As China embarks on its reform programme, the international trade union movement is debating its response. Most trade unionists and worker educators however have little access to information on China. In this article, Han Dongfang, editor of China Labour Bulletin, provides a critical overview of the labour situation in China today. He argues that Chinese workers are the victims not beneficiaries of free market reforms and that effective trade union education is non-existent.

Independent trade unions are illegal in China. The Chinese government recognises only one union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Education of ACFTU officials is intensive. Unfortunately, the primary function of the ACFTU is to assist management while paying mere lip-service to worker representation. Workers are virtually powerless to protect themselves, despite the fact that most are ACFTU members. The union imposes management discipline on workers instead of fighting for workers’ interests. Consequently Chinese workers do not approach the ACFTU for help. They know that this union’s sweetheart is China’s establishment, a contradiction borne out by the fact that the local ‘union representative’ is also frequently the factory boss as well as the local Chinese Communist Party (CCP) secretary. Therefore effective trade union education is non-existent.

The ACFTU is not a small organisation. It has approximately six million employees. Not all the officials are hell bent on helping the establishment to exploit workers. There are shopfloor level ACFTU leaders who are prepared to try and represent their members. It is the political commitment of the ACFTU to the Chinese ruling class and the vested interests of its leaders that makes this so-called trade union a lackey of the state.

Working and living conditions

Officially, 70% of China’s population lives in the countryside and is involved in agriculture. In reality, no one knows the exact proportion. Millions who are officially classed as farmers have not handled a hoe for up to twenty years, forced away from their agrarian tradition by policy changes in land use and economy. Many ‘farmers’ now work in newly created township and village enterprises, in industrial co-operatives, or increasingly have been lured to work in China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs).

Each SEZ is small enough to be efficiently policed, and strict control is imposed over the movement of people and the goods they produce. At first, four such zones were established near Hong Kong to help reverse China’s 1979 - 1980 record US$3.9 billion trade deficit. Now there are over 1,000 cities throughout China participating in SEZs or foreign investment zones employing more than 20 million workers, a substantial proportion of China’s estimated 50 million migrant workers.

The role of SEZs is to attract foreign investment and draw in modern management techniques and new technology to produce goods to sell overseas. The export value adds precious foreign currency to China’s treasury. Distinguished from the rest of China by a relative lack of red tape in establishing factories, SEZs appeal to multinational corporations for low taxed production and cheap labour. Many workers are young women. Government propaganda promised SEZ workers a share in China’s new wealth via secure jobs protected by the acquisition of modern technological skills. However, the industrial reality for migrant workers is not so rosy. The government, desperate for modernisation, decided workers are the ones who must pay for it through low wages, substandard accommodation, disregard for health and safety, and bullying (frequently violent) management techniques. Instead of creating new wealthy workers, SEZs have delivered poverty, sickness, death, and dangerous, insecure and tyrannical employment to their workforce. SEZs are also pilots for what China refers to as "the socialist market economy", better known as free market capitalism.

Further incentives are offered to foreign investors in SEZs. Labour and trade union laws are routinely disregarded by enterprises with tacit complicity from the government, resulting in an unprotected, and underrepresented workforce which cannot easily return whence it came.

Workers in other sectors of the economy are also discovering that their working conditions are changing drastically under the relentless drive for profit. In the early years of CCP rule, huge state owned industrial enterprises were created. Management of these enterprises degenerated into rigid bureaucracies. They failed to underpin a healthy economy due to bad planning, poor management, inefficiency, corruption, inappropriate products, and lack of democracy. Now the authorities are desperate to ditch these enterprises along with millions of workers, who were told they had jobs for life. The government is dismantling these enormous enterprises through privatisation and rationalisation, squeezing the workforce out through redundancies and lay-offs. The remainder are forced to work harder, longer and less safely for lower wages. The government’s problem is that the scale of sackings necessary to complete the reform programme is bigger than it dare attempt. It is terrified of unleashing social discord. One solution which has emerged throughout China’s state run enterprises is to refuse to pay workers’ wages (though management continues to pay itself), adding to China’s growing problems of poverty and hunger.

Smashing democratic organisations and protest

Faced with increasingly corrupt officials and management which imposes deteriorating working conditions, some workers have felt forced to protest. Their frustration found release in the Democracy Movement of 1989, and ‘workers’ autonomous federations’ began to appear in China’s major cities. Such federations are mass organisations completely outside the control of either the CCP or the state machinery, and so threaten CCP supremacy. Such a hazard to the CCP’s omnipotence was more than it could bear. The Democracy Movement was shattered by People’s Liberation Army soldiers in Beijing on 4 June in what is popularly known outside China as the "Tiananmen Square Massacre". In this bloody conclusion to the 1989 mass protests, trade unionists and other protesters were treated as if they were subhumans bent on destabilising China. In fact they wanted quite the opposite: social cohesion, an end to corruption and open elections. More recent attempts to organise workers have met the combined hostility of party, state and private capital, with the ACFTU policing the working class in the name of ‘stability’. Many activists now rot in prison convicted on trumped up charges.

Independent trade unions were theoretically possible in China until 1992, when the government introduced a new Trade Union Law. Article 12 of this law stipulates that only the ACFTU can legally represent workers in China. In effect this law merely closed legal loopholes, as the ACFTU is the only union the CCP has ever recognised.

As China’s Open Door policy proceeds in businesses and enterprises, the ACFTU has been actively promoting itself to international trade union groups with worrying success. The danger is that these groups may become convinced that the ACFTU works in the interests of Chinese workers, and officially recognise it. This would be demoralising for genuine Chinese trade unionists. It must not be allowed to happen. Chinese workers will find it even more difficult to organise and bargain collectively, and non-Chinese trade unionists will continue to find it almost impossible to work in solidarity with them.

The China Labour Bulletin (CLB) is a Hong Kong based organisation dedicated to establishing independent trade unions in China. It is a direct descendent of the attempt to set up autonomous trade unions during the 1989 Democracy Movement. Headed by Han Dongfang, a Chinese labour activist jailed for his part in the 1989 movement and exiled for his subsequent insistence on independent trade unions, CLB investigates and publicises the situation, trends and changes affecting the labour movement in China. Despite the draconian nature of the Chinese regime, we are in direct and regular contact with Chinese workers via telephone and letter and have established a network of labour activists. CLB also broadcasts regular, interactive radio programmes into China, specifically discussing trade union issues. The CLB is funded by international trade union federations, and is published every two months.