The International Center for Joint Labor Research (ICJLR) in Guangzhou, China, was closed down without notice last November.
The Center was established in 2010 by the University of California, Berkeley, and China’s Sun Yat-sen University. It was the first international research institution devoted to the study of labour issues in the country.
Not a single piece of news about the closure from Chinese sources can be found. The UC Berkeley Labour Center’s website says: “The ICJLR was closed by Chinese authorities … no specific reasons were given for this action.”
The closure was ominous. The government increasingly seems to be cracking down on even minor acts of dissent.
In early March, at least 10 women’s rights activists from a number of cities were arrested during midnight house raids. Five of those detained – Li Tingting, Wu Rongrong, Zheng Churan, Wang Man and Wei Tingting – are members of China’s Women’s Rights Action Group. They have been charged with “picking quarrels and provoking troubles”, which could result in a maximum three-year jail sentence.
According to the Workers’ Viewpoint, a Chinese labour blog, this could be the first large-scale political crackdown targeting women’s rights NGOs since the Communist Party took power.
Neither the ICJLR nor the women’s rights activists have radical agendas that threaten the rule of the regime.
The major interest of the ICJLR, for example, is to design and advocate for a collective bargaining system through which the current Labour conflicts in China could be made less fierce. The arrested women activists were campaigning against sexual harassment on public transports and planned to hand out leaflets in several major cities on 7 March, a day before International Women’s Day.
Nevertheless, they are deemed dangerous. There is a Chinese expression that says: “A frightened general takes every bush and tree for an enemy soldier.” The Chinese rulers fear that any resentment expressed in public may cause social unrest of unpredictable scale. Therefore, civil organisations that are capable of mobilising a crowd have to be contained or disbanded.
Although the ICJLR is only a research institution and has never been involved in strikes, its connections with the grassroots Labour NGOs in the Pearl River Delta – the biggest production and export zone in the country – and its partnership with an American university inevitably worried the authorities.
In the case of the women’s rights activists, according to the Workers’ Viewpoint they have a loose network across the country, consisting of about ten NGOs and hundreds of enthusiastic core members, mostly young women. Although they are few in numbers, their cause is supported by many.
Since Xi Jinping was elevated to the presidency in March 2013, scores of political activists have been arrested. However, China’s social unrest has not been contained.
The Labour movement is a good example. According to China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labour NGO, the total number of labour incidents, including strikes and other forms of workers’ protests, increased dramatically throughout 2014 and reached a recorded height of 272 cases in January this year.
On March 8, another major incident occurred at Stella Footwear, one of the world’s largest shoe manufacturers. Five thousand workers from two factories in the industrial city of Dongguan went on strike demanding the company pay compensation for unpaid housing fund payments. The local government responded with riot police and dogs, but couldn’t intimidate the strikers, who went back to work only after the company relented.
This was yet another example showing that the labour movement, even without a coordinated leadership, is the most powerful social force in the country. The tyrants and their ruffians can shut down NGOs and persecute individual activists, but have no way to eliminate the collective struggles of the workers.
The fate of the ICJLR and the crackdown on women’s rights NGOs once again shows that the Communist Party will become only more repressive, intolerant and authoritarian.
However, shutting down the most moderate voices of civil society will likely push more people to question the legitimacy of the current state.

