News and Letters Lead Article June 1998

Clinton' s ready to deal in China

by Bob McGuire

On this ninth anniversary of the June 4, 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square of students and workers demanding freedom and democracy, Bill Clinton will be preparing for his summit meeting with Jiang Zemin. No more is there the annual farce in which Clinton questions then decides that China' s record on human rights and political prisoners merits continued free trade--not when so many U.S. companies have grown fat on the labor of workers China has offered for superexploitation in this decade.

The summit in Beijing scheduled for late June will take place surrounded by the tottering and crashed economies of the Asian rim. India' s decision to gain popular support by flaunting its long-known capacity to build atomic weapons has turned the spotlight on conflicts in a pan-nuclear Asia, and on high-tech military proliferation. And the revolt led by students in Indonesia which ended the rule of Suharto put on display the mass anger over the human costs of domestic exploitation in the global market into which all Asian leaders have led their countries. The bigger headlines involving China' s neighbors make it the calm site in the eye of the storm.

EXPLOIT, EXPORT, EXPLOIT

That China' s own export-based growth continues after the meltdown of production in Thailand, South Korea and Indonesia has been a matter for self-congratulation among Chinese officials. Other Asian exporting nations have devalued their currencies in hopes of returning to prosperity by surpassing China in exports, and a prime source of capital investment like Japan suffered a plunge in real estate value and a run-up in corporate debt. On the other hand China, while maintaining 8% annual growth for the moment, has found it necessary to deny repeatedly any plans to devalue the yuan.

What they have continued to further devalue are living conditions of workers in the export industry. From the beginning these workers were not granted the wages and rights of workers in the state enterprises, but subjected to the whims of factory owners. As competition for work stiffened, not just between countries but between provinces, export zones and even subcontractors, already unbearable conditions worsened.

The 10-hour day has become 12 hours, 15 hours or more. Newer factories have dropped wages by as much as half from $3 a day. Whatever forms of coercion contractors have chosen in order to exact control of the workforceÐlocked factory gates and dormitories, confiscatory fines, beatings by private security--they are backed up as before by " Public Security," the police.

What makes this production possible, and what threatens the regime, is the world' s largest army of the unemployed. Twenty million unemployed from state enterprises in the cities, by official count, is the smallest sector. Another 30 million are furloughed from state enterprises. Peasants displaced from the land have become a floating work force of perhaps 140 million in the cities and towns.

The young women of this group in particular have produced half of the shoes and a quarter of the clothing sold in the U.S. and have made Nike, Taiwanese factory owners, and Chinese entrepreneurs prosperous while working below subsistence. Nike recently aimed to divert boycotts and protests over its production in Asia by pledging to hire no more workers under 18. But Nike is not even pretending to make promises about paying subsistence wages. The brush-and-glue-pot production techniques exposed in a recent television report on Nike and Adidas in Vietnam demonstrate that below-subsistence wages save companies on capital investment, even at the level of 19th century technology.

Little wonder that this state-capitalist regime has reacted most harshly to any demands for worker control. As soon as they began, displaced peasant demonstrations in Beijing in 1979 and a union inspired by Poland' s then-insurgent Solidarity union were both quickly crushed. (For this reason, it is worrisome to hear that in Indonesia one student leader refused an offer by workers' groups to join in the student demonstrations for fear things would " get out of control." Some leaders in 1989 similarly had tried to use student I.D.s to screen entrants into Tiananmen Square, to separate themselves from workers who had formed the Beijing Workers Autonomous Union there.)

Han Dongfang, jailed as a founder of that union, passed along a report from one factory in Guangdong which had the " right" to make a fired worker crawl out of the gate or face a beating. It was an all-too-typical factory, with 15-hour days, familiar as well to Karl Marx when he was writing " The Working Day" in CAPITAL over 130 years ago. It shows the need to fight for the ten-hour day, let alone the eight-hour day, all over again, against capitalists who wouldn' t be satisfied if they could take all 24 hours in a worker' s day.

