"I'm not going to stop," he said in a telephone interview this week from Shenzhen.
On Dec. 19, judicial officials in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, informed Mr. Zhou that his law practice in the city had been deemed illegal. Mr. Zhou, 45, whose practice is registered in the city of Chongqing, hundreds of miles to the northwest, said the order was an effort by authorities to stop his lawsuits on behalf of workers.
"The government authorities here in Shenzhen hate me," Mr. Zhou said, adding that a lawsuit he brought in July on behalf of female workers who had been strip-searched at a factory owned by South Koreans drew widespread media attention and embarrassed the city.
"They're afraid of all the negative publicity," he said.
Despite the Communist Party's proletarian oratory, China under Communist rule has never been a workers' paradise. While many workers belong to government-sponsored unions, there is little effort made to protect their rights. The unions routinely side with the factory owners in settling disputes.
Many factory owners in southern China skimp on overtime pay or withhold wages. Some of the worst offenders, Mr. Zhou has said, are factories owned by companies based in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
In 1997, Mr. Zhou began representing workers in the dense manufacturing zone around Shenzhen, where a large portion of the world's toys, shoes, clothing and electronic gadgets are made. Most of those workers earn less than $1 a day while working in often hazardous conditions.
Mr. Zhou has won financial awards for nearly 150 of the 700 people he has represented in the area. As a result of his work, compensation for a severed hand - one of the most common injuries - has risen to more than $24,000 from an average of about $4,000.
Mr. Zhou works on a contingency basis. His clients pay him 10 percent of their court awards. He receives nothing for cases that he loses, even though he provides housing and other support for his clients while their cases are pending.
"I still have more than 30 injured workers living with me," he said.
Mr. Zhou has had trouble with the Shenzhen authorities before.
Shortly after he began working there, in 1997, the local bureau of justice confiscated his legal license. It returned the license after he sued.
The latest trouble comes in the context of a campaign to rid Shenzhen of "underground" lawyers who are not licensed to practice in the city, according to the notice ordering him to stop practicing.
Under the Lawyer's Law, however, his Chongqing license gives him the right to practice anywhere in the country. While Mr. Zhou has an office in Shenzhen, he has no registered legal practice there and so is not under the jurisdiction of the local justice bureau, he said.
The notice from the authorities, which warns of "harsh legal discipline" if he continues his legal practice, has no basis in law, Mr. Zhou said. "As far as I'm concerned it's meaningless," he said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Zhou has filed an appeal with the Longgang District Court in Shenzhen.
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Linuxmax.net: Red Flag takes the battle to Microsoft from sde Thu, Dec 27th @ 12:17 PM Microsoft Corp. scored a coup earlier this month by getting several of China's top PC makers, including market-leader Legend, to agree to bundle the Windows XP operating system on their machines. The Linux community there is fighting back. Some of the early leaders in getting Linux onto China's PCs -- including the recently-listed Xteam, which developed the first Chinese Linux OS for PCs -- appear to have withdrawn from the PC battle to concentrate on the server market. But state-sponsored Red Flag Software Co. is leading the battle to get Linux OS onto China's desktops. Red Flag has just drafted a report detailing the financial and security issues involved in government departments using Microsoft products. Red Flag was founded by the Software Research Institute of the prestigious Chinese Academy of Sciences, also the parent of the Legend Computer Group, and NewMargin Venture Capital. Initially concentrating on operating systems for servers, it has branched out to Linux PC systems, embedded Linux for PDAs, thin clients, set top boxes, and recently, Linux for the country's rapidly growing computerized lottery system. Red Flag aims to become the top software developer in China, and in doing so, claim the lion's share of the market from foreign firms in the same way Legend has done in the PC market. Sun Yu-fang, Red Flag's chairman, says the Red Flag report provides convincing proof of the economic losses and security risks that could be caused by continued use of Windows, rather than Linux products. Chinese government officials and Linux developers have been harping on this theme for some time, but the Red Flag report is the first attempt to quantify the situation. ...........The report comes as China has finally joined the World Trade Organization after more than a decade seeking admission. And one of the expected changes WTO membership will bring is a crackdown on software piracy, starting with the rampant piracy within the country's huge bureaucracy, whose computers operate on mostly bootleg Windows operating systems and Microsoft applications software. In the report, Sun says that China could save itself up to USD $20 billion next year if the 9 million PCs that are expected to come off production lines were to be bundled with a Chinese-developed Linux OS rather than a Microsoft OS. He says the current penetration rate of the Chinese version of Microsoft Office XP, which was launched in China less than six months ago, is already more than 90% in government departments, although he doesn't say how much of this was legal business and how much pirated. Albert Li, chief executive of another listed Linux developer, Hong Kong-based Thiz Technology, says using local versions of Linux would boost China's software market and the economy as a whole. "The intellectual property rights issue is something China wants to pursue due to the WTO accession. Right now at least 85% of the software used in China is pirated. But China will lose a lot in foreign exchange if companies now turn to genuine software and the money goes to a few foreign software vendors." .............On the security front, Sun does not make any new observations, but reiterates that, because Microsoft has not disclosed Windows source code, there are security problems for government departments such as the national defense agency if they adopt Microsoft platforms.