Pen/Insular_Notes

The latest issue of New Left Review has an excellent interview with Han Dong-fang, Chinese labour activist, veteran of Tiananmen Square and founder of the China Labour Bulletin, run from Hong Kong. As luck would have it, this is the article they have put up online free for nonsubscribers to read, so there’s not excuse not to get stuck into it.

The most gripping part is Han’s description of his involvement in the uprising of 1989 - his apparently meteoric rise from a nobody railway worker to someone whom the students felt it necessary to hide from the tanks and who they compared to another famous labour organiser:

At around 11.30 pm on June 3rd, a group of fifteen or twenty young people arrived looking for me. My comrades tried to push them out, but they just broke in, saying I had to go with them, that there was going to be a bloody massacre here. Without saying who they were, they insisted I should not stay, and mentioned Solidarność, comparing me to Lech Wałęsa. Of course, I was flattered to be accorded such importance, but I didn’t think my life was more valuable than anyone else’s. Besides, it would be shameful for me to run away. I told them I was staying. Eventually the young people left, but returned five minutes later and one of them said: ‘Excuse me, but I’m afraid you have to go with us. That’s our mission, your destiny’. A very strong fellow gestured to the others, and several of them just picked me up and physically carried me out of the tent. Then they walked me to the east side of the square—the army came from the west—surrounding me to protect me from bullets. It was an extremely touching moment. In the north-west corner we saw a burning tank. We went past the Public Security headquarters, and then the Beijing Hotel, where I saw a man riding a bicycle eastwards with one arm, the other bleeding copiously. By this time it was around one in the morning. When we reached the Dongdan intersection on Chang’an Avenue, near where I lived, they said: ‘Alright, now leave the city. We have to go back to the square to protect some other people’—and then they disappeared. I never found out what happened to them, whether they survived in the square, were injured or went to prison.

Much of the rest of the interview outlines the nature of and reasoning behind the China Labour Bulletin’s strategy of confronting the Chinese state and the big foreign employers through legal means. This means hiring a lot of lawyers, filing lawsuits, and, ultimately a strategy of taking over the official state unions from below. Han describes this as a way of building up the confidence of Chinese workers that they can fight back for better pay and conditions and even workplace democracy. It seems to be quite a successful strategy at the moment, but it obviously has huge limitations when faced with a vast and powerful state machine. Ultimately at least the threat of more drastic action from workers and peasants will always be necessary to get serious concessions from Chinese bureaucrats and foreign bosses alike. It also seems unlikely that the idea of taking over the official unions from below will get very far and at some point this means that there has got to be some new form of labour organisation in China. In this context it would be interesting to look at how workers have organised themselves in other times and places where the state has attempted to repress all expressions of worker collectivity (perhaps Tsarist Russia or the partially successful example of Solidarnosc in Poland).