Chinese Labor Activist Jailed for 10 yrs.

[Stephen E Philion]

this is really wierd. American professors go to China and pay professors
to hire people to do all kinds of research all the time on labor related
issues, including interviews with workers about worker related protests.
Further, info on these issues is easily accessible from interviews with
taxi drivers, workers on the street, at factories, hanging out outside
factories...So, these charges are really quite odd, I doubt much in the
way of any 'intelligence' was revealed to the American professors that
they couldn't have gotten from the Workers' Daily...especially given the
pathetically low price of $US 300 that was paid. Foreign intelligence
agencies don't use piddly sums like $300 to buy off informants, they spend
10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars on officials or intellectuals and
get them to collect the information they want. 
The case of a University of Hawaii professor-spook who had hundreds of
thusands in money from the CIA to do very sensitive research on the
prospects of ethnic conflict in Xinxiang and dissolution of China...tells
us as much. Afterwards, the prof had a conflict with the CIA over the
findings. The CIA was hoping he would produce findings that would
demonstrate that China was going to fall apart from within as a result of
ethnic conflicts in Xinjiang. He found otherwise and reported that in his
findings. A while thereafter, in a 'leftist' Maoist publication in China,
I found an article on this episode, but nothing in the way of a
note or comment on how a CIA funded prof could so *easily* get officials
and intellectuals to do such sensitive and intense intelligence gathering
for them. 

   In my research in China I occasionally ran into suspicion that I was
part of some foreign organization...I was not unsympathetic with Chinese
concerns with intelligence organizations' penetration of China, but I
would still tell people that the state of research in China today is one
that is far more beneficial to imperialists organizations with massive
budgets to buy off officials and intellectuals than for poor grad students
like myself who are independent Marxists just trying to get a dissertation
done. 
That is to say, reform in China has ultimately made China much easier for
real foreign intelligence operations to spend millions to gather real
intelligence. And arresting a railway worker and putting him in jail for
10 years for taking 300 dollars from an American professor...when praytell
will economists at Peking University's EconomiC Research Center be cracked
down on for collusion with the Ford Foundation and the spread of
neo-liberal ideology, collection of information for IMF, World Bank...and
of course massive bribes, I mean donations...

Steve

                      South China Morning Post - China
August 25, 1999                                      

                                      

                    Labour activist jailed for 10 years

                                      

   ASSOCIATED PRESS

   _________________________________________________________________

   

   Updated at 2.44pm:

   A court in central China has jailed a labour activist to 10 years for

   allegedly informing people overseas about workers' protests, a human

   rights group said on Wednesday.

   

   He Chaohui, a 38-year-old railway worker, was convicted on Tuesday of

   ''illegally providing intelligence to foreign organisations'' by the

   Intermediate People's Court in Hunan province's Chenzhou city, the

   Hong Kong-based Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic

   Movement in China.

   

   He had earlier served a two years for having organised workers'

   protests and strikes in Chenzhou.

   

   Authorities detained He last October after finding a check for US$300

   to him from an American university professor, the group said. The

   check confirmed their suspicions that He provided overseas groups with

   information about workers' movements in Hunan, it said.

   

   The severe sentence is typical of those meted out to dissidents and

   labour activists as China tightens controls ahead of the 50th

   anniversary celebrations of October 1.

   

   Last December, another dissident, Zhang Shanguang, was sentenced to 10

   years after he gave an interview to US government-funded Radio Free

   Asia about farmers' protests and rural taxes.

   

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