Sid Zoichi

Chinese state cracks down, but workers keep fighting

The death of Zhou Xiuyun, a migrant worker in the north China city of Taiyuan, once again has revealed the intensity of China’s class oppression.
Last December, a group of workers were denied entry to a construction site when they tried to demand unpaid wages. After a minor scuffle between these workers and security guards, cops were called in and started arresting the most rebellious workers, among whom were Zhou’s husband and son.
Knowing that the arrestees would be tortured at the police station, Zhou tried to stall the police van by gripping the legs of one of the officers. The cop then strangled Zhou until she passed out. For the next hour, she lay unconscious on the cold ground.
No ambulance was called; Zhou was thrown into the van and taken to a police station with the other arrestees. Next morning, her husband, who had been severely beaten in the station and suffered six broken ribs, was told that his wife was dead.
Although the state’s propaganda machines are currently characterising Zhou’s death as a tragic but rare incident caused by bad eggs in the police force, most workers know which side the cops are always on.
A Chinese labour activist group, Workers’ Viewpoint, has counted nine cases of large-scale police crackdowns against striking workers in Guangdong province since last October. In the case of Qingsheng Garment Factory, a supplier of fashion brand Uniqlo, 600 cops were deployed on the ninth day of a strike. The workers, mostly women, were attacked with batons and shields and driven back into workshops.
This repression against workers also reflects the declining fortunes of China’s economy.
The country’s growth continues to slow, dropping from 7.7 percent in 2013 to 7.4 percent in 2014 – a 24-year low. According to the Financial Times, Chinese industrial profits slumped by a record 8 percent in December.
The giant state-owned enterprises have the backing of the central government, but many small private companies are going bust.
As a result, many bosses reportedly are restructuring their investments to minimise tax payments. One example is Asia’s richest capitalist, Li Ka-shing, who recently restructured his business empire in China and Hong Kong and registered the new companies in the Cayman Islands.
A 4 February report in the South China Morning Post notes that “more than 75 per cent of companies that have listed in Hong Kong in the past decade or so have incorporated in the Caymans, including a number of state-owned enterprises”.
China’s migrant workers, who mostly work in the private sector, have become the first group to feel the pain of the economic slowdown.
This is why, compared with the 2010 strike wave, in which workers were mostly demanding pay increases, current industrial actions in the coastal economic zones are more defensive. Many workers are fighting for unpaid wages, social security funds or compensation before their factories are closed down or shifted overseas.
The current struggles also are much tougher than in 2010. Strikes last for longer, and workers need to picket 24/7 to prevent bosses from moving plant equipment out secretly.
If the Communist Party were genuinely representing the working class, as its leaders and propaganda machine always claim, it would expropriate the assets of the misbehaved capitalists and set up a national fund to compensate the affected workers.
However, the party is committed to the opposite agenda: it safeguards the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of the workers.
Despite the oppressive climate, workers aren’t giving up without a fight. Zhou’s death has caught national attention only because her workmates and family resisted handing over the footage of the incident, which was on their mobile phones, to the police. Instead they uploaded it to social media.
When Taiyuan police offered a large sum of money as a compromise, Zhou’s husband told the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Television: “If I accept the money as an out-of-court settlement, more ordinary people around the country will suffer from police brutality. No matter how much money they offer, I won’t give up demanding justice.”
The brave stand of Zhou’s family is supported by many workers and labour activists across the country, who are themselves oppressed by the state but continually show solidarity in various ways to keep the campaign alive. So far, their efforts have led to the arrest of four cops involved in the incident.
China’s labour movement has displayed promising signs of united struggle. For instance, in January, tens of thousands of taxi drivers in five different provinces struck on the same day. There was no observable and open coordinating body, but it definitely was not a coincidence.
The recent labour history of the country shows that police boots and batons can’t repress the workers’ struggles completely; the latter always come back with more determination and courage.

China’s workers on the defensive, but still fighting

A movement for genuine universal suffrage has continued for more than a month in Hong Kong. Protesters still occupy sections of major roads in three sites: Admiralty, Mong Kok and Causeway Bay.
The week before my arrival at the beginning of October was the most intense period. The authorities had attempted to disperse the crowds with pepper spray, tear gas and triad gangsters. Cops displayed a banner reading “DISPERSE OR WE FIRE”. The violence brought up to 200,000 people to the streets on 28 September to prevent bloodshed by police.
Fortunately, no more tear gas has been used, nor have bullets been fired.
Unfortunately, none of the movement’s demands have been met. The Chinese and Hong Kong governments have ruled civil nominations for the island’s chief executive out of the question.
The current struggle has precedents. As in other countries around the world, a student movement flourished in Hong Kong during the 1970s. It built the foundation for the subsequent democratic movement. When society was politicised by the negotiation over the transfer of sovereignty from Britain to China in the early 1980s, many civil groups were quickly established and pushed the British authority to open the door to direct voting for the Legislative Council elections.
In the 1990s, many leading members of the movement were elected and they started to focus on the parliamentary struggle, rather than mobilising on the streets. The movement gradually became today’s Pan-democracy Camp.
However, after two decades of the parliamentary road, the Pan-democracy Camp has been unable to win genuine universal suffrage. The younger generation chose to go back to the streets.
Initially I thought that the Hong Kong government would clear the occupied sites within a couple of weeks. After witnessing the battle of Mong Kok I changed my mind. In the early morning of 17 October, several hundred riot police successfully removed all the barricades at Mong Kok and reopened the streets to traffic. But more than 10,000 protesters flooded into the district later in the evening and squeezed the cops out of the main road at midnight.
Nevertheless, the ultimate enemy of the protesters is the central government in Beijing, which holds an uncompromising position of maintaining its absolute authority over Hong Kong’s democratic progress.
Part of the reason for this was made clear by Hong Kong’s chief executive Leung Chun-ying, who in late October said: “Civil nomination will make politics and policies lean towards the poor.” Obviously, this statement could be applied to the rest of China. Beijing worries that if democratic rights are won in Hong Kong, the poor in Mainland will demand the same.
Hong Kong has the second largest citizen-to-police ratio in the world. And it seems that it would be almost impossible to repress the movement without bloodshed. Yet a Tiananmen Square-style confrontation would destroy the Communist Party’s legitimacy.
On the other hand, the economic impacts of the protest movement are minimal, and the supportive voices in Mainland are tiny and controllable. The Communist Party bosses might feel that they can wait patiently for the movement to disintegrate of its own accord.
That is a real danger. The protesters do not have a clear strategy to push the movement forward. The Pan-democracy Camp has left the burden of leading to the student leaders of the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS). Those young women and men are courageous but politically inexperienced. They still hold illusions that lobbying the leaders of the Chinese state will prove fruitful. Their latest plan is to send a student delegation to Beijing.
The far right currents within the movement pose as the firmest defenders of the occupations, but they also don’t offer productive strategies to break the deadlock. Their primary activities are attacking the HKFS, the Pan-democracy Camp and the left wing groups.
The left in Hong Kong during the colonial era was largely controlled by Beijing, and joined the establishment after the handover in 1997. The groups formed in the new century are still too tiny to play a leading role, even though their young membership works tirelessly on the streets every day.
Nevertheless, the left has realised that the movement has to win the hearts of the working people. So they are now organising the college students to go to the poor neighbourhoods to explain how genuine democracy can be used in fighting for higher wages and lower housing prices.
A total victory is unlikely in the near future, but the umbrella movement has already made a giant impression.

