Boss's Murder Opens Window Onto Worker Unrest in China
By PETER WONACOTT Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
XIANNING, China -- On a misty October morning, Xu Yudong set out to visit his former boss at a state-run factory in this downtrodden industrial city. As he left home, he waved off his father's suggestion that he take an umbrella. Instead, he zipped on a blue and white windbreaker, tucking his family's watermelon knife inside.
Passing through the gates of Xianning Chemical Fiber Factory, he climbed a dark stairwell in a squat, white office building. Factory Chief Wang Shihua was walking out the door when Mr. Xu arrived at room 211.
Soon other factory officials heard Mr. Wang's screams. As they rushed through the open door of the office, they found Mr. Xu clutching a bloody knife, apparently frozen in fear. They dumped Mr. Wang in the back of a small taxi and rushed him to the hospital, but it was too late.
The stabbing that early morning last year marked a final twist in the quiet unraveling of a skinny introvert who liked board games. The 28-year-old factory worker had spent the previous 11 months trying to navigate the shoals of China's rapidly deteriorating job market.
In November 2000, Mr. Xu was laid off. After futile attempts to find a new position, he bribed his way into a job. When this new job didn't work out, he agreed to a severance package he felt was woefully inadequate. He was due to collect a payment under the package from Mr. Wang on the day of the stabbing.
Retracing Mr. Xu's quest for job security opens a window on the tensions simmering in China's state-run factories and explains a lot about why worker unrest has become the most combustible element in China's economic future. For two decades, economic reforms have been transforming China's prosperous coastal cities, thanks in part to foreign investment that has helped create plenty of new jobs to ease the way of corporate restructuring. Now those reforms have reached inland to economically stagnant cities where state-run businesses have kept millions of Chinese financially afloat.
Urban Unemployment
The result is that employees in cities such as Xianning for the first time are facing problems well-known to Western industrial workers. Since 1998, 25.5 million people in China have been laid off from state enterprises. The number of China's urban unemployed is expected to top 20 million in four years, compared with 6.8 million in 2001, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.
Those statistics are staggering in a nation where lifetime employment and retirement payments traditionally were a sure thing. In the northeast cities of Daqing and Liaoyang as many as 80,000 petroleum and metal workers in March protested layoffs, corruption and unfair severance packages. A month later, retired steelworkers in Southwest Guizhou province also took to the streets to protest layoffs.
Mr. Xu, a young man with a mop of hair, a thin mustache and an earnest expression, confronted those very problems as his work world began to crumble. "I could feel he was under a lot of pressure," recalls his 26-year-old brother, Xu Yulin, over a lunch of pig-foot soup, a favorite of Mr. Xu's. "Work pressure. Life pressure. Whatever."
Xianning, in the central province of Hubei, is hundreds of miles from the prosperous Chinese coast. The city of 2.5 million is home to poorly performing textile companies ill-equipped to compete domestically and badly located to take advantage of export opportunities.
Mr. Xu arrived in the city as a baby. He had been abandoned in a ditch by his mother and rescued by an uncle. His father took him to Xianning, where he was raised in dank communal housing with barred windows and mildew-streaked doors.
Although Mr. Xu failed to distinguish himself at the city's polytechnic high school, he had ambitions. "I will try to be an outstanding youngster in the new era," he wrote in a self-evaluation. "I dare to fight against bad behavior."
After graduating in 1993, he found work as a midlevel machinery-maintenance technician at Chemical Fiber, which makes synthetic thread for socks and other garments. Mr. Xu was known as mechanically adept if not especially energetic. "The leaders didn't like him because he didn't work as hard as he should," says a colleague who still works at the factory. "The fact was, that no matter how hard you worked, the salary never changed." Mr. Xu earned $79 a month, which he turned over to his father and stepmother.
He had his eyes open for something better anyway. After five years at the factory, he landed a job at the Xianning School of Public Health with the help of his father, Xu Changshen, who worked there as a cook. It was a temporary job, but his family believed he would soon be hired on a formal basis with full benefits. Just in case, Mr. Xu applied for a three-year leave of absence from Chemical Fiber.
