers received totally inadequate severance packages, although there was no unified standard of compensation. Some workers were given as much as 2,000 yuan (US$280) for each of their working years, while others had to make do with only around 300 yuan (US$45) per year worked. Many former SOE workers have still not received any compensation at all for losing their jobs.
Along with a range of other serious social problems – notably education reform and healthcare reform, which have left these vital services beyond the financial reach of millions of ordinary workers – all this has led to the gap between rich and poor in China growing wider by the year.
As a result, more and more hard-pressed Chinese workers are nowadays being forced to take a more confrontational position and to openly stand up for their rights. For many, indeed, it has become a matter of simple survival to do so. If the workers' movement in May 1989 was content to pursue a vague and ambiguous agenda of greater democracy and freedom of speech, it can no longer afford to do so today. What is most urgently needed now is for the range of labour rights and working standards already laid down in Chinese law to be actually implemented and enforced. And if we look at the tens of thousands of collective workers' protest taking place in China each year nowadays, we can see that this is what they are in fact calling for – in other words, they are making worker-specific demands.
Workplace exploitation and abuse of workers' basic rights has also risen sharply since the time of Tiananmen. According to Chinese government statistics, there was a total of 5,600 labour dispute cases around China in 1987, but by 2004 this number had risen to 260,000 – as much as a 45-fold increase. In Guangdong Province alone, the number of labour dispute cases handled in 2004 by the provincial labour arbitration committee was 50 times greater than it was in 1995.
Similarly, in the four-year period from 1979 to 1982, about 20,000 petitions and complaints were filed by citizens around the country. But during 2005 alone, more than 30 million petitions and complaints were filed – that is, around 1,500 times as many as in 1979-82. In 2005, moreover, more than 80,000 of those petitions and complaints cases were ones involving more than 20 people – and most of the participants were workers.
Clearly, the limits of the effectiveness of governmental repression of the workers' movement is fast being reached in China. The greatest threat, at this point, to the national "stability and unity" that the authorities claim to be upholding would be for them to continue driving Chinese workers irrevocably into a corner from which, in terms of basic livelihood, they have no peaceful means of escape.
China is no longer, at least in economic terms, the hardline Communist country that it used to be. The country has plenty of laws and regulations in place to protect labour rights – the PRC Labour Law, the Trade Union Law, the Production Safety Law, and also regulations on collective bargaining and wage negotiations. If Chinese workers were allowed to organize their own trade unions, to stand up collectively for their own rights, and to negotiate with their employers in accordance with the legal norms and procedures already formally in place, then much of the current social unrest could be avoided. And the "social harmony" now being sought by the government would move swiftly from being a mere pious hope to becoming a truly realizable objective.
4 June 2006