AN APPEAL for independent union activists in China was made to the international metalworkers conference in Copenhagen in the third week of June.
Trini Leung, an activist of the Hong Kong Trade Union Education Centre, explained that a few hours before the massacre in Tiananmen Square worker activists there asked her to take their message to the outside world: "We are surrounded, tell the world what happened to us. Tell history about our struggle." REPRESENTING a Hong Kong organization that promotes independent union organization, Trini Leung is also the author of a book on the Chinese workers and market socialism in the 1980s. She had good contacts with workers in China interested in independent unionism going back well before the recent events.
Leung explained: "The workers were indirectly very much inspired by Solidarnosc in Poland. The Chinese media had said practically nothing about it. The workers were very interested and curious, and asked me to translate everything I could get hold of about the way the Polish workers organized themselves, about their attitude to students and so on."
She told the gathering of metalworkers: "The short history of the free unions in
China belongs to you as metalworkers."
The founders of the independent union set up their banner and a tent in Tiananmen Square. They handed out leaflets reporting that thousands of workers at the
Beijing steelworks were on strike. But they also reported that the works was surrounded by troops. That was two days after the demonstration of a million people on May 17, in which large contingents of the workers at the steel complex 4 big industrial plants were also present. marched. Banners from most of the city's International Viewpoint #167 • July 10, 1989