On the evening of 15 April 1989, the day of Hu Yaobang's
death, the campuses of Beijing's university district were already
stirring to political activity. 1 At the very same hour, around
the revolutionary heroes' monument in the centre of Tiananmen
Square, ordinary citizens began to gather, mourn, and talk
politics - much as they had during the 'April 5th' movement of
1976. 2 From a few dozen who gathered there in the first hours
after dusk, the crowd grew to well over a hundred by midnight. In
the darkness, small knots of people talked together under the
cover of anonymity - about inflation, official corruption, and
victimization within work units. Around 4 o'clock in the morning,
a group of about twenty workers from the Ministry of Textiles
marched into the square and placed a commemorative wreath at the
base of the monument. 3
For the next several evenings, ten to twenty young workers - all
in their twenties and thirties - met after work at the monument
to discuss the situation and decide what to do. As they told
tales of their treatment within their work units, of the effects
of inflation on themselves and their friends, and cursed the
corruption and incompetence of China's leaders and bureaucrats,
they discovered that they all had similar experiences and points
of view. By 17 April, as university students began their marches
in the streets of Beijing, 4 these workers discovered that the
students were denouncing the officials' speculation and
corruption - the same kind of things they had been griping about.
By the 18th, as more joined in their discussions, they began to
talk of forming their own organization, and some advocated going
back to their work units and carrying out the movement there.
They resolved to talk over the issue of a new organization with
their co-workers during the day, and they pasted up wallposters
in the city asking citizens whether they would welcome an
independent organization for workers.
On the evening of 19 April and the early morning hours of the
20th, students staged a sit-in at the Xinhuamen entrance to the
Zhongnanhai compound, which contains the residences of many of
the nation's leaders. Some of the workers stood among a large
crowd of bystanders. After the protest was eventually broken up
by military policemen swinging belts and clubs, rumours spread
throughout the city about the 'bloody incident of 20 April'. 5
Enraged, one of the workers made a fiery speech at the heroes'
monument denouncing the army, and the group issued two handbills
challenging the Party leadership, their economic policies, their
personal corruption and that of their families. The gauntlet was
thrown down in the name of the Beijing Workers' Autonomous
Federation (hereafter referred to as
gongzilian
). 6
Thus was born - at least in name - an organization that played,
outwardly, little visible role in the democracy movement until
shortly before the declaration of martial law on 19 May; and one
that received almost no media attention until it staged protests
at the Beijing Bureau of Public Security over the arrest of three
of its members on 30 May. 7 At its height in the week preceding
the carnage of 4 June, the union had mobilized some 150 activists
working continuously in the square. It issued calls for a general
strike, but since the union had no organized branches in places
of work, these calls went largely unheeded. Its membership was
decimated in the bloodletting and arrests of June.
From the perspective of the Polish workers' movement a decade
before, the political significance of
gongzilian
appears limited indeed. In an assessment written shortly after
the events, we observed that
gongzilian
'was more a result of the upheaval than a cause', a movement
that took advantage of the political space created by a much
larger student movement, the disunity of the government, and the
resulting paralysis of the regime's political apparatus. 8
Such an assessment appears, after more sustained research, to
underestimate the significance of
gongzilian
in two distinct ways. First, the organization played an
increasingly pivotal role in the mobilization of street protests
after the declaration of martial law; as the student presence in
the square dwindled in the last days of May, the membership of
gongzilian
grew, its organization reached a high state of readiness, and it
took a high profile in organizing the resistance to martial law.
Moreover, while
gongzilian
lacked formally organized branches in places of work, it had a
number of important informal ties to workers and work units
throughout the city, from whom it enjoyed steady moral and
material support until the rifle shots began to ring out. Unlike
the student movement, the workers' movement had picked up
momentum after martial law and appeared to gain confidence and
strength as May turned into June.
The more lasting significance of
gongzilian
, however, is to be found not in its size, organization or
activities, but in the mentality and political orientation of its
membership.
