Chinese Employers Accused of Goon Hiring

[brentspeak]

Source: Associated Press

Chinese Employers Accused of Goon Hiring

Sunday January 6, 2:01 pm ET
By William Foreman, Associated Press Writer

Chinese Employers Accused of Hiring Hoodlums to Attack, Cow Labor Organizers

SHENZHEN, China (AP) -- Huang Qingnan lifts his hospital sheets and shows a long scar below his left hip. His right thigh needed stitches and surgeons fought to mend muscle and tendon gashed in his calf.

The 34-year-old labor activist was stabbed repeatedly by knife-wielding thugs, one in a series of attacks that experts and workers' rights advocates fear may signal a worrying new trend -- privatized intimidation.

Once it would have been the communist government going after activists such as Huang. Today, he's less worried about the government and more about gangsters he believes are being hired by China's rough new capitalists to cow troublesome workers.

(snip)

Liu Kaiming, who runs the Institute of Contemporary Observation, another Shenzhen labor group, said authorities know who attacked Huang but won't do anything "because the government doesn't care much about the case."

Read more: http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080106/china_attacks_on_activists.html

---

The Chinese government doesn't want to do anything about the union-busting? Well, then shouldn't their Most Favored Nation trading partner status with the U.S. be automatically revoked??? (Yeah, like that's going to happen anytime soon. :eyes: )

[Deja Q]

1. Weren't Republicans angry when Clinton gave them MFN status?

Depends on whom you ask...

http://www.buchanan.org/pa-00-0121-cpac.html

In appeasing China with permanent MFN, Bill Clinton today has the backing of the Republican Party.

Clinton hails NAFTA, GATT, the WTO, and globalization; and like trained seals, Republicans clap in unison. Mr. Clinton favors open borders, a million new immigrants a year, and handing over high-tech jobs to low-wage workers from foreign lands. Bush and McCain cheer him on and the Congressional Republicans applaud.

(I know, the source is Buchanan, but it speaks volumes. Especially given a current Presidential candidate, who is using Bill Clinton extensively (for some reason).)

http://www.hrw.org/campaigns/china-98/visit.htm

May 26, 1994: President Clinton de-links human rights and MFN, saying while China had not made significant progress on many of the issues outlined in his 1993 Executive Order, a tough human rights policy was hampering the ability of the U.S. to pursue other interests. He bans $200 million worth of annual imports of Chinese munitions, and announces a "vigorous" new human rights policy, including an effort to get U.S. businesses in China to adhere to a voluntary set of principles for protecting human rights, increased support of broadcasting to China, undefined expanded mulitlateral efforts on human rights and support for nongovernmental organizations in China -- despite the fact that none existed at the time.

May 1995:White House announces voluntary code of conduct for businesses as promised in the 1994 decision to de-link MFN but the code proves to be generic, not aimed at companies operating in China.

July 1995: Congress passes China Policy Act, demanding that the administration take diplomatic initiatives to improve human rights in several specific areas.

October 24, 1995: Clinton meets with Jiang Zemin in New York, prior to another meeting at the APEC meeting in Osaka, Japan in November.

June 1996: Clinton renews MFN and the House of Representatives votes to support him by a vote of 286 to 141.

June 1997: Vice-President Al Gore visits China, signing $685 million worth of contracts for the Boeing Corporation with Premier Li Peng while saying nothing about human rights and byapssing Hong Kong just months before the July 1 handover to China.

Too much information out there. But none of it is making that one Presidential candidate look any good...

[grytpype]

2. I thought Communism was supposed to be good for workers.

Right? What went wrong?

[Deja Q]

3. I thought that, by folding China into the rest of the world order, they would improve.

Depending on the news article, things have improved. From the number of people out of poverty to the "bubbly" they drink. Sadly, their conduct has been irresponsible and that is only their fault.

[grytpype]

6. They've become the most ruthless capitalists in the world.

They supply the slave labor American capitalists wish they had.

