U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE

WASHINGTON : 

For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office

Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866) 512–1800; DC area (202) 512–1800

Fax: (202) 512–2250 Mail: Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402–0001

27–931 PDF 2006

THE LOT OF CHINESE WORKERS:

DO CHINA’S LABOR LAWS WORK?

ROUNDTABLE

BEFORE THE

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE

COMMISSION ON CHINA

ONE HUNDRED NINTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

APRIL 11, 2006

Printed for the use of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China

(

Available via the World Wide Web: http://www.cecc.gov

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE COMMISSION ON CHINA

LEGISLATIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

Senate House

CHUCK HAGEL, Nebraska, Chairman

SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas

GORDON SMITH, Oregon

JIM DEMINT, South Carolina

MEL MARTINEZ, Florida

MAX BAUCUS, Montana

CARL LEVIN, Michigan

DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California

BYRON DORGAN, North Dakota

JAMES A. LEACH, Iowa, Co-Chairman

DAVID DREIER, California

FRANK R. WOLF, Virginia

JOSEPH R. PITTS, Pennsylvania

ROBERT B. ADERHOLT, Alabama

SANDER LEVIN, Michigan

MARCY KAPTUR, Ohio

SHERROD BROWN, Ohio

MICHAEL M. HONDA, California

EXECUTIVE BRANCH COMMISSIONERS

STEVEN J. LAW, Department of Labor

PAULA DOBRIANSKY, Department of State

DAVID DORMAN, Staff Director (Chairman)

JOHN FOARDE, Staff Director (Co-Chairman)

(II)

(III)

C O N T E N T S

Page

STATEMENTS

Han, Dongfang, Director, China Labour Bulletin, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China ........................................................................................... 2

Munro, Robin, Director of Research, China Labour Bulletin, Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China ...................................................................... 5

(1)

THE LOT OF CHINESE WORKERS: DO CHINA’S

LABOR LAWS WORK?

TUESDAY, APRIL 11, 2006

CONGRESSIONAL-EXECUTIVE

COMMISSION ON CHINA,

Washington, DC.

The Roundtable was convened, pursuant to notice, at 10 a.m., in

room 2255, Rayburn House Office Building, John Foarde (House

Staff Director) presiding.

Also present: Celeste Helm, Director, Bureau of International

Labor Affairs, U.S. Department of Labor; Chris Mitchell, Office of

Representative Michael M. Honda; William A. Farris, Senior Counsel; Patricia Dyson, Senior Counsel for Labor Affairs; Kara

Abramson, Counsel; and Diana Wang, Research Associate.

Mr. FOARDE. Good morning, everyone. Let us get started. Welcome, on behalf of Chairman Senator Chuck Hagel and Co-Chairman

Congressman Jim Leach, and the Members of the CongressionalExecutive Commission on China, to this staff-led issues roundtable.

This is approximately the 55th such roundtable that we have

done since February 2002. Our Commission members and the

CECC staff find them extremely useful in getting into very great

detail on the issues involved in human rights and the development

of the rule of law in China that are part of our statutory mandate.

Our theme this morning is Chinese labor laws. We are particularly pleased to have two very distinguished and very knowledgeable panelists to help us get into these issues. They may hold the

record for coming the longest way to appear and to share their expertise and knowledge with us. They both come from Hong Kong.

I will introduce each of them in a moment.

Our procedure is, as we have done for the last four and a half

years or so, that we will invite each of our panelists to make an

opening presentation of about 10 minutes, and when both of them

have spoken, then we will go to a question and answer session in

which the staff panel up here will pose a question and listen to an

answer for roughly about five minutes each. We will do continuing

rounds of questions until we exhaust the topic, or reach 11:30 a.m.,

whichever comes first. Our experience has been that we never exhaust the topic, so we will have some mercy on our panelists and

let them go after about 90 minutes.

After a few weeks, the complete transcript of this morning’s

roundtable will be available on the CECC Web site. That’s at

www.cecc.gov.

2

The National People’s Congress [NPC] enacted labor laws in

1994 and in 2001 that many people in China and many observers

abroad saw as positive steps for Chinese workers. In practice, however, both sets of laws have been implemented inconsistently across

China, resulting in a legal regime for labor in China that does not

protect workers against exploitation and abuse. Such abusive practices are particularly common against rural workers when they migrate into areas in China in which industrial development has been

rapid and demand for labor is great. These migrant workers frequently find it difficult to protect themselves against health problems, long working hours, wage arrearages, and other forms of

exploitation.

Chinese workers are making their discontent known by holding

large public protests in many places in China. Public demonstrations are one of the few methods open to exploited workers to bring

their grievances to the attention of government authorities. Most

protests are peaceful, but during 2005, at least one incident involved workers battling security officers.

Our panelists this morning will discuss these and other issues

and developments, as well as offer comments on new labor legislation under consideration in China, so is with great pleasure that

I introduce our first speaker this morning.

Han Dongfang is the Director of the China Labour Bulletin

[CLB], resident in Hong Kong. Han founded the CLB in Hong Kong

in 1994 to promote democratic unions and the protection of labor

rights and labor standards in mainland China. A railway worker,

Han joined the Workers’ Autonomous Federation during the prodemocracy movement in Beijing during 1989 and was detained

without trial for 22 months after the June 4, 1989, Tiananmen

crackdown. Han maintains contact with Chinese workers through,

among other means, his three weekly radio call-in shows and news

programs broadcast over Radio Free Asia.

Welcome, Han Dongfang. Over to you for 10 minutes or so for an

opening statement.

STATEMENT OF HAN DONGFANG, DIRECTOR, CHINA LABOUR

BULLETIN, HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION,

CHINA

Mr. HAN. Thank you, John. It is my pleasure to be here to share

my experience with our daily work on labor issues in China. This

reminds me. We did, once in Hong Kong, a roundtable about coal

mine safety with you. At that time, the coal mine safety issue was

not as terrible as today. We really hoped that that roundtable could

make a greater impact.

I do remember that we proposed an idea, that a Coal Miners’

Health and Safety Committee should be organized, otherwise the

disaster will get bigger and bigger. So now there is no committee

being founded and the problem is getting bigger and bigger. We are

in trouble in the coal mine area.

This time, we are talking about the rule of law and civil society

and how, from our work experience, we can contribute ideas from

our daily work. I just want to mention a case first that I would

share with everybody here.

3

About nine months ago, or a little bit longer ago, we were approached by a group of jewelry factory workers. They got silicosis

after years working in the jewelry factories cutting stones without

proper protection. After a few years working in the factory, they

started having breathing problems and they went to the government’s special hospital for work-related diseases. The hospital

deliberately misdiagnosed their disease as tuberculosis. These

workers just felt they had bad luck. They left the factory and got

a little compensation. Once they went back home, far away, thousands of miles away from Guangdong, they took the tuberculosis

medicine for a year or more. It did not work, and their health problems were getting worse. They went to the local work-related disease hospital to get another check, and they found this silicosis.

They decided to go back to Guangdong to ask their boss to pay

compensation.

