Guangzhou labor activists are given suspended sentences

The trial of three labor activists - Zeng Feiyang, Zhu Xiaomei and Tang Huanxing - is over. The verdict came the same day of the trial - September 26 - which was held in a courtroom on the outskirts of Guangzhou. Feiyang was sentenced to three years, with a suspension or reprieve of four years. If he commits an offense during those four years, then he will have to serve his prison sentence. This may very well mean he will not be able to get involved in the things he excels in during that period of time - labor organizing and collective bargaining. The same is true of Xiaomei and Huanxing who received a sentence of 1.5 years, with a suspension or reprieve of two years. The other activist still in detention, Meng Han, has yet to have his day in court. His case was sent back by local prosecutors to the police investigators for further review.

The sentences were bittersweet. They were lighter than expected, especially that of Zeng Feiyang who was the target of a high-level smear campaign conducted by state media organs soon after his arrest and not allowed to see his lawyer for six months. And the suspended sentences mean that they can now go home to be with their families. But the lighter sentences came with a cost. The plaintiffs had to admit they were guilty of "gathering a crowd to disturb social order" even though their efforts to organize workers to engage in collective bargaining had the opposite intention, which was to get workers to the bargaining table and find a peaceful, orderly way to resolve their dispute. And as already mentioned, their sentences mean they may have to abstain from the work that they excelled in, which was to organize and train workers on collective bargaining.

The politics of this case are interesting and there should be more analysis forthcoming. The impetus for the arrest of these activists appears to have come from the center, but local law enforcement were charged with carrying out the arrest, investigation and prosecution of this case. In the past, Guangzhou and Panyu law enforcement had cooperated with Feiyang on a number of occasions and knew him well. Did local law enforcement officials play a role in getting a lighter sentence for these plaintiffs and making the best of a difficult situation? Interestingly, while the media reports of the trial focused on Feiyang's closing statement in the trial concerning foreign funding and involvement, the court verdict made no mention of foreign funding and involvement. Instead, it offered a more narrow argument and set of evidence detailing how the plaintiffs were making efforts to encourage workers in the Lide factory to go on strike. In other words, it looked at the case from the perspective of social stability rather than national security in an effort to lower the sensitivity of the case and justify a lesser sentence for the plaintiffs.


Below are many of the media reports that came about soon after the sentencing was announced. 

English-language media reports

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/09/27/world/asia/china-labor-activists-guangdong-sentenced.html?smid=tw-share&referer=

https://www.ft.com/content/2dd79f86-8387-11e6-8897-2359a58ac7a5

http://news.trust.org/item/20160926124803-z40cl

http://m.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/2022717/guangdong-labour-rights-activists-get-suspended

China court sentences trio for disturbing social order-http://www.china.org.cn/china/2016-09/26/content_39376176.htm

http://mobile.shanghaidaily.com/nation/Leader-of-strike-trio-says-he-was-used-as-a-tool/shdaily.shtml

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/wires/afp/article-3809159/China-sentences-activists-disturbing-social-order-Xinhua.html

http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1008765.shtml


Chinese-language media reports

http://hk.on.cc/cn/bkn/cnt/news/20160926/mobile/bkncn-20160926165007985-0926_05011_001.html

http://std.stheadline.com/instant/articles/detail/235836-%E4%B8%AD%E5%9C%8B-%E8%BC%94%E5%A4%A7%E7%94%B7%E7%94%9F%E8%88%87%E6%BC%82%E4%BA%AE%E5%90%8C%E7%AA%97%E5%90%88%E7%85%A7+%E8%B6%81%E6%A9%9F%E9%9D%9E%E7%A6%AE%E5%88%A4%E5%9B%9A5%E6%9C%88%E7%8D%B2%E7%B7%A9%E5%88%91

http://www.rfa.org/mandarin/Xinwen/XQL-09262016070421.html

http://www.ftchinese.com/story/001069516

曾飞洋等聚众扰乱社会秩序案一审宣判 三被告认罪_财经网 - CAIJING.COM.CN
http://m.caijing.com.cn/api/show?contentid=4180801

