It was no surprise that when the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security (MHRSS) announced in early June that raising the retirement age for workers in China was unavoidable due to people’s longer life expectancy, it quickly galvanized a heated public debate.

In a poll of half a million netizens conducted by People.com after the announcement, over 93 percent of respondents opposed the plan. Those against the plan were mainly ordinary workers who wanted to take their pension as early as possible after years of hard work, and young graduates concerned about their job prospects.

A young job hunter in Humen, Dongguan. Photograph by CLB..

Migrant workers, already underprivileged and disadvantaged, are the arguably the biggest victims of this proposed plan. As a young factory worker in Shandong told CLB, they would have to pay more and wait longer for their pension. A political scientist in Guangzhou argued that blue collar workers in particular deserved to retire early with a decent pension because they have already worked excessively long hours without proper medical care.

The latest Migrant Workers Survey issued by the National Bureau of Statistics showed that over 84 percent of migrant workers worked more than 44 hours each week in 2011 but only 23 percent of employers provided work injury insurance for migrant workers, and only 17 percent provided health insurance.

In contrast, white collar workers such as civil servants, teachers, doctors, who would benefit more from their experiences as they grow older, are more willing to retire at an older age. A white-collar worker at one of China’s most popular internet portals told CLB:

Now Chinese people are able to live longer and enjoy better health. If they retire at the current retirement age, they would feel restless and have nothing to do all day long. They could have contributed more to the society.

But a Shenzhen-based university teacher told CLB that if the retirement age was raised, government policy would be more likely to lean towards old people, which would be detrimental to young people’s employment, their entrepreneurship and eventually the country’s overall competitive edge. He added that:

It’s unfair, especially for migrant workers, if the government wants to fill the widely debated pension gap by asking employees to make longer pension contributions. Instead, I’d rather recommend that the government curtail administrative and social stability spending to make more room for pension subsidies.

Moreover, increasing the retirement age would further exacerbate the disparity between enterprise employees and civil servants. Under the current system, civil servants don’t need to make any pension contribution, but are entitled to receive pension three times as high as enterprise employees, who together with their employers have to make a monthly contribution equivalent to 28 percent of their salary until they retire, according to Liu Zhengjun, an officer at Tsinghua University, during an interview with Investor Journal.

In response to concerns raised by the public, a MHRSS official said on 19 June that the idea of deferring the retirement age was still under discussion and won’t immediately take effect. In fact, the official discussion of this topic dates back to as early as 2005.

The current retirement age in China is 60 for men, 55 for female civil servants 50 for women working in enterprises. According to UN health index published in May 2011, the life expectancy of China ranks 85th out of the 187 countries surveyed, 84 percent of the life expectancy in Japan and one percent lower than that in Malaysia and Thailand.

During his concert tour of Hong Kong last week, “New Worker” Sun Heng once again called the public’s attention to the threatened closure of the Tongxin Primary School for the children of migrant workers, which he helped set up on a deserted factory site on the outskirts of Beijing in 2005.

The Tongxin (“same heart”) Primary School is one of the 20 unlicensed migrant schools in Beijing’s Chaoyang district slated for closure by the local education department because of alleged “serious hidden dangers in its location, fire prevention, electricity, healthcare, etc.”

Last week, the Chaoyang Education Committee announced that it planned to close all the unlicensed migrant schools in the district by the end of 2014. It has already cut the number of unlicensed schools from 150 at the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 to just 20 now.

Tongxin Primary School is located in Picun, a village in suburban Beijing where the majority of residents are migrants from all over China. While many go to work downtown in the morning, some run their own food or fruit stalls, clinics, drug stores, barber’s shops and grocery stores in the village.

At the gate of the Tongxin school, a wall of copper plaques tells visitors that this school has diverse partnerships with Beijing universities, such as Peking University and the Communication University of China.

