China’s Emerging Civil Rights Movement

In April of this year, the Congressional-Executive Commission on China met to discuss “The Lot of Chinese Workers: Do China’s Labor Laws Work?” It’s a fascinating read and is available here.  The CECC is a government body created by Congress in 2000 to monitor human rights and the rule of law in China. At the committee's most recent hearing, they took testimony from Han Dongfang and Robin Munro of the China Labour Bulletin, concerning China’s emerging rights defense movement – the so-called Wei Quan Movement, which translates in English to “Defending Rights.”

While rooted in Tiananmen Square protest movement, according to Robin Munro “this is the most significant development” in the last 25 years.

Munro explained to the committee:

“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."

Munro goes on to compare efforts of Chinese workers “China’s emerging civil rights movement.”

“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.”

Ten years ago worker and community protests would have been automatically categorized by local Chinese officials as “political.”  Organizers were arrested and charged with such crimes as counter-revoultionary or endangering state security.  But now, according to Munro:

“...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.”

Historical experience in the U.S. and around the world has shown that when workers and citizens realize that they are entitled by law to certain rights, they may well create the institutions needed to access and enforce those rights.  The more than 300,000 labor job actions involving more that 4 million workers, reported last year by the government demonstrate that Chinese workers are engaged in a massive “citizen law enforcement” effort.  The massive number of wildcat strikes occurring in China shows that Chinese workers are not waiting for official unions to reform themselves. Instead, they are fashioning new ways to improve their lot. (See our previous blog on efforts of Chinese workers to fight back.) The challenge is for the US and the other labor movements is to find ways to encourage new independent workers organizations in China.

Later we’ll blog on what some in China are calling “China’s New Labor Movement.”