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Lead article
News & Letters, June 2001
Spy plane tussle diverts view of mass unrest in China
by Bob McGuire
On June 1, President George W. Bush quietly extended China's most favored
nation trade status just ahead of the 12th anniversary of the June 4, 1989
Tiananmen Square Massacre (on June 4 more than 50,000 people in Hong Kong
remembered the murdered protesters). Bush's action was taken days after
China agreed to return the U.S. spy plane that crash-landed on Hainan
Island. China has insisted over U.S. objections that the plane be shipped
back in pieces, echoing the Cold War-era way in which the U.S. returned a
North Korean MiG.
The standoff over the spy plane came at a moment of growing friction
between China and the U.S., exacerbated by Bush's announcement in May that
he will do "whatever it takes" to militarily defend Taiwan. His push for a
nuclear missile "defense" system, which China sees as directed against
itself, and his decision to sever some contacts between the U.S. and
Chinese military, indicate a not-so-subtle shift in U.S.-China relations.
U.S. rulers have long desired some external "enemy" with which to detract
attention from problems at home, and China may well fit the bill for George
W. Bush.
Yet as the renewal of most favored nation trade status shows, the
month-long confrontation over the spy plane on Hainan was secondary to
trade relations. Bush has followed the senior Bush and Clinton in
pretending that increased trade and investment with China will lead to
increased freedom. They have ignored the urging of Chinese dissidents who
see crackdowns continue unabated, especially against strikes and peasant
uprisings.
One expert marveled at the hard line that Chairman Jiang Zemin took over
the spy plane, on the grounds that withdrawal of U.S. investors could
overnight reverse a decade of China's production gains, with annual growth
in GNP staying in double digits during the mid-1990s and still holding
around 8%. Even in the U.S. we have witnessed how mobile capital can be, as
when Motorola shutters an Illinois plant constructed but five years earlier.
Renewal of most favored nation trade status merely confirmed what China's
rulers already knew, that they need not fear foreign capitalists willingly
pulling up stakes over foreign policy issues, even if writing off
investments in the largely labor intensive export industry, though in
excess of $40 billion, would be relatively cheap. They might find countries
where wages would be a little lower than the average Chinese worker's wage
of less than $60 a month, but not the workers to replace the 10,000
factories in the export zone city of Shenzhen alone.
Nevertheless, China's rulers have their own reasons for railing against the
U.S. A recent report by Communist Party's inner sanctum warned of a
spreading pattern of "collective protests and group incidents" against the
regime by workers, peasants, and the unemployed. Entitled "China
Investigation Report 2000-2001: Studies of Contradictions Among the People
Under New Conditions" it warned that growing protests against inequality,
poverty and corruption is jeopardizing "stability." In light of this, the
regime is more than willing to use the "nationalist card" to attempt to
deflect attention from mounting crises at home.
During the stand-off over the spy plane Jiang permitted demonstrations that
backed the government and even egged on the authorities to take an
aggressive stand against the U.S. One slogan, "blood debt must be paid in
blood," backed stern action in the name of the downed Chinese fighter
pilot. Such demonstrations were forbidden 12 years ago when aimed at state
and party rulers, including Li Peng and the late Deng Xiaoping, for
slaughter of demonstrators around Tiananmen Square and in Chengdu, as well
as armed repression of demonstrators in over 200 other cities.
CHINA'S DEEPENING CRISES
The contribution to favorable growth in GNP from China's coastal export
zones masks a crisis in the industrial heartland. This is giving foreign
enterprises even more leverage.
A growing army of unemployed from shuttered state enterprises now exceeds
25 million. It is backed by more than 100 million fleeing rural areas and
interior provinces in search of work in the cities and on the coast, where
they can claim no legal status. The state has asserted the right to
discipline the workforce--by the official union backed by police, army,
labor camps and prisons--for foreign-owned factories as well as for heavy
industrial plants that have been the heart of the state-monopoly
enterprises.
The most jealously guarded monopoly of all is the top-down, official All
China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Workers suffered even a greater
share of the death meted out by martial law troops on June 4, 1989 than the
university students who initiated the occupation of Tiananmen Square. Those
who founded the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation on Tiananmen Square
in 1989 and autonomous unions throughout the country were pursued and
jailed.