But during a brief tour of the school, CLB noticed the poor lighting and shabby teaching equipment in the classrooms. Five or six teachers were squeezed into a ten square meter office, busy writing or preparing class materials. The restrooms were unsanitary and malodorous. When school is almost over, kids of all different ages play chase with each other in the narrow playground.

The school is at the end of a narrow alley, crammed with grocery stores and small restaurants on both sides. After school hours, CLB saw police arrest a youngster who ran a gambling store on one side of the alley. A Picun villager told CLB that police came to the village almost every day. And at around 7 pm, street would be full of sex workers looking for business.

The struggle for survival

According to statistics from Beijing Municipal Education Commission, out of the 478,000 migrant children that have reached the age of compulsory education in Beijing, 70 percent now study in public schools. The others receive education either in licensed or unlicensed private schools like Sun Heng’s Tongxin.

In spite of concerns about safety and the poor quality of education, unlicensed schools are still popular in suburban areas like Picun. None of students and graduates from Tongxin that CLB talked to complained about their school but the best they could say about it was that it was “okay.”

Apart from affordable tuition fees and proximity to home, private migrant schools don’t ask parents for the extensive documentation required by public schools. Neither do they charge migrant parents a “boarding fee.” Such fees were prohibited by Beijing way back in 2004, but still exist under the name of “school donations.” Several Beijing residents told CLB that “boarding fees” ranged from 50,000 to 100,000 yuan, more than a migrant worker’s total income for a year.

Beijing has over 1,000 public schools that claim to accept migrant students, and out of the 200 private migrant schools across the entire city, only a quarter are licensed, according to statistics from CNTV last year.

Sun Liming, principal of the Limin Hope School in Haidian district, told a seminar in Beijing late June that the rapid development of Beijing’s suburbs had led to his school being demolished seven times since it was founded in 1999. In trying to keep the school afloat over the years he had accumulated a debt of over 500,000 yuan, he said. Primary school students at the Limin Hope School pay around 1,000 yuan for tuition per semester plus text book fees.

Growing demand

Statistics from the Beijing Municipal Education Commission show that the number of migrant children in Beijing who have attained the age of compulsory education is growing by around 40,000 each year on average since 2000. It is doubtful if public schools and licensed private schools alone can accommodate this growing number of migrant children in Beijing. Chaoyang Education Committee claims that it is encouraging the development of quality education resources in the suburban areas most commonly inhabited by migrant workers. It has, for instance, set up junior secondary schools in the district associated with such well-known institutions as Renmin University and Northeast Normal University.

But China Academy of Social Sciences Professor Wang Chunguang stressed at the Beijing seminar in June that concerted efforts from media, central government and civil society organizations are needed in order to safeguard the rights of migrant children to education.

“Under media pressure, the central government needs to roll out relevant policies to incorporate the compulsory education of migrant children into the evaluation system of local officials,” Professor Wang said. “Meanwhile, civil society groups have an increasingly important role to play in helping migrant children access education resources.”

Sichuan, the Chinese province perhaps most synonymous with the export of rural labour, now has more rural labourers employed at home than in other provinces. In the first half this year, there were 10.9 million rural workers from Sichuan employed inside the province, up 23.7 percent year on year. By contrast, there were 10.1 million rural migrants employed outside the province, down 4.1 percent year on year, according to official statistics.

Sichuan now joins the other well-known labour exporting province, Henan, in having more rural labourers at home than away, giving further weight to the view that we are seeing a significant regional rebalancing of labour in China.

And it is a trend that many workers welcome. One rural labourer from Hubei who had recently returned home pointed out that there was no longer a substantial difference between wage levels close to home and wages in the coastal provinces. Moreover, he said, he now had more time to spend with his children and elderly parents.

A sound equipment salesman from Hunan who has been working in Shenzhen for a year and earns around 3,000 yuan a month told CLB that, although he can save a lot of money in Shenzhen, he does not feel at home in the big city.

