Washington Post: China's Workers

Thursday, August 15, 2002

CHINA'S ENTRY into the World Trade Organization, both Clinton and Bush officials have said, will have broad-reaching and positive effects, not only opening a vast market to U.S. goods but also encouraging greater political freedom and openness inside the world's most populous nation. Everyone hopes these predictions prove correct. But China's entry into the world economic system has been lopsided so far. After long negotiation, it agreed at least in principle to follow international rules governing trade. But internally, it continues to deny its workers the most basic rights of association, petition and expression -- including rights that China, by accepting other international accords, long ago promised to respect.

These lapses are highlighted in a recent report from Human Rights Watch that reviews workers' protests that occurred this spring in several northern Chinese cities. The protests, about which The Post's John Pomfret filed dispatches at the time, involved "tens of thousands of workers from dozens of factories and mines, and lasted longer than any protests since the violent suppression of the 1989 Democracy Movement," Human Rights Watch says in its assessment. Chinese authorities did not respond with the same viciousness as they did in 1989, nor did they crack down as hard as they have against the Falun Gong spiritual movement. But they stymied the protests with carrots and sticks -- "mostly sticks," the report says -- including huge shows of police force and temporary jailings.

Beneath those tactics, though, is a political and economic strategy that depends on "fundamental violations of civil and political rights, including denial of workers' rights to form independent labor unions as well as pervasive media censorship." China's Communist regime has to a great extent unleashed private capital. People are free to start businesses, move where they please, hire whom they please -- all of which would have been unthinkable in Mao Zedong's day. But the loosening is, once again, lopsided. Workers who are cheated or exploited have no recourse. Would-be union organizers are handed long prison terms. Judges, controlled by the party, are frequently corrupt. As The Post's Philip Pan reported recently, tens of thousands of Chinese workers are injured or made sick on the job, then routinely fired and left to fend for themselves. The result is a nascent capitalism inside a dictatorship that many workers perceive as stacked against them. "If you have a cutthroat heart, you can make it," one resident of the northern city of Liaoyang told John Pomfret last March. "If you are a good person, I don't think you can."

So far, American companies seem little troubled by this lopsidedness. They are happy to pay the exceedingly low wages and to accept the system that helps keep them low. U.S. officials work harder to enforce the standards of the World Trade Organization than of the International Labor Organization. But China is a member of both, and its failure to uphold the terms of the latter membership -- including respecting the principles of freedom of association and collective bargaining -- raises questions about its commitment to the former as well.