Gongzilian
represents the emergence of a new species of political protest
in the People's Republic. It does not fit the mould of worker
activism in the Cultural Revolution or the mid-1970s, where
factions of political leaders mobilized their local followers for
political combat.9 Nor does it conform to the traditional model
of intellectual remonstrance that dissident Chinese citizens (and
students) have shared with elite intellectuals - as exemplified
by the educated working youths who, as relatively literate
essayists, led the 1974 Li Yizhe protests in Canton or the
1978-79 Democracy Wall Movement in Beijing. 10 The workers of
gongzilian
were quite ordinary working people, often sharp of mind and
tongue, but with limited education and writing ability (as their
wallposters and handbills make evident). They displayed a kind of
anti-elitism and populism that was earlier seen, in a quite
different form, during the Cultural Revolution, but which on this
occasion was expressed as part of an unabashed working-class
trade-union mentality. This attitude was apparent from their
first pronouncements of mid-April, and it was reinforced and
further developed in the course of strained relations with the
elitist and self-absorbed student movement that held the square
for much of May.
Gongzilian
held attitudes toward the Party, the Party's reformers, the
reforms of the 1980s, and even toward the student movement, that
are quite different from the more highly publicized views of
China's students and intellectuals - and in many ways consciously
opposed to them. Such attitudes are widely held among China's
working people, and under the right circumstances they could play
a significant role in the country's uncertain political future.
In this essay we shall therefore recount, in turn, two separate
stories about
gongzilian
. The first is the story of its development and activities as an
organization; and the second is that of the emergence and
articulation of a distinctive and novel political mentality.
The Emergence and Development of an Organization
The decision to form an independent union coincided with the
outrage elicited by the beating of students at Xinhuamen. During
the previous few days, the twenty or so participants in the
evening discussions in the square had found that workers in their
respective units were all saying the same thing: they were very
dissatisfied, especially with inflation and their treatment by
leaders of their units, and they were greatly interested in an
organization that would speak on their behalf. When several
workers spoke up at the monument on 20 April, they related not
only their outrage at the authorities' actions, 11 but also
raised a series of questions about special privileges and
economic policy at a point when the student movement still
restricted itself largely to mourning for Hu Yaobang. The several
workers who spoke that day attacked the official trade union and
denounced inflation for cutting into workers' living standards.
In one of the handbills it distributed,
gongzilian
blamed the 'steady decline of people's living standards' and
uncontrolled inflation on the 'long-term control of a dictatorial
bureaucracy'. 'In order to safeguard the extravagant lifestyles
of a minority', the statement continued, 'the rulers issue large
numbers of bonds, like treasury bonds ... to take away forcibly
what little income the workers have'. 12 The workers punctuated
their inaugural handbill with demands to stabilize prices and to
make public the incomes and expenditures of high state officials
and their families. 13
The angered workers, in a second handbill, addressed a series of
pointed questions to the Party leadership. The main theme was to
condemn the privileged lifestyles of high officials: the workers
asked how much money one of Deng Xiaoping's sons had bet at a
Hong Kong race-track; whether Zhao Ziyang paid any money for the
privilege of playing golf; how many villas were maintained for
political leaders and at what cost; and (again) what were the
personal incomes and expenditures of top officials. The workers
also wanted an explanation of how the Party leadership viewed the
'shortcomings' of economic reform and why proposed measures to
control inflation never seemed to work. They expressed fear about
China's mounting international debt, asking how much this
amounted to per capita and how its repayment would affect living
standards in the years ahead. 14
The handbills and the commotion at the monument on 20 April
attracted several dozen more workers into the fledgling movement,
some of whom, most notably Han Dongfang, emerged from the crowd
that day to give speeches and subsequently to play key leadership
roles in the organization. The activists declared that workers
interested in forming an independent union should henceforth meet
daily at the western reviewing stand in front of Tiananmen where
the organization did indeed take shape, remaining at that
location until the very end of May. Despite the fact that their
numbers quickly swelled to about 70 or 80, the activists still
felt it was too risky to identify themselves as '
gongzilian
' during speeches, or to hoist a banner bearing that name. In
fact, the activists on the square, who had come together singly
or in groups of two or three from the same work unit, felt so
insecure until mid-May that they remained, by tacit agreement, on
a surname-only basis. 15
They were all newcomers to the activity of political dissent, and
had among them very little education or experience in leading an
organization. They tried fanning out to various large factories
(not always their own) and to the most active university campuses
to build contacts and gather information, advice and ideas. 16
Like many ordinary Beijing citizens, they also helped to clear
the way for the students during the large demonstrations of 27
April and 4 May, and helped to provide food and drink for the
participants.