“When you stand on the busy streets and watch the passers-by, you feel the income gap, the different social classes and values. It doesn’t give a firm footing to a worker like me,” he said. “If my hometown has the same development opportunities, I would definitely go back.”

Inland provinces such as Sichuan and Guizhou, amongst others, have already established themselves as a new engine for economic growth in China and they are expected to maintain that status in the future. In the first half this year, Guizhou and Sichuan registered 14 percent and 13 percent growth respectively, against 7.4 percent growth in Guangdong and 7.2 percent growth in Shanghai, both below the national average of 7.8 percent.

Fixed asset investment in China’s central and western regions has also grown faster than in the east. They saw 25 percent and 24.2 percent growth year on year respectively in the first seven months this year, compared with 19.2 percent growth in fixed asset investment in the eastern region.

Francis Cheung, head of China/HK strategy at CLSA, said the major strength of inland provinces in attracting investment is that the government is putting more money into infrastructure development and more migrant workers are coming home, turning inland provinces into low-cost and competitive economies.

“Although overall infrastructure growth in China has been declining rapidly as the government spent so much money in 2009 and 2010, new infrastructure spending is mostly in central and western provinces and these two regions are going to get a larger share of investment spending from China in future,” said Cheung.

Investment incentives in Sichuan, for example, include more favourable tax, land, mining and bank lending policies for both domestic and foreign enterprises. These policies have already attracted major Taiwan companies like Foxconn, Compal and Wistron, as well as their suppliers, who are eager to move inland to cut production costs amid the global economic slowdown.

Foxconn, the world’s largest electronics manufacturer, said back in 2010 that it would cut the number of employees in Shenzhen from 450,000 to 300,000 and transform the Shenzhen plant into to a research and development, pilot production and logistics centre. In the same year, it opened its iPad plant in Chengdu, the provincial capital of Sichuan.

Foxconn chairman Terry Guo said the plant plans to achieve an annual output of 100 million iPads by 2013 and recruit 500,000 workers by 2015. There are currently around 80,000 workers in Foxconn, about one fifth of the total number of new jobs created by major investment projects in Chengdu last year, according to statistics from the Chengdu Human Resources and Social Security Bureau.

For an entry-level worker, Foxconn is paying a basic wage around 1,550 yuan a month in Chengdu versus 1,800 yuan in Shenzhen. Most rural workers from Sichuan don’t care too much about this 250 yuan gap as their living expenses are relatively low and they can enjoy a better quality of life closer to home.

Not only are rural workers being attracted by job opportunities close to home, they are also setting up new businesses in the province with the skills and experience gained from years of working in coastal provinces. Statistics from Sichuan showed that in the first half this year, migrant workers who returned to Sichuan had set up more than 2,000 businesses with a total revenue over ten billion yuan.

However, Francis Cheung also had a word of caution: If land and labour costs in central and western provinces continue to rise rapidly, factories would be unwilling to relocate there due to their inferior logistics network.
 

For business leaders attending a “small and medium-sized enterprise summit” in Guangzhou last weekend, it was very much a tale of two business models, the traditional “made in China” model and the newer more innovative “create in China” model.

While the traditional labour intensive, low cost, export-orientated factories are suffering because of the global economic downturn, manufacturers with higher added value are sounding increasingly optimistic.

These manufacturers are riding the tide of innovation, energy saving and environmental protection, and are aiming to lead the evolution from “made in China” to “create in China.” Although their export orders have been affected by the economic uncertainties, the situation is still generally positive.

An Anhui-based electronic components manufacturer, for example, said it is investing 900 million yuan in new research and development and production centers employing 1,000 workers and technicians. It generated 320 million yuan in revenue last year from clients like Huawei, Eriksson, Alcatel-Lucent and Bosch, and that figure is expected to increase this year.

A ten-year-old Guangzhou-based auto parts supplier meanwhile is on the cutting edge of “remanufacturing,” recycling used car parts (mainly steering mechanisms) in order to save energy and protect the environment. The regional manager of this 200 employee facility said they always invested in and created new technology, and he was confident the factory would continue to prosper because it could not only retain existing clients but regularly acquired new customers as well.

