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NEWS & LETTERS, May 2002
Worker unrest met with force in China
"We are the working
class," stated one worker in a March 11 mass demonstration in Liaoyang in
China's northeast. Over 5,000 workers of Liaoyang Ferro-Alloy, in particular
workers laid off and retired over the last three years, defied police
intimidation to picket and blockade streets. Their demands related to job losses
and unemployment, pension and health benefits stolen and withheld from them for
more than a year. Workers in this demonstration
opposed the government shuttering or privatizing of state enterprises that have
led to 25 million layoffs in the last three years. The workers targeted a local
official as the symbol of the government's policy of deliberate bankruptcies, as
well as official corruption, since he had arrogantly claimed there was no
unemployment at all in Liaoyang. The regime has plans to lay off
another 540,000 workers in 2002, one-third of the workers left in state industry
in the area. The World Bank calls unemployment already in excess of 40% in many
a town in the "Rust Belt" northeast as foreign capital goes to coastal
export industry from Shanghai south. Protests multiplied and
escalated through the rest of March and April in China's northeast—they are
still ongoing as we go to press. Demonstrations expanded to 30,000 and more,
especially after the arrest and abuse of workers' elected representatives,
beginning with Yao Fuxin on March 17. Yao was detained as a healthy man, but his
wife found a paralyzed stroke victim when she was finally allowed to visit him
over three weeks later. On March 20, the same day that
1,000 workers stormed city hall to demand Yao's release, police forced their way
through picket lines to arrest three more protest leaders. Daqing oilfield
workers, once the elite among China's production workers, organized their next
demonstration on April 4 without selecting anyone as leaders to deny public
security forces any easy targets. Daqing protests then spread to Lanzhou
Chemical workers. The only exception to
suppression of news coverage about the protests is official slanders of the
workers as hooligans. This shows that Chinese workers know the government is not
merely at the service of a company as in the U.S., the government is the
company. They need our international solidarity. The following workers are
presently incarcerated: Yao Fuxin, Yao Yunliang, Pang Qingxiang, Wang Zhaoming
and Gu Baoshu. To add your voice to the campaign to free them, contact China
Labour Bulletin, PO Box 11362 GPO, Hong Kong; or The International Liaison
Committee of Workers and Peoples, Paris. –Bob McGuire |
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