Not until after the student hunger strikers marched to Tiananmen
Square on 13 May, leading to the square's continuous occupation
by several hundred thousand students and onlookers - and the
withdrawal of soldiers and traffic policemen from the city centre
- did the
gongzilian
activists feel that the time was ripe to unfurl a banner and
declare their existence and aims. They set up a loudspeaker
system, initially with a few megaphones, but by the eve of
martial law one week later they had the use of microphones and
large public-address speakers. On the wall at the base of the
western reviewing stand, and on the ticket kiosk adjacent, they
posted their pronouncements and requests for donations of
materiél
, and set up makeshift tents that they then occupied
continuously. From here, they began to establish a loose
leadership arrangement and an organizational structure to divide
tasks among them. 17
The week of 13-20 May witnessed huge street demonstrations. Large
numbers of workers from factories and other work units throughout
the city for the first time demonstrated their vocal support for
the emerging democracy movement.
Gongzilian
marched prominently in each of these demonstrations, driving
several vehicles lent to them in response to their wallposter
requests, and displaying their banner alongside those of
delegations from the many state-owned work units in the city. 18
Large numbers of the workers who marched in these processions
went over to the western reviewing stand afterwards to make
contact with the fledgling union: scores of them joined and
became activists themselves, and many more came to inquire, to
offer encouragement and advice, or to volunteer to act as a
liaison with their own work units or to help organize material
support for the union's activities.
With the core of activists now swollen to around 150, and
emboldened by the support garnered during and after the large
street processions,
gongzilian
decided to attempt to establish itself as a legal organization.
Members went for help to the offices of the All China Federation
of Trade Unions, but despite the official union's public support
for the students in the square, it refused to assist them. They
went to the municipal government offices, but were stopped at the
door with the verdict that their organization was illegal. They
went to register with the Beijing Bureau of Public Security, but
were rebuffed as troublemakers. 19 Undaunted by their inability
to gain official recognition, the group nonetheless formally
declared itself established. From the midst of a huge crowd at
the square after the massive demonstration of 18 May, one of
gongzilian
's leaders hoisted a megaphone and announced the union's official
inauguration. The next day, with rumours of impending martial law
in the air,
gongzilian
hastily issued a brief proclamation which ended with the words,
'Let the workers of the entire nation know that we workers of
Beijing are now organized'. 20
The week of the hunger strike also saw a marked escalation of
gongzilian
rhetoric. At a time when many students and intellectuals were
seeking to strengthen the hand of the moderate and reformist
elements within the Party,
gongzilian
articulated a fundamentally different definition of 'the
movement'. Even before martial law,
gongzilian
targeted the system. In a remarkably incendiary document issued
on 17 May,
gongzilian
declared, 'The illegality and brutality of corrupt officialdom
has reached an extreme! There is no place for truth in China! No
reactionary force can suppress the outpouring of the people's
anger! The people will no longer believe the lies of the rulers'.
Reminding the Party of the
editorial of 26 April
, in which
gongzilian
's first two handbills were described as 'counter-revolutionary',
the newest handbill demanded a retraction, denounced the
editorial and its 'backstage supporter' (
houtai
[Deng Xiaoping]), and asked, 'since you don't have the guts to
answer our questions, despite mouthing slogans for 40 years about
believing in the masses, do you dare publish these two
documents?'