A sales manager at a Jiangsu auto parts company that supplies components to Honda, Yamaha and Suzuki plants in China said he wasn’t worried about the recent anti-Japanese protests and calls for a boycott of Japanese products because his customers were all Sino-Japanese joint-ventures. Joint-venture cars have distinct badges that make them easily distinguishable from those imported from Japan and are generally not being targeted in the current boycott. Although revenue had declined due to the recent economic downturn, demand from domestic clients remained strong, he said.

Meanwhile, Zhu Qingguo, deputy chairman of Zhejiang Chamber of Commerce in Guangdong, looked a worried man at the SME summit. He estimated that only one quarter of his member SMEs were profitable. Three quarters are either making a loss or just about breaking even, he said.

SMEs in Zhejiang have been particularly hard hit by the recent economic slowdown. Their once highly acclaimed small, flexible cost, competitive family workshops have been challenged by currency appreciation, weak demand and rising raw material and labour costs. A hardware manufacturer, for example, said that while in the past only three factories might bid for one order, now about ten factories are bidding for the same order.

And as The Observer reported from Zhejiang’s “Sock City” Datang early this month, whole towns that grew rich in the early 2000s exporting low cost consumer products are now under threat. “I'm very worried. This year is much worse than 2008-9,” said Xu Leili, the owner of a major sock manufacturer in Datang who has already seen several of his rivals go under.

The fate of China’s SMEs will undoubtedly have an impact on China’s labour market because as Liu Yuting, the head of the Ministry of Finance’s enterprise department, noted at the Guangzhou summit, SMEs create over 80 percent of the jobs in China’s cities. If China can successfully manage the transition to “create in China,” there is reason to be optimistic. If it sticks with “made in China” there may be trouble ahead. 
 

Workers at Shiroki, a Japanese auto parts maker in Guangdong, had long been unhappy at the company’s practice of forcing them to work an additional 20 minutes each day to make up for their rest period, which was not considered by the company to be work time.

On the surface, the 500-strong workforce seemed to have an advantage in pressing their demands in that they had a democratically elected trade union that had been in place since the company’s founding in 2003. However, all of the union’s discussions with management were framed within the officially sanctioned model of “collective consultations” (集体协商), which favoured conciliation over the use of collective action or protest to back up workers’ demands.

After a year of fruitless negotiation involving the enterprise union, management and the Guangzhou municipal trade union federation, in July last year, the enterprise union sought the help of the Shenzhen-based Laowei Law Firm, which has been at forefront of collective bargaining initiatives in China.

Over the next six months, Laowei provided legal advice on the trade union’s role in collective bargaining and helped train the trade union representatives in negotiation skills. Laowei’s director Duan Yi, meanwhile, kept in regular contact with officials from the district and municipal trade union federations and briefed them about the progress of negotiations at Shiroki.

Laowei’s aim was to transform the collective consultation process at Shiroki into proper collective bargaining (集体谈判). And a key component of collective bargaining is the ability to break a deadlock in negotiations by mobilizing the workforce in collective action.

And that is precisely what happened on 1 February this year when union members voted to no longer do the prescribed “20 minute overtime” that had been at the centre of the dispute.

The protest worked almost immediately. Within two hours the boss agreed to cancel the forced overtime and issued a public statement to that effect. The mere threat of collective action had achieved in a few hours what a year of collective consultations had failed to do.

In the past decade, as labour protests and strikes have become increasingly widespread in China, government officials have started to weigh the best way to mitigate labour conflicts. And although collective bargaining is at an embryonic stage in China, Duan Yi explains that Laowei hopes: “That by gradually showing officials our successful collective bargaining cases we can convince them that collective bargaining is indeed effective in protecting the interests of both workers and management.”