http://news.jcrb.com/jxsw/201609/t20160926_1651849.html                        

广东劳工NGO案今宣判 “首要分子”曾飞洋判三缓四_手机凤凰网
http://inews.ifeng.com/50027155/news.shtml?srctag=pc2m

http://tv.cctv.com/2016/09/26/VIDEdf5ID3tQY4Tjr4NQmyNP160926.shtml

https://theinitium.com/article/20160927-dailynews-china-workersright/

http://v.ifeng.com/news/society/m/201609/01c5f387-846e-11e6-b0dc-002590c2aaff.shtml

http://m.toutiao.com/i6334710640434741762/?tt_from=weixin&utm_campaign=client_share&app=news_article&utm_source=weixin&iid=5639031379&utm_medium=toutiao_ios&wxshare_count=7&pbid=23123403488&from=timeline&isappinstalled=0

http://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_1534807

Trial for Guangzhou Labor Activists Scheduled for September 26

Much of the recent news about Chinese civil society has centered around the trial of China’s rights defense lawyers such as Pu Zhiqiang, Zhou Shifeng, and most recently Xia Lin who was sentenced to 12 years in prison. All of them deserve a great deal of attention for the courageous and important work they do in taking on difficult cases.

In this post, I want to make sure that Chinese labor activists and workers are not neglected because they are some of the most active and potentially influential civil society actors in China. Worker strikes and protests are at historically high levels and worker self-organizing is taking place among Walmart China workers, teachers, and taxi drivers, among others.  In some cases, workers are assisted in their organizing efforts by activists working for independent labor NGOs in provinces like Guangdong.  Such is the case of the Guangzhou-based Panyu Workers Center which helped workers in dozens of factories organize and engage in collective bargaining with their employers. In doing so, they acted in the role of de facto trade unionists doing the job that China's official union, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), should do but does not. In their most recent successful case, the Panyu Center helped workers in the Taiwanese-owned Lide Shoe Factory reach a collective agreement with management for economic compensation and unpaid overtime and social security totaling nearly 120 million yuan.

A number of the staff of the Panyu Center are now about to go on trial tomorrow (September 26, 2016) at the Panyu District Court on criminal charges of “gathering a crowd to disturb social order” which carries a maximum five-year prison sentence. The staff on trial are Zeng Feiyang, the director, and Zhu Xiaomei. They will be joined by another labor activist who is not on staff at the Panyu Center, Tang Huanxing. A third Panyu Center staff member, Meng Han, had his trial postponed when local prosecutors sent his case sent back to the police for further investigation.

This is a high-profile case that began on December 3, 2015 when a number of labor activists in Guangzhou were rounded up and interrogated. Many were later released, with the exception of staff from the Panyu Center who were clearly the center of this attack. Unlike previous cases of repression against labor groups which originated from local authorities, this one showed clear signs of coming from Beijing. Soon after the crackdown, China’s main state media organs – the New China News Agency, CCTV and the People’s Daily – launched a smear campaign against the Panyu Center, and Zeng Feiyang in particular.

I encourage readers of this blog to follow this case closely to see how authorities of the Communist Party of China – the party of workers and farmers – treat some of China’s most prominent labor activists. The Panyu Center staff have already had their rights violated by the police and other authorities on a number of occasions. The state smear campaign, which sought to try them in the media, before they even had a court trial, was only the most brazen example. We also know that the police did not allow them to see their lawyers for several weeks. In Feiyang’s case, it took six months before he was able to finally meet with his lawyers.  In addition, their family members weresubjected to physical threats and verbal harassment when they did not cooperate or, in the case of Feiyang’s mother, after she filed a lawsuit against the state media organs for defaming Feiyang's character.

I will be posting more on this case once we hear the results of the trial. Hopefully, I will have some good news to report.

