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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004Lead ArticleUnrest girds China's growthby Bob McGuire A mine disaster which killed 35 on May 1, a persistent independent union movement, and a new women's movement of mothers of the martyrs of the crackdown on the Tiananmen Square revolt of 1989 reflect an undercurrent of revolt in China today. Fifteen years ago, all eyes were on China as millions of Chinese--students, workers, intellectuals--demonstrated in cities across the country under the banner of freedom and democracy. By odd circumstance there was television coverage where Chinese rulers normally control information, so viewers around the globe caught glimpses of a developing movement that maintained itself, not even halted by declaration of martial law, until the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre of June 4, 1989. The spectacular expansion of the Chinese economy since 1989 might now seem to overshadow the memory of Tiananmen Square, but the two things are connected. Popular revulsion in the U. S. against tanks crushing dissidents in Beijing and elsewhere after 1989 forced a debate in Congress on China’s human rights record and economic sanctions. CHEAP FORCED LABOR Both Bush and Clinton in turn expressed their class allegiance by making a charade out of the annual certification of China’s human rights status so that nothing interfered. U.S. capitalists have, with capitalists from Taiwan, Japan and the rest of the world, poured over $450 billion in capital investment into China in the last dozen years, concentrated in the coastal export zones which have been at the heart of the boom years. For that investment, capitalists have sought out not just cheap labor, but cheap forced labor. A growing unemployed army of 150 million displaced workers not only makes it seem to the capitalists that expansion could proceed without limit, but the numbers of jobless put even more downward pressure on wages. Displaced peasants actually pay agents to get a job in export zone factories, under conditions of forced labor that include 12-hour days and more, regimentation of off-duty hours and factory dormitories locked from the outside. They incur debts that make them effectively indentured servants; they are brought back if they are able to run away from the factory. By comparison, Baldemar Velasquez of Farm Labor Organizing Committee in a recent speech estimated that there are 400,000 Mexican and Guatemalan workers in North Carolina doing construction, farm work, landscaping, and poultry work who have paid $1,200 to $3,000 to be smuggled into the U. S., making the movement of immigrants in just one state a billion-dollar industry. The difference is that in China, workers can be drawn into debt to get their jobs without crossing borders. The status of workers in foreign-owned export industries, as forced labor without a voice, is underlined by the fact that they are not eligible to join the sole official union, the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), and so can not unionize at all. Workers in foreign-owned sweatshops now do have the right on the books to form a union connected to the ACFTU, but only on paper. Most shops have not been able to form unions, or factory managers have turned up as union officers. After all, the ACFTU as a Communist Party-controlled union in a party-controlled state-owned industry has always been the ultimate company union. China’s rulers since 1989 targeted those who have sought independent unions like the Beijing Autonomous Workers Union formed on Tiananmen Square, or similar unions in Shanghai and elsewhere. Despite repression wherever authorities have found signs of independent organizing, the banner of an autonomous union remains one of the worst fears at the top. Hand in hand with the rise of China’s industrial development has been shuttering of the bulk of state-owned industry and privatizing much of the rest of state property into the hands of cronies close to power. The plant closings have written off a whole generation of veteran workers, much more thoroughly than U. S. plant closings in auto, steel, meatpacking and the like. China’s boom economy has no need for displaced workers when, like developing capitalism around the world, they can find uprooted peasants, youth and girls, to work at the so-called minimum wage of $54 to $72 a month--or less. So fearful of the future are Chinese workers that the savings rate, even including subsistence workers, is an astounding 45%. The case of Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang, the “Liaoyang Two,” shows how much the authorities--state, local and union--fear workers at these dismantled and privatized plants. Yao and Xiao, held responsible for demonstrations demanding fraudulently withheld severance pay and pensions, were sentenced last year to be jailed until 2010 and 2007, respectively. TRUE COST OF GROWTH On May Day came word that 35 miners were killed at a coal mine in Shanxi province. The greatest horror amidst this news was that the deaths represented a normal day in the mines. The official death toll of coal miners in 2003 may have been in actuality above 12,000--more than 350 times the death rate in U. S. mines. Shortages of electricity, which is 70% coal-fired, have led to scheduled blackouts and lost production as often as three days a week. Coal production pushed up by 20% in 2003, even