Han was writing from Hong Kong because he is still barred from the rest of China even after Hong Kong' s return to Chinese control. (See CHINA LABOR BULLETIN, P.O. Box 72465 Central Post Office, Kowloon, Hong Kong.) Han' s exclusion gives the lie to Clinton administration claims that they pay attention to human rights and deserve credit for token release of political prisoners like Wei Jingsheng and Wang Dan. They weren' t released--they were expelled. This is just one more attempt to separate their voices from the opposition remaining within China, and is no more humanitarian than the mass deportation of workers and radicals in the U.S. in 1919 during the Palmer Red Raids. The fact is that 2,000 more political prisoners remain jailed, their numbers have swelled with fresh arrests of dissidents even in the month prior to the summit.

This year it is projected that heavily subsidized state enterprises, the steel, chemical and other giant factories technologically behind world levels, will be shut down or sold off. This restructuring has been delayed so long because of the threat to those in power of massively expanding the numbers of unemployed. Premier Zhu Rongji has announced that, timed to the shutdown of state enterprises, ten ministries and fully half of the eight million cadres will be eliminated.

Given the corruption at all levels of the Communist Party and state apparatus, the well-connected cadres were best able to escape punishment for their extortion and personal enrichment. The fear is that these are the cadres likeliest to survive this massive cutback. Many of these became the first successful private capitalists by the simple technique of spinning state property into their own hands. Meanwhile, groups of veteran cadres have already joined demonstrations of the unemployed.

THE ARMY AS HIGH-TECH BOSS

Even as the state divests itself of many industrial enterprises, the army is concentrating its economic power. The army, of course, has long received the bulk of high-tech investment. But with a tradition of sideline enterprise, the army as a whole and as individual units is connected not only to military-related industry but even to farms, stores and factories. The military company accused of contributing campaign money to the Democrats was in effect caught acting like a U.S. military contractor. It was in the satellite-launching business.

Because sales from high-tech sidelines, even nuclear and chemical, enrich the military, they have supplied customers from Pakistan to Iraq even at risk of sanctions to China' s exports to the U.S. Export of the products of prison labor likewise makes moneyÐsomething familiar to the U.S. as champion of free enterprise which is expanding prison industries at the expense of " free" labor.

The ultimate in for-profit enterprise--sale of organs from executed prisoners--has its parallel in the U.S. in ghoulish calls to harvest organs of death row prisoners. But for China it chillingly echoes the story from the pen of the great revolutionary writer Lu Xun in the 1930s, " Medicine," in which a poor family, in the belief that it can cure their child' s tuberculosis, bribes a jailer with all that they have to obtain the blood of a beheaded prisoner, a young revolutionary.

Blood is at stake today, the blood of a generation overworked and discarded in coastal export industry, of peasants and workers displaced from land and work. The regime headed by Jiang Zemin may be able to dismantle Maoist state industry, but they cannot get past Mao Zedong' s state-capitalist legacy. Whether the policy is the gargantuan Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River, worsening the North China water crisis, or military capitalism, or support for captive labor/free enterprise in export industry, the real hallmark of Mao' s legacy is silencing the voice of the masses.

The recent factional document within the Communist Party, authored by Fang Jue, " China Needs a New Transformation," reveals some internal tension, indicated by the room the author had to hint at national self-determination for Tibet. Though Tibet is autonomous on paper, supporting actual Tibetan self-determination is as forbidden as workers' autonomous self-organization, a position dissidents outside the party have kept alive.

India' s nuclear tests have raised the stakes for China. If these nations and Pakistan dare flaunt their possession of nuclear might for internal political gain, how far removed is actual use of nuclear might for internal political gain? Post war history has proven these three to be adversaries willing to do battle, and nuclear clout was a specter in China' s war with Vietnam. To the list of countries with regimes ready to sacrifice a part of their populations to globalized production if not war, add Indonesia. That mass revolt there may not be matched elsewhere, at the moment, especially in China, makes it even more urgent to confront all regimes based on national chauvinism and suppression of workers' freedom and dissent.