On 4 June 2023, we mark 34 years since the Chinese state’s massacre of pro-democracy protesters around Tiananmen Square. The students’ stand in 1989 is rightly honoured around the world. Less widely known, yet hugely significant, was workers’ action. Over several months, steel, construction, transport, office and other workers demanded democracy, denounced inequality, challenged the party-state elite’s corruption and profiteering, blockaded the army, and struck. From Beijing to Guangzhou, they organised federations independent of the state-controlled “unions”.
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Since around the time of the courageous Sitong Bridge protest in Beijing, and accelerating with the explosive “White Paper” protest movement, there has been a step-change in the situation for building international solidarity with struggles against exploitation and oppression in China and the territories it controls. The labour movement here in Britain, and worldwide, can and must take up that responsibility.
Since around the time of the courageous Sitong Bridge protest in Beijing, and accelerating with the explosive “White Paper” protest movement, there has been a step-change in the situation for building international solidarity with struggles against exploitation and oppression in China and the territories it controls. The labour movement here in Britain, and worldwide, can and must take up that responsibility.
Street protests across China followed the death of ten people in a fire in a block of flats in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang (East Turkestan, the Uyghur region) on 24 November. Protests in Urumqi itself, and in many other cities across China in the following few days, said that the ten had died because Covid curbs stopped them fleeing the fire. As of 29 November, the protests had ebbed for the time being, but they represent a new peak of an agitation building up for months.