Still fighting in Hong Kong

Sid Zoichi is currently on the ground in Hong Kong reporting for Red Flag. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/RedFlag_news">@RedFlag_news</a> on Twitter for updates.
Sid's previous dispatches can be found <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/umbrella-revolution-not-rained-out-yet">here</a>, <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/snapshot-opinions-occupy-hong-kong">here</a>, <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/streets-hong-kong">here</a>, and <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/hong-kong-erupts">here</a>.
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The occupy site at Admiralty was packed with protestors again last Friday.
After a planned negotiation was cancelled by government spokeswoman Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, student leaders from Hong Kong Federation of Students and student activist group Scholarism called for a rally.
Despite the attendance being up to 100 000, no further actions were announced by organisers.
It seemed that the Hong Kong government was using delaying tactics when it said that talks would be postponed indefinitely.
On one hand, Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor stressed that the decision made by the People’s National Congress of China over Hong Kong’s democratic progress won’t be reviewed. That means that the government is not budging an inch on the key demand of the protest movement – genuine universal suffrage.
On the other hand, the island’s chief executive, Leung Chun Ying, said on Sunday that no crackdown had been planned, meaning the protest could continue.
However, a blitzkrieg on Queensway Rd in the Admiralty district was launched at noon today, when there were less people at the Central site.
The cops caught the protesters off guard and the latter lost all the roadblocks except the last line.
But an anti-occupy march then occurred. In order to separate the two groups, the cops had to leave the last line of roadblocks untouched and retreat from the occupied Queensway Rd.
At the time of writing, protesters are rebuilding the destroyed roadblocks. There is no intervention from the cops, who are standing not too far away.
Another thing worth mentioning is the tension between the right and the left in the movement.
Although claimed to be a leaderless movement, the struggle over leadership and discourse among different political forces never stops in Occupy Hong Kong.
The nationalist far right is the most aggressive. Not only are the distinctly left-influenced organisations such as HKFS and Pan-democracy Camp denounced as capitulationists and communist spies. Anyone who tries to argue a different line to the far right is also labelled a trouble-making leftist.
For example, last Friday a group of high school students, with no affiliation to the left, were showing a film about Hong Kong’s past social movements. Civil Passion, the main right nationalist group, mobilised its supporters to shut the viewing down.
Meanwhile, the left has realised that they have to counterattack. On Sunday HKFS reached out from Admiralty, where its headquarters is located, and held discussions at Causeway Bay and Mong Kok.
The students met fierce opposition at Mong Kok, which the far right sees as its stronghold.
Nevertheless, HKFS completed an open discussion forum with the help of the other left forces. The present of police meant that Civil Passion couldn’t shut it down violently.
Similarly, the attempts to stop the film viewing weren’t successful after the first night because left wing youth, including those in the group Left21, defended the high school students.
However, the far right won’t give up easily.