So one extreme case was when a worker walked into his boss’s

office and asked for compensation, and he said, ‘‘You know, I was

working here for a few years, I got this disease here, I am dying,

so why do you not give us some compensation? ’’ The boss told him,

‘‘Yes, I know you are dying, but if you do not walk out of my office

now, you are dead now.’’ So this is the way the workers have been

treated in the workplace, and this is the way the workers have

been treated when they realized they do have this legal right to

claim compensation. But they have just been treated that way.

They approached us and we hired a local lawyer from the local

city, from Xinjiang, who helped these workers collect evidence and

file the lawsuit in the local court. About nine months after—it

takes quite a long time, but nine months is not really that long

compared with many others—we did manage to get this group of

workers compensation. The highest compensation in one single case

was 460,000 renminbi, which is about US$60,000. Obviously, it was

a record-breaking compensation case in this area.

From this, we learned several things. At the beginning, we felt

it probably would not work. The local court had been co-opted, and

the factory owners are so powerful economically, and the workers

do not feel they can really make it. But eventually, when we went

through the legal procedure, we realized there were possibilities.

It is not the case in today’s China that you talk about the court

and administrative section and everything as one. We can really

separate each part of the government into great detail, and know

who is on which side. Today’s China is really changing.

In this specific case, we realized that if we handled it well, if we

focused very much on the law and the workers’ rights and nothing

else, just a very detailed focus on the case itself, the chance would

get bigger and bigger that we could win the case for the workers.

But not only win the case for the workers, for the compensation,

but outside of this, really increase the workers’ confidence and

trust in the legal system and the law.

One of the biggest problems in my country is that people do not

trust the law. People think the law is for ruling people, not for protecting their rights. You say, ‘‘the law is for protecting you,’’ and

they do not believe it. But through this legal process and getting

compensation, it made these workers believe more in the legal system. In addition to that, it will encourage other workers from

4

neighboring factories, not only this factory, to do the same and to

have more and more confidence in the legal system and the law.

Also, after this case we won, these workers were willing to do

something else, although they are dying. Probably, at the longest,

they can live for seven years. They are unable to be cured completely. But they are willing to help other workers. They are writing

down their own stories, circulating the stories to the neighborhood

factory workers who are working in the same position where they

got the disease. They are warning other workers to be careful and

ask for X-rays and a health check. This is a positive case.

Of course, we have got a negative case, too. We have the

Heilongjiang Coal Mine explosion, with 171 people killed last November. After two months, we approached some of the families. At

the beginning, the families we approached wanted to accept our

lawyer to file a lawsuit. Once we more or less worked out the lawyers from Beijing, a week after, we called them about the case, and

about 80 percent of them dropped. They said, ‘‘We do not want to

file a lawsuit any more. We are scared of the local government and

we are scared the local government is connected to the local mafia.’’

So, no matter how much you explain to them the legal procedures,

they just do not want to proceed. So this case really gave us an insight into how difficult it can be. But we do have hope, but we also

have difficulties.

From my work experience as a Chinese labor activist, as a Chinese citizen, this is my country, this is my home, no matter how

hopeless it can be or how dark it is, we have to find the way out.

We do believe it is difficult, but there is hope, which is through the

legal system. We must raise public awareness and self-confidence.

That will be the way out to create a civil society. That is what we

believe the future will be.

I will stop here.

Mr. FOARDE. Great. Han, thank you so much. We will come back

to some of those very interesting issues during the question and

answer session.

I am now very happy to introduce Robin Munro. Han Dongfang,

as he noted, has been a panelist on a CECC roundtable before, one

in Hong Kong that we held in October 2002 on coal mining safety.

But Robin is our guest for the first time, so we not only want to

welcome you, but also want to extend congratulations on behalf of

the Commission for having earned your Doctorate of Philosophy.

So, Dr. Munro, congratulations!

Robin is director of Research for the China Labour Bulletin in

Hong Kong, and also contributes research to the quarterly journal

of the U.S. NGO Human Rights in China. A graduate of Edinburgh

University and an honorary research associate at the Law Department of the School of Oriental and African Studies at London University, Robin received an award from the American Psychiatric

Association for his work on the political abuse of psychiatry in

China, and defended his Ph.D. thesis on ‘‘Judicial Psychiatry and

Human Rights in China.’’

So, Dr. Robin Munro, welcome to Washington, and thank you for

sharing your expertise with us this afternoon.

5

STATEMENT OF ROBIN MUNRO, DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH,

CHINA LABOUR BULLETIN, HONG KONG SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE REGION, CHINA

Mr. MUNRO. Thanks very much, John. It is a great pleasure to

be here.

When I got my Ph.D. last year, it was in the Law Department

at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. My professor said to me, ‘‘You do realize, Robin, that you can now teach

law in a university,’’ which I found a very chastening thought. I

have no special skills in that area, but it is nice to think I could.

I would like, in my short talk, now, to look at some of the broader issues facing the labor movement in China today and to look at

workers’ rights more generally and how that is developing.

There has been a lot of attention paid over the last year and

more to the issue of worker unrest. The Chinese Minister of Public

Security told us, over the last two years on two separate occasions,

that the scale of urban protests had been increasingly rapidly over

the last 10 years, and the figures were that, 10 years ago, there

were only 10,000 collective large-scale protests around China each

year. Then two years ago, for the first time, the authorities announced there had been 74,000 that year involving 3.7 million people, mostly workers. Also, this figure includes rural protests, but it

certainly seems most of the unrest is in the cities so far.

Then late last year, the police minister announced that this figure had risen to 87,000 for last year, involving well over 4 million

workers. Everyone knows that there is large-scale unrest around

China’s cities.

I think the main reasons are not hard to find. Chinese workers

and their families have lost the job security and social welfare that

they enjoyed for decades before the Reform Era. It may not have

been much, but it was a safety net. That is gone. Since the reforms

of the state-owned enterprises [SOEs] from the mid-990s onward,

around 50 million Chinese workers have lost their jobs. The latest

research shows that only a very small percentage of those laid-off

redundant workers have actually found full-time, proper jobs, if we

can call them that, since then. The great majority have gone into

casual jobs. They become stall-holders, or just hustlers in the cities.

On top of that, government policy, over the last 15 years in particular, has really made the Iron Lady from my country, Great

Britain, Mrs. Thatcher, look like a very relaxed liberal in terms of

social policy. For example, the health system has been largely

privatized.

In fact, hospitals and the medical services in China are now officially categorized as ‘‘commercial enterprises,’’ and they act like it

as well. They are not getting government funding to anywhere near

the degree needed, so hospitals are now selling the most expensive

drugs in order to raise revenue to keep running.

Most urban residents do not have medical insurance, which they

need. So a serious illness in family can effectively bankrupt a working class family within weeks. This is one of the root causes of the

kind of protests we are seeing, extreme social insecurity.

On top of that, you have the education system, which also seems

to be run on basically a commercial basis these days. School fees

impose a very heavy burden on most ordinary families. In the counVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:04 Jun 08, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00009 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\27931.TXT CHINA1 PsN: CHINA1
6

tryside, fees are often prohibitive. Many rural children cannot now

go to school, at least beyond the first few years of primary school.