Nowadays, government and trade union officials do sometimes silently assent to the use collective action to force management to make compromises during bargaining. However, workers representatives still run the risk of reprisals from management and the authorities.

In April this year, for example, two workers representatives at the Hengbao jewellery factory in Guangdong were detained for three weeks after leading workers in protests to demand payment of their social security dues.

“How to protect workers’ representatives remains an acute issue if we want to make collective bargaining sustainable,” said a worker at the Panyu Migrant Worker Centre which also trains workers in collective bargaining skills.

But as Laowei’s Duan Yi pointed out, although workers representatives may currently face law suits or get fired or transferred from their position after leading collective protests; support from their coworkers and civil society organizations could ultimately bring about the legal protection needed for representatives engaged in collective bargaining.

“The essence of the law is fairness and justice. As long as workers’ demands are fair and justifiable, our legal system will gradually lean toward collective bargaining,” he said.
 

The number of migrant worker deputies attending the National People’s Congress (NPC) in Beijing has increased tenfold from just three last year to 31 deputies this year. However, that still represents little more than one percent of the total number of NPC deputies or about one deputy for every eight million migrant workers.

Many of the migrant worker deputies are now managers or entrepreneurs but their proposals and suggestions to this year’s NPC reflect their humble origins. Sun Donglin, for example, who is now the chairman of a construction company in Hubei, proposed that 31 December be formally designated as “Migrant Workers’ Rights Protection Day.” Sun became well-known after his brother, a labour contractor, was killed in a road accident delivering wages to his employees. Sun took over and made sure all of the workers got their salaries before the Lunar New Year holiday.

Former factory apprentice and now company shareholder, Wang Qinfeng, suggested that China reform its vocational education system, saying that high quality technicians are the cornerstone of a strong industrial country. Liu Zhongjun, a carpenter who lost four fingers in an accident, simply wished that all construction workers get paid on time. While a deputy from Guangdong called for free train rides for all during the four major Chinese holidays (National Day, Lunar New Year, Tomb Sweeping Day and Labour Day).

Other proposals originated not from the deputies own experiences but from the lobbying efforts of civil society organizations. One of the most impressive campaigns came from Love Save Pneumoconiosis, a nationwide volunteer group established to provide aid to migrant workers with pneumoconiosis, which gathered 813 signatures from pneumoconiosis victims in Hunan and Sichuan for an open letter to the NPC outlining suggestions on how to resolve the problem of providing long-term medical and welfare relief to migrant workers with pneumoconiosis.NPC deputy, Xie Zilong, the chairman of the Hunan-based LBX Pharmacy, agreed to submit their suggestions during the NPC session.

Official proposals to the NPC have to be signed by at least 30 deputies but individual suggestions can be directed to specific government bodies, which are then required to respond to those suggestions.

One deputy Wang Yi, who made several suggestions on environmental issues to the National Development and Reform Committee, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Ministry of Water Resources over the past five years, told the 21st Century Economic Herald:

I was neither very satisfied nor very unsatisfied with the responses from the government. Officials would tell me my suggestions are good but are difficult to put into effect due to practical restrictions, and as NPC deputy, I understand their situation.

The right to strike came up again during the annual parliamentary gathering in Beijing last week. Ge Jianxiong, head of Fudan University Library, suggested that the right to strike be restored to the Chinese constitution, telling the Financial Timesthat strikes were an effective way of defending workers’ rights, and should be legally protected.

Two years ago, Guangzhou businessman and national legislator, Zeng Qinghong, made a similar proposal to the National People’s Congress. Zeng was well known at the time for his mediating role in the 2010 Nanhai Honda strike and his proposal to legitimize the right to strike caused considerate debate among academics.

For most workers however it has remained an academic debate. There has not been a right to strike in China since it was removed from the constitution in 1982. But this has not prevented workers, especially young, well-educated workers who are well aware of their rights, from going out on strike. In mid-February, for example, when hundreds of workers at the American-owned International Paper factory in Panyu struck for a better annual bonus, they didn’t think about the legitimacy of the strike.

