It shows things are getting more difficult, said Anita Chan, an expert on China's labor relations at Australian National University in Canberra. At the same time, the statistics also helped explain why the increased unrest has yet to translate into a movement challenging the Communist Party's monopoly on power or seeking to establish independent labor unions. And no evidence exists of workers uniting to strike at several businesses at the same time. Andrew Walder, an expert on Chinese urban workers at Stanford University, said a key reason the unrest hasn't translated into a broader movement is that strikes remain scattered and workers are unwilling or unable to unite to pursue broader goals. There have been periodic press reports for most of the last 10 to 15 years or so that labor disputes are on the rise in China, he said.
Scattered strikes are politically meaningless.
Some researchers suggested that the 1999 figure for labor disputes, which represented a 29 percent increase over 1998, was limited by massive government subsidies. Last year during the 50th anniversary of China's Communist revolution, party officials were told to stress stability at all costs. Labor relations in 2000 will deteriorate as special subsidies fade out, the economic and labor reforms' intensify and more and more workers are laid off, said Tak Chuen, an expert on China's labor issues at Hong Kong Baptist University. Chuen said Chinese workers face a difficult situation because accession to the WTO will do nothing to improve their livelihood, at least in the short run, but failure to do so will not help either. The Legal Research article, written by retired scholar Shi Tanjing and published in November, called on the government to end its ban on strikes.