So we can see that there is great social injustice in China and

it is getting worse. The government has said, over the last couple

of years, that it wants to bring in policies aimed at restoring what

the leadership calls a harmonious, stable society. This is the rubric

of government policy now. But so far, we have not seen the meat

in the sandwich there.

The scale of social unrest in the cities has prompted many observers to question whether China’s development model is, in fact,

stable. Can it continue? Is there a major social crisis looming?

But among this discussion of China’s long-term stability, there is

not a lot of analysis, I do not think, of what the actual nature of

this protest is. I would like to just emphasize here that it is mainly

protests from workers across a range of issues.

So whereas 10 years ago I think you could have said China did

not have a labor movement, that is no longer really the case. As

we know, freedom of association for workers is legally prohibited.

They can join any union they like, as long as it is the official All

China Federation of Trade Unions, which does not act like a union,

it acts effectively as a labor discipline enforcement arm of the government and the Communist Party.

So there is no freedom of association for workers. But hitherto,

people have tended to think that, therefore, there is no Chinese

labor movement. I think the scale of worker unrest nowadays is so

great, you can go to almost any city in the country now and there

will be several major collective worker protests going on at the

same time.

So China now has a labor movement. This is an important point

to just put there on the table and recognize. It is not organized. It

is spontaneous, it is relatively inchoate. But then so were labor

movements in most Western countries before trade unions were

permitted.

We have basically a pre-union phase of labor movement development in China today. It also has great potential, I think, for becoming a proper labor movement. One of the things that China Labour

Bulletin and other groups like us are trying to do our best to ensure is that, as this movement emerges, it develops along healthy,

law-abiding lines. That, in China, means, above all, that China’s

new labor movement needs to be non-political in outlook. It needs

to focus on livelihood issues, bread-and-butter issues for working

people and their families, and avoid the temptation or the potentiality which is always there in Chinese society, because Chinese

society is so heavily politicized, the potentiality to begin making political demands at an early stage. That would be fatal, I think, for

the fledgling Chinese labor movement.

Therefore, in our work we emphasize that workers should stay

away from politics, concentrate on developing healthy labor relations in China. China is now a capitalist society. China’s labor

movement does not need to be like Polish Solidarity, for example.

Why? Because in Poland, before 1989, everything was state-owned.

Therefore, whenever you had worker unrest, it was automatically

directed at the government. It became political very quickly.

7

In China, you have capitalism. You have private entrepreneurs.

Worker protests and dissatisfaction are directed at factory owners,

essentially. The state-owned sector is virtually gone. So that is the

future. Labor relations in that kind of economy do not need to have

a political aim, and this is a very important point that we need to

bear in mind.

Now I would also like to point out that another issue that is attracting a lot of attention outside China now is the emerging rights

defense movement, the so-called Wei Quan movement—in Chinese

it means ‘‘Defending Rights.’’ Now I have been following human

rights in China for about 25 years, and to my mind, this is the

most significant development that has yet happened on the Chinese human rights scene.

It is significant because, for the first time, through this rights defense movement, we are seeing local communities—it is a very

grassroots-based movement—organizing protests against local injustices, appealing to rule of law principles, often taking their case

to court. They are protesting about things like forced evictions from

urban properties for urban redevelopment, illegal land seizures in

the countryside, the locating of heavily polluting factories on communal land where rural children come down with horrible illnesses.

For the first time, we are seeing a grassroots-based rights movement in China, and it is getting more and more widespread. The

reason, again, is not so difficult to see. It is because the level of

social injustice in China today is very high. People are fighting

back, but they are doing so through appeal to the rule of law in

pursuit of legally specified rights that now, after many years of

propaganda and education about the legal system, they actually

think they should have and they are entitled to. ‘‘Why are we not

getting these rights? ’’ they ask.

Now I think we should be calling this rights defense movement,

the Wei Quan movement, ‘‘China’s emerging civil rights movement.’’ That is what it is, it is a civil rights movement at an early

stage.

I use that term because I think there are comparisons with the

civil rights movement in places like the United States in the 1960s.

What we are finding in China is that you are having civil rights

lawyers from the cities going down to the countryside, hooking up

with local protestors, telling them how to achieve their aims legally. You are getting academics coming in from the universities,

going down to where the protests are and offering their advice and

help. Also, you are getting investigative journalists reporting these

cases and getting the word out, increasingly opening up a new

space within the news media. Also, the government is fighting back

and trying to restrict those media freedoms, but, still, the momentum is very great in this area. So we are getting a new synergy

between key elements in society who are working together, so this

is all new.

I want to emphasize that, really, it is the workers’ movement

that I referred to a moment ago, consisting of these 87,000 mass

protests, countless wildcat strikes that are never reported, all these

kinds of things over the last 10 years, it is that movement which

has really created this space, this emerging civil society space,

8

which the country’s emerging civil rights movement, involving

many other types of social actors, is now beginning to occupy and

use.

It is the sheer weight of numbers of worker activity and protest

over the last 10 years which has one very important consequence:

10 years ago, any worker protest would immediately be categorized

by the local government as a political challenge. Very likely, the

organizers would be arrested, possibly charged with counter-revolution or endangering state security. Now, because of the sheer quantity of these protests and their diffuse spreading around society, it

has no longer become tenable for the government to categorize each

and every incident of worker protest as some kind of political

threat. They have been forced to acknowledge that these are not

political threats, these are, in fact, protests against local injustice.

That is all they are. There has become, therefore, almost willy

nilly, a level of greater tolerance within local governments for these

kinds of protests, and hence for the emerging civil rights movement.

So I think there is a very important synergy and symbiosis developing in China between the workers’ movement and this very significant, broader, emerging civil rights movement.

I think I have many other things to say, but I will stop there.

Mr. FOARDE. And we can pick up some of your other thoughts

during the question and answer session. Thank you very much,

Robin, for that really good presentation, and to Han Dongfang, for

his opening remarks.

The complete transcripts of today’s roundtable, as I mentioned

earlier, will be available in a few weeks on the CECC Web site. If

you are not already signed up on our mailing list for future

roundtables, hearings, and activities of this sort, please visit the

Web site and sign yourself up.

I would like to proceed now to the question and answer session.

We will give everyone on the panel here about five minutes to ask

questions. You may direct your questions either to Han or to Robin,

or to both. We will go around until we reach 11:30.

I would exercise the prerogative of the Chair to begin by picking

up on a thought that Han Dongfang had. You mentioned, in the

case of the jewelry workers with the silicosis, that after they won

their case, they were helping by spreading the word around about

their case to their fellow workers and advising their fellow workers

to seek compensation. Are they doing that in writing by putting out

publications or letters? Or is CLB, for example, helping to publicize

this type of case, or other cases like it, by circulating information

about it in Chinese into China?

Mr. HAN. The workers themselves are doing it on their own.

They are writing up their own stories, their experiences, and warning other workers to be careful, and one, two, three. The law says

you should have the right to ask for a medical check if you suspect

you are having this situation.

But CLB is also doing our part separately from the workers.

Through helping this group of workers, we put together this report.

We realized, through this legal process, that several things were

absolutely wrong.

