During the civil war with the Kuomintang numerous workers' units joined Mao's Hunan army and participated in the Nanchang Uprising. The largest union support came from the iron miners of Hanyehping in Wuhan. In fact, the First Red Army was largely composed of workers. When these troops were destroyed in battle with the forces of the Kuomintang, the first generation of trade unionists in China was virtually eliminated.
The 1937 start to the war with the Japanese finished off most of the others; even though the Kuomintang and the Communists co-operated with each other to battle the Japanese...
When, after the end of the war, there was a brief interlude of relative calm in China, the US and the OSS forces active in China sent in a large number of American unionists and labour specialists to China in an effort to build a strong Chinese trade union movement. Dick Deverall of the Free Trade Union Committee attempted to set up labour programmes in China. John Shulter and his colleagues in the US Labour Department tried to foster free unionism in Peking, Shanghai and Canton.
But, with the gradual ascendance to post-war power of the Chinese communists under Mao, in 1949 the forces of the Kuomintang were driven from mainland China and the US labour missions were terminated. The All-China Federation of Trades Unions (a national Chinese labour federation formed in 1925 --ACFTU) was recreated under tight Chinese Communist party control and became similar in function to the AUCCTU of the Soviet Union (the Soviet central trade union federation). The ACFTU was a founding member of the World Federation of Trades Unions (WFTU) and remained an important member in it after the International Confederation of Free Trades Unions (ICFTU) split in 1949.
The ACFTU is the only workers' federation allowed to operate in China, representing 135 million workers in 31 provincial, autonomous regional and municipal federations and 10 national industrial trade unions. Any union established must be registered under the ACFTU. It is a part of the Chinese governmental structure. No independent trade unions are allowed to operate outside government control. The government considers the ACFTU to be a quasi-governmental body; indeed, an arm of the government and a subsidiary organ of the Chinese Communist Party, designed to facilitate and support government policies within enterprises and to ensure the continued control of the working population. It has been a conservative force in industrial relations and is used more to control than to protect and advance workers' rights.
There was a modest change in the early 1990s through the introduction of the comprehensive "three-system" reforms in state-owned enterprises in terms of labour contracts, rewards systems and social insurance. It had little beneficial effect in the non-state industrial organisations and it did nothing to assist the aims of working people during the two major calamities created by the Chinese Communist party.
Rather than bring social justice and the rise of workers' rights, the Chinese Communist Party brought in "the Great Leap Forward", which introduced a mandatory system of rural agricultural collectivisation and oppression of the rural poor. Private farming was outlawed and those who opposed the program were jailed, robbed of any civil rights and 're-educated'. The Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe on a monumental scale. Estimates of the death toll of the program range from twenty to forty-five million Chinese, most of whom died of starvation.
After the Second World War and the rise of the Chinese Communist Party to power the Chinese peasantry formed into villages in which peasants owned their small-holdings. The Communists imposed a "hukou" system of internal passports in 1956, which restricted movements within the country. Then they ordered that these agricultural properties be collectivised. Not only did agricultural productivity decline but strange schemes, like backyard steel mills, were enforced and encouraged, which further diverted rural labour from farming. Those who opposed were labelled 'rightists' and punished. It was an unqualified disaster.
Although the harvest of 1958 was very productive, the diversion of labour to alternative projects like steel-making meant that a great deal of the harvest was never gathered from the fields. Then a giant storm of locusts attacked the food stock and grain stores. The Great Sparrow Campaign of the Communists had destroyed the birds that were the predators of the locusts so the locusts destroyed the crops without control.
This was followed soon after by the Cultural Revolution, where young activists purged the dangerous intellectuals and dissidents from the cities and sent them to 're-education camps' in the provinces.
The Cultural Revolution is something with which the President has some familiarity. His father was a revolutionary leader of the first generation of Great March of the Chinese Communists and was deputy premier to Chou En Lai in the late 1950s. In 1962 he was purged from any leadership posts for being associated with an 'anti-party clique'. Xi Zhongxun was forced to undergo public self-criticism and in 1965 was demoted to the position of a deputy manager of a tractor factory in Luoyang. Things were worse for him during the Cultural Revolution and he spent time in and out of prison. As Xi's father was purged from his offices and imprisoned Xi himself was rusticated and moved out of Beijing to Yanchuan County, Shaanxi until his father was reinstated and rehabilitated in the party. When Xi Zhongxun fell afoul of Mao Zedong in 1962, his family was consigned to manual labour in Liangjiahe village, a ramshackle town in northern Shaanxi province. Xi Jinping spent seven years in Liangjiahe under the same conditions as his neighbours.
A new system was introduced for the use of Chinese labour, the Lao Gai, which means "reform through labour". This is the system of large prison camps where non-criminals were sent to be re-educated through hard labour. It is estimated that in the last fifty years, more than fifty million people have been sent to lao-gai camps. Many export goods were produced for export from lao-gai camps. Recently they have been abolished.
Most organisations of Chinese labour were created the public sector, involving state workers, and not among those employed by private industry. The Chinese introduced a social welfare system tied to the place of work, the danwei. This was an extended Chinese welfare state whose benefits were heavily concentrated within the state workforce and delivered through the workplace, to which virtually all urban residents belonged by the 1950s.
There has been an increasing shift of workers out of purely state employment into the private sector. Danwei is not universal anymore and many of the social, housing, wage and job-security issues that were formerly the preserve of the state have become the responsibility of private companies. As a result of the 1994 Labour Law the ACFTU has been given limited autonomy, collective-bargaining status, and limited participation in state corporation decision-making. As part of the policy of opening the Chinese market to a limited form of private capital, there are many workers who are no longer in the danwei system.
The Current State of Chinese Labour
In recent years there has been an increased level of frustration among Chinese workers; especially among those employed in State-Owned Enterprises (SOE). Their principal complaints derive from three major problems. The first, and perhaps the most irritating, is that the workers have often not been paid for months at a time. In the late 1990s the ACFTU estimated that almost twenty per cent of the workforce had not been paid for over five or six months. This is compounded by the large numbers of workers who have been laid off from their jobs as part of the 'optimisation of work (yohua zue) reforms started in 1987. In 1995 the system of permanent employment was removed and by 1998 over ten million state workers had lost their jobs. In a recent study, researchers found that sixty-seven per cent of these laid-off workers lived in debt (largely to the local money-lenders) and thirty-one per cent were totally destitute. This has led to waves of strikes and demonstrations across China as workers demand their unpaid salaries and pensions. The laid-off also demand their unpaid social benefits.
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