The Fight Against Inequality: Martin Luther King and China's Labor Activists

The issue of inequality is arguably the central issue of our time. On this last day of February, I can’t let January (MLK’s birthday) and February (Black History Month in the U.S.) go by without making a connection between Martin Luther King and China's labor activists. The two seem like strange bedfellows but both have fought long and hard for the one percent to share more of its wealth with the 99 percent.

Many Americans know that King was assassinated in 1968 on April 4, but few know that he was assassinated in Memphis where he had gone to support a strike by sanitation workers. Many know King as a civil rights leader, but few know him as a democratic socialist who was broadening his activism beyond racial and religious lines to take on the issue of economic justice.  In 1968, he and the Southern Leadership Religious Conference (SLRC) began the organizing a Poor People’s Campaign to call attention to the problem of poverty in the U.S. and worldwide. That campaign took him to Memphis in that fateful month of April where he was shot in the neck on the balcony of his motel at the tender age of 39.

Few people also know that one of the signal events in modern Chinese labor history was a strike by more than 200 sanitation workers in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou in August of 2014. The workers went on strike because the management company that employed them decided not to renew their street cleaning contract with the district government. When the management company refused to talk to the workers about severance pay and their future employment prospects, the workers went on strike.

With the help of a local labor NGO, the Panyu Workers Center, the workers organized, elected representatives and approached the management company with their demands. When the company again refused to talk, the workers went on strike. Soon after, with the encouragement of local government and union officials, the workers representatives and management company sat down and came to a collective bargaining agreement in which the management company agreed to a severance package that totaled nearly three million yuan (about U.S.$476,000). 

Several things made this case unusual and important in the annals of Chinese labor history. One was that workers succeeded in getting a collective bargaining agreement in an authoritarian country where the official union stands on the side of the government and management and does not engage in collective bargaining on behalf of workers. Second, the local authorities and unions encouraged the workers and management to negotiate, instead of arresting or firing the workers for striking as is the norm in China. Third, the workers received support from other sectors of society - local students, journalists and other members of the public.

In his speech to the striking Memphis sanitation workers on February 12, 1968, King sought to lift the spirits of an overflow crowd with words that would have sounded familiar to the Chinese sanitation workers in Guangzhou[1].

“You are doing many things here in this struggle. You are demanding that this city will respect the dignity of labor….One day our society must come to see this. One day our society will come to respect the sanitation worker if it is to survive… All labor has dignity.

 

But you are doing another thing. You are reminding, not only Memphis, but you are reminding the nation that it is a crime for people to live in this rich nation and receive starvation wages. And I need not remind you that this is our plight as a people all over America.

Now you are doing something else here. You are highlighting the economic issue. You are going beyond purely civil rights to questions of human rights. That is a distinction.

Now let me say a word to those of you who are on strike. You have been out now for a number of days but don’t despair. Nothing worthwhile is gained without sacrifice…. Let it be known everywhere that along with wages and all of the other securities that you are struggling for, you are also struggling for the right to organize and be recognized.

We can all get more together than we can apart; we can get more organized together than we can apart. And this is the way we gain power.  Power is the ability to achieve purpose, power is the ability to affect change, and we need power.”

The story of U.S.-China relations over the last 30 years can be read as the story of how inequality was accelerated within and across borders. The tremendous growth in trade and investment between the U.S. and China led to the hollowing out of industrial urban centers in the U.S., and the lifting of hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. In the process, wealth became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few in both countries. China, in particular, went from a relatively egalitarian country to one of the most unequal countries in the world. 

The Guangzhou sanitation strike is, in a sense, a natural product of this decidedly unnatural inequality in a communist country. It is also a product of a growing consciousness among Chinese workers of their rights and their collective strength, or as King noted, their power to induce change.  In King’s words, “never forget that freedom is not something that is voluntarily given by the oppressor. It is something that must be demanded by the oppressed.”

King’s universal language would have resonated deeply with the Guangzhou sanitation workers. It’s unfortunate that he did not live to see their achievement, one victory on the battlefield in the long war on inequality. He would have been only 86.

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[1] “All Labor Has Dignity,” in Cornel West, ed., The Radical King (Boston: Beacon Press).