March 23, 2002
THE SPECTRE of worker solidarity has never appeared in China. For all the predictions of exiled trade union leaders like Han Dongfang, no anti-government labour movement has ever emerged nor is one likely to. There is no knowing when China' volcano of social unrest will erupt but this week' worker protests in Liaoning and Heilongjiang provinces will probably not spark a destabilising explosion. Worker unrest in the industrial northeast follows the usual pattern of factory sit-ins and gatherings outside local party headquarters. The party responds by issuing dark threats in private, soothing words in public and arresting the ring leaders, or the "small minority of trouble-makers". Eventually, the provincial or central governments find some extra money to buy off the workers at least temporarily while the organisers disappear for long prison sentences. What has never happened is that the protesting workers transform themselves into an unofficial but organised trade union that covers an industry or geographical area. The protests are always organised by relatively small groups of workers based around one - often bankrupt - factory. These workers are usually fighting to persuade the officials to give them a better pay-off. Such protests are tolerated and sometimes even have the support of the factory bosses. The real anti-government agitation in the dismal rust belt cities of the northeast comes more from the Falun Gong movement. In Changchun they recently dared to take over state broadcasts to put across their message.
Although the technology is readily available for workers to communicate and co-ordinate their activities, they don' do it. The reason is partly ideological - this is the class that has benefited from socialism and its members have always trusted the party to take care of them. Further, most of them are dependent on the goodwill of the party for almost everything they need - their work unit, housing, health care, subsidised food, pensions and education. It is a brave person who throws all that away to take up an illegal political struggle to overthrow the Government. Worker protests in Liaoyang, about 40km from Liaoning' capital, Shenyang, have taken place most years since the mid-1990s. Unemployment has reached about 25 per cent as most of its textile, chemical fibre and steel plants have shut. Price reforms in the early 1990s allowed customers and suppliers to choose their business partners according to the market rather than the plan.
Many factories, with their old equipment and managers trained in the command economy, could not compete with their southern competitors. That much is understandable. What has created a potentially revolutionary situation is the gross corruption and bungled reforms of the cadres. A string of top officials in Liaoyang, including the former boss of the Liaoyang City Ferro-Alloy Factory, Fan Yicheng, have been arrested for corruption. Managers ran up huge debts, nearly a billion yuan in the factory' case, using loans from state banks. Workers say the management, in cahoots with municipal officials, has siphoned off a large amount of this money, leaving the state and the workforce to bear the consequences.
The huge and blatant scale of corruption in Liaoning has become public knowledge after the arrest of more than 120 top municipal officials in Shenyang, starting with party secretary Mu Suixin. His party apparatus worked hand in glove with the local mafia and effectively destroyed all attempts to build a credible new economy.
Despite all this, Premier Zhu Rongji chose Liaoning as the test bed for the new national pension system. At his closing press conference at the National People' Congress, he claimed this and other experiments had been a great success. The protests in Liaoyang and Daqing in Heilongjiang prove otherwise. It has been impossible to run a pilot scheme in Liaoning because no one was willing to contribute to a common pension fund. Most of the enterprise pension funds had been plundered and no hard- pressed local government wished to dilute what was left by contributing to a common fund.
Instead, the central Government prefers to concentrate its resources on grandiose projects like the rebuilding of Beijing for the Olympic Games. Consequently, millions of workers in Liaoyang and other cities have not been able to draw their pensions or subsistence payments.
The workers in Daqing, the great oil field in a former wilderness, are by comparison better off. Daqing is now run by PetroChina, which in 2000 listed in New York and Hong Kong. It is a massive capitalist enterprise with a book value of US$29 billion (HK$225 billion) and profits of US$6.7 billion last year.
PetroChina has raised billions of dollars in funds and can raise even more if it wants to as long as it sheds workers and redundant plants. So far it has shed about 50,000 of its 442,000 workforce but the unlucky ones do at least have the chance of hefty payouts. The protests by some of the 90,000 workers in Daqing appear to be largely over a dispute about the size of this pay-off. Those in Liaoyang have been getting about 180 yuan a month (HK$169) in unemployment pay and are being offered a one-off 20,000-yuan deal. The oil field workers are pushing to get two or three times as much. After the cash has been paid out, the workers will abandon all welfare rights unless they choose to start contributing individually into the new pension fund. The real injustice of the negotiations is the imbalance of power between the two sides. PetroChina' cadres are enjoying all the perks of working for a big corporation in a capitalist economy, including stock options, but benefit from a Leninist political system that forbids collective bargaining and public discussion. There is an official trade union but it is subject to the local party committee' authority. It is illegal to form an unofficial trade union or any other independent organisation and China has shown little intention of responding to pressures from the International Labour Organisation to allow free collective bargaining.
The Han Dongfangs of China do not even enjoy the backing of Western leaders who represent their domestic labour movement, such as Britain' Tony Blair or Germany' Gerhard Schroeder. Such leaders have put no pressure on China to free imprisoned trade unionists and adhere to international conventions safeguarding trade union rights. Most arrested labour leaders disappear without trace, their names rarely become known to the outside world. In the semi-privatisation of profitable state industries, the new owners feel answerable to shareholders - the state or the private investor.
If the workers do not like their lot, armed police are always there to make them see reason.
Jasper Becker is the Post' Beijing bureau chief
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