BY EVA CHENG
On April 8, thousands of workers gathered again in numbing cold at the Tieren Square in the north-eastern oil city of Daqing, taking their almost daily protests since March 1 into their sixth week.
PetroChina Co., which owns most of the Daqing oil assets, has sacked 86,000 of its 400,000 workers in the last three years in an aggressive bid to raise its profit rates since it became partly owned by foreign capitalists, following its stock exchange listings in New York and Hong Kong.
Up to the mid-1990s, many struggling state firms still issued a minimum living allowance (though often not paid on time) to the "surplus workers" who had been sent home. In the last few years, many of these workers were enticed and/or pressured to accept a lump-sum payment in exchange for agreeing to terminate their employment contracts. Many agreed, often based on entitlements which their original employer later failed to provide. Many Daqing workers now say they have been cheated.
In early March the government reneged on an earlier promise to pay the retired workers' heating bills and demanded that they make new large annual payments to remain covered by the company's medical and old-age insurance schemes. This was the spark for the retired workers to begin their public protest.
The employed Daqing workers joined the protest demonstration two weeks later after their mandatory contribution to their pension plans was tripled.
The Daqing protest has been the most sustained and biggest self-organised workers' mobilisation in post-1949 China. At their peak in the first half of March, between 30,000-50,000 workers were participating.
Similar workers' protests have erupted in recent weeks in the provinces of Liaoning, Hebei, Jilin, Sichuan, Guizhou, Guangdong as well as in Shanghai and the capital Beijing, along with actions in solidarity with the Daqing protests in Xinjiang autonomous region in the west, and Hebei and Liaoning provinces.
The protests in Liaoyang, Liaoning province, first started between March 11-13, gathering 5000 workers from six bankrupt enterprises. The workers demanded payment of unpaid wages and the prosecution of corrupt local government and enterprise officials. The protest actions swelled on March 18 to more than 30,000 participants from 20 enterprises, partly in reaction to the police arrest of a key labour organiser. The protesters demanded the sacking of the provincial People's Congress chief, Gong Shangwu.
Protests 'everywhere'
In mid-March, 10,000 coal miners in Fushun, also in Liaoning province, blocked highways and rail tracks to protest against shortfalls in their severance packages. According to the New York Times, disputes over severance terms also led to large protests at the Huabei oil field in Hebei province and the Songjiang oil field in Jilin province.
According to the March 19 Hong Kong Apple Daily, the protest in Guangyuan, Sichuan province, exploded on March 13 with more than 20,000 workers encircling the local government building and blocking traffic. There were clashes with the police and a number of injuries.
The March 19 Hong Kong Oriental Daily News, reported a smaller protest in Guangyuan, with 1000 textile workers striking on March 15 in protest at acute job insecurity.
More than 200 retired workers from a major automobile factory in Beijing blocked traffic in front of their former work place on March 27 for three hours in protest against the long delay (up to four years) in their retirement payments, as well as alleged corruption of enterprise officials.
Between 1000 and 3000 workers in an electronics factory in Dongguan, Guangdong province, occupied their work place on April 7, demanding wages not paid for up to three months, following news the previous day that their Taiwanese employer had folded his business. Workers reportedly clashed with the factory's security guards, resulting in more than 10 workers being injured.
An unspecified number of workers in Shanghai were reported to have launched a protest on April 7 to demand unpaid wages and unpaid retirement entitlements.
More than 1000 retired workers from a steel mill in Guiyang, Guizhou province, blocked the road in front of their former work place on April 8. They were protesting against the inadequacy of their retirement allowance of 100 yuan (US$12) a month, as well as the long delay in repayment of their deposits with the enterprise's social security and retirement funds.
Intimidation
Government officials have resorted to the often used tactic of intimidation and the selective arrest of key organisers, refraining so far from a more general crackdown which might provoke even bigger and more widespread mobilisations from large numbers of angry workers.
As privatisation of state-owned enterprises and the associated dismantling of workers' extensive social welfare rights — rights which were a key result of the abolition of capitalism in China in the 1952-53 — have accelerated over the last decade, Chinese workers' protests are becoming more widespread. However, they had been sporadic, short-lived, relatively small and with apparently little permanent organisation.
The recent actions in Daqing and Liaoyang seem different. Deeply disgusted by the official unions' failure to defend their interests, the Daqing workers formed their own union and elected their own representatives.
A significant degree of self-organisation was also demonstrated in the Liaoyang protest. A key organiser of this protest, 52-year-old Yao Fuxin, was arrested by police, and warrants were issued for more than 10 other organisers. The workers responded with new protests demanding Yao's release.
By late March, three more labour leaders in Liaoyang had been detained by police, while the state-run television bombarded the public with allegations that the workers were colluding with "foreign black hands", naming the US-based China Labour Watch organisation as one such foreign backer.
Workers' growing realisation of the need for self-organisation is well captured by a comment by a Liaoyang worker cited in the March 29 New York Times: "We can't go on living like this, and nobody is listening to us ... We can't take our problem to the official trade unions. They are the Communist Party's unions, not ours."
The official Heilongjiang provincial Federation of Trade Unions' attitude on the Daqing workers' own organisation is telling. A federation official told the March 6 China Labour Bulletin that such worker-initiated bodies are "unacceptable and illegal" because the existing constitution of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions only allows local unions to be formed by peak union bodies and not by workers themselves.
The issues involved in the Daqing protest are typical of those facing workers employed at or retired from state-owned enterprises throughout China.
Well aware that its drive to turn state-owned enterprises into profit-driven, privatised companies could lead to growing worker resistance, the March 18 People's Armed Police News reported that its officers, China's main anti-riot force, were warned to prepare for a further rise in "mass incidents" following China's recent admission to the World Trade Organisation.
From Green Left Weekly, April 24, 2002.
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