Sunday, Mar. 24, 2002

Working Man Blues

By MATTHEW FORNEY Zhengzhou and NEIL GOUGH Liaoyang

Liaoyang's streets wear the scars of economic devastation. The avenues of this Manchurian city of 1.8 million residents run past abandoned plants and ghost factories. Cities like this were once the industrial backbone of China's planned economy; at the now barren complexes, factory windows are shattered or caked with dust. In the center of town listless workers line crossroads with wooden placards strung across their chests reading "carpenter," "electrician," "plumber"—an army of unemployed laborers that locals say makes up 80% of the workforce. City Hall, a dingy building on Democracy Road, is where workers used to grovel at government offices for back pay or undistributed pensions.

The days of mere groveling seem to be over. For the past three weeks, crowds of disgruntled workers swelling up to 30,000 have gathered outside City Hall, demanding jobs and pensions, carrying posters of Chairman Mao, China's patron saint of workers, and banners reading "The government has humiliated the people!" In the nearby province of Heilongjiang, simultaneous and similarly large worker protests occurred at the Daqing oil fields, which schoolchildren still study as the pinnacle of Chinese engineering and Maoist cradle-to-grave security. In both spots, workers were peeved, genuinely needy of some economic relief—and, most surprising, organized. Workers from one factory, Liaoyang Ferro-Alloys Plant, had tried demonstrating last October against the closure of their factory but accomplished nothing. So they reached out to other workers. According to labor activists, leaders from the plant brought together workers from five other factories for protests that began March 11. That day, 5,000 people gathered in front of Liaoyang's City Hall. Within a week, after the detention of a labor organizer, workers from up to 20 factories had joined. "I've never seen this many people out here at once," said one resident last Thursday, "or this determined."

Is China, the once self-proclaimed Worker's Paradise, seeing the birth of an independent labor movement? Not if Beijing has any control over the situation. The Communist Party traces the fall of the Soviet Union to Poland's legalization of the Solidarity labor union, and leaders still deride worker movements as "the Polish disease." It was the sudden emergence of China's first independent union in May 1989, during the Tiananmen Square uprising, that prompted the leadership to send in the tanks. (A large number of the uncounted victims of that slaughter were workers on the avenues around Tiananmen; in the crackdown that followed, only workers faced execution. Students received jail terms.) These days, those who challenge China's single, official labor union still face harsh penalties. Cao Maobing, for example, tried to set up a union at his state-run silk mill in eastern China's Jiangsu province two years ago. Local officials apparently decided that was a lunatic idea: Cao was involuntarily committed to an insane asylum for six months and abandoned organizing.

What can't be denied, however, is that in China's vast and troubled rust belt, workers are cautiously but increasingly taking collective action. In the urban wasteland of Zhengzhou in Henan province in central China, more than a thousand kilometers from last week's protests, workers have braved arrests and beatings to protest the closure of their factories. More workers are traveling the country, making contacts, liaising. "There's a level of organizing between factories that we haven't seen before," says Li Qiang of the New York City-based China Labor Watch, himself a former Sichuan construction worker. A recent report by the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences frets that labor disputes "are growing larger in scale with extremist actions, bringing about a bigger negative impact on social stability." In 1999, the last year for which Beijing issued labor-dispute statistics, the government recorded more than 120,000 "incidents," a 29% increase over the previous year. And although China's official unemployment rate is only 3.4%, Peking University economist Xiao Zhuoji puts the urban unemployment rate nationwide at 15%-20%.

By last Friday, scores of police vans wove through the donkey carts on Liaoyang's streets. Workers were demanding the release of four leaders detained by police and the sacking of government official Gong Shangwu, a delegate to the National People's Congress—a dangerous appeal that smacked of political dissent. "It's the first time I've heard of worker demands going beyond economics and into politics," says Ching Kwan Lee, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who researches labor. "Now we have great power," said one worker, "especially if we stay united."

Although Liaoyang and Daqing provide the most dramatic examples of organizing, workers in Zhengzhou over the past two years built a network of activists that succeeded, for a while, in resisting factory closures with the risky tactic of physically occupying their plants. A man who goes by the pseudonym Wang Ren is one of the leaders. Now in his 50s with ample girth and a wide-open face, he could have stepped out of a 1960s propaganda poster. For three decades he labored at the Power Generation Equipment Plant, a money-losing factory with half-century-old machinery, that in 1996 was ordered to merge with a private company.

Despite written assurances that the new owner would "quickly raise the quality of production and create a pillar industry," Wang suspected the new boss was really after his plant's assets. The factory stood along a tree-lined boulevard near a shopping district: a perfect place to build apartments, and the new owner was a property developer. There was no evidence of foul play in the sale of the power equipment plant, but if the new owner were to scrap the factory and make a killing, the workers wanted decent payouts.

In late 1998, a moving company interrupted the production line and began unbolting machinery from the floor. The workers drove out the intruders, guarded the premises around the clock and began looking around for help. Some went to the Worker's Cultural Palace Park, a recreation center built for the proletariat during the heyday of communism. Today it's a gathering place for angry, unemployed laborers. A dozen workers volunteered to help occupy Wang's factory.

Wang and his colleagues made friends with the employees of the nearby Zhengzhou Ceramics Plant, which produced dinner plates for export to the U.S. Workers there say they received no severance pay after the plant went bankrupt and merged with a private company, so they took over the factory two years ago. Police tried to force them out; workers from Wang's factory joined in to keep the siege going. Recently, both factories were shut down. Shi Jian, the ceramics factory workers' leader, went into hiding after receiving threats to his life. In February 1999, he returned home to visit his nine-year-old son. Unknown assailants savagely beat him, fracturing his skull with steel bars and plunging knives into both legs. Today a jagged red scar encircles his head like a crown. That attack broke the labor movement in Henan. Today, just one factory in the province remains occupied by workers.

In Liaoyang, labor leaders are on the run after last week's dramatic protests; according to fellow demonstrators, they sleep at friends' houses to avoid arrest. "There's not really any formal organization here," says a worker. "But we still have a good many people with the will to protest." More street action is planned for this week. But if the government gives concessions—releasing the detained leaders, coughing up some cash—things could simmer down fast. As the military police who cruised the streets of two industrial cities last week remind us, workers in China are trying to unite—at the risk of being put in chains.