Chinese Rulers Fear Angry Workers May Finally Unite

SHENYANG, China — Liu Lao is on the longest vacation of his life: two years and counting.

In 1997, the state-run iron foundry where he worked suddenly stopped production after losing too much money. But rather than lay everyone off, the factory bosses sent employees home “on holiday,” a semantic ploy that allowed them to avoid having to pay severance and welfare benefits.

Liu now spends his extended, unpaid “holiday” standing on a sidewalk in this ancient imperial city, peddling cheap steering-wheel covers to passing motorists and stewing in a kettle of discontent.

“If workers had supported the students in ‘89,” he grumbled, referring to the abortive anti-government protests that year in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, “the outcome would have been a lot different.”

A decade after Beijing sent tanks in to crush demonstrators on June 4, 1989, killing hundreds--perhaps thousands--of people, the prospect of labor unrest worries China’s Communist leaders the most as they seek to hold on to power in the world’s most populous country.

The former students who pushed for democracy are a spent force these days, in prison, in exile or indifferent, more concerned about their pocketbooks than politics. Their successors at China’s universities are more likely to back the government than attack it--witness the student-led demonstrations that erupted after last month’s NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, the Yugoslav capital.

But with unemployment spiraling and the economy slowing, disaffection among urban workers, a key segment of Chinese society, is on the rise. And while few Western commentators seem to remember, the Communist regime is acutely aware that economic and labor grievances played an important role in the 1989 protests, a realization that helps explain Beijing’s continuing jitters over restiveness among China’s 200-million-strong urban work force.

Already, reports are rife of labor unrest across the country, from Hunan province in the south to here in the northeast, China’s Rust Belt.

So far, most of the unrest has taken the form of small, isolated protests by unpaid workers who block traffic or picket local authorities to get their demands heard.

But the government fears that laborers--particularly the unemployed, who number between 15 million and 25 million in China--might organize en masse to become the wellspring of new opposition to Communist rule. Or, worse yet, that disgruntled workers might try to link up with other disenfranchised groups, such as political dissidents, to create some sort of united national front.

“Until you get Wuhan hooked up with Beijing, which is hooked up with Shenyang, it’s not going to be a threat to the government,” said a Western diplomat who tracks labor issues. “There’s potential for localized protests, but until there’s a national organization, it’s not a threat.”

Little evidence has emerged of serious coordination among workers countrywide or between workers and other groups. Many unemployed laborers, often in their 40s and 50s, say they have too much to lose to mount challenges that appear doomed to fail against the implacable machinery of an authoritarian state.

“If we get thrown in jail, who will take care of our families?” asked Yu Wenting, 47, a factory worker who has been out of a job for two years. “Under the Communist Party, the Chinese people have become obedient. They don’t dare fight the party.”

But Beijing is taking no chances.

3 Labor Activists Reportedly on Trial

Last week, three men who tried to set up an independent labor watchdog group in the central city of Tianshui were put on trial for subversion, a Hong Kong-based human rights group reported. The charges carry stiff prison sentences and are similar to those filed in December against democracy activists who tried to establish an opposition political party. The activists are now in jail.

Maintaining “domestic stability” remains the Communist leadership’s mantra in this year of sensitive anniversaries, including the 10th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the 50th anniversary of the founding of Communist China.

“Without stability, nothing can be achieved, and successes already attained will be lost,” Vice President Hu Jintao warned in a published message to workers to mark International Labor Day on May 1. “Workers must wholeheartedly cherish the nation’s political stability and unity.”

It is apparent that not everyone feels the same way.

Protests Commonplace in Hard-Hit Shenyang

Here in Shenyang, an industrial hub once humming with activity, small-scale protests have become commonplace, with demonstrators lying down in busy streets to get the municipal government’s attention. Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province, has been particularly hard hit by a combination of factors--China’s market reforms, official corruption and Asia’s sluggish economy--that has forced scores of state-owned enterprises to go under and thrown hundreds of thousands of people out of work.

On a single day in April, three different demonstrations were staged by workers and retirees unhappy over not getting paid their wages or pensions, witnesses said.

Mostly, the standoffs have ended peacefully, dissipated by official promises--often unkept--of back pay.

But harsher tactics aren’t unknown. And the occasionally heavy-handed treatment of labor activists is tacit acknowledgment of the influence and prestige Chinese workers have traditionally enjoyed as the “leading class” of the Communist revolution.

Mao Tse-tung cut his teeth on labor organization in a mining area in central China in the 1920s. During the civil war of the 1940s, both the Nationalists and Communists sought to infiltrate, use or smash trade unions--big, populist organizations capable of mounting major strikes--in aid of their respective causes.

Although the 1989 demonstrations were led by students calling for political reform, they were fueled in large part by economic complaints over rampant corruption and runaway inflation.

Two weeks before the tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square 10 years ago, a group of labor activists declared the formation of the Beijing Autonomous Federation of Workers, an act that some think was one of the last straws for the increasingly desperate government.

One of the federation’s leaders, Han Dong-fang, who spent 22 months in prison and now lives in Hong Kong, said bread-and-butter issues could yet prove the downfall for a regime that has staked its legitimacy on delivering economic growth and prosperity.

“People’s temperatures are [close to] exploding,” said Han, who hosts a radio show on labor issues and receives dozens of calls each week from aggrieved workers on the mainland wanting to know what they can do to press their case.

Beijing has tried to blunt worker dissatisfaction by co-opting some of the agenda of the protesters of 1989. Since then, the government has tamed inflation and launched a highly publicized crusade against official corruption, a problem that feeds widespread hostility toward the Communist Party.

What has also let off steam so far is the huge gray market that has enabled people such as Liu Lao to sell small goods or take low-skill jobs to keep clothes on their backs and food on their tables.

Official statistics put the number of unemployed in Shenyang at half a million, but residents themselves believe it to be much higher, citing closure after closure of state-owned enterprises in the area: ironworks, pharmaceutical plants, textile makers, coal mines, steel foundries.

“It’s true that the factories are old and the equipment is old,” said Wang Shifu, a former worker at a state-run interior decorating firm. “But that doesn’t mean that all the factories should go bankrupt. It’s the factory managers who are corrupt and who sell the factories and pocket the money.”

Man Hasn’t Received Any Jobless Benefits

Repairing bikes on the roadside earns Wang a meager 100 yuan (about $12.25) a month. He is supposed to receive nearly twice that from the local government in monthly unemployment insurance, but he has not seen a penny of it.

So what about strength in numbers, the idea of uniting with his fellow laid-off workers to demand their due?

“That’s the theory,” said Wang, 47. “But who will dare to take the lead?”

“People know that you don’t come to a good end if you fight the Communist Party,” added Liu, the former ironworker who was put “on holiday.” “Chinese people are like scattered sand. It’s difficult to get them to unite. Everyone just cares about his own affairs.”

Activists hope that as China totters toward establishing the rule of law, workers will begin developing a sense of their rights under the Constitution, until now a relatively hollow guarantor of freedoms, such as the stated right to form independent trade unions.

Ultimately, as laborers assert themselves in the workplace and learn to take charge, such organizing may prove more of a threat to single-party government than the street protests and uprisings the current regime now fears, labor advocates say.

“We don’t want mass [action]. We don’t want violent struggle,” Han said. “The most important thing is that people have their eyes open and know what’s going on.”