At first, things worked out well. The slower pace of a water and electrical-maintenance worker was better suited to Mr. Xu's nature. But his career hopes were soon dashed by the worsening economic climate in Xianning. At the time, China was making a big push to gain entrance into the World Trade Organization. As part of widespread reforms, banks were eliminating politically motivated loans and the government was cutting subsidies. When the results of those shifts filtered into Xianning, the city was hit by a wave of layoffs.
In November 2000, after two and a half years, Mr. Xu lost his job at the School of Public Health. He got his father to ask an old friend, Xianning's vice mayor, to put in a good word for him at Chemical Fiber, where he hoped to get his old job back, his father says.
But Mr. Xu's timing couldn't have been worse. Chemical Fiber was also in a slump. The company had underestimated its costs at a time when new competition was driving prices down. Meanwhile, interest payments on bank loans were coming due. The company was cutting jobs. When Mr. Xu reapplied, he was turned away. Officials told him he could try again in five months, after his leave of absence expired, according to his family members.
Fruit and Cash
Mr. Xu felt he couldn't wait that long. He needed to help support his father and stepmother. He had always been frugal, but after being laid off spent as little money as possible. He stayed home, watching television and sometimes playing a board game known as wei qi, or go. Often he helped his stepmother with chores.
Then friends at Chemical Fiber offered an important tidbit of advice: A job could be bought. Mr. Xu spent about $45 on fruit and small gifts, which he delivered to the apartment of Mr. Wang, the new factory boss, according to Mr. Xu's family members.
An electrician by trade, Mr. Wang had joined the Communist Party and married the daughter of the head of the towel factory where he worked. Local government officials chose him in 2000 to run Chemical Fiber after the previous factory chief was removed for corruption.
Mr. Wang told Mr. Xu that he would have to wait and reapply for a job. The family then approached a friend who had a good relationship with Mr. Wang. They gave the friend another $60 and asked him to buy something the factory boss might like. The friend reported back that Mr. Wang had accepted the gifts, according to members of Mr. Xu's family. But still nothing happened.
"People at the factory said it wasn't enough,'' says Mr. Xu's father. "They said it would cost anywhere from $240 to $600 to secure a job.''
For Mr. Xu, it was all bewildering. He knew of other laid off workers who were making payments, getting their jobs back and moving on with their lives. "If those less qualified than you are getting their jobs back, how would you feel?" asks Qian Jun, a former classmate of Mr. Xu's brother who often works the evening shift at Chemical Fiber.
Mr. Qian remembers a day when Mr. Xu visited him at his new apartment to help him rewire the lighting. It was a sort of wedding gift, and Mr. Qian thought the contrasts between the lives of the two young men -- one about to be married, the other still living with his parents -- stung his friend.
Mr. Xu considered going to Shanghai or Guangdong to look for work. But that strategy would have required strong work skills and stamina to compete with thousands of others trying the same thing. Besides, Mr. Xu was something of a homebody. He decided that the answer to his problems rested with Mr. Wang.
He asked his stepmother for $120 -- the equivalent of more than two months of his salary at the school of public health. This time he stuffed the whole wad of cash into an envelope and delivered it to Mr. Wang at the factory. The factory chief declined to accept it at his office, but did take the gift when Mr. Xu later brought it to his home along with some fruit, according to Mr. Xu's brother and sister. Mr. Wang told Mr. Xu to come back and see him in a couple of weeks, the brother says.
Chemical Fiber managers won't discuss Mr. Xu's case and referred all questions to the Xianning city government. The local government, in turn, referred questions to the Hubei provincial government. Neither government answered faxed questions. Wu Jinfang, Mr. Wang's wife, declined to discuss her husband.
An Unexpected Option
The job Mr. Wang came up with wasn't what Mr. Xu had in mind. The factory chief assigned him to a small sock factory associated with Chemical Fiber. The work was grueling and the pay was about 30% less than his old job at Chemical Fiber, according to salary figures provided by Mr. Xu's family. After two, 14-hour days as a dye worker, Mr. Xu quit in humiliation.
Not long afterward, an unexpected option arose. Chemical Fiber was offering severance packages in an effort to further reduce its work force. Mr. Xu qualified for a package because he was still technically on leave from the factory.