Taking a page directly out of the book of rebel organizations
during the Cultural Revolution, the document then denounced in
detail the special privileges, tours abroad for children, spouses
and baby-sitters, and the keeping of mistresses by high level
officials, and declared that 'we have calculated carefully, based
on Marx's
Capital
, the rate of exploitation of workers. We discovered that the
"servants of the people" swallow all the surplus value produced
by the people's blood and sweat'. Following this analysis to its
logical conclusion, the document then declared, 'There are only
two classes: the rulers and the ruled... The political campaigns
of the past 40 years amount to a political method for suppressing
the people. History has shown them [i.e., the communists] to be
fond of "settling accounts after the autumn harvest." But
history's final accounting has yet to be completed'. The document
concluded by warning political factions at the top not to try to
use the people's movement for their own ends: 'Deng Xiaoping used
the April 5th movement [of 1976] to become leader of the Party,
but after that he exposed himself as a tyrant. The reforms that
followed were shallow and false. The standard of living has
declined for most people, while heavy debts go unpaid'. 21
Another handbill issued at about the same time contains similar
confrontational rhetoric and, in effect, asks workers to
sacrifice themselves for the sake of the next generation:
'China's rulers for forty years, and perhaps for thousands, have
kept the people in a state of subservience, stripped of all
rights, and anyone who dares to protest has had their own and
their families' heads chopped off'. After noting the severe
sanctions meted out to workers when they dared to take part in
independent political activity, the document declared, 'Ah, the
Chinese! Such a loveable yet pathetic and tragic people. We have
been deceived for thousands of years, and are still being
deceived today. No! Instead we should be a great people; we
should restore ourselves to our original greatness! Brother
workers, if our generation is fated to carry this humiliation
into the 21st century, then it is better to die in battle in the
20th! Fellow workers, tyranny is not frightening; [instead] what
is frightening [to the tyrants] is a general rebellion under
tyranny'. 22 The confrontational rhetoric was accompanied by a
warning and an ultimatum: the 19 May document demanded acceptance
of the student hunger-strikers' demands within 24 hours, or a
one-day general strike would be called for 20 May, and further
measures decided upon at that time. 23
Gongzilian
also declared that it was organizing a large march on 22 May 'to
bring the democracy movement to a new high tide'. 24
The declaration of martial law shortly after midnight on the
evening of 19 May radically altered the pattern of political
activity in the city. Beginning with the successful blockade of
army units by unarmed citizens throughout the city in the early
morning hours of 20 May and afterward, mass resistance to the
government was suddenly a reality. By daylight on the 20th,
gongzilian
reiterated its call for a general strike (excluding essential
services, communications and transportation), to stay in force
until the troops withdrew. 25 The militant positions that the
workers' organization had articulated, and the organization it
had developed on the square in the preceding week, thrust it into
the middle of unfolding events on the streets. Meanwhile, popular
outrage over martial law drove many new recruits into the freshly
declared workers' organization, swelling its ranks. On 20 May
gongzilian
began a public registration drive on the square. Blank identity
cards were purchased from stationery stores, and membership cards
were issued to those who showed both work unit and Beijing
resident's identity cards. Despite the clear danger that such
membership records might present, by 3 June
gongzilian
claimed to have registered almost 20,000 members. 26
As it clarified its procedures and leadership structure that
week, a loose 'preparatory committee', and later a 'standing
committee', came to lead the movement, without any formal offices
designated for individuals. Within this loose and consensual
structure, however, Han Dongfang emerged informally as the
dominant leader and spokesperson. Separate departments were set
up for organization, propaganda and logistics, 27 and an office
for liaison work maintained communications with various large
factories, active university campuses, and other worker and
citizen groups. By the end of May
gongzilian
had promulgated a program and a constitution that established a
general assembly, standing committee and executive committee. 28
It now had a printing press and issued more professional-looking
handbills on the square, and also operated a print shop in the
Chongwen district. 29 A 'workers picket corps' (
gongren jiucha dui
) was formed to maintain order in the vicinity and protect the
students, if needed, and four 'dare-to-die brigades' (
gansi dui
) were established to assist in blocking any police or military
movements.
The propaganda department reorganized the broadcasting operation
and made it into perhaps the most important aspect of
gongzilian
's presence on the square. The programming was revamped and the
equipment upgraded. By the end of May, it broadcast continuously
from morning into the evening. Several broadcasting specialists,
none of them workers, were enlisted for their voices and diction.