One is that the law makes it really complicated for the workers

to even obtain the medical check. For example, the law says you

9

have to have an approval letter from your employer to say you are

working in the suspect working place, and then the hospital will

receive you. Otherwise, you cannot do that. So, I do not know many

employers who are really willing to do that in China.

Second, of course, you have this hidden corruption between the

hospital and factory bosses. So we go through the legal procedure

and we realize there is something wrong, including the role of the

union that is missing, and we put out a report. Also, with some

concrete policy suggestions. We decided to go that way. So that is

a side kind of result.

CLB put the report out through our legal help work. So, hopefully we will be able to use these cases, very concrete cases, and

it might remind policymakers, lawmakers, to keep their eyes open

on this, and hopefully they can change the law or enforce the legal

procedure.

Mr. FOARDE. Very useful. Thank you.

Let me take the rest of my time to ask Robin Munro. During

your presentation, you stressed that the social unrest that we have

seen in China, particularly recently, was really led by workers. It

was really worker protests. Just to clarify, are we talking about

workers in manufacturing sectors, in extractive industries, or in agriculture? What, if any, role have workers in service industries had

in organizing or being part of these protests?

Mr. MUNRO. Well, I think the first thing is, we do not know a

heck of a lot about how these protests break down. It was very

much a first when the Ministry of Public Security announced these

very high aggregate figures two years ago, and then again last

year, with 87,000 protests. What we have is really anecdotal evidence and a number of reports of individual protests. A lot of reports. But we do not really know specifically how those numbers

break down between sectors.

What we do know, though, is that in the late 1990s, most of the

urban protests by workers involved state-owned enterprises—workers who had been laid off, or ‘‘xiagang’’ as the Chinese say—and

the protestors were finding that instead of getting proper redundancy money, pensions as applicable, and medical insurance as

they had been promised, they were getting virtually nothing. They

were being put on the minimum monthly living allowance by the

government and had no job prospects whatsoever. So a lot of the

protests in the late 1990s were either laid-off state-owned enterprise workers or retirees from these enterprises whose pensions

had disappeared, for example.

That changed after about 1999 or 2000. I think most of the urban

protests now come from the manufacturing sector, mostly from

rural migrant workers, of whom there are now reckoned to be anywhere between 100 and 140 million, who have come to Chinese cities from the countryside to seek work.

We have seen a lot of protests in these very large shoe factories,

for example, where you have got tens of thousands of workers.

Electronics factories, also. That is another place where there have

been a lot of protests, usually because overseas investors from

places such as Hong Kong and South Korea are paying wages

below the local legal minimum wage, and they are not paying overVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:04 Jun 08, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00013 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\27931.TXT CHINA1 PsN: CHINA1
10

time rates as they are required to do by law, all these kinds of

things.

There was a big protest, I think it is worth singling out, up in

the city of Xianyang, which is a kind of twin city of Xi’an in central

China. It is where the Xi’an Airport is located. The tourists never

go there; you do not want to go there. It is a very gritty industrial

city, very depressed economically.

In late 2004, there was a massive strike by almost 6,000 female

workers. This was a state-owned textile factory. About three days

into the strike, I flew up there to check it out. I managed to get

myself detained briefly, but extracted myself without major incident.

But what was really interesting there, talking to the workers, is

that it was a community-based protest. And, yes, it was about the

fact that the factory had been privatized, a lot of the workers had

lost their jobs. Those that remained were put on short-term contracts at a lower rate than they had before. Also, workers who had

been there for 20, 30 years were being told that they would have

to do a six-month probation period to see if they were ‘‘up to the

job.’’ This was insulting to them.

But what struck me is that the main reason for that protest was

a sense of community outrage at what was being done to their factory that they had built up over the last 40 years. So it was less

about economic things and more about a sense of protecting their

community.

In the service sector, not so much is known about that. You do

hear reports of protests from office workers. One very important

area where there is a lot of unrest is in the teaching profession in

China, especially amongst rural teachers. You have two grades of

teachers in China. One is the state teachers, mostly in the cities,

and then you have the so-called community teachers, who are

mostly in the countryside. Community teachers receive a third or

a quarter of the wages that urban teachers get. What is much

worse, though, is they are often simply not paid. It is quite astonishing. One wonders how these people manage to survive.

But over the last couple of years there has been a series of largescale, protracted protests by rural teachers, often involving hundreds at a time, going on for months, because they have not been

paid for a year, sometimes two years. They basically live by borrowing money from friends and relatives. So there is one example,

I think, of how extraordinarily unjust the new system is in many

respects.

Mr. FOARDE. Thank you very much. Thanks to you both. I would

now like to recognize Celeste Helm, who is Director of the Office

of Foreign Relations in the Bureau of International Labor Affairs

at the U.S. Department of Labor. Celeste is here this morning representing Steven J. Law, the Deputy Secretary of Labor, who is one

of our CECC Members.

Celeste, over to you.

Ms. HELM. Thank you. This is my first visit to the Commission,

and I appreciate the opportunity to be here today. I thank both of

you for your presentations. They were both very interesting.

I was interested in your point about capitalism versus communism, that it is now recognized that China is a capitalist economy. As you point out, the protestors are mainly focused on issues

11

of social injustice; however, in the drive to capitalism it seems that

the government, like it or not, is going to be pushed into making

decisions that liberalize trade policies, and in so doing, encourage

the private sector. In the process, it seems the government will

have to come to the conclusion that worker rights are an important

component of that philosophy. How do you see the tension between

Communism and capitalism playing out in terms of worker rights

over the next five years?

Mr. MUNRO. I think the first thing to add there is the government itself does not acknowledge that they now have capitalism in

China. The continuing ideology, despite all the evidence in everyone’s eyes and pockets, is that you have a ‘‘socialist market economy’’ in China, but it is not capitalism. But of course it is. It, in

many ways, is even a more unrestrained form of capitalism than

we have had in the harshest periods in the West, I would say, in

the early phases of capitalism here.

I think there is a shift in government perception that is beginning to catch up with the realities, the ideology and the government’s emphasis nowadays since Wen Jiabao and Hu Jintao took

over on developing a harmonious, stable society notwithstanding, is

very much a reflection of that. When Wen Jiabao says ‘‘we must

build a harmonious, stable society,’’ the message he is sending is,

‘‘my God, we have an extremely unharmonious and unstable society right now.’’ That is the subtext. So there is recognition there

that something has to be done. They are beginning to grapple with

this issue.

I think the fact that they have made so little progress on improving coal mine safety is just a very vivid example of how difficult

they are finding it. They are coming up against huge vested interests in the economy in the case of the private coal mine owners,

state mine managers, and so forth.

In fact, of course, as capitalism develops, these vested interests

get stronger and stronger. Also, it is leading to greater and greater

decentralization and local power. As provinces become wealthier,

they have their own priorities. They are less amenable and less

obedient to central government dictates. So this complicates the

issue and makes the task of trying to build this harmonious society

even more daunting.

I think my guess over the next five years—and this is an optimistic guess, what we hope will happen—is that the government

will recognize that it has capitalism. Capitalism involves tensions

between workers and employers which have to be addressed

through constructive negotiating and arbitration mechanisms.

