Five Chinese labor activists released but not free

May 13, 2020

On May 9, China Labour Bulletin announced that five Chinese labor activists had been released after spending 15 months in detention and another 14 days in quarantine because of the pandemic. The five are Zhang Zhiru, Wu Guijun, Jian Hui, Song Jiahua and He Yuancheng. Guijun, Jian Hui and Yuancheng were well-known in the labor rights community having founded or worked for prominent labor organizations in the south of China. Jiahua, the only female in this group, was a former worker-turned-activist after her experience in 2015 representing workers at the Lide Shoe Factory in one of China's best-known collective bargaining cases.

Since their arrest back in January 2019, we have had little information about their whereabouts or circumstances. It now turns out that they were pressured to dismiss the lawyers of their choosing and accept state-appointed lawyers. Unbeknownst to their families, they were also tried behind closed doors on criminal charges of "gathering a crowd to disturb public order" (聚众扰乱社会秩序罪). Zhiru and Guijun were sentenced to three years imprisonment, suspended for four years, while the others were sentenced to 18 months, suspended for two years. The suspended sentences mean that they will be closely monitored, and their movements restricted, during the period of their suspension and unable to continue their previous work.

Unlike the arrests of five prominent labor activists from Guangdong in December 2015, the arrests of these five activists garnered less international attention, coming in the midst of a string of other arrests of workers and activists, many connected to the high-profile Jasic Technology case in Shenzhen. Together, the harassment, detentions and arrests of workers and activists from 2015 to the present, all stemming from Xi Jinping's broad-ranging assault on civil society, represents the most severe crackdown on labor in China in recent memory. As I wrote in my last post on the power of labor during the pandemic, the crippling of worker centers and labor activists has made it much more difficult for civil society to monitor labor violations and assist workers and their families during the COVID-19 pandemic and the opening-up phase.

On a personal note, I know four of these activists well, having worked with Zhiru, Jian Hui and Jiahua during my time at China Labour Bulletin. In 2016, we had plans to bring Jiahua and several other female worker activists to Bangalore, India to discuss their collective bargaining experience with Indian female garment workers. It would have been a meeting of labor activists from the world's two most populous countries. Unfortunately, Jiahua and the others were stopped at the border on their way to meet us in Hong Kong to board the flight to Bangalore. So in a quick act of improvisation, they put together a video message and we carried it to Bangalore where we shared it with the Indian garment workers. More recently, I was in touch with Jian Hui who had moved from Shenzhen to Changsha, in the neighboring province of Hunan, where he was excited about starting up his own worker center. The last message I received from him was on December 19, 2018, a month before he disappeared.

I've thought and worried about him and the others often since then, so news of their release is sweet indeed but comes with a bitter aftertaste knowing they will not be free to do what they love.

Remembering the power of labor during the pandemic

May 1, 2020

They are the healthcare workers in our hospitals taking care of our loved ones. They are the sanitation workers keeping our streets and parks clean and collecting our garbage. They are the public transport workers keeping subways and buses going for those of us without cars. They are the people in delivery centers packing goods we order online while sheltering at home. They are the farm workers and meat packers working to ensure we have food on the table. They are workers in factories making our personal protective equipment (PPE), thermometers and ventilators. The list could on.

In my first blogpost of 2020, I'd like to use the occasion of International Workers Day to remember the power of labor in the global fight against the COVID-19 pandemic by highlighting the situation of workers in China. In countries like the U.S. we are reminded of this power by reading reports of workers on the frontlines organizing for better personal protective equipment, payment of wages and hazard pay, paid leave, etc. In China, where this pandemic began and where much of our PPE is produced, news about worker grievances and protests rarely gets out thanks to heavy censorship, and the fierce repression of Chinese labor activists and organizations over the last few years. Thanks to reporting by organizations like China Europe Association for Civil Rights and China Labour Bulletin, we have some idea of how workers, and the organizations and individuals seeking to assist them, are responding during the pandemic.