Far right pressing in Hong Kong

Sid Zoichi is currently on the ground in Hong Kong reporting for Red Flag. Follow @RedFlag_news on Twitter for updates.
Sid's previous dispatches can be found <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/snapshot-opinions-occupy-hong-kong">here</a>, <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/streets-hong-kong">here</a>, and <a href="http://redflag.org.au/article/hong-kong-erupts">here</a>.
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Often a mass movement will develop rapidly. Two weeks ago no one foresaw that a student protest would become a large scale occupy movement in Hong Kong and the most significant democratic struggle in the Chinese cultural sphere since Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Yet by the time I arrived in Hong Kong five days ago, things did not appear very promising. The number of protesters was declining at all the sites; the Hong Kong nationalist right, led by the Civil Passion group, were gaining the control of political discourse; the pro-establishment right had mobilised thugs to attack the occupiers and nearly wiped out all the satellite sites; rumours about police or army crackdown were frequently aired; both the moderate and far left groups were denounced and unwilling to initiate public discussions.
After protesters at Admiralty removed the blockade outside the entrance of the government office building on Monday and the formal negotiation between student leaders and government representatives was announced to be held this Friday, many western media estimated that the movement would further decline. All the major international presses such as BBC and Al Jazeera withdrew their well-equipped live-broadcasting stations from the pedestrian skywalk at Admiralty on Tuesday.
However, I think the situation is still developing. The number of protesters at Causeway Bay and Admiralty has stabilised in recent days. It’s true that many protesters do go to work or school in the daytime, but people come to visit in the evening. Then those who guard the sites during the day go home to have some rest.
At Mong Kok, despite chaos incited by the pro-establishment right and many protesters arguing for a retreat to Central, the numbers have grown from a few hundred to a few thousand this week. I think this is mainly due to the fact that people think they have to come here to protect those who had been attacked. Yet there is no immediate threat from the thugs.
Although the most insistent voice for holding Mong Kok is the Civil Passion group, people staying at the site are varied in outlook: environmentalists, welfare campaign groups, local residents, hoods who have gang backgrounds but hate the establishment and the cops, students and workers without political affiliation, etc. The discourse is not dominated by the nationalist right anymore.
This environment provides space for the far left. Some Hong Kong leftists organised a street discussion group on Wednesday evening. A small number sat in a circle in the middle of the blocked road to talk about what strategies and tactics are needed to push the movement forward. In ten minutes, about 100 people had joined in. Students and workers, men and women, young and old, gathered to listen and express their ideas. The group chat turned into a public meeting.
One person said that this movement is a significant turning point for Hong Kong: a new generation of youth has been radicalised and the 30 years of de-politicisation has ended. However, a defeat would be fatal, he said, because those who have participated would lose hope on social change.
Elder people shared their experiences from the 1989 movement and said the same courage is needed in Hong Kong now. They received applause.
People also debated whether a stage victory has to be accepted if Beijing refuses to grant civil nomination. Someone argued that the movement may need to take more flexible tactics, depending on the circumstances.
Taking about the potential split among the protesters, another explained that the splits based on nationality, age or region are harmful. However, a split based on class should be welcomed.
This argument was in response to recent appeals from the so-called “respectable figures in the society”, including university vice chancellors, barristers and the Cardinal. Those people said they support the movement but urged the youth to retreat from the streets.
Later I found that other discussion groups had appeared. Some were organised by the left, some by the right. People who don’t belong to any established forces also formed small circles to talk politics. At Admiralty, people only talk to their friends or listen to lectures, but here a different atmosphere has emerged.
Student leaders rejected the “going home” appeal from the respectable figures. Instead, they insisted that a big rally should be held at the time of the negotiation. The government is mobilising the anti-occupy forces as well. A taxi drivers’ rally was held this afternoon near the Central site.
It’s hard to predict the outcome of the negotiation, but there is clearly a push for renewed mobilisations tomorrow.
UPDATE: Negotiations,scheduled for Friday were cancelled on Thursday night. The Hong Kong government is refusing to give ground on the question of the direct election of the island's chief executive.