Those mechanisms do not exist right now. Workers are not being

represented in the marketplace. They have no union that speaks

out for them.

The government is terrified at the thought of allowing genuine

functioning unions in China, and it is very easy to see why. They

take one look at what happened in Poland and Eastern Europe and

said, ‘‘over our dead bodies will we allow this course of evolution

to begin.’’ So they are very vigilant about allowing any kind of

worker self-organization.

But I think we are hearing messages from policymakers and academics in China who are very aware of all these issues and they

12

are saying that there is beginning to be some kind of acknowledgement officially that you must allow workers some degree of genuine

representation in order for the system to work. Economically, it is

not a Communist system, and different rules are needed to make

the system work properly.

The experience of Western countries shows that unions can contribute to social stability. That is their role in the social democracy.

It has been shown very clearly. We hope China’s leadership will get

that message and act on it.

Mr. FOARDE. Han, did you have a comment on that question?

Mr. HAN. Yes, I have a short one. Now we are talking about how

economic development will make the government go that way, or

increasing social unrest will make the government have to go that

way.

But there are differences between the government being pushed

by the trouble they created, and there is a way we can prevent

most of the trouble by rebuilding some system, which is not existing. Like in Chinese we say ‘‘mie huo fang huo,’’ which is putting

down a fire to prevent a fire. These are totally different things.

What we are talking about is that we suggest to the government

that they should change their mentality, which is putting down a

fire, one after another, to try to create a system that prevents a

fire. So at the same time we cannot really put a hold on the government so they will put some new elements on to prevent the fire.

So from the citizens’ point of view, the workers and farmers, how

can we lead the workers and farmers that way to push the government in that way to rebuild the system?

Mr. FOARDE. Thank you very much. I would like, now, to recognize Chris Mitchell. Chris represents Congressman Michael Honda

of California, who is one of our CECC Members.

Over to you, Chris, for five minutes.

Mr. MITCHELL. I arrived a bit late, so I apologize if I ask questions that you discussed prior to my arrival.

I am wondering how much media coverage there is on these protests that are taking place.

Mr. MUNRO. You are monitoring the media more than I am.

Mr. HAN. All right. The media can be separated into two areas.

One, is traditional, like the TV and printing media, and newspaper

and magazines. The other one is also based on this traditional

media, but they also have their Web sites. On their Web site, there

is much more—10 times, 50 times, 100 times—information than in

the printed versions.

For example, actually in most of the cases, we are helping the

workers and farmers from the Internet. There are, for example,

many Web sites. Every morning, I go there, sometimes twice. You

find people are posting their stories, or just one or two sentences

about where something happened. We will just grab it and go for

the investigation and see whether we have a chance at helping

them.

The other thing is that this kind of Web site posting also helps

the local news media, the reporters. Today, we can really see both

the Internet sector, printed, or even TV and radio go really far. For

example, take the reporting on the coal mine accidents. Five years

ago, you would not imagine how they would do the coal mine acciVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:04 Jun 08, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00016 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\27931.TXT CHINA1 PsN: CHINA1
13

dents. Five years ago, they only listed figures: which month, which

day, how many people killed, and the value of the damage. Today,

these journalists go to the families, they interview the wives and

daughters, their parents, about their miserable lives and why their

husband would go as a coal miner, and how much you owe, and the

stories behind the accidents, behind the figures. Even the China

Central Television [CCTV] has done several very serious reports on

coal mine accidents. It is really improving.

Mr. MUNRO. I would just add one point.

I think, when it comes to actual worker protests or unrest, there

is still pretty much a taboo, I think, Dongfang, would you agree,

on reporting these in the local news media? Print media or television. They just maintain radio silence. Even when there is a massive protest going on in the center of the city, it will not appear

in the local newspaper.

But as Dongfang was saying, on a whole range of somewhat less

sensitive worker rights’ related issues, especially in individual

cases, there is now this new generation of investigative journalists

in China who are eager to go out, get the story, and see it in their

newspaper.

So a lot of individual cases, like the silicosis cases we worked on,

for example, were reported quite extensively in the Guangdong

print media. In fact, there was even a national magazine article

talking about the cases. There is much wider coverage, but still

this taboo on directly reporting on actual protests.

Mr. FOARDE. Next, I would like to recognize Pat Dyson, who is

our Senior Counsel for Labor Affairs. Any time we put one of these

roundtables together it takes a lot of heavy lifting, both conceptual

as well as administrative, and we always turn to our staff experts

in the first instance for thinking about how to put these together.

So Pat has done that for us again successfully.

Over to you for five minutes.

Ms. DYSON. First, I would like to thank you both for coming. I

know you have a very heavy schedule while you are in the United

States, and we really appreciate it.

There has been much talk in the press that I have seen about

labor contracts recently. I want to know how extensive you think

they might be and whether these will actually protect workers, and

how the system works. Will there be any input from the workers’

side, the workers’ congresses, or even the ACFTU in drawing up

these contracts and how they will protect workers? Robin? Or both.

Mr. MUNRO. Well, yes. In fact, they are now revising the labor

contract law in the People’s Republic of China. There is a lot of

debate. It is before the NPC at the moment. At CLB, all our staff

is currently compiling views and opinions so we can send a formal

set of recommendations to the NPC on this new legislation, because

we think it is very important.

I think, of course, there are two types of labor contracts. One is

the individual labor contract, which has been going on in China

since about 1984. This was when they began to smash the iron rice

bowl, a shift to a system of fixed-term contracts, with limited duration, set levels of pay and conditions, and so forth. Most workers

in China now have that individual labor contract. They are all supposed to, by law. There are still some private factories that are sort

14

of cowboy operations employing mostly employing migrant workers,

that do not give them labor contracts. But by law, they are supposed to have them.

The other type of contract is the collective labor contract. This

began to be introduced by the government about 10 years ago.

They had a major campaign in the mid- to late 1990s to propagate

the collective labor contract within the state-owned enterprise sector, and there were something like 180,000 of these collective contracts negotiated and signed in the SOEs.

I put ‘‘negotiated’’ in inverted commas because the mechanism

for negotiation is that, where there is an official union present, the

union has to negotiate the terms of the collective contract with

management. But the official union rarely actually did this.

Of course, the collective contract applies equally to all the workforce. That is the point about it. It sets down a single, unified set

of standards of treatment for all workers in a given enterprise.

Workers also, at the same time, have their individual contract, but

the collective one takes precedence.

What we know from this SOE collective contract campaign is

that academics in China, including ACFTU academics that studied

it, have said that actually it was a bit of a farce. The local Bureau

of Labor would draw up the model collective contract, a meeting

would be called in the factory between the trade union chairman

and the manager, they would have the model contract there on the

table, and they would say, ‘‘Do you want to change anything? ’’

They would say, ‘‘No, let’s just sign it.’’ That is the extent of the

negotiation. In many cases, the workers themselves did not even

know they had a collective contract.

So that kind of spoils the whole point, because the collective contract is a very good vehicle for labor rights, if it is well negotiated,

involving real worker participation. That has been missing.

