NEWS & LETTERS, April - May 2009
World in View
China workers' revolt
The global meltdown has curbed China's explosive economic growth, plummeting from 11.7% for 2007 to 6.8% for the last quarter of 2008 and projected to fall nearer 5% for the first quarter of 2009. Sounds healthier than the actual "negative growth" worldwide, but for the world's workshop this has meant shuttered factories and ballooning unemployment, over 2.7 million newly unemployed just in the export-oriented new industrial cities near Hong Kong alone.
Workers' resistance to these job losses has heated up confrontations with government forces. Police stopped a planned march of textile workers from their closed factory in Baoding to Beijing, and have repeatedly intervened against other demonstrations by workers cut loose from export industry.
China is counting on millions of the newly unemployed migrant work force, with no legal right to remain in the cities they had worked in, returning to rural poverty in the interior rather than joining in protests. But even in the boom years many of the nearly 100,000 strikes and demonstrations annually have taken place in rural areas whose exploitation has helped feed the economic engine.
With the clout that two trillion dollars in foreign currency reserves gives it, China has pressed for a more dominant voice in currence policy, but it is still running scared: its economic stimulus package is an attempt to quickly return to at least 8% growth, below which unemployment will continue to rise, as would unrest.
Timing could not have been worse for the Hu Jintao regime, as rising unemployment coincides with the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Important anniversaries in 1989 of the founding of the Communist Party of China and of the May Fourth Movement helped extend marches and occupations from April 15 until the bloody suppression June 4, 1989. Now anyone publicly raising the massacre, professor or ex-soldier or mother of one killed on Tiananmen Square, is detained or under police scrutiny.
--Bob McGuire
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