Workers at a hospital construction site in Wuhan

Workers whose livelihoods are being threatened are organizing and protesting

Migrant workers in Wuhan where the epidemic began were pressed into action in early February to build hospitals to isolate and contain patients with COVID-19. Unable to return to their homes for the Chinese New Year holiday, many worked overtime with inadequate PPE to construct these hospitals. Later some of these workers organized to demand payment of wages owed to them for their work.

In the first half of March, thousands of financially struggling taxi drivers in several provinces staged protests demanding a reduction in their vehicle rental fees. While some of the organizers were fired, in many cases, they successfully forced concessions from their employers and the local government.

Even healthcare workers in some hospitals have posted online demands for payment of promised government subsidies.

Mutual-aid groups, worker organizations and volunteers are offering assistance and advocating for worker rights

In their struggles during the pandemic, workers have been abandoned by China’s only union, The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), a party-controlled organization which was set up to represent workers but often functions more as an arm of the government.

In the void left by the ACFTU, civil society groups – mutual aid groups, worker organizations, and volunteers – have emerged to offer assistance to workers and call attention to vulnerabilities faced by workers and their families.

A number of self-organized mutual-aid groups composed of students and social workers in a dozen cities came together to fund raise for PPE for sanitation workers, and to draw public attention to the contributions made by these workers.

Other volunteer groups have called attention to the “digital divide” facing children of rural migrant workers whose classes were transferred online yet who lack the equipment or internet connections enjoyed by students living in the cities.

The few worker organizations that have not been suppressed are also providing assistance. Organizations working with domestic workers have started a hotline for counseling and information about epidemic prevention. Others have opened legal aid hotlines for workers seeking information about their labor and employment rights during the pandemic.

As workplaces start back up, reports have emerged about employers opening up too soon and without providing workers with adequate PPE. In a case of a state-owned factory in Fujian that required its employees to show up before the official re-opening date, workers posted complaints to the local government online and said they would refuse to show up for work. In another case, student interns in Shenzhen were told to show up for work even though they were still owed wages. When they complained to the local government, the factory was ordered to stop its operations.

These stories from the front lines in China give us a fleeting glimpse into the pressures that workers in China face and represent only the tip of a very large iceberg. Still they remind us of the contribution of Chinese workers who make much of what we depend on, including the PPE that keeps us healthy and safe.

CDB and CLB: Claiming the Space for An Independent, Progressive Civil Society in China

Sometimes you need to leave home to appreciate the family you left behind. I had that epiphany recently. Having worked for China Development Brief and China Labour Bulletin, two civil society organizations that developed a reputation for independent and authoritative monitoring and analysis about civil society and labor in China, I confess to taking their importance for granted. Then, when I was invited recently on a fact-finding mission to Israel and Palestine to meet with NGOs working on human rights and humanitarian issues, it suddenly became clear to me.

The purpose of our mission was to investigate restrictions on NGOs’ access to funding, a critical component of their freedom of association rights. These NGOs play an important role in monitoring, documenting and seeking to ameliorate violations of international human rights and humanitarian law in Israel and Palestine. Over the last few years, like their counterparts in many other countries, they began encountering greater pushback by the Israeli government, including on issues such as funding. In 2016, an NGO Transparency Law was passed in the Knesset requiring Israeli NGOs that received more than 50% of their funding from foreign governments, to declare their foreign government funding sources on their publications and websites, and in meetings with government officials. This law had the clever but sinister effect of singling out Israeli human rights NGOs that rely heavily on foreign government funding, while leaving untouched nationalist, right-wing NGOs that also rely on foreign funding but from private donors.

In our meetings with these NGOs about the pushback against their funding sources, one name came up again and again: an Israeli civil society organization called NGO Monitor.  On the surface, NGO Monitor comes across as the kind of organization that China Development Brief was meant to be, an authoritative one-stop shop for foreigners interested in NGOs in that country. Its objective, as stated on its website, is “producing and distributing critical analysis and reports on the activities of the international and local NGO networks, for the benefit of government policy makers, journalists, philanthropic organizations and the general public.”