He applied and was offered $414 for his five years at Chemical Fiber. Friends at the factory said other employees, who had worked fewer years, had received more. Frustrated, Mr. Xu took his complaint to the deputy factory chief, and then Mr. Wang, who agreed to raise the amount to $604. But when Mr. Xu returned to the deputy factory chief, he was told he would have to reapply for the higher amount. Mr. Xu brought the document back to Mr. Wang to get his signature, but the factory chief already was gone, according to police documents.
That the boss had so readily agreed to increase the severance payment gave the young worker an idea. On the night of Oct. 30, according to his police confession, Mr. Xu decided to try to squeeze even more money out of Chemical Fiber. As he prepared to leave home the next morning, Mr. Xu impulsively grabbed a foot-long watermelon knife he had made years before as a factory student intern.
He returned to Chemical Fiber a little after 8:00 the next morning. It looked like Mr. Wang was preparing to leave his office, so the worker thrust the new application towards him. Mr. Wang wanted to know why the whole matter hadn't already been sorted out, and Mr. Xu explained that he was re-filing his application, according to his confession. Mr. Wang returned to his desk and picked up a pen.
As he did, Mr. Wang noticed that Mr. Xu, standing to the left of the desk, had lifted his windbreaker with both hands to reveal the long watermelon knife. Mr. Xu was about to ask for more money when Mr. Wang lunged at him, grabbing both his arms, according to Mr. Xu's account to the police.
The factory chief then bit hard into the worker's left index finger. Flushed with pain and panic, Mr. Xu grabbed the knife with his right hand and held it above his head.
"Help! Help me!" Mr. Wang cried out.
Mr. Xu plunged the knife into the boss's belly. The corpulent factory chief clutched his gut and crumbled against a window, according to the police documents.
Mr. Xu was taken off to the police station. The family hired a local defense lawyer, Yan Wenli, who took the case for $240. The lawyer says it was hopeless from the start. "What he had done had a very bad impact on society," Mr. Yan says. "It whipped up terrible opinions."
For a government trying to play down worker unrest, the murder struck a dangerous chord. It put in plain view the anger felt by unemployed workers. As layoffs mounted, it would be easy for people to draw parallels to their own problems.
Mr. Xu was slapped with the most serious charge possible, premeditated murder, punishable by death. Authorities quickly moved to demonize him. Inside viewing stands at the factory, handwritten posters appeared condemning Mr. Xu. One called him a "hysterical, frenzied, despicable and evil murderer spurned by thousands." Posthumously, Mr. Wang was nominated for one of the country's highest honors, "state martyr," according to an official at the Xianning civil affairs bureau.
After the local People's Intermediate Court had found their son guilty, Mr. Xu's parents appealed to the province's Higher People's Court. They were awaiting the final verdict when Mr. Xu's younger brother, Xu Yulin, went to the police station to process a friend's identity card and learned from an officer that an execution was scheduled for the next day.
"My brother?" he asked.
"Probably," the officer replied.
On Jan. 18, Mr. Xu was executed by gunshot. His parents, who had received no official notification of the Higher People's Court decision, didn't know where Mr. Xu would be shot, so they waited for his body at the local crematorium the next morning. The partly covered body arrived in the back of a blue truck, the hands still tied behind its back and a plastic bag over its head. Mr. Xu's brother recognized the clothes.
The family buried Mr. Xu's ashes in the mountains of his father's village.
Since the execution, Mr. Xu's father and stepmother have moved into their other son's apartment, which overlooks a sodden running track. The last time they saw Mr. Xu alive was that drizzly October day when he left home with the watermelon knife. Xu Changshen, retired and frail, keeps a photocopy of his son's confession close at hand. On each page is the young man's thumbprint. "I thought if Factory Chief Wang didn't agree to more money, I would demand he return the gifts," Mr. Xu's confession states. "I only intended to threaten him."
The family insists that Mr. Xu never planned to murder his boss and that he should have been spared the death sentence. Mr. Xu's father stares out the window before words come to him. "We have neither wealth nor power," the old man says, his voice shaking. "That's the problem. We couldn't save my son's life."
Write to Peter Wonacott at peter.wonacott at wsj.com