One worker explained how line managers had simply told workers not to report for duty that day but instead gather at a designated place to put pressure on the company to respond to their demands for a better bonus, which reportedly had been cut from 2,000 yuan to 750 yuan.

“We didn’t consider if our behaviour was legal or not,” said the worker over the phone. “We simply wanted to seek an explanation for why our annual bonus was cut this year.” He added that they were actually following the example of another factory in Guangzhou that had succeeded in getting a bonus increase after going out on strike at the end of December.

The worker said they had approached the trade union before going on strike but the union officials were largely unresponsive. “They did not take us seriously,” he said.

The majority of factory workers in China think the same way. They don’t seek the union’s consent to strike. Strikes are a spontaneous and often effective means of achieving workers’ demands. The downside is of course that they risk being fired or even detained.

The right to strike would in theory protect such workers but as Chang Kai, professor at Renmin University, has noted, the precondition for legislation on the right to strike should be that trade unions can vigorously represent workers. Most countries in which workers do have the right to strike also have unions that can and are willing to organize strikes. And in most cases, strikes normally occur after collective bargaining reaches a standstill or fails. Given the current inability of Chinese unions to represent workers or to hold real collective bargaining, legislation could actually deprive workers of ways to effectively bargain with their bosses by placing restrictions on the conditions for strike action.

It’s worth mentioning however that the Shenzhen Federation of Trade Unions is pushing union reform. The union chairman at the Japanese owned Ohms factory who was democratically elected last May is now facing workers’ demands to step down because of his failure to defend workers’ rights in recent labour disputes.

While workers still have much to learn on how to elect a union chairman who can really represent them, the voices calling for the re-election of the union chairman at least shows that the union reforms have succeeded in instilling the real role of the trade union into the workers’ mind set.

The Chinese Dream has been analysed and interpreted in many different ways since President Xi Jinping first floated the idea at this year’s National People’s Congress. But perhaps the biggest difference is between how China’s workers and the official trade union see that dream.

On 1 April, appropriately enough, The All-China Federation of Trade Unions called on unions across the country to spread the idea of the “Chinese Dream - the Beauty of Work,” a concept that encouraged workers to take pride in their work and work harder for a Chinese renaissance.

According to media reports, in less than a month, trade unions had organized over 1,500 propaganda groups with thousands of grassroots officials working on the factory floor. The reports claimed that more than four million workers had listened to the Chinese Dream propaganda and gradually digested the concept and were then motivated to be the practitioner of the Chinese path and a driving force for Chinese power.

Provinces and cities like Shaanxi, Qinghai and Shanghai issued detailed directives on how to carry out the propaganda work. These directives contained no mention of workers’ rights and interests but instead were full of words like “harmonious society,” “hardworking” and “socialism with Chinese characteristics.”

Lang Guoqing, the deputy chairman of the Qinghai provincial union, for example, mentioned “socialism with Chinese characteristics” 17 times in a 2,300 character commentary.

When it comes to the implementation of the Chinese Dream, Lang stressed that unions should guide workers with socialism’s core values, instruct workers to voluntarily undertake their legal and social duties, and keep collective labour disputes at bay.

In other words, the union must obey and serve the Party and the state in realizing the Chinese Dream.

Away from dreamland, the latest figures from the National Bureau of Statistics show that less than half of China’s 263 million migrant workers have signed labour contracts with their employees – making them far more vulnerable to exploitation and rights violations. Only 14.3 percent of migrant workers have a pension, 24 percent of them have work-injury insurance, 16.9 percent have medical insurance, 8.4 percent have unemployment insurance, and only 6.1 percent have maternity insurance.

Due to ineffective trade union representation, many migrant workers struggle to protect their rights and can only improve their pay and working conditions through collective action. They have a totally different vision of the Chinese dream from that of the official trade union.