30 News from BBC, VOA and Taiwan radio were broadcast live, and
purloined '
neibu
' materials, such as a speech by Yang Shangkun urging a military
solution, were read out to listeners. After working hours,
however, the broadcasts were turned into a kind of democratic
forum. Political statements and satirical songs and poems were
written down and handed in by people in the audience to be read
out to the crowds. This turned out to be the most popular of the
organization's activities, and the one with the highest profile.
Ordinary workers, disgruntled journalists and government office
workers, even disaffected cadres and soldiers, submitted
statements to the broadcasters - often exposés of official
duplicity or wrongdoing - and these were read out to large and
appreciative audiences every evening.
Gongzilian
organized demonstrations of its own almost every day, starting
with 20 May, and helped to coordinate the largest ones held to
protest martial law. 31 The group accused the city government of
trying to instigate 'turmoil' and called on all work units in the
city to organize brigades to maintain order during martial law so
as to avoid any pretext for force of arms. 32 In the course of
this work extensive contacts were developed with other citizen
organizations and with members of large state work units,
including officials. Liaison was maintained with employees of the
Capital Steel Corporation who were organizing their own workers'
federation; 33 with construction workers who would soon form an
autonomous federation for workers in their trade; 34 with the
Capital Workers Picket Corps; 35 the Flying Tigers Motorcycle
Brigade; 36 the Beijing Citizens Dare-to-Die Corps; 37 and two
workers' organizations from the Northeast. 38 Contacts with the
student organizations occupying the square became more frequent,
though no less strained than before (see below for more on these
strains). Close contact was also maintained with members of those
factories whose delegations were still marching on the square,
notably the Beijing Coking Plant, whose factory director
reportedly led a march. Older workers, workshop cadres and union
personnel from both state factories and the All-China Federation
of Trade Unions loitered around the headquarters and the
broadcasting station, offering advice and encouragement, both
oral and written. 39
Throughout the period of martial law,
gongzilian
maintained the same tone in its leaflets that it had during the
hunger strike: a rhetoric that fused together the idea of working
class struggle with the language of democratic opposition to
political oligarchy. In a statement issued on 26 May to all
Chinese overseas,
gongzilian
stated, 'The foundations and columns of the People's Republic
are stained with our blood and sweat. Our nation was created from
the struggle and labour of we workers and all other mental and
manual labourers. We are the rightful masters of this nation. We
should be, indeed must be, heard in national affairs. We
absolutely must not allow this small handful of degenerate scum
of the nation and working class to usurp our name and suppress
the students, murder democracy, and trample human rights!' 40
Another handbill issued the same day likened the movement to the
Great French Revolution, whose 200th anniversary was rapidly
approaching, and urged workers to 'storm the Bastille of the
1980s'. Declaring that 'The final struggle has arrived', the
document continued, 'We have already seen that the fascist
governments and Stalinist dictatorships spurned by hundreds of
millions of people have not, indeed will not, voluntarily
withdraw from the historical stage. Li Peng along with his
backstage supporters and his followers are engaged in their final
performance; they may still stake all on a last political
gamble'. In a now-familiar style, the document called for all
people to prepare to make great sacrifices in this final battle,
in order to complete the mop-up campaign against Stalinist
dictatorship and to live like human beings under unprecedented
freedom and democracy: 'Storm this 20th century Bastille, this
last stronghold of Stalinism!' 41 Three days later, they
proclaimed, 'we must unite to sweep Deng Xiaoping from the
historical stage'. 42
Symbolic of its growing confidence,
gongzilian
, an organization that had dared not declare its existence
publicly until mid-May, and whose members had not revealed to one
another their full names until that point, confronted the
security forces on two occasions at the end of May. In the first,
on 28 May, members of a student picket corps ran to
gongzilian
headquarters to report that a number of students had been beaten
and arrested in a village in suburban Daxing County. They asked
for reinforcements to go to the village to demand the students'
release.
