China Labour Net

Over many years, China has become the “world’s factory” and its industrial development has greatly increased employment opportunities. This has also been accompanied by the frequent…

Globalisation has enabled big corporations to spread their production around the world, dividing and ruling workers in those countries. The recent global credit crunch has clearly demonstrated that the historical destiny of workers around the world is now linked together. At the same time, some of the more forward looking sections of the international labour movement have formed cross boundaries cooperation. The economies of the Chinese speaking regions in the East Asia areas with a population of 1.3 billion people are linked together by the same capitalist system. Big corporations from any one of these areas might have investments in all the areas employing large number of workers. Unfortunately, cooperation between the unions in Taiwan and Hong Kong is minimal and exchanges with the international labour movement happen mostly at the leadership but rarely at the grassroots level. China’s dictatorial regime has never allowed labour movement to exist. Recently there is an increase in collective labour struggle in China and there are now more individual activists willing to contribute to the movement, but the objective and subjective conditions are still hugely inadequate. There is a need for a platform to enable Chinese speaking labour movement activists to exchange, share and learn from each other, and in particular from the international workers’ movement. The lack of basic democratic rights means a permanent website outside China with a vision to include China’s labour movement is very important.

In this feature of Worlds of Labour website, we invited activists from Germany, UK and China (Hong Kong) to illustrate and comment the changes of social security systems in their own countries and region. They point out the existing problems and proposes improvements.

April 12, 2010 http://www.chinatechnews.com/2010/04/12/11875-chinese-employees-angry-about-lack-of-benefits-from-philips More than ten people, all of whom were reported to be former…

The signature campaign to free the Chinese labour activists detained last month has already been endorsed by 172 organisations, both local and international. 2450 individuals have also endorsed it. We urge human and labour rights supporters to continue to circulate and/or endorse the statement

On January 13, 2016, General Electric (GE) in Mannheim-Käfertaler and the other sites let the cat out of the bag. In a crowded staff meeting the CEO of GE-Alstom Germany, Alf Henryk Wulf, announced brutal cutbacks on behalf of the new corporate masters.

There will be three presidential candidates competing in Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election. They are Tsai Ying Wen the leader of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), Eric Chu who represents the Chinese Nationalist Party (Kuomintang, KMT) and James Soong from the People First Party (PFP). According to pre-election opinion polls, Tsai Ying Wen’s popularity rating is the highest, much greater than that of Eric Chu and his party that is currently in power. The third competitor James Soong’s influence is relatively insignificant. Therefore, people are expecting that the opposition party, the DPP, will defeat the KMT. The result of this ongoing campaign seems quite predictable.

At least four labour activists remain in criminal detention following a recent crackdown on labour organisations. From 3 - 5 December, labour NGOs based in Guangdong province were targeted…

On 13 October Okinawa Governor Takeshi Onaga nullified the permit to carry out land reclamation in Oura Bay, granted by the previous Governor Hirokazu Nakaima, explaining that it contains illegalities. We of the Anti-Helicopter Base Council unconditionally support this decision, and more than ever give our full backing to the Governor.

In 2014, like many people, Sai Fai had to endure pepper and tear gas at one of the the three occupation sites where he worked in Admiralty. This was where he learned the first lesson of politics. At first he was just curious about what the students were doing there but soon he was drawn into the movement to support the students. One day he asked himself the question, “the students are doing this for us, but what have we done?”