though China’s mines include previously mined seams and pick-and-shovel operations. This pressure for production as some grades of coal doubled in price put workers’ safety last, especially in privatized mines. Coal is not the only commodity putting an upper limit on growth. Availability of high grade concrete for the Olympic Stadium in 2008 that plans for this showplace structure were redrawn to use half as much concrete. And China has bought so much oil, becoming the world’s second leading oil importer behind the U.S., that the ultimate export economy ran trade deficits in all three months of the first quarter of 2004. The pace of economic expansion has quickened despite shortages of raw materials and energy and looming environmental disasters as uncontrolled expansion fouls water and land. China’s gross national product expanded by 9.1% in 2003 and rose again to 9.7% in the first quarter of 2004, back to levels not seen since the mid-1990s. The vigor of a renewed wave of U. S. plant shutdowns and production running off shore has proven that China remains the irresistible center of attraction for capitalists seeking to pay labor at the minimum and injected China into political discussion in this election year. The AFL-CIO has taken the approach of demanding sanctions against China for unfair labor practices, even by pro-free market World Trade Organization standards involving 750,000 of the three million U.S. factory jobs lost to runaway shops in China. DEALING WITH ENEMIES With economic crisis looming, authorities have treated any criticism of government or even local officials as a frontal assault on the regime, and have redoubled efforts to eliminate safe havens for opposition. In Hong Kong, China announced years ahead of scheduled elections that there would be no direct election of the Hong Kong chief executive in 2007 or expansion of voting for the Legislative Council in 2008. This represents de facto gutting of the autonomy guaranteed to Hong Kong for 50 years after the former British colony reunited with China in 1997. Beijing is throwing down the gauntlet to those who have already marched 20,000-strong to protest on April 11 the effective end of Hong Kong autonomy. Will authorities tolerate the much more massive demonstrations scheduled for June 4, the anniversary of the Tiananmen Massacre, and July 1, the date Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty? Voices of opposition are being silenced by extra-legal means. Death threats and vandalizing of their offices caused two radio talk show hosts to flee Hong Kong. A third talk show host, Allen Lee, not only resigned his job but, as a deputy to the National People’s Congress, resigned his political position as well. Similar intimidation in Guangdong has removed editors and reporters who dared to criticize the government handling of last year’s outbreak of SARS. Beijing used even more heavy-handed intimidation against its opposition by sending a war fleet into Hong Kong. Naval maneuvers in waters near Taiwan could have been a dangerous intervention while the narrow reelection of Chen Shui-bien’s independence-minded party remained in dispute. Yet China did not heat up its rhetoric until after Chen’s election was confirmed. It was as if creating turmoil might disturb relations with capitalists on Taiwan which dominate sections of the mainland economy. Neither an independent interest in Marxism nor the truth has protected opponents. Last fall a Henan province court sentenced provincial official Ma Shiwen to eight years imprisonment for circulating an official report which placed blame for the AIDS epidemic in Henan on officials who had orchestrated selling blood for profit. In April Hu Jia, an AIDS activist, was arrested in Beijing for supporting the public call by a retired military surgeon for verdicts to be reversed on participants of Tiananmen Square. Even leaders of “Mothers of Tiananmen Square,” mothers of those martyrs, were arrested at the end of March, then released. Just as quickly, one leader, Ding Zilin, was arrested again at the beginning of May. There were opposition leaders after 1989 who said that change would only be possible after Deng Xiaoping died. Not only is Deng dead, but his appointed successor Jiang Zemin has been succeeded by Hu Jintao, yet these arrests, and removing the future of democracy from Hong Kong, send the message across China that nothing short of regime change will give them full voice--and sends the message to capitalists in and out of China that forced labor will remain on sale. Twenty-five years ago, General Motors production worker and Marxist-Humanist Felix Martin wrote a “Letter to a Chinese Worker” at the time of Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the U. S. He expressed solidarity across borders long before China became the world’s favored sweatshop: “The only thing that these leaders and rulers see is how much more surplus or unpaid labor value they can get out of each worker. Private capitalism as in the U. S., or state capitalism as in China or Russia, is really the same no matter what one calls it.” This is more true than ever. While time may have eroded the ideological veil preventing many in the West from solidarizing with Chinese workers and dissidents, it is the exchange of ideas about liberation that can fuel an internationalist movement to finally uproot capitalism in all its masks. |
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