Actually, at CLB we have a new program which we started several months ago, which we are calling CC–2005, a slightly cheeky

designation, thinking in terms of SA–8000 and these other CSR

standards. But it stands for Collective Contract 2005. We are urging multinationals that operate in China to pressure their supplier

factories into allowing the workers to negotiate a proper collective

contract in the workplace.

I should point out that in most of the private sector in China

where we are interested in doing this, there is no official union

presence. The ACFTU has only penetrated less than 30 percent of

the private enterprises. Now, this gives a very good opportunity because, under the collective contract regulations in China, where

there is no union presence, the workers are allowed to elect their

own representatives for the purposes of negotiating and signing

this collective contract. So we see this as providing an opportunity

to create a basic organizing space, legally protected in the private

sector.

Mr. FOARDE. Han? Please, if you have a comment.

Mr. HAN. Yes; just briefly. Robin just mentioned the multinationals. So collective contracts, as part of the collective contract

regulations, as part of the labor law system, can be very useful. As

we keep mentioning, the labor rights protections should be as concrete as possible, as detailed as possible.

15

This collective contract regulation really can bring several things

for workers. The key thing is workers’ participation. According to

the collective contract regulations, the negotiation process can be

done by either an ACFTU representative, or if there is no ACFTU,

it can be done by elected workers’ representatives. So that is very

clear.

What we want to do is get this collective contract regulation connected, with a code of conduct, a corporate social responsibility

kind of thing, which they have been trying to work out for more

than 10 years but have never worked out. Now we try to put it together as a new program. We make the corporate social responsibility, the Code of Conduct document, which has no teeth, and

make them, together with Chinese law, have teeth, in particular

with the workers’ participation, workers’ representation.

So together with international or multinational companies’ pressure, and the workers’ pressure on the Chinese legal system, that

will make a target of the factory owners and their illegal

behavior.

Mr. FOARDE. Very useful. Thank you.

I would now like to recognize William Farris, who is a Senior

Counsel on the Commission staff.

William, over to you.

Mr. FARRIS. Thank you.

My question is about detentions in China. We have seen an apparent increase in the number of worker-related protests, but it

does not seem as though we are seeing a similar increase in the

reports of people who are engaged in these protests being detained,

at least not for extensive periods of time.

I am wondering if that is a change in the tactics of the government in handling these protests, or if these detentions are occurring but they are just not being reported, that the information is

not getting out. I would just like your thoughts on that.

Mr. MUNRO. Just a quick response. I think, again, we have to go

back to the fact that we have this figure from the authorities of

87,000 last year, I think, for protests. That is a huge number. We

only have details on a very small percentage of that number. So basically we do not know what is happening to the workers involved

in those protests and who is leading them in most parts of the

country.

I think that with China’s extraordinary degree of openness these

days, compared with 25 years ago, it is easy to forget that there

is still a huge information deficit in most parts of the country. For

every city in which there are a lot of foreigners, there are 10 times

more cities in which there are hardly any, not to mention foreign

journalists being there, of whom there are none.

So, again, we just do not know what is happening to most of the

people organizing these protests. I think, in general, as I mentioned earlier, there is a greater degree of tolerance by local governments for such phenomena these days, and it is driven by the

sheer weight of numbers. The authorities have to live with it, to

some extent. They cannot be arresting everybody involved in all

these protests. It is just not doable. Also, they recognize that it

would just exacerbate what are mass protests. So I think the tacVerDate 11-MAY-2000 15:04 Jun 08, 2006 Jkt 000000 PO 00000 Frm 00019 Fmt 6633 Sfmt 6633 U:\DOCS\27931.TXT CHINA1 PsN: CHINA1
16

tics of local authorities now is to try to defuse these protests. Often,

you do see concessions made.

One of the ironies, in fact, is that the government wants a stable

society and that people should follow the law and use legal channels to resolve their problems, but the fact is that the legal channels usually do not work, and that is what drives workers to take

to the streets.

Once they take to the streets, they are actually more likely to

prompt the government to intervene to solve the problem, which,

of course, leads to a situation where workers think they get more

by publicly protesting. So it is somewhat ironic. But in any case,

it is enlarging the social space, I think, for this kind of thing, which

is welcome.

Mr. HAN. I just want to add something. These massive worker

protests without proper organizing are basically based on anger,

not based on well-organized activities. Except in some cases that

involve teachers, most of them are based on anger. What we found

is they are based on anger.

Although, as Robin says, the local government is having more

tolerance than before, based on the numbers. But quite often, these

activities are based on anger and it is easy to go too far across the

legal lines, and that gives the local governments the excuse to arrest workers.

Now we are not only watching them, but we also try to involve

these cases, not only the labor disputes and these disease cases.

For example, in 2004, we hired a lawyer to help the Stella shoe factory workers, which is Taiwan’s big shoe factory chain. There were

about 30 workers detained, and finally 9 of them were charged and

sentenced. We hired a lawyer to help them eventually appeal. We

managed to get a compromise sentence. The Appeals Court

changed the verdict from a nine months sentence and a three and

a half years sentence, to sentence them until the day of the Appeals Court decision. So that is a compromise.

So it is also important, we realized, to get these workers’ leaders

out of prison by helping them, and also give them two different

ideas, different feelings. One is we had better do it legally and not

go too far. Second, to tell these workers that even if you are in prison, you are not going to be left behind and somebody will help you.

So that makes it into a constructive way, not leave the initiative

in the field to die, but rather to grow.

Mr. FOARDE. Please go ahead.

Mr. MUNRO. I just had one thought. Yes. We do not know how

many workers are detained in China for protests. I think it is

largely because we just do not have the information, as I said. It

varies a lot from province to province, city to city. There tends to

be, in the inland provinces, a repressive police response. Those are

also the places we have less access to and information about.

But one thing I want to mention is that there is a very worrying

trend in China, and this is happening against the civil rights movement, as well as workers. That is for local authorities to act with

local criminal gangs, triads, thugs, to mobilize those sorts of elements to go in and suppress protests. We have seen a worrying

spate of reports about this over the last year. It is very disturbing

because it indicates a drift toward official lawlessness. People have

17

been beaten to death by these thugs over the last year, and very

few of them are ever being caught and punished because they are

acting, obviously, on the go-ahead of local authorities who do not

want to be seen to be mobilizing police. They would rather take a

short cut and send in a bunch of thugs to beat the hell out of the

protestors.

Mr. FOARDE. Thank you both again.

I would like, now, to recognize Kara Abramson, who is a Counsel

on the Commission staff.

Kara, over to you.

Ms. ABRAMSON. Thank you. Dr. Munro, you made reference to a

strike in 2004 by 6,000 women workers. This case draws attention

to the gender composition in certain sectors of industry. Do you

think there are adequate protections in both the law and practice

for women workers?

Mr. MUNRO. No, not at all. Let us just look at the migrant

women workers, for example. In many industries in south China

along the eastern coast that are in the private sector, the workforce

is made up of 80 to 90 percent women.

