Chinese workers speak out after
CHINA that many workers were moonlighting or peddling to make up the difference. One of them even claimed that he could make more money by not working, and instead doing "business" - that is, petty trading and black market activities.
Since many goods are expensive and in
Tiananmen massacre IN LATE June, the American Trotskyist monthly Socialist Action sent a five-person delegation on a 10 day visit to China. We publish below a shortened version of one of the articles giving an account of their trip that appeared in the July 1989 issue of Socialist Action. JIM HENLE
S OCIALIST ACTION sent a five-
person delegation (Mya Shone, Nat Weinstein, Rod Holt, Ralph Schoenman and myself to travel to Shanghai and Beijing for 10 days in late June to find out from Chinese workers themselves what their feelings were about the regime, the students and their own living situations. We wanted to know what they had witnessed and what they
When we arrived in China, arrests were continuing, police were searching for activists. In Beijing, martial law was in full force, with troops stationed throughout the city. Reports of shooting incidents persisted, and the troops were especially aggressive at night. In Shanghai People's Park, government wall cartoons showed the army skewering with bayonets. It could be dangerous for workers even to speak with us. Nonetheless, after cautious preliminaries, workers were often very eager to speak their
Chinese workers work a 48-hour week. Wages are low - railroad workers we met made 145 yuan (around $40) a month with 100-200 yuan bonuses supplementing this wage.
On the other hand, workers have job security and rent is nominal (around 2% to 4% of monthly salary). Retirement age for most men is 60; for women and some men it is 55. Health care is free, and, according to rail workers themselves, of good quality.
Many workers complained loudly of the lack of adequate housing. In Beijing, where high-rises stand over ancient
ERB walled neighbourhoods, workers allotted six square metres per person. Ignoring soldiers standing only a few yards away, residents of a cramped workers' neighbourhood complained of rats and roaches.
"The economic reform is hurting the people"
Mainly they blamed the government for the bad situation. When we asked who the new housing was for, we always got the same answer:"not for workers". Most of the new housing was for foreigners, officials and those whose factories were profitable enough to provide new housing.
Inflation is a serious problem, estimated at 30% per annum or more. In a neighbourhood restaurant in a workers' area of Shanghai, one group of young workers told us that prices, especially of vegetables, were going way up. Even the lunch we had ordered was becoming unaffordable for most workers. They felt that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was allowing the peasants and other entrepreneurs to get rich at the expense of the great majority. They said: "The Party's policy of economic reform is wrong. It hurts the people."
Today, a month's wages only last two or three weeks. We asked how they managed to survive."You have to find a way, was the standard reply. They pointed out scarce supply, extra money is often saved up for big purchases. Savings are deposited in state banks that earn, we were told, only 0.7% interest. Now inflation is eating away the purchasing power of those savings. This is another way workers are being robbed by inflation.
"The distribution of income is unfair" one well-off worker told us. He had worked a year in a moderately skilled post in connection with world trade. He makes five times what his father is making after 24 years as a teacher. "The bureaucrats speak with their lips, not their hearts"
We met construction workers who earned only two yuan (around 54 cents) a day and worked only half the month. Many like them were farmers who were unable to make a living now under the single family "household responsibility" system. While some farmers are getting rich off the market reforms, many others are unable to make ends meet.
Some of the young workers could not even afford to get married. "There is no love," one said bitterly. "Only money is important." We asked these "What can you do? People must be angry about inflation."
All of them exploded at once: "There's nothing you can do!" We asked then: "Don't workers ever get together to fight inflation, to demand raises from the managers?" "They do," they responded, "and they're promised raises. But the raises never come. The bureaucrats [this was the term they used] speak with their lips, not with their hearts."
The inflation follows the economic "reforms" the CCP has introduced. The reforms allow for the expanded role of the market, including an expansion of foreign investment. Widely praised in the capitalist press, the reforms did not gain much favor with the workers we spoke with.
We met one Shanghai worker, "Sam," who was extremely insightful about this and many other issues. On the reforms, he was adamant: "The reforms have no real effect [in modernizing China]. Ninetyfive percent of private business does nothing for the people. Many people just buy from Guangzhao [near Hong Kong in the special economic zone in the Southern coast] and sell to Shanghai at a profit."
"If people were involved in production through better organization," Sam continued, "it would have a lot more effect than private business. It's the government's fault. So much of the economy is lost because people have nothing to do." Everyone spoke about the coruption of 5
International Viewpoint #169 • September 18, 1989
CHINA the regime. We were especially interested in this because the student demonstrators' call for an end to corruption seemed to have been a point of common ground with the workers. Some workers told us: "The salary of a plant official is not that high. But they make their money in bribery. official if you want to get anything done."
By all accounts, the advantages of privileged position were getting more blatant. favors. We were told bureaucrats to buy a scarce item like a TV and sell it at black market rates.
Some of what people call corruption is actually legal. One young official complained that the government allows officials to eat everywhere free at a cost of $48 billion yuan each year to the people. This is actually more, he said, than is invested in education. Meanwhile the regime vilifies student leader Wu'er Kaixi for once having lunch with a visiting student delegation from Hong Kong.
Corruption is an integral part of the bureaucracy. Sam was asked to characterize the system. "Is it bureaucracy?" we asked. "Bureaucracy is only one side of it," he responded, "Corruption is the oth-
He continued: "Corruption is like a dead body starting to stink. Officials have to be corrupt just to be in the bureaucracy. To be a director of a factory you have to be trusted by those above. The whole system and government create corruption.