The wave of executions of workers that followed centered on Shanghai, where
current Party chairman Jiang Zemin was Shanghai party chief and where
current Premier Zhu Rongji was mayor. A number of workers from independent
unions in Hunan rotted in jail until last year; several thousand remain
jailed. The regime chose to expel others such as Han Dongfang of the
Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation from the country on the pretext of
the need for medical attention and then denied him re-entry to China
proper. In the face of certain punishment for publicly forming labor
organizations since 1989, workers from Hunan to Gansu to Inner Mongolia
have been jailed up to ten years for "threatening state security" for
organizing over lay-offs, pay or job conditions.
Workers in the coastal export industry did not have union membership or
coverage under the trade union law for most of the 1990s. Foreign
enterprises had a free hand on wages, hours and conditions. Now the ACFTU
is rapidly adding members in a branch for foreign invested enterprises
under a separate law. Is that for the benefit of workers in those plants?
Not likely, considering that a poll showed near-unanimous praise, by
factory owners, for their working relationship with the ACFTU.
One factory in Shenzhen that had been shorting its workers over $25 a
month--nearly half the minimum wage--and ignoring overtime pay, first claimed
that it was subject to no labor laws, then tried charging the wage
shortfall for food and dormitory lodging. As for safety conditions, 10,000
workers were permanently disabled in Shenzhen alone, for which in practice
the reward was to be fired.
Conditions of life and labor run at a catastrophic level as well in state
industry, where union and industry both answer to the same state-capitalist
boss, the party-controlled state. In the coal mines, an astounding 10,000
miners died each year on average during the 1990s. Pressure to double
production to fuel expansion in a coal-based economy puts at risk even more
lives in the immediate future.
Safety has taken a back seat to cost-cutting in plants as well as mines as
the government has withdrawn the subsidies from heavy state industry. As
many as 40,000 state-run enterprises have been allowed to go bankrupt.
Others have hung on with massive lay-offs which frequently target older
women by cannibalizing pension funds, or even extorting loans from workers.
SWEATSHOPS AND LABOR REVOLT
The tragic explosion that killed more than 40 people in an elementary
school in Jiangsi this year exposed sweatshop conditions in that one school
as young children were forced to produce firecrackers to cover tacked-on
school fees. Spotlighting these illegal fees that in part replace funds
withdrawn to Beijing explain the increasingly early dropout rates and the
number of underage children in the workforce.
More than 90% of secondary schools also have sideline enterprises.
Collectively their revenue, over $15 billion (not including the part that
ended up in the pockets of school officials) nearly equaled the national
education budget for all levels of schools combined.
Anti-corruption show trials of party cadres, even high-level officials
sometimes ending in execution, cannot remove responsibility for pervasive
corruption from single-party domination. Peasants who are guaranteed by law
that local fees will be no more than 5% of the value of their crop have
been presented with fee on top of illegal fee, totaling more than 100% in
some townships after a poor harvest.
Even though acts of defiance are criminalized as "endangering state
security," peasant uprisings have increased in the 1990s. So far troops and
armed police have followed orders, as when they killed two peasants in a
Jiangsi village in April.
But labor disputes have multiplied even more. Strikes and job actions
numbering 8,150 in official statistics in 1992 had exploded to 120,000 by
1999, all illegal. Privatization of state-run enterprises, transferring
assets but not obligations to the well-connected, has created an added
reason for job action. So will privatization to foreign capitalists.
Although some job actions have made gains, many of them have ended in
arrests. But the scale of job actions testifies not only to the desperation
of workers, it also indicates how discredited the ruling Communist Party
has become since 1989. Merely the bayonet and the certainty of jail cannot
keep workers from striking or blocking trains.
It is easy to see the fallacy of some student activists in the aftermath of
1989 who looked for help from the U.S. government whose support goes
annually to Chinese rulers. U.S. workers, on the other hand, have a basis
for solidarity by facing in milder forms some of the problems of Chinese
workers, from privatization and buyouts to housing shortages and overtime.
With the agenda that Bush has laid out, the situation of the Chinese might
even be an ominous vision of our own future if we cannot block Bush's plans.
The publication of THE TIANANMEN PAPERS this year testifies to the
continuing battle to "reverse verdict" on the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Some figured that it was necessary to wait until Deng Xiaoping died before
reform could take place. Now Deng has been gone for four years and Jiang,
whose only claim to power is that one man, Deng, picked him in 1989 because
he was effective in defusing worker protests, still sits in office. But as
worker and peasant opposition becomes bolder, never has his rule been so
precarious.
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