http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A11895-2002Jan20.html
By Philip P. Pan Washington Post Foreign Service Monday, January 21, 2002; Page A01
DAFENG, China -- On the fourth night of the strike, management cut off the heat. The 2,000 workers occupying the Shuangfeng Textile Factory responded by huddling together and wrapping themselves in thick blankets and surplus military coats. Even as the temperature neared freezing, they refused to leave.
Not long ago, banners on the factory walls reminded workers they were "masters" of the Communist state. Now, the same workers were camped on a cold floor between rows of rusty spinning machines, nursing their grievances over boiled water and biscuits.
Mostly middle-aged women, they spoke quietly of pay cuts and worthless stock shares, of corrupt officials and missing pension funds, of being cheated in China's rough-and-tumble transition from socialism to capitalism.
They spoke, too, of the risks they were taking by fighting back.
Three times, police had tried to expel them from the factory, dragging women out by the hair, jabbing others with electric batons. Three times, the workers had managed to hold on. Now, there were rumors a military police unit had been summoned to this small city 150 miles north of Shanghai.
"We know this is dangerous," said one young woman sitting in a corner of the vast factory floor near large spools of white cotton yarn. "But it's too late to be scared now."
Then, glancing out a window, she added nervously: "The police should be here soon."
The battle in Dafeng, which began Dec. 16 and ended less than two weeks later in defeat for the workers, is part of a larger story playing out across China's fast-changing industrial landscape. Two decades after the ruling Communist Party adopted capitalist economic reforms while continuing to restrict political freedom, growing numbers of Chinese workers are risking arrest to stage strikes, sit-downs and other demonstrations.
In many ways, these protests are acts of desperation by people struggling to survive without the help of effective labor unions, courts or other institutions that provide checks and balances in a market economy.
As thousands of state factories are closed or sold, workers who once were promised lifetime job security and benefits now face mass layoffs and, sometimes, the loss of their savings to corrupt managers. Their willingness to fight back presents a thorny political problem for a party that has always staked its legitimacy on providing a better life for the working class.
It is difficult to estimate how often these protests occur, in part because local officials often try to conceal them from their superiors.
But one recent government report acknowledged the country is in the midst of a "high tide" of labor unrest, with the number of workers participating in strikes more than doubling in the first half of the 1990s alone. Another report in an internal party publication said there were 30,000 protests of significant size in 2000, or more than 80 incidents per day.
The authorities often respond to these protests by trying to appease the workers; at other times they react with force, sending in police and jailing the most outspoken demonstrators.
"We have no idea what's going to happen next," the young woman in the factory here said that night as the strike wore on. Like many interviewed for this report, she asked not to be identified out of fear she would be arrested. "The government doesn't want to back down, and neither do we."
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