'Umbrella revolution' not rained out yet

Sid Zoichi is currently on the ground in Hong Kong reporting for Red Flag. Follow @RedFlag_news on Twitter for updates.
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When Hong Kong police fired tear gas to disperse Occupy Central, in the Admiralty district of the city on 28 September, many protesters reasoned that they should put their eggs in different baskets.
In the following days, up to 9 different locations were occupied. People believed that the satellite sites could entangle parts of the police force and the government wouldn’t have the resources to carry out a crackdown at Central. Besides, if Central were lost, protesters could go to the other sites and continue the struggle on the streets.
However, not all the sites had the number and resources to maintain long-lasting occupations. Because one of the principles of the movement is non-violence, the cops just removed roadblocks quietly at night at some sites when the number of protestors dropped.
There are three sites still holding their ground: Central (Admiralty), Mong Kok and Causeway Bay. Unlike Mong Kok, where fights between pro-occupy and anti-occupy forces were quite intense, the Causeway Bay site is less confrontational.
When I was visiting this site on Monday afternoon, there were about 80 protesters. The occupied area is the smallest of the three, encompassing a section of street no longer than 200 meters. Tents were set up behind the roadblocks at both ends of the street. Towels and clothes were hung out on ropes tied to nearby lamp poles, which made for a colourful scene.
People were sitting in small circles of friends or alone. A young couple brought their little daughter here to experience some democratic education and have a picnic. Passers-by were taking photos or reading the posters, but the nearby shops were hardly disrupted by the protest. Only a handful of cops presented and they kept their distance.
I approached two young people, who felt more comfortable chatting in Mandarin than in English. One was a student. As most other youth, she was shocked by the aggressive police tactics on 28 September. Cops had ripped the goggles from the face and pepper sprayed her friend, who is temporarily blinded now.
She told me that she can only visit the sites during the day because her parents are strongly opposed to the protest because her aunt is a public servant and the family is worried about her employment. On the other hand, her boyfriend’s father, who has a “red record” (meaning he has worked for or cooperated with the Chinese government), is surprisingly supportive of what they are doing.
Despite this, she expressed her dislike towards the mainlanders who come to Hong Kong to buy baby formula and luxury goods. She argued that proposed new amendments to the Race Discrimination Law would give everyone living in Hong Kong the same rights as the permanent residents and encourage more mainlanders to come. I noticed that a free right wing newspaper called Local Press has been handed out at Occupy Central, in which the same argument is promoted.
When I mentioned the Pan-democracy Camp, she showed an expression of strong disgust: “They are what we called ‘Zuo Jiao’ [roughly translates as ‘Left Clowns’]; can’t trust them.” I ask who should be trusted. “Leung Kwok-hung, he went down on his knees in front of students at Central.” Leung is a member of the Pan-democracy Camp. So there is not total clarity.
I came back to Causeway Bay in the early afternoon of Tuesday. There was a heated debate occurring between a man and two young women. The man was in his 30’s, an immigrant from mainland and working in the financial sector. “I’m a right winger so I don’t support what they’re doing on the streets”, he told me. “My friends who work in Shanghai’s financial institutions can’t stop laughing now because investments have been shifted away from Hong Kong to Shanghai! People only care about democracy when living in a materially affluent society. Hong Kong has to develop first. Look the economic achievement in mainland!”
I remind him that people in mainland have few democratic rights. They are repressed by the government all the time. It was like talking to a wall. “I think the repression is necessary, because we need a strong government – can’t let the Communist Party collapse.”
The two young women were making paper cranes, which symbolise hope in many Asian cultures. One of them, Stella, speaks excellent mandarin. “I am first year at uni and … had been doing support work during the student strike and the sit-in protest outside the Legislative Council. When I saw what happened in the ‘tear gas night’, I felt that I had to join the front line and have been at Occupy Causeway Bay site for a week. I am doing various duties here, including giving public speeches, taking the role of picketer and making yellow ribbons.”
I asked how long she and her friends are going to occupy. She spoke with pride and steadfastness: “Causeway Bay may not last very long because the number of protesters is too small to stop a police crackdown. Then Mong Kok would be the next to retreat. But if we can’t hold here, then I will go to Central (Admiralty) – definitely not going home! We won’t give up until the government accepts our demands. Maybe they won’t give everything we want but civil nomination for the chief executive election is the bottom line. No withdrawal from the streets unless this is promised.”
I mentioned that negotiation between the student federation and government are announced to begin on Friday. “I hope this will be fruitful. However, the end of this occupy movement is not going to be the end of our struggle for democracy.” I ask about the left and the right. She said: “I am left wing but I don’t agree with everything the left has argued for in this movement … In terms of the arguments around mainland, I don’t think Hong Kong can lead a national movement. The mainland people may awaken themselves in the future, but Hong Kong can’t wait for another 40 years.”
On Tuesday evening at the Admiralty site I meet Boyi, who is in her 20s and works at a financial company. Like others, she was moved to join the movement after seeing the images of the tear gassing. “I have a job so can only come after work. After staying at the site overnight I will go home to take a shower and go to work again … going home to play video games is much more comfortable, but those students choose to stay here, because they are genuinely fighting for our future.”
Boyi’s father is a retired police officer and all his friends are in the police. “I don’t understand why all the police offices are opposing the Occupy, I asked them and they can hardly give convincing explanations. My sister supports the Occupy as well and wrangles with my parents all the time. Her husband is from mainland. Even though growing up in a patriotic family in mainland, he comes here regularly to support.”
I mentioned that the movement has been labelled leaderless, and she responded: “I don’t want take orders from someone on the top. However, I think we need a platform to collectively make decisions and [need] some representatives to negotiate with the government. They should only be our spokespersons, but shouldn’t make their own decisions on behalf of us. I don’t support the student leaders such as Joshua Wong [the founder of the student activist group Scholarism] because they are more concerned about their personal interests.”
There is a significant amount of anti-Chinese mainlander sentiment being stoked by the nationalist right. Boyi, like others I have met, clearly had been influenced. “People in Hong Kong don’t automatically hate the mainlanders, but we worry about the Beijing government will use the immigrants to take over”, she said.
Some of the tensions reflect a general chauvinism, yet concerns for democracy are weaved into the explanation: “I don’t want my future children to be patriotic, impolite and apathetic about the freedom of speech … If the chief executives are selected by Beijing, they will take away the already decreased democratic rights in Hong Kong and turn the society into totalitarianism.”
Then there are economic problems. People’s concerns on these fronts are being deflected onto mainlanders in general. Although being a full time worker in the financial sector, Boyi can only afford to rent a tiny apartment with enough space for one bed, one desk, one wardrobe and a small bathroom. There is no way she can buy a house in the foreseeable future.
Most of the Hong Kong youth are in similar situations. It is understandable for them to feel frustrated when they see mainland opulence coming to Hong Kong to buy gold jewellery and Hermès bags as though they are just grocery shopping. But it’s not like Hong Kong is without its own rich capitalists and landlords. The left in the movement has tried to explain the class divisions both within the mainland and within Hong Kong. However, it is not an easy task.