But there are very specific guidelines amongst the factory owners

about who they want to employ, and for how long. What we find

is that, for example, by the time a female migrant worker has

reached the ripe old age of 25 or so, she is regarded as ‘‘over the

hill,’’ too old to employ. It becomes more and more difficult for her

to get a job anywhere. By that time, they have been working 12,

sometimes 14-, 15-hour days, 30 days a month. They will have one

day off a month, if they are lucky, in often unsafe, hazardous working environments. A lot of them have occupational illnesses, problems, or injuries. Their health is often very poor by the time they

are in their mid–20s. There is nothing left for them but to go back

to the countryside. If they are lucky, they have some hard-earned

savings, but often, increasingly nowadays, they do not.

Take Guangdong, for example. Over the last 15 years, the cost

of living has increased 300 percent, approximately, whereas, according to official surveys, the average migrant worker’s wage has

gone up about 15 percent, in many cases. So, clearly, a lot of these

migrant workers have little or nothing left at the end of the month

to send home, which defeats the whole point of going to the cities

in the first place.

But what we find, the funny thing is, take the Xianyang factory

strike. Nearly all the workers were women. But what struck me,

when I went up there and managed to make contact with some of

the strike leaders, is that they were all men.

CLB did a field-based survey last year of about 40 women workers, some in China. We went and interviewed them, and we have

written a report on this which is on our Chinese Web site, and we

are currently producing an English version of that report which

will be available soon.

But one of the findings is that women workers do tend to be

more fearful of retaliation by their factory bosses. They are less

willing to stand up for their rights in general, but by no means always, I might add. But this is a problem. I think it is partly a facet

of the traditional Chinese social values and system, where women

are expected to be less assertive. But certainly women are facing

18

the major brunt of a lot of the problems facing the workforce in

general.

Mr. HAN. Gender discrimination, definitely, is a problem in

China, because it will have the cultural background probably that

is worse in many places. Even after Mao made women as . . . half

. . . How do you explain that?

Mr. FOARDE. ‘‘Holding up half the sky.’’

Mr. HAN. Yes. Thank you. Make sure that is on the record. But

the way we see it, is, yes, it is there. How bad it is, to us, is not

that important. But it is important. How to find a way out is worth

thinking about every day. For example, we have a case that we

have been trying for about a year and still have not finished the

process yet. There were many retired women workers from two sectors. One is the oil sector, the other is the coal mining sector. They

are called ‘‘dependent workers.’’ They were hired in the 1950s and

1960s when China just began developing the oil sector. They went

with their husbands and do work like cooking or cleaning up work,

or like teaching the children in kindergarten. Then they were

asked in the late 1980s to retire. They got a small amount of

money per year, like 700 or 800 yuan, which is US$100. The

luckier ones received 50 yuan a month, and the lowest I know of

from the Shanxi Province, the Tungtuan coal mine, they receive 10

yuan a month as their retirement benefits.

So we are trying to help them file a lawsuit based on labor law,

and to compute how much they deserve, based on how many years

they served the company, where they really could find the record

to claim their retirement benefit.

Through this, we hopefully can raise awareness, that even these

people are being treated as dependent workers, and they also deserve a retirement benefit. So that is one way to go through, again,

the legal system, using the current law to raise awareness about

the gender discrimination issue.

Mr. FOARDE. Thank you very much.

I would like, now, to recognize the other half of the dynamic duo

that helped put together this morning’s roundtable. Diana Wang is

the most recent addition to our CECC staff, and is our Research

Associate. Diana.

Ms. WANG. Thanks, John.

Robin, you talked about how expensive education and health care

can be. We know that migrant workers are especially vulnerable to

financial bankruptcy because they are often denied social services

in urban areas based on their rural household registration, or

hukou, status. My question to both of you is: will hukou reform

help migrant workers?

Mr. MUNRO. Well, I think it depends on how far the reform goes.

Certainly it is urgently needed, the reform of the household registration system. Some commentators and academics on the subject

have described it as China’s equivalent of a kind of apartheid system, in which there was this total separation between the rural

population and the urban population in previous decades. It was a

criminal offense for rural dwellers to move into cities without going

through the formal change of hukou status required, which most of

them were not eligible for and did not get. It was a lifetime tag

that restricted a person’s life opportunities radically.

19

With the development of the private economy, the market economy, since the early 1990s, in particular, there has become a de

facto erosion of that social wall between town and country. As we

know, over 100 million migrant workers are now living, mostly legally, in the city, although on a temporary basis.

But as you say, their children are not allowed to go to local

schools, so they cannot bring their families legally to the cities.

They are not eligible for local health care support, all these things.

And you know what? They are not even recognized as real workers. That is the funny thing. They are not regarded as real

‘‘gongren,’’ the Chinese word for worker. They are ‘‘mingong,’’ which

means ‘‘people workers,’’ or migrant workers. So in the public perception, they do not really belong long-term in the cities.

That is beginning to change. One example of that, one sign of

that, was a couple of years ago, when the All China Federation of

Trade Unions, for the first time, announced that it would begin allowing migrant workers from the countryside to join the union.

That kind of conferred on them at least a partial recognition that

they were real workers. So that is an important thing.

I think, however, there has been very little response from the migrant workers themselves. They are not beating a path to the door

of the ACFTU. This points to another interesting issue that is perhaps worth mentioning. When I said earlier that there is now a

labor movement in China that actually exists, that also means that

it is good that we can stop thinking of Chinese workers just as

these passive victims, as they are so often depicted in scholarly

studies and news reports, you know: ‘‘poor Chinese workers.’’ Increasingly, they are beginning to stand up for their rights and demand what the law says they should have.

I think that is particularly conspicuous amongst migrant workers, oddly enough. With the traditional urban workers, there is a

different mentality, because for decades they had a strong dependence on the state. The state looked after them, gave them the social

welfare, educated their children more or less for free, gave them

very cheap housing, and so forth. When they were all laid off in

the late 1990s, urban workers’ protests were directed at the government, saying, ‘‘Come in and fix our problems. Help us. Do not

abandon us.’’

The migrant workers have a very different mind-set. No one, no

official, in their years back home in the countryside, in 99.9 percent

of the cases, has ever done anything for them. They are very much

more independent minded. They are more assertive, in fact, I

would say.

In CLB, we were thinking in terms that China’s migrant workforce is, in fact, China’s future working class. The urban workers

are finding their living standards dragged down radically, both by

a combination of government policy and by the competitive forces

of the migrant workers who are now present in huge numbers in

the cities. So there is a leveling happening, or a joining together.

We really have to keep a close eye on migrant workers, because I

think they are where the labor movement will be in a few years’

time.

Dongfang, do you have something to add?

20

Mr. HAN. Yes. Actually, the hukou system and the reeducation

through labor system, to me, are the most two evil things in this

system. They can do, really, a lot of evil things. The hukou system,

in particular, can be compared to the apartheid system in South

Africa. That is about the human race, and this is about human

class, among the very well-born.

Based on the hukou system, you can really see why the migrant

workers in Guangdong Province, for example, can never settle

down in that place where they have been working for more than

10 years. They always have to think about going back home, and

they do not belong to this place. That is why, in Guangdong Province, if you go driving or walking in these industrial towns, and the

factories, one after another, you see, especially at lunch time or before dinner time, between 5:30 to 6 in the afternoon, you see these

young workers, mostly women, walking in front of factories on the

roads, talking to their friends. It looks like blind souls. They have

no roots. They are not allowed to put down roots there to build

their community.

