China’s recent crackdown on labour activists may have little to do with their own actions

Manfred Elfstrom says the arrest of Zhang Zhiru and other activists may have been connected to university students’ support for agitating workers in Shenzhen, China’s economic slowdown and the US being distracted with its own government shutdown

Human rights in China

Manfred Elfstrom

Published: 11:30pm, 7 Feb 2019

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When I first met Zhang Zhiru in 2006, it was at the headquarters of his organisation, Spring Wind. The office was a couple of flights up a modest residential building in an industrial park. Books were neatly organised on shelves for workers to borrow. Long tables facilitated discussion. A portrait of Lu Xun, China’s great modern social critic, gazed down on the scene.

When I say Zhang’s organisation, I mean his second one. The first had been disbanded by the government shortly before we met. That earlier group led an unusual campaign to abolish the fees charged to workers who wanted to file for arbitration of grievances. Thousands of signatures were collected as part of this effort.

In China’s employment law system, arbitration is a necessary prelude to having your day in court. When the country enacted a new Labour Dispute Mediation and Arbitration Law in 2008, the fees were removed.

Cases doubled from the year before. The concurrent passage of a new Labour Contract Law and the 2008 financial crisis were probably the main causes of this spike, but abolishing the charges for arbitration probably played a role, too.

A former employee who had tried unsuccessfully to win compensation for a work injury, Zhang has since helped workers on thousands of cases, covering everything from injuries like his own to wage arrears and social insurance.

Participants in the scores of free legal training sessions that he organised have gone on to become not only successful litigants but also resources for their coworkers.

But Zhang has always stubbornly believed workers achieve the most when they act collectively. After the dramatic Honda strike of 2010, as the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions and its affiliates experimented with what they called “collective consultation”, Zhang and other labour organisers in the Pearl River Delta sensed a political opening and promoted real, worker-led collective bargaining.

Workers at Foshan Fengfu Autoparts, a factory supplying parts to Honda Motor’s joint ventures in China, take part in a strike to demand higher wages in Foshan, Guangdong province, in June 2010. Photo: AP

Then, at the end of 2015, things changed quickly. Several activists in the greater Guangzhou area were detained. Two of them, Zeng Feiyang, the founder of the region’s first grass-roots labour organisation, and Meng Han, were formally charged with disturbing social order.

Of particular concern seems to have been their involvement in helping negotiate the resolution of a protracted strike at a shoe factory. Zhang survived this chill. The government seemed to move on to other targets. He returned to his work, albeit in a much more cautious manner.

Chinese workers at Amazon Echo factory ‘overworked, underpaid’

In January, however, authorities finally circled back and detained Zhang, along with several other activists – Wu Guijun, Jian Hui, Song Jiahui and He Yuancheng – in Guangdong.

Others were briefly taken into custody and then released. Zhang and Wu, like Zeng and Meng before them, reportedly face charges of disturbing public order.

There are several possible reasons for the current wave of repression. None directly relate to the actions of Zhang or the others.

The most obvious is that a daring group of Marxist students at elite Chinese universities have rallied in support of workers at an electronics factory in Shenzhen; dozens of these workers and students have disappeared.

Like other local NGO leaders, Zhang has had nothing to do with this movement. But the movement has raised the chilling spectre for authorities of a cross-class alliance for social justice.

Another possible reason is that China’s economy is slowing, and the government is therefore dealing with any and all potential troublemakers decisively before things get worse.

In a few weeks, when workers return from their Lunar New Year break to shuttered factories, the state does not want anyone ready with tips about how to challenge bosses. Again, the problem here is a national one, but Zhang and his colleagues are paying the price.

A final possible reason is that the US is preoccupied with other things. Beijing understands its domestic challenges in the context of its rivalry with America.

Washington is assumed to always be on the lookout for problems to highlight and use to undermine China’s political system. The US government shutdown in January may have prompted the Chinese authorities to move on perceived threats while they had the chance.

Concerned people outside China have few options in these situations. What we can do is tell the stories of people like Zhang Zhiru, in the hope that more attention to their cases will result in leniency. In fact, their stories should have been told more in the past.

At a time when an ethos of narrow self-interest and disdain for the weak is on the ascent in not only China but many countries around the world, Zhang and his fellow activists offer a ray of hope.

Manfred Elfstrom is a postdoctoral scholar and teaching fellow at the School of International Relations, University of Southern California

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