Countdown to China Upheaval Ends With ‘9’

This is China’s Year of the Rabbit. It is also a year of fateful Chinese anniversaries. The important question for the rest of the world is whether this could be a year of political unrest and social upheaval, too, in the world’s most populous nation.

A few days ago, a Chinese newspaper, the Economic Times, reported that under what it called “the most conservative estimates,” unemployment has now reached 9.3% in Chinese cities. The paper helpfully added: “This is far below the actual number.”

And there may be worse to come. China’s state-owned industries, its civil service and its army are expected to lay off millions more. Meanwhile, Chinese migrant workers whose labor is no longer needed in the countryside continue to stream into the cities, looking for jobs.

All this is taking place at an ominous time, in a year ending in “9.” The last major social upheaval in China was in 1989, when huge protests for democracy and against corruption swept through Chinese cities, and the Chinese regime responded with its deadly crackdown in Beijing.

This was only the most recent of modern China’s heavily freighted “9” years. The May Fourth Movement, China’s tradition of student and intellectual activism, began in May 1919. The People’s Republic of China was founded on Oct. 1, 1949. The Tibetan uprising and the flight of the Dalai Lama into exile took place in March 1959.

Few people outside China realize the weight of these anniversaries. This phenomenon is not merely a matter of mystical belief in numbers; it has a certain political logic too.

“It’s a very Chinese thing,” observes Xiao Qiang, a Chinese exile who is executive director of Human Rights in China. “The country is not a democracy. It has its own way of raising issues. June 4 [the date of the military assault on Tiananmen Square in 1989] is ordinarily a taboo subject. But if you put it as an anniversary, it’s a legitimate topic of discussion.”

Indeed, the 1989 tumult started under the political cover of observing anniversaries.

Ten years ago, at the time of the Chinese New Year, the dissident Fang Lizhi publicly called upon the regime to honor the anniversaries of 1919 and 1949 by releasing political prisoners. That set off a chain of events that, in the end, turned 1989 into yet another milestone year.

Of course, none of these anniversaries would matter much if economic conditions in China were tranquil. But they aren’t.

If President Clinton wants to learn what life is like for ordinary Chinese these days, he shouldn’t listen to his friend President Jiang Zemin. Instead, Clinton should be reading the work of an Australian scholar named Anita Chan. She is one of the few researchers who has studied Chinese workers--their lives, wages and working conditions.

In a recent paper for the magazine Human Rights Quarterly, Chan described in detail a system in which employers--whether the Chinese government or Taiwanese and South Korean factory bosses--recruit Chinese peasants from distant provinces to work long hours at low wages in unsafe conditions.

These Chinese migrant workers “are not entitled to any of the benefits enjoyed by the local residents, such as social welfare, schooling and employment for their children,” Chan writes. They are required to obtain temporary residence permits, in a system comparable to the passbooks that South African migrant workers were required to carry under apartheid.

“In places where the cost of the permit is too high for the migrants to afford, the factory pays it on behalf of the worker as an advance, thereby immediately trapping the worker in a bonded relationship,” Chan reports.

Chan visited a Taiwanese-run Guangdong Province shoe factory that makes sneakers for such companies as Adidas, Nike and Reebok. The average monthly salary was 600 to 700 yuan (about $80), almost double the minimum wage.

However, she found that “this seemingly ‘high’ wage was attained by working about 80 hours of overtime a month (maximum overtime is 36 hours a month by national law).”

Chinese protest movements often begin under the guise of anti-foreign (in the past, usually anti-Japanese) demonstrations, which the leadership finds hard to suppress. Might we soon see Chinese workers taking to the streets to denounce their Korean and Taiwanese factory bosses?

Maybe not during the coming anniversaries. The political controls seem tight these days. The Chinese regime recognized before anyone else the possibility of unrest this year. That was the main reason for the crackdown on dissent that began late last fall.

But the underlying problems remain, and the controls can’t succeed forever. “Are they going to suppress dissent through 1999?” asks Xiao. “Through the year 2000? And then what?”

Jim Mann’s column appears in this space on Wednesdays.