gongzilian
sent out a picket team in a truck borrowed for the occasion. In
front of them were a group of motorcyclists from the 'Flying
Tigers'; behind them five more trucks filled with supporters. In
a scene reminiscent of local confrontations during the Cultural
Revolution, they pulled up to the county Party headquarters to
demand the release of their comrades. The officials there refused
to acknowledge that any arrests had taken place, but the rescue
team later learned where the prisoners were hidden, rushed there
and gained the release of eight students. Enraged at the
officials' lies, they stopped by the local public security bureau
on their way out of town, shouted their disapproval and pelted
the building with rocks. 43
The second confrontation with security forces occurred on 30 and
31 May, and brought
gongzilian
into the foreign media spotlight for the first and only time. On
the evening of the 29th, activists around the headquarters
noticed that they were under surveillance by plain-clothes
policemen. Around one o'clock in the morning of 30 May, Shen
Yinhan, a member of the
gongzilian
leadership, was forced into a public-security jeep in front of
the Beijing Hotel. As he was being pushed into the jeep, he cried
out and threw his notebook to the ground. His cries attracted the
attention of onlookers, who recovered the notebook and took it
back up Chang'an Avenue to the union headquarters.
Gongzilian
denounced the arrest in broadcasts and in a hastily printed
handbill, called for a demonstration that noon at the Beijing
Bureau of Public Security. 44 It was later discovered that two
other members of the federation's leadership had also been
arrested, along with 11 members of the Flying Tigers Motorcycle
Brigade. These arrests appear to have been provoked by the
confrontation at Daxing County two days before.
Han Dongfang led a delegation of some thirty members to the
Bureau offices at 10.40 that morning. Accompanied by the
gongzilian
legal adviser, a law student from Beijing University, he met a
representative of the Bureau at the gate. The negotiations got
nowhere: the representative insisted that
gongzilian
was an illegal organization and that in any case he would only
negotiate with students; moreover, he refused to admit that any
arrests had been made. 45 By the time they exited the gate, a
large crowd of citizens and students had gathered. Han Dongfang
took up a megaphone and, in front of the assembled crowd of
several thousand, gave a speech about the constitution and
illegality, and denounced the arrests. 46 A group of police
photographers came out and began to survey the crowd. The crowd
remained, chanting slogans and singing the theme song from
'Plain-clothes Policeman', a popular movie about the suppression
of the 1976 Tiananmen protests. In one memorable encounter, an
overweight cadre emerged from the building and loudly berated the
workers: 'What law do you know; I am the law!' Foreign newspeople
at the scene took photographs and videotapes of the event. When a
Japanese newsman rushed up to photograph the confrontation, the
cadre slapped him. When the newsman protested, 'I'm a Japanese!'
the cadre quickly pulled back his arm and apologized: 'I thought
you were Chinese'. 47
The organization quickly issued a handbill to inform the public
of the impasse in negotiations, 48 and at 9.30 that evening,
gongzilian
held a press conference for the foreign media. 49 The next day,
it organized a sit-in demonstration at the offices of the
Ministry of Public Security; and more protests in the square,
involving students as well, were scheduled for that evening.
Perhaps in response to these stubborn protests and the world-wide
media attention that this confrontation earned the arrested
workers, they were released on the afternoon of the 31st. As
three thousand students marched in Tiananmen Square to protest
the arrests, Han Dongfang made a rousing speech to announce the
news. 50
In the wake of the confrontation over the arrests of the 30th and
31st, the Bureau of Public Security began to put increasing
pressure on the
gongzilian
headquarters at the western reviewing stand. With constant
rumours of an imminent military solution, the numbers of students
and citizens on the square were dwindling rapidly. Students from
Beijing, especially, were returning to campus or going home.
Safety dictated that the remaining diehard students and citizens
stick together. The student leaders finally gave up their
long-held and much-resented objection that the workers stay off
the main part of the square in order to keep the democracy
movement 'pure'. When on June 3 news of massacres at outlying
intersections began to reach the square, most members of
gongzilian
rushed out to resist the troops, while most of the remaining
students huddled more tightly around the monument to await their
expected martyrdom.