When asked about his Chinese dream, a young worker who was fired from an American-owned factory in Guangzhou this February because he refused to do overtime said, “Ordinary workers only know how to work hard and make a living. We don’t have many dreams. I simply hope I can have a more relaxing job in the future.”

An elderly migrant worker who was severely injured in a coal mine accident but received very little compensation said he hopes the state can take better care of injured workers such as him.

A jewellery worker who later became an advocate for the rights of workers with pneumoconiosis said he hopes that workers’ rights to a safe working environment can be enforced and not just left as words printed on paper.

A Shenzhen-based labour NGO worker said the Chinese dream should mean decent working conditions and a dignified life. So that the children of migrant workers can enjoy equal rights to education with urban residents, access basic medical care when they are ill, and get legal redress when their labour rights are violated.

The gap between what the official unions think and what workers want is very worrying. But since Chinese workers cannot form independent unions, perhaps the best solution to this yawning gap is to reform the official union from the bottom up and encourage real workers’ representation in factory unions. Encouragingly, this is already happening in some factories in Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

China’s Work Safety Law stipulates that factories should make sure that fire exits are always ready to use and clearly signed. This was tragically not the case at the Baoyuanfeng poultry plant in the north-eastern province of Jilin where 120 workers died in a fire this week.

The fire doors were locked, the factory said, to prevent workers from walking around and disrupting production. Some employees said that as 70 percent of the workers were women, the doors were locked to prevent them from going to the toilet too often.

China’s law on fire prevention states that that both employers and the trade union should educate workers on fire prevention. And factories that are likely to be exposed to fire hazards, should provide fire safety training to its employees and organize regular fire drills.

Firstly; it is not clear if this factory with more than 1,000 employees even had a trade union. Secondly; none of the workers had received any fire safety training despite the fact that this factory (like many other poultry businesses) used flammable and combustible liquid ammonia in the production process. Workers who were lucky enough to escape the fire which began just as the 6.00.am shift was starting described scenes of chaos as they ran to the exits only to find them locked.

Some observers say the factory management simply did not have fire safety awareness and did not anticipate that their “simple” way of factory management would result in the loss of over one hundred lives. However the 325 deaths, including 288 students, in an auditorium fire in Xinjiang in 1994 was also very much related to closed fire exits, according to official accounts. Back then out of the eight fire exits, only one was operational.

Sadly, government officials in Jilin took a more active stance in dealing with potential social unrest in the aftermath of the tragedy than in overseeing work safety at the factory before the disaster. Jilin Party Secretary Wang Rulin stressed on the day of the accident that while the government should set up a work team for each victim’s family and make sure they are properly compensated; the municipal government and other departments should make detailed arrangement to prevent “mass incidents.”

“We should enhance the guidance of public opinion and accept people’s supervision; we should enhance both service and guidance towards the media; we should enhance management over social media; we should prevent malicious speculation and the spread of rumors; we should prevent anything that misleads public opinion and disturbs social stability.”

The media, probably following the order of “properly guiding public opinion”, started to emphasize the government’s intense rescue effort, the mayor’s sincere self-criticism and the severe punishment imposed on the factory management.

We don’t yet know how much compensation the victims’ families will get and who will pay the bill. Lawyers gave a conservative estimate of 600,000 yuan for each victim’s family, and the amount may vary depending on whether workers have elderly and children at home. The amount is usually decided by local government’s negotiation with the victims’ relatives and paid by the factory if workers don’t have work injury insurance.

There have been four workplace fire disasters and seven work accidents in the past week leading to at least 149 deaths. Obviously the current system of fire prevention and work safety is not working. Rather than repeating old clichés like enhancing implementation and supervision, it might be more effective to encourage and allow workers to be involved in the dialogue and play an active role in supervising fire safety equipment and safety measures. After all, they are the people who are likely to care most.