As times get harder, workers resent the growing privileges of the bureaucracy all the more. And they resent the political system which amounts to little more than a mutual-aid society for the bureaucracy.
"The dictatorship is what people hate
When we asked Sam what was the cause of the uprising, he said, "Inflation is part of it, but many are getting used to inflation. The dictatorship is what people hate." Another worker told us: "We need more democracy. This is reasonable. Democracy is more than freedom of speech. We need input into decisions. We don't need a dictator, whether he's called "emperor' or "general secretary'."
The young workers we lunched with in Shanghai told us: "You have to be careful what you say, even among friends. We cannot say it openly, but in our hearts we support the students."
Sam was an active participant in the Shanghai protest demonstrations that followed the June 4 massacre. About half-amillion people were involved in Shanghai in street actions. A government train ran over and killed some protesters and violence erupted.
"Some of us," Sam told us, to see the broadcasts in the hotels serving foreigners [on cable]. We saw that the people attacked after the government atrocities occurred. Then the government attacked again. Official TV showed pictures of people attacking trains, but put an earlier date on the film. So it seemed like the people initiated the violence. But in 10 years all of China will know the truth."
"Ninety percent of the people in Shanghai support the students," Sam continued. "Students stopped the transportation for four days by blocking over 150 main intersections in Shanghai." couldn't get to work and used the breakdown of public transport as an excuse for staying home. Some students later told us shutting down the city. In Beijing we also found support for the students. We met a worker who had led a contingent from his factory to Tiananmen. He had also begun organizing an independent union.
For the moment the army preserves order. According to Sam, "The soldiers come from the country and are little aware of the political situation, so they don't care. Control and censorship in the army is very strict. Soldiers believe in the ruling stratum very strongly. Most officers are involved in the black market."
Fully three weeks after the massacre troops maintain a strong presence. were told that about 400 rifles were taken from the soldiers, of which only 100 had been recovered. Sniper fire has been reported and there is a rumor that two soldiers have been garroted at night. Giant banners hang from the main buildings. "Combat bourgeois liberalism!" "Insist on support for the leadership of the Communist Party!"
Our hotel, the Jinglun, where the army opened fire on a group of tourists, now sports a banner that reads, "Hail the Communist party!" In the workers' districts, notices read, "Don't listen to rumors! Don't go to underground meetings!"
Even in martial law Beijing, we were approached by people who told us that we must go and tell the truth of what hap-
Opened in Tiananmen. While we heard outrage at the regime for peration at its power, we did not find a mood of dejection. We heard workers' perspectives on how change could take place. A number of workers looked to the reform wing of around Zhao Ziyang as the model, a sentiment we also found among students.
The most extensive and most interesting conversation we had about reform was with the Shanghai worker Sam. He said that there should be a separation of the ruling party from the government and that the rule of law should replace arbitrary rule. He clearly saw the need for new leadCrackdown pre-empted mass self-organization
Sam agreed with us that Zhao was part of the bureaucracy and would not be bold enough to provide the needed change. His support for Zhao was conditional and he even stated, "There should be more than one party." The workers, he recognized, needed an independent political voice.
In Shanghai a setback has been suffered. Even at the height of the movement, only the beginnings of workers' organization developed. Some independent unions and worker groups formed, but there were no mass committees.
While workers and students maintained order in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the brutal crackdown pre-empted mass selforganization. Workers are now cut off from one another and from many of the ideas and experiences that can enrich their movement. Most workers we talked to had not thought things through like Sam. We told him we thought his insight into the government and the crackdown were especially clear and that he had a rare understanding of the situation.
"There are many people like me," he said. "Most just don't talk about it [the government massacre] in public. When people go home, everyone talks about it. Before the massacre people had little understanding of the situation, but now people are awakening. This awakening will be broad — and it will be deep." *
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POLAND strikes. There were 352 strikes, on occasion involving entire sectors (according to Rzeczpospolita, July 13,1989). Throughout July and above all in August, strikes have been even more numerous, and have included regional general strikes, some called by the regional structures of Solidarnosc, others supported by those structures only after they were underway, and somewhat reluctantly.
The formation of a government led by an oppositionist is a new concession to the demands of the workers. It is not clear, however, that even this will be enough. The material situation of the population has worsened, and the desire to get rid of everything that even vaguely recalls the 45 years of bureaucratic rule is extremely powerful.
Twenty-five years of social explosions
The consequences of
The opposition has come to the forefront of the political scene under the double impact of the collapse of the Stalinist model and the awakening of the leadership of historic failure the Polish party-state apparatus to the reality of the situation. The leaders of the Polish bureaucracy have faced social explosions for 25 years and have already tried everything
At the end of the war the Stalinists suc-
FOR THE FIRST TIME for 40 years, a "People's Democracy"
has a prime minister who is not out of the Stalinist stable. The nomination of Tadeusz Mazowiecki, a close adviser of Lech
Walesa and director of the Solidarnosc weekly, is an indication of the crisis of bureaucratic rule in Poland and throughout the Soviet bloc.
The Polish bureaucracy has failed to overcome the aftermath of the revolutionary wave of 1980-81, or to "normalize" its rule.
Furthermore, popular pressure has continued to mount, as shown by the results of the June elections and the continuous strike wave of 1988.