OVER the next three weeks, we will watch a slick propaganda parade of Chinese “sporting heroes”. But we will not see China’s true heroes in the glittering stadiums of Beijing — because they are in prison, or they have “disappeared.” If you are indiscreet enough to ask after them, you will be instantly smeared as “anti-Chinese”. Yet many of us want to believe we are being tolerant — and even anti-racist — by sticking our fingers in our ears when it comes to the conflict within China. Why? Because at some semiconscious level, we don’t want the Chinese people to be allowed to speak and assemble and think freely — because it would mean we had to pay more.
Meet the young women crammed into damp dormitories in China’s River Pearl Delta, and they will tell you why. These women — mostly teenagers, or in their early twenties — made most of the goods in your home. Like 200 million other young Chinese workers, they have made the epic journey from China’s villages to its metastasizing factory-towns, in search of a job. They live in their factories, sleeping on bunk-beds; they tell themselves they will do the job for a decade, then leave.
The China Labor Bulletin conducted a study of their lives. Zhang, a 21-year-old woman who made artificial Christmas trees, was a typical interviewee. “We worked seven days a week, and we only had three days off a year,” she says. “We worked overtime every night until 10 in the evening. The workshop was always filled with smoke. You couldn’t see very far. When you entered the room, your eyes burned and watered, and you had difficulty breathing.” One night, Zhang — exhausted and sore-eyed — was pushing plastic through an iron-roller when she felt terrible pain. Her hand was trapped. She was taken to hospital for extensive skin-grafts. Two weeks later the factory abruptly stopped paying for the medical treatment. They told her to get back to work. “I felt like jumping out of a window,” she told the researchers. The skin on her hand is still peeling and painful. “When you enter this factory,” another young woman says, “you are under their control. If you get tired and want to stretch your neck or look around, you can’t. They won’t even allow you to look around!” If you do, you are docked the day’s wages. To prevent workers from trying to seek out better factories, it’s normal to pay two or three months in arrears. If you quit, do you get the backlog? Never.
Occasionally, inspectors from Western multinationals arrive — but the women are drilled to give false answers. Every month, 50,000 fingers are sliced off in Chinese factories; every year, 130,000 Chinese people die in them, while more than a million contract fatal diseases. These women — and hundreds of millions like them — want to be able to band together and demand better conditions. But they are prevented. Only one trade union is allowed in China — and it is controlled by the government and designed to suppress labor, not represent it.
If you try to organize independent of this bogus trade union in the workplace — to demand breathing masks, say — you are beaten, or put in prison. It is a strange hybrid: a Maoist police state, enforcing the most extreme model of capitalism.
Nonetheless, the Chinese people are kicking back: There
are 87,000 workplace protests a year. Last year, there was a tumult in Chinese factories after a string of workers died of organ failure while doing 50-hour shifts. The panicked government was poised to make a major concession: they were going to allow the formation of elected trade unions.
It was startling: independent political organizations? Elected? In China? But it didn’t happen — because there was panic from rich-world investors. Organized workers can ask for more safety measures, and better wages. Microsoft, Nike, Ford, Dell and others — acting through the American Chamber of Commerce — swiftly announced the laws were “unaffordable” and “dangerous.” European and American governments parroted the corporate line. Far from lobbying for freedom, they enthusiastically lobbied against it. So the Chinese dictatorship watered down the proposals, and the girls of the Pearl Delta factories are stuck. This isn’t Chinese “culture” — it’s our corporate culture’s wet dream, forced on them.
