employees have complained about sharing dormitories with colleagues who tested positive for COVID. They claim they were misled over compensation benefits at the factory that accounts for 70% of global iPhone shipments.
Foxconn on Thursday offered 10,000 yuan ($1,400) to protesting recruits who agreed to resign and leave the plant.
The company apologised for a pay-related "technical error" when hiring, which workers say was a factor that led to protests involving clashes with security personnel.
Edit: Read this article from Sixth Tone instead. It’s much better.
what would a nationwide labor movement look like in China? would the CPC remain neutral and leave it to the pronvicial governments or could they choose to back the movement?
i keep thinking china is unique in that despite the capitalism they have a solid foundation of educated marxists with real political power to prevent the kind of rightward turn that would happen in a western state.
The government will never let their be a nationwide labor strike/movement. Two reason:
Firstly, the government, at all levels, is heavily intertwined with the needs and demands of the people. They conduct extensive surveys and polls and the cadres go to even the most remote villages and places to understand the people. They will simply never let the situation get so bad that there is a nationwide labor strike. Some local and provincial governments are corrupt and elitist, and sometimes try to suppress such movements. But nationally, China always responds to growing capitalist contradictions and creates laws (and enforces them!) to ease them. And it cracks down on such corruption in local governments.
Secondly, if the government somehow missed in this objective and let conditions get so bad that millions across the country were marching and striking, the government would crack down on them. That movement would absolutely be filled with western spies and bankrolled by western spy agencies (even if the vast majority of people were genuinely striking). The possibility of such a movement growing into an anti-Communist Party movement would be so high that the CPC would have no choice but to quell it. In addition, the CPC have a plan on how to achieve socialism. They will not let anyone, not even the Chinese workers who suffer under capitalists, destroy that plan.
Again, I repeat, this second point is never going to happen. It is purely hypothetical. The CPC is heavily intertwined with the people and will never let things get so bad at such a wide scale. Even the fucking nationalists in the government would not let such a thing happen because it would destroy China, much like it did the Soviet Union, but so, so much worse.
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I don’t know much about that time, but yes. From what I do know, the protests were largely a result of the critical transition period of Reform and Opening Up where several key pillars of Chinese Socialism to that point, particularly in the rural areas, were being dismantled. Of course there would be protests. Understandably so. To many, it was clear revisionism and betrayal of the revolution and of Mao.
In addition, of course, was all the infiltration by capitalists amongst the protesters, many of whom wanted China to become a Western puppet under a neoliberal government.
So the government cracked down. Hard. On both, the people who were genuinely suffering and the opportunists who wanted to tear China down and break it apart. The government was in no condition to be able to distinguish between the two groups.
Anyways, those are the kind of conditions that would be required for a nationwide protest movement. And I imagine the government today would respond similarly.
This is correct. The western line that the Tianenmen protests were about "greater democracy" is mostly bullshit. Yes, there were some western educated academics and PMC types who were trying to convert their newfound economic power into political power, but the vast majority of the protesters were working class people upset with their material conditions.
Matt Christman talks a little bit about it as a tangent to the book on China he's currently reading on his grill stream.
Listen to 231 - The China Bust 11.11.22 by Grill Stream on #SoundCloud https://on.soundcloud.com/ZaKPZ
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