NEWS & LETTERS, June - July 2009
World in View
China 20 years after
Over 150,000 people marched in Hong Kong in the largest demonstration since 1989 to honor the thousands of workers and students killed by tanks and soldiers in and around Tiananmen Square 20 years ago on June 4. This demontration represented dissent that China's rulers suppressed elsewhere.
The anniversary struck as the global recession has deepened, ending China's double digit annual economic growth. Wishful thinking official projections of 7.9% GDP growth for 2009 would fall just short of what is needed to absorb the growing workforce. But in light of exports dropping 25% since February, unemployment may rise this year by as many as 40 million workers--a tinderbox for unrest.
Therefore China's rulers employed extraordinary means to silence not only the Tiananmen generation of dissenters, but also the post-1980 generation that remade China as the world's workshop. Zhang Shijun, one of 300,000 soldiers ordered to clear Tiananmen Square, was detained in March for expressing public regrets for the army's role. Ding Zilin and other members of Tiananmen Mothers were confined to their houses by force on June 4 this year.
As Beijing Spring unfolded over seven weeks in 1989, tens of millions of students and workers demonstrating in over 400 cities used technology like television and fax machines to bypass official control of information. This year, in advance of June 4, the government shut down social networking sites used especially by youth, like Twitter and Flickr, and even Hotmail, not unlike Iran blocking texting before and after the June elections.
The government has now threatened tighter control of each internet user by mandating that all personal computers sold after July 1 include built-in software allowing central blocking and monitoring of "pornography and other unhealthy information." Thanks to companies like Google and Yahoo customizing their systems for easier surveillance, reporters and essayists, or prominent satirists like Lu Di, have been jailed even before that new technology.
As the economic downturn began, 25,000 factories in the city of Dongguan alone shut their doors as of February. Guangdong provincial officials were pushing Beijing to suspend the Labor Contract Law, which legalized unions, though only for the foreign-owned export industry, in 2008. Workers in closed factories have had to challenge companies and local officials for even severance pay provisions in the law.
Companies like Wal-Mart and FedEx, which are virulently anti-union in the U.S., accepted the government's company union as their own company union. Yet reporters have found sweatshops supplying hi-tech products for companies like Apple and Microsoft that have kept even this weak union at bay, continuing to pay less than the minimum wage to workers locked in and working up to 100 hours a week.
A new round of strikes, each one a wildcat strike, has broken out among workers left holding the bag. Despite the new labor law, which was intended to reduce industrial strife, 85,000 strikes and other incidents were officially recorded in 2008.
It made news this spring that Zhao Ziyang, the Party Chairman removed from power in 1989 and placed under house arrest until his death in 2005, recorded his memoirs while confined and got them out to be published posthumously this year. They confirmed that the fear of workers' participation, particularly creation of autonomous unions, motivated Communist Party reaction to mass demonstrations for freedom and democracy, and ultimately to bloody suppression.
Six decades of questions in opposition to China's rulers--of workers' control, Marxist Humanism, freedom and democracy--have been suppressed but never fully answered. They remain alive for the next generation of students, intellectuals and workers.
--Bob McGuire
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