So that is the most important thing, which is that you have tens

of millions of people working in this place, but none of them think

they belong to this place. None of them will have the chance, the

thought to plant their family in this local place. Even if they work

for 15 years, they cannot plan for their children to grow up here.

There is no kind of generation-after-generation plan. Let us think

about this compared to something similar in this country, like the

Irish, who moved from their country to this continent. They could

settle down. But those people from Sichuan Province, from Shaanxi

Province, they moved to Xinjiang so they could make quick money.

Even after 15 years of making money, they call it ‘‘quick money.’’

They can never settle down to create their society. That gives them

no chance to build up their self-confidence as a proper person, as

a worker, as Robin has said, to plan the family future. That is the

most evil thing, to make people rootless wherever they are working.

Mr. MUNRO. Just one very quick thought also. This rootlessness

also means that Chinese migrant workers have no sense of loyalty

to the place where they are working, and that is becoming a major

problem for factory owners inside China. Migrant workers are networking like crazy all over the country. If a migrant worker they

know from their village who is in another province calls and says,

‘‘get up here, there is a new factory offering better conditions,’’ they

will be off tomorrow. So there is massive turnover in the

workforces in factories in places like Guangdong, and there is even

a labor shortage now. This is not functional for the system. This

is another reason why I think, for economic reasons, if nothing else,

the government needs to seriously address these hukou restrictions.

Mr. FOARDE. Thank you.

I would like to recognize, again, Celeste Helm from the Department of Labor. Please?

Ms. HELM. I would like to follow with a question about whether

there is any new information on prison labor in terms of how many

prisoners might be engaged in making products for export.

Mr. HAN. Well, I am afraid at the China Labour Bulletin we

focus on non-prison labor. We are short on energy and short on resources, and we are not very focused in that area. Right, Robin?

21

Mr. MUNRO. Yes. I mean, I have studied this in my previous jobs

with Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. This issue

got a lot of attention internationally in the early 1990s when there

were a lot of expose ́s, when a lot of companies importing prisonlabor and prison-made goods from China into the United States,

Britain, and other countries were caught out by journalists, and

human rights reports, and so forth. A lot of publicity was given to

this issue at the time.

This led the authorities in China to clamp down tightly on any

information about these kinds of practices. I believe they are still

going on very widely. It is getting a lot harder to get the information because the Chinese Government is now heavily sensitized to

this issue and is restricting information.

Mr. FOARDE. Chris Mitchell, do you want to take another question?

Mr. MITCHELL. Do you see significant differences in working conditions between Chinese-owned factories and American and other

foreign factories?

Mr. HAN. Yes, there are differences. Now it is changing. First of

all, there are no longer state-owned enterprises. I am not saying

there are zero, but basically, the biggest enterprises, like the oil

fields, are on the stock market. They are not state-owned any more.

Basically they are running, if we can put it that way, closer and

closer to the market management way. But, of course, you have no

organized labor to balance this.

The condition, for example, about one or two months ago, we reported one case from Shandong Province, from the Heze Cotton

Textile Factory. It was a very big state-owned textile factory. There

were about 50,000 workers before. Now they have only 5,000 or

6,000 people working there occasionally, not really long term. They

subcontract these different work sectors to individuals, and these

individuals become the boss of this sector. They produce different

things using the existing machines. It is very funny. They call

themselves boss, the workers call them ‘‘boss,’’ but they do not own

these machines. The machines belong to the factories, but they subcontract everything and they pay a management fee to the local

government, and then they just take all the profits.

It is a very strange system. But they force the workers to work

12 hours a day, where before it was 8 hours a day, three shifts.

Now it is two shifts every day. These workers worked 12 hours a

day, but they earned only 300 yuan to 350 yuan maximum. So

after about a half of year of this new system being introduced, the

workers were exhausted and they went on strike. We reported on

this but we were not able to follow this case. So that is one case

that reflects how the former state-owned enterprises are being

privatized. They are treating the workers in a similar way as the

factories in Xinjiang, where the bosses are from Taiwan and Hong

Kong. But one difference is that these Hong Kong and Taiwan factories do have pressure from outside, which is the corporate social

responsibility pressure, and you also have, although it is not effective, some people flying in, checking it out. But from these

privatized, state-owned enterprises, nobody cares and there is no

pressure at all. They are completely Chinese owned and managed

factories.

22

Mr. MUNRO. Yes. I think that is right. In general, I think the effect of the market in China and the pressures of globalization

where Western consumers are expecting their China-made shoes,

clothes, and toys to be cheaper every year nowadays, this is really

exerting a downward leveling effect on working conditions in China

across the board.

So, as Dongfang said, the trend in both the former state-owned

enterprises and the private sector factories has been toward worse

working conditions, lower wages, less job security. Across the board

this is happening, and it is very hard to see how it can be resisted,

other than by allowing workers freedom of association, so they can

begin to negotiate their terms of employment and not just have

them imposed by the market.

To answer your question more specifically, I think, in general, we

find the Western-invested factories in China, because of their codes

of conduct, because of the pressure from the consumer movements

in the West, they do tend to have better working conditions. That

is not always the case, but conditions are better than in domestic

or Asian-invested factories, let us say, in general. But that is not

always the case. There is an example we studied a year or so ago,

a factory called AXT, which was actually based in California, that

made very advanced printed circuit boards using, not silicone, but

gallium arsenide—I think I got the name right—which produces as

a by-product polychlorinated biphenyls [PCBs].

And, what do you know? This factory from California was mostly

hiring immigrant Chinese workers, and many of these workers

came down with various cancers and there was a big investigation

by the California Department of Health Services. Massive fines

were slapped on this company because they were found to have

very unsafe working conditions, and workers were absorbing this

arsenic, basically, and other toxic compounds.

How did the factory owner react? Well, it paid the fines, then

closed down the factory and relocated to Beijing. They did not improve their working conditions. They did not make a constructive

response. We have tried to find out what is happening in this

American-owned factory in Beijing, but we have been unable to get

that information. But we are very worried that they have just exported the health and safety problem to China, where they can get

away with it.

Mr. FOARDE. Well, thank you for those answers.

Our 90 minutes this morning have gone very quickly, as we expected they might. We could continue for a much longer time, if the

time were available. But I think, in fairness to our panelists and

our audience, we should probably bring things to a close.

The reason that we have gone so quickly is due to the erudition

and the deep knowledge and understanding of these issues by our

two panelists. So on behalf of Chairman Chuck Hagel and CoChairman Jim Leach, and the Members of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, our thanks to Han Dongfang and

Robin Munro for coming all this way to share their expertise with

us.

Thanks as well to all of you in the audience who came to hear

Han and Robin this morning, and to Celeste Helm and Chris

23

Mitchell from the personal staffs of our Commissioners, and to my

colleagues on the Commission staff.

Please check our Web site for upcoming hearings and

roundtables. For this morning, we will bring this roundtable to a

close. Thank you all very much.

[Whereupon, at 11:30 a.m. the roundtable was concluded.]

Æ