On closer inspection, though, much of its content takes a very critical and even hostile view of more progressive, left-wing NGOs that monitor and call attention to human rights violations against Palestinians. One common line of attack is to point out the reliance of these NGOs on foreign government funding, particularly funding from European governments. Labeling these NGOs as “foreign agents,” NGO Monitor along with other nationalist, right-wing NGOs, with support from powerful politicians and officials, have over the last decade launched media and lobbying campaigns to delegitimize the work of human rights NGOs in Israel and Palestine. Their campaigns have worked. They led Israeli legislators to draft the 2016 NGO Transparency Law, and pressured European governments to review their funding commitments to human rights NGOs in Israel and Palestine.

The case of NGO Monitor shows how important it is for independent, credible, progressive NGOs to claim and defend the epistemological space and language for talking about NGOs in any country. It is clear that NGO Monitor now occupies a vital space for civil society in Israel. It has become an almost indispensable resource for those who want to better understand the NGO space in Israel. Like CDB’s NGO database, it has a large database of local and international NGOs working in Israel and Palestine. In fact, it seems to have the only such database in the English language. When you type in an Israeli NGO’s name, the first search result to come up is from NGO Monitor’s database which presents profiles of that NGO’s funding sources and activities written from the perspective of NGO Monitor.

The problem of course is that NGO Monitor has a highly partisan agenda, one that is intent on dividing civil society, and aligned with nationalist, right-wing NGOs and the current Netanyahu government.  What it and other right-wing groups in Israel are doing is eerily familiar to the ideological warfare taking place in President Trump’s America, and raises deeper concerns about their role in undermining Israeli democracy. As Professor Amal Jamal notes in his report, The Rise of Bad Civil Society in Israel, “bad civil society” organizations like NGO Monitor, make “use of democratic procedures to silence and delegitimize any critiques of government policies, especially those voiced by [human rights organizations]…. “The cooperation of ‘bad civil society’ with…government ministries and central political parties feeds the public sphere with anti-democratic values and norms, which undermines civil and democratic ideals and liberal freedoms and brings the entire democratic system into question.”

At CDB and CLB, we spent hours discussing and debating our positioning in Chinese civil society, knowing we were one of the few go-to sources on civil society and labor for the international community. We emphasized our independence from the government, and our support for grassroots NGOs, workers and the progressive values they stood for. But in the process of defending them, we ensured that our reporting and analysis remained credible and impartial, and tried our best to use accurate information, adopt a neutral tone, and avoid attacking other civil society organizations.

Of course, any reporting in China has to tread carefully in a restricted and censored space where there is less room for different ideological positions. In a democratic and open society like Israel’s, the space is more wide open for organizations to voice more critical and extreme views. That makes NGO Monitor’s occupation of the English-language space there that much more astonishing. Now, recognizing that they waited too long to respond, human rights organizations in Israel and Palestine are considering ways to fight back and reclaim some of that space by setting up a more independent, impartial alternative to NGO Monitor.

Here’s where I had my epiphany. After seeing what happened in Israel, the significance of CDB and CLB became clear to me. These two NGOs occupied the civil society space in the early days back in the mid-1990s, when there wasn’t much of a civil society in China, and they spent the last 20 years or so defending that space with integrity on behalf of an independent, progressive civil society. In doing so, they helped to build the linguistic and epistemological infrastructure for understanding and talking about civil society in China.

The Chinese government is now seeking to reclaim some of that space with more assertive legislation and initiatives and, at some point in the future, as China’s society opens up and discussion and debate become more ideological and contentious, other groups on both the right and left will enter the fray. But I’m confident that Chinese civil society is in a good position to deal with these challenges, in part because of the contributions made by CDB and CLB.