[happyslug]

11. Most communists do NOT think the Chinese were EVER communistic.

Mao's movement was more a traditional Chinese Peasant revolt than a Marxist revolt. Karl Marx saw the URBAN workers revolting against a Government controlled by the Upper Middle Class. Technically this did happen in Russia in 1917. Through it should be note the Lenin's Bolsheviks only won 25% of the votes in the election of November 1917, after the October Revolution, while the Socialist Revolutionary Party won 57% of the vote. Thus you can say that the Soviet Union NEVER had a majority of the people, the people, as a whole, preferred another party. The Bolsheviks won for they controlled the urban centers of Russia, and thus the communication lines, while their main opposition, the Socialist Revolutionary Party, being rural based had no center to expand from (i.e. no one for one part of the political base to contact other parts of the political base). This division do to distances was the chief reason Marx rejected rural based Peasant revolts and said a revolution will be urban based, for an Urban based revolution would grab the center of communications and once you have them you have the country.

As to Mao's revolution, his was a RURAL peasant revolt. The Urban centers were important NOT as a source of Revolution, but as objects to be taken by his rural peasant army. In that sense his was a traditional Chinese peasant revolt to overthrow an incompetent ruling group (Much like the Ming had done to the Mongols in 1368, and what happen at the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in 967 AD).

Since the 1949 Chinese Revolution was a RURAL BASED PEASANT REVOLT, it did the same things as the Ming Dynasty did 700 years ago, gave power to the people who organized the peasants, giving power to the peasants for a couple of Generations, but by he third Generation more worried about holding society together (And preserving their own elite role in that Society) then any real improvements to the peasants (and in many ways how the Soviet Union did the same as the third generation after the accession of Stalin to be the head of the Soviet Union).

The 1917 Revolutionary Period:
More on the Bolsheviks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsheviks

More on the Mensheviks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menshevik

More on the Socialist Revolutionary Party:
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSsrp.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionaries


The Ming Dynasty (Founded by a peasant Revolt):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_Dynasty

Overthrow of the Tang dynasty in 967 AD (Another Peasant Revolt):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huang_Chao
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Dynasties_and_Ten_Kingdoms_Period

On the Chinese Civil War, as you can see it was a traditional Peasant Revolt NOT a urban based Marxist urban worker's revolt:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_Harvest_Uprising
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Chinese_Republic

[David__77]

4. Chinese workers need their own "gangs."

So the new rich are waging a class struggle against Chinese workers. The solution is for the Chinese workers to answer the class struggle blow for blow. You can be sure that the Chinese state would then step in the at least partially correct the capitalists' behavior, if only for the sake of "political stability."

[happyslug]

12. The Chinese have done this before.

See my previous post, but such "Gangs" or Tongs (Which means "halls") have occurred before in Chinese History. At the end of the Tang Dynasty, the end of the Yuan Dynasty and in the Boxer rebellion of 1900 (and at other times in Chinese History, but these are the most famous times for such groups).

[Sam Ervin jret]

5. We have the same crap with our own union!! They are just more "civilized" these days. If you look

back at the beginning of the century though, you see pretty much the same thing. Thugs going into the neighborhoods and killing union organizers in an AMERICAN tradition, an export, if you will. China is a pain in the ass like all countries who are trying to keep more money for the rich ( oh that is all countries) but they are just a few scores behind us in these things(and we are moving backwards).

[Virginia Dare]

8. It's a race to the bottom, isn't it?...n/t

[upi402]

7. I bet disappearances are going on, like Mexico etc.

The Republicans are drooling over this form of union busting. Count on THAT!

[Judi Lynn]

10. You'd better believe it! There's a real problem with the 3rd largest US foreign aid recipient,

Colombia, holding the world's worst record in murder of union members.

Apparently it's alright with U.S. fascists if it happens in a right-wing controlled country.

[Omaha Steve]

9. I posted this in labor without checking the title

It was an accident. Good post.