A snapshot of opinions at Occupy Hong Kong

Sid Zoichi is currently on the ground in Hong Kong reporting for Red Flag. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/RedFlag_news">@RedFlag_news</a> on Twitter for updates.
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Almost immediately on landing in Hong Kong, I experienced the impact of the protest movement: the route A11 bus that connects the airport and CBD couldn’t get to the stop near my accommodation because the road was blocked.
Eventually, I reached Wan Chai by subway and headed to the Occupy Central site on foot.
Hennessey Road is supposed to be one of the busiest streets in Hong Kong, but there were fewer pedestrians than Brisbane’s city streets on a Sunday morning. Considering that this was the golden week of Chinese national public holidays, surely tourism has been impacted. It’s hard to believe the official figure, which says the number of mainland travellers has only declined 1.8 percent.
It was nearly midday when I arrived at Admiralty, the centre of the occupy site. The scope of the occupation was much bigger than I expected: the boundaries are roughly Queensway in the south, Rodney Street in the east, Lung Wo Road in the North and Tim Wa Avenue in the west. Most tents are set up in the middle of Harcourt Road. (<a href="https://www.google.com.au/maps/place/Admiralty+Centre/@22.279288,114.165099,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x3404006702387647:0x3bd5ea10bb8b8f2a">See map</a>.)
During the day, university-aged young people guard the tents. Many posters say this is a movement without leadership and marshals, but many are using walkie-talkies to communicate. Comrades told me that those people are members of the Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS). The first aid stations, rubbish collection and supplies distribution are mostly organised by the HKFS.
The major targets of Occupy Central have been the buildings of the Central Government Offices and the Chief Executive’s Office. Leung Chun Ying, the chief executive, and the public servants had been prevented from entering these buildings. However, the government has reopened old office buildings, so the administration is still operating. Most of the financial institutions are not under siege.
A rumour spread Sunday night that the police would disperse protesters blocking entrance to government buildings – Leung had announced that public servants would go back to work from Monday. The clearance didn’t occur; only food trucks were allowed to pass the blockade to deliver food to the cops inside. And the public servants were not prevented from entering the buildings on Monday anyhow.
At its peak on Sunday night, there were 10,000 to 20,000 people at Central, but people go to work and study during the day and the number is down to about 1,000, if you don’t count the travellers.
Another major occupy site is Mong Kok, which is a shopping district across the harbour. Conflicts between occupy supporters and anti-occupy supporters escalated there on Saturday. Various reports said gangsters were hired to attack the site and that many protesters were injured. When I arrived on Sunday evening, a large number of cops were present, including plainclothes.
Debates among the protesters also erupted over whether to continue occupying the site. Comrades in Hong Kong told me that anti-occupy forces were trying to provoke confrontations in Mong Kok and that if things turn nasty the government would have an excuse to remove the protesters. Public opinion would shift toward law and order sentiment if the protest becomes violent. Therefore, some left wing activists think the movement should concentrate the force at Central.
A different opinion says retreating from Mong Kok would be a symbolic defeat. Speeches were made to encourage people to stay because a withdrawal would negate all the efforts they had made last week. Their slogan is “If we lose Mong Kok, Central will not last long”. There were about 600 who decided to stay in Mong Kok when I was heading back to Central at 9:30pm.
When I came back on Monday afternoon, the number of sit-in protesters had dropped to less than 200. I was told that this is the usual size during the day. The atmosphere was calmer than previous days: no gangsters, plainclothes pulled out and uniform cops were in a relaxed mood also.
I noticed that the first aid station had disappeared and assumed people might be retreating in an orderly manner. Two uni students told me that they thought the Mong Kok protesters should go to Central if more violence occurred here because people’s safety is the most important thing. Two others, recent graduates, disagreed: the fewer protesters stay, the more emboldened anti-occupy groups would be to attack.
The last site, Causeway Bay, is the smallest and the most peaceful. There were less than 100 people guarding the blocked section of the street at noon on Monday. The only disturbance was an old woman, who yelled at the protesters in Cantonese, accusing them of making their families worry.
Anyone trying to initiate a public discussion about how to bring the movement forward is labelled a “bloody lefty” by the anti-mainland currents. The right wing Hong Kong-nationalist group has a considerable influence. Their anti-mainlander propaganda has a market among the youth and they have successfully posed themselves as the most radical and uncompromised force in the movement.
They are probably the fastest growing force in Hong Kong. They don’t have parliamentary wing, and organise through a number of media platforms such as “Passion Times” and “Local Press”, which include a free newspaper, online news channel, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Apart from opposing both the Hong Kong and Beijing governments, they are also ruthlessly attacking mainlanders and the left in the movement. They are the driving force for staying at Mong Kok.
As a result, the left wing forces are trying to keep a low profile. In general, the environment is very unfavourable for the left. The Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions called a general strike some days back. Local comrades describe it as “symbolic” because the unions had not made any preparations for industrial action and hardly any of them tried to mobilise their members.
Proposed negotiations between the HKFS and the Hong Kong government have been postponed again because the two sides cannot reach an agreement on the conditions of the negotiation.
The majority of people on the ground have little idea about the future of the movement. A volunteer at the Central site told me that now the only thing they can do and have to do is stay on the streets.

