China Labour Net

Anybody who claims to be a defender of civil rights should protest against the arrest, since no one should be treated as a criminal simply for what they have spoken or written. We have reservation about parts of the Charter, but we condemn Liu’s arrest by the authorities and their repression of the document. It is sad to see that Chinese writers associated with the well known ‘new left’ website Utopia have criticised the position of the Charter, but remain silent on the arrest, even implicitly applauding it. This is especially troubling as individual new leftists and their publications have faced the same kind of suppression in recent years.

As the economic crisis begins to unfold, China is set to emerge as a major concern for the world's labour movement. This is not to say that Chinese workers themselves are not suffering, along with everyone else, from the crisis. The post-Deng Xiaoping era has seen China tie itself firmly to the world capitalist market, dismantling any semblance of ‘socialised' industry. The state owned enterprises were gutted long ago, while an enlarging private capitalist class has emerged. The Iron Rice Bowl, a system under which many workers had guaranteed employment, health care and housing was conspicuously smashed.

On a midnight of early June 2009, 10 construction workers left a construction site near the China Agriculture University in Beijing with their luggage. The 9 men and 1 woman came from rural villages in Henan province in the Central China or Guizhou province in the Southwest China. In China, they are known as ‘nongmin gong’ (peasant-workers). According to the national census in 2000, the number of peasant workers in the country reaches 120 million. In 2004, a research report from the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), the official trade union centre, estimated that 40 million, or one-third of the peasant-workers were working in the construction industry (ACFTU, 2004).

Nearly three years ago GLS undertook an informal listening project to hear what was on the minds of labor leaders, labor rights advocates, and NGO staff from around the world as they grappled with the challenges of globalization.