As a matter of fact, China’s Work Safety Law has one specific chapter on workers’ rights and obligations. Workers have the right to know the potential hazards in the workplace and the preventative and emergency measures in place. They are also entitled to make safety suggestions to the management and to report and sue factories for safety violations.

But in reality, workers seldom know about such rights, nor do they have the power to bargain with the management on their salary and social benefits, a function that the trade union should play.

Poultry workers in China are known to suffer from extremely bad work conditions with air and noise pollution, exposure to high temperatures, unpleasant smells, poultry blood, feces, and disease. Working in the poultry industry also poses a significant challenge to the mental health of workers. However, their salary, working and living conditions rarely attracts public attention compared to workers on the assembly line. For example, 48-year-old Cong Yanrong who worked at Baoyuanfeng with her husband said each of them earned less than 2,000 yuan per month at the factory.

It is about time that the trade union did a much better job in representing workers interests in the food processing industry and that government officials started taking their duty of oversight seriously.

The Beijing airport bombing that shocked the nation on 20 June not only raised questions about the fairness of China’s legal system but also highlighted the lack of effective channels for migrant workers seeking redress for injustice.

Eight years ago, Ji Zhongxing, a strong, confident and handsome young man from Juancheng county in Shandong was living his Chinese Dream working as motorcycle taxi driver in the southern boomtown of Dongguan. He had been working for six years and knew the risks of operating a motorcycle taxi in violation of local rules but his monthly income of 3,000 yuan was just too attractive to let go of.

However, he could never have imagined what happened in the early morning of 28 June 2005. While he was “illegally” carrying a passenger on his motorbike, Ji claims he was severely beaten by local chengguan (城管), low-level officials employed by the city to enforce traffic regulations etc. He was left paralyzed from the waist down and filed a lawsuit against the chengguan. The chengguan denied the beating and despite eyewitness testimony from Ji’s passenger, the court still ruled that his paralysis was the result of a traffic accident and not a beating imposed by the chengguan.

Ji soon lost faith in ability of the judicial system to address his grievances and returned home to Shandong where he embarked on the time-honoured practice of petitioning. He was intercepted several times during his petitioning trips to Dongguan. But one letter to the political and legal affairs committee in Beijing was eventually forwarded to the Dongguan authorities. In 2010, five years after the accident, the Dongguan authorities gave Ji 100,000 yuan in “humanitarian assistance.”

It was made clear to Ji at the time that this was definitely not compensation for a beating at the hands of city officials. Ji’s brother pointed out on his weibo that when the Dongguan police handed over the 100,000 yuan, Ji had to sign a “no more petitioning” agreement.

Ji was only in his mid-20s when he was paralyzed. The 100,000 yuan, improved his living standard for a short time but it was far from enough to get his old life back. His girlfriend left him shortly after he was hospitalized and he no longer has the ability to work.

Desperate to get attention for his plight, Ji travelled to Beijing on 20 June, in order to detonate the homemade bomb he had carried all the way from his hometown. His failure to get justice through legal means or by petitioning is probably what led to this extreme act of “performance art.” There is a popular saying among the nation’s petitioners that “If you want to have your complaint resolved, you have to go big.”

Yet unlike the earlier “terrorist” cases such as Chen Shuizong, who set alight a bus in Xiamen killing 47 people last month, or Qian Mingqi, the mastermind behind three explosions in Jiangxi that killed four in 2011, Ji had no intention of harming others because of the injustice he had suffered. Ji reportedly spent about ten minutes persuading onlookers to stay as far away from him as possible, so that he hurt no one but himself.

Officials from Ji’s hometown of Juancheng supported his claims about the beating and told reporters that if Dongguan had handled the dispute in a timely manner, the bombing could have been avoided. The Dongguan municipal intermediate court has now reportedly reopened the investigation.

Ji has been detained and is likely to face criminal charges of jeopardizing public safety but the famous rights lawyer, Liu Xiaoyuan, said on his weibo that he’s willing to provide legal assistance if necessary.