On the streets in Hong Kong

Sid Zoichi is currently on the ground in Hong Kong reporting for Red Flag. Follow <a href="https://twitter.com/RedFlag_news">@RedFlag_news</a> on Twitter for updates and redflag.org.au for interviews and reports.
An inspiring protest movement has swept Hong Kong. Normally, you only find news of this city in the travel and stock market sections of the newspapers. But suddenly pictures of Hong Kong students equipped with umbrellas and goggles and facing down police and thugs are hitting front pages.
The movement has been brewing for some time. The annual number of protests and demonstrations reached more than 7,000 in recent years – an average of 20 protests every day.
Beneath the image of prosperity and affluence, tremendous inequality exists. The island’s Gini coefficient, the standard measure of inequality, is one of the highest among developed countries. Its skyrocketing property prices and flourishing financial sector generate a tremendous number of millionaires and billionaires, but its minimum wage is a miserable HKD$28 (about A$4) per hour. And the cost of living in Hong Kong is not necessarily lower than in Australia.
An undemocratic election process, which privileges the representatives of Hong Kong’s capitalist class and denies genuine universal suffrage, is widely hated. It was first established by the British during the colonial era, but, since China resumed control in 1997, it has maintained the status quo. An autonomous government in Hong Kong that granted concessions to the labour movement would definitely fan the flames of industrial unrest in China’s Pearl River delta, or even further to the north.
 This is why the Chinese central government has been constantly manoeuvring around the promises and laws made prior to 1997, which said clearly that Beijing would not interfere in Hong Kong’s internal politics during the first 50 years of reunification.
There are about 3.5 million voters in Hong Kong. However, the top leader, the chief executive, is nominated and elected by an election committee of 1,200 members, the majority of whom are loyal followers of Beijing. Only about 240,000 voters have the right to vote for those committee members. Furthermore, the elected chief executive must be approved by the National People’s Congress (the rubber stamp of the Communist Party) before taking office.
This set-up has been criticised and opposed by pro-democracy groups, which are known as the Pan-democracy Camp. In response to majority sentiment, the central government instructed current chief executive Leung Chun Ying to formulate a seemingly progressive solution, which would allow all Hong Kong permanent residents to vote for the chief executive directly after 2017.
However, the government stipulated that candidates still must be preselected by the 1,200-person election committee.
This deception was the trigger for student strikes and sit-in protests led by the Hong Kong Federation of Students. Students from 24 universities and colleges hit the streets on 22 September. High school students led by Scholarism, a student activist group formed in 2011, joined the struggle a couple of days later.
A large number of those students have participated in the protests against Moral and National Education, which is a school curriculum proposed by the Education Bureau of Hong Kong in order to promote patriotism among the younger generation. Together with 30 other organisations, Scholarism organised a 90,000-strong demonstration in 2012, which forced the government to drop the curriculum.
The victory gave the students more confidence, and they became more ambitious. Most of them are not satisfied with the conservative strategies pursued by the Pan-democracy Camp and are willing to take more radical action.
The student protest was hit with pepper spray and mass arrests on 26 and 27 September. However, authorities underestimated the determinations of the protesters – 60,000 were mobilised and gathered in front of government headquarters later on the night of 27 September. Subsequently, a new round of “Occupy Central”, which originally formed as part of the global Occupy movement in 2011, began the following morning.
The government realised that heavy-handed repression would only enrage more people, so the police force was ordered to step back after it fired tear gas during the first night of the occupation.
Initially, the rulers in Beijing hoped the protesters would tire quickly and disperse. It did nothing of note except to strengthen mainland censorship during the first days.
However, along with the decline of protester numbers, signs of a crackdown have started to emerge. The Chinese government’s propaganda machines are turning to a more threatening tone; more anti-riot equipment has been issued to the standby police force; and occupation camps are being attacked by unidentified thugs.
The movement in Hong Kong is at a crucial juncture.

