When I first arrived in Beijing as an FT correspondent in the summer of 2016, I visited the apartment-turned-office of a group of labour activists who were setting up a blog about migrant workers’ issues.
The campaigners were all women in their twenties, like me. They saw me as an emissary from a distant land, and quizzed me about the UK’s long history of trade unionism. One had recently visited Europe for the first time, to attend a conference of trade unions.
A year later, the police forced the group out of their apartment, and shut down their blog. The activists set up a second blog with a new name, and rented new offices in other cities. In 2019, following a crackdown on labour organisers, they and their friends started to disappear from public view — some of their own will; others after being detained.
Some have never been let out. In late 2021, as I was preparing to move back to the UK, the MeToo activist and journalist Sophia Huang Xueqin was arrested by police in Guangzhou on her way to London. She was about to take up a British government scholarship at the University of Sussex. The police also took Wang Jianbing, a labour activist who was seeing her off at the airport.
Now that I’m back in the UK, I savour everyday freedoms more keenly: the ability to ask a stranger what they think of the prime minister, or to attend a union meeting without caring who sees me going in.
None of this can be taken for granted. Since I returned, the British government has put forward legislation that erodes the right to protest as well as the right to strike. The proposal that the government decide the minimum number of public-sector staff on duty during a strike would give ministers in charge of the UK’s biggest employer unchecked power to suppress industrial action.
We need to celebrate our democracy without becoming complacent. A decade ago, Chinese social media platforms were largely uncensored. A generation ago, China’s press roamed over a broader range of topics. For years, China’s constitution guaranteed the right to strike; Deng Xiaoping removed it in 1982, worried that workers would disrupt a growth model that depended on low wages for cheap exports.
That development model worked for a time, but by the late 2000s, China’s leadership started talking of the need to redress imbalances in the economy, particularly the mismatch between low domestic consumption and high investment.
They have made little progress. Peking University economist Michael Pettis argues that this is partly due to the lack of bargaining power enjoyed by workers. In the OECD group of developed economies, economists Alexander Guschanski and Özlem Onaran have found that lower union membership leads to workers enjoying a smaller share of output.
Since no strikes in China are legally recognised, the illegal variety — wildcat strikes — proliferate. “Wildcat strikes are more costly than regulated strikes,” says Eli Friedman, chair of international and comparative labour studies at Cornell University. “They exact more damage on the employer, and also on the workers, who can’t have a strike fund.”
Friedman points to the mass walkout of Foxconn staff last October from the world’s biggest iPhone plant, which one analyst says cost Apple $1bn a week in foregone sales. Many similar walkouts happened over Covid restrictions in factories across China.
None of these walkouts were organised by official unions. Independent unions are illegal in China; they have to be overseen by the local government, which more often than not, sides with management to suppress unrest. As a result, these unions are relegated to organising lotteries and at the most, the occasional social event.
But making striking more difficult does not remove the underlying conditions that drive workers to strike. Instead, it pushes discontent underground. And without negotiation conflict is hard to avoid.
The number of wildcat strikes across China grew throughout the early 2010s, peaking at almost 2,800 incidents in 2015, according to advocacy group China Labor Bulletin. That year, police detained labour activists across China’s southern manufacturing region to deter further organising.
These days, the very things those detained activists were fighting for — maternity leave, medical care, and pensions — lie at the root of the low fertility, patchy healthcare, and old-age poverty that the Communist party is trying to tackle. China’s workers knew what the country needed long before the leadership caught on.