Hong Kong erupts

During the Chinese winter of 2010-11, I stayed in Changsha, capital of Hunan province, for a couple of months. All the problems of Chinese capitalist development were on full display.
The city is often referred to as “the capital of entertainment” due to its florescent media industry. Downtown Changsha is sleepless. Splendid neon lights shine from dusk till dawn. Shops, cinemas, restaurants and karaoke houses abound.
Walking these magnificent streets, you encounter a beggar or a homeless person every 10 metres. Three-year-old children grab the legs of passers-by for change, primary school-aged kids peddle flowers to couples, and old people in shabby clothes kneel on the cold pavement trembling. Beside them, rich people get out of their luxurious cars and step into the fancy clubs.
The scenes reminded me of the words of a famous poem by Du Fu of the Tang dynasty, which was written more than a thousand years ago: “Behind the vermilion gates meat and liquor go to waste, while out on the road lie the bones of those frozen to death.”
After three decades of uninterrupted high-speed economic growth, China’s inequality is only increasing.
To justify the embrace of market capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, the “chief architect of China’s reform and opening-up”, famously claimed in the 1990s: “We should allow some people and some regions to get rich first, then let the rich help the poor, so as to gradually achieve common prosperity.”
China’s Gini coefficient of wealth (a measure of inequality: 0 would represent perfect equality; 1 would indicate all wealth in the hands of one person) rose from 0.3 in 1980 to 0.55 in 2010, making Deng’s rhetoric a total joke.
Even the government-controlled Academy of Social Sciences admitted in a recent report that the top 1 percent of households own one-third of total assets in China. The bottom 25 percent of households own only 1 percent of all assets.
The non-government National Economic Research Institute believes that the gap is much larger than that, because the official figures do not calculate the so-called “grey income” of rich households, such as government officials’ wealth gained through corruption.
The case of Zhou Yongkang reveals only a tip of the iceberg of this hidden “grey income”. Zhou was formerly the head of China’s secret police and a member of the previous Central Committee Politburo Standing Committee (China’s top leadership usually consists of fewer than 10 members).
After internal power struggles in the ruling circles, he was abandoned by the Communist Party last year. Subsequently, a Hong Kong source exposed that the Chinese government had confiscated more than RMB100 billion (around $17.5 billion) in assets from Zhou and his close confidants.
Instead of helping the poor to “achieve common prosperity”, those who have been allowed to get rich first are more willing to give a big slice of cake to powerful party officials such as Zhou. In return, the officials implement economic policies that favour the bosses, ignore the appeals from the poor and direct the forces of state violence to repress the revolts of workers and peasants.
On 2 August, a grievous dust explosion occurred in a metal products factory in Kunshan, killing more than 70 workers. The company had refused to install de-dusting equipment – a refusal indulged by the government’s supervisory institutions.
Disgustingly, the local government has an advertising slogan that says, literally: “The people of Kunshan welcome your investments; the higher your exploitation rates are, the more delighted we shall be.” In this slogan lies the cause of China’s rising inequality.
Having grown up in the city, I have little first-hand knowledge of China’s rural areas. However, the poverty of the rural population is one of the most important factors contributing to inequality.
Research conducted by Wuhan University sociologist Liu Yanwu highlights a shocking picture of life for the rural poor. In some villages investigated by Liu’s team, more than 30 percent of the deaths of elderly people are the result of suicide. They do not want to become economic burdens on their children, who usually are migrant workers in the cities.
The recently established rural pension system provides only a pitiful monthly payment of RMB55 (less than $10). Once struck by serious illness, the elderly rural poor normally cannot afford medical treatment. Suffering from the illnesses and unwillingness to bother their struggling children make suicide seem the only solution in many cases.
Such devastating inequality inevitably breeds desperate resistance. That’s why there have been massive factory strikes of up to 50,000 workers, riot-like environmental protests lasting for days and battles between militarised police and villagers armed only with shovels.
Many of the poor in China have realised that neither the rich nor the government will help them to achieve common prosperity. Thus the only way to make their lives better is through collective struggle.

Chinese state cracks down, but workers keep fighting

China’s workers on the defensive, but still fighting

Still fighting in Hong Kong

Far right pressing in Hong Kong

'Umbrella revolution' not rained out yet

A snapshot of opinions at Occupy Hong Kong

On the streets in Hong Kong

Hong Kong erupts

Rising inequality in China

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