Gongzilian
's Political Mentality
Much that was distinctive about the
gongzilian
political mentality is due to the fact that the leaders and
members were almost uniformly ordinary young workers with little
education and virtually no movement experience. 51 They came to
the square from steel mills, railway yards, machine building
plants and construction companies (see Table 1 below). They were
not, as the government later asserted, unemployed workers or
members of Beijing's 'floating population': as already observed,
all who registered had to show proof of employment at a Beijing
work unit. 52 The group's leaders had at most a high school
education, and they often had to rely upon several 'advisers'
with university background to help them draft their
proclamations. 53 These were not people who perceived themselves
as players in an elite political game, and they displayed an
acute sense of alienation not only from the political system but
to a considerable extent also from the student leaders and
intellectuals.
Activist #1, 26, high school graduate, sales clerk, Xidan
department store, member of leadership committee and head of
logistics
Activist #2, 29, high school graduate, owner of private clothing
stall, broadcaster
Bai Dongping, 28, high school graduate, railway porter, Beijing
railway bureau, Yongdingmen section
Han Dongfang, 26, worker, Fengtai rail yards of the Beijing
Railway Bureau, member of leadership committee
He Lili, 36, lecturer, Workers' and Staff College of the Beijing
Machine-Building Bureau, member of leadership committee
Jing Gang, worker
Li Jiang, worker
Li Jinjin, 33, graduate student, Beijing University Law
Department, legal adviser
Liu Huanwen, 27, high school graduate, worker, No. 1 Cold Rolling
Mill of the Specialty Steel Plant of Capital Iron and Steel
Corporation, head of picket corps
Liu Qiang, 28, high school graduate, print shop worker, Beijing
Plant No. 3209, leadership committee
Liu Xiang, 21, worker Liu Zihou, worker, Beijing Freight Hauling
Company, head of a picket brigade
Qian Yumin, 28, high school graduate, worker, Beijing railway
bureau, member of leadership committee and secretary
Shen Yaqing, construction worker
Shen Yinhan, worker, member of leadership committee
Tian Bomin, worker
Wang Dengyue, worker, Xuanwu District Construction Company,
leadership preparatory committee
Xiao Delong, cook, Qinghua University
Yan Fugan, worker
Yue Wu, cadre, factory in Shanxi, briefly in leadership group in
mid-May
Zhao Pinlu, worker, Fengtai Crane Works
Zhou Yongjun, college student, Beijing University of Politics and
Law, leadership committee, head of propaganda department
Sources
:
Gongren qilaile
(see footnote 27); interviews cited in the text;
Zhongguo zhi chun
[China Spring], January 1990, pp. 31-32; Beijing Bureau of
Public Security, transcripts of interrogations of Qian Yumin, Bai
Dongping, Liu Qiang, Li Jinjin, and Liu Huanwen, 27-31 March
1990, submitted to Japanese courts in the air piracy case of
Zhang Zhenhai in Japan (see
Xinhua she
, 16 December 1989).
Why do a lot of workers agree with democracy and freedom? ... (I)n the workshop, does what the workers say count, or what the leader says? We later talked about it. In the factory the director is a dictator; what one man says goes. If you view the state through the factory, it's about the same: one-man rule... Our objective was not very high; we just wanted workers to have their own independent organization... In work units, it's personal rule. For example, if I want to change jobs, the bus company foreman won't let me go. I ought to go home at 5, but he tells me to work overtime for two hours, and if I don't he'll cut my bonus. This is personal rule. A factory should have a system. If a worker wants to change jobs, they ought to have a system of rules to decide how to do it. Also, these rules should be decided upon by everybody, and then afterwards anyone who violates them will be punished according to the rules. This is rule by law. Now we don't have this kind of legal system.
Underneath the militant political rhetoric was a
straightforward demand for workplace representation, collective
bargaining, and impartial enforcement of workplace rules.
The Critique of Economic Reform
It is on the subject of the reforms that the organization
displayed the strongest emotions and the greatest disdain for
China's leaders. This may come as something of a surprise to
foreign observers who, during the 1980s, viewed the unmistakable
accomplishments of reform through lenses provided by China's
pro-reform intellectuals. Despite unprecedented rises in living
standards,
gongzilian
portrayed the reform era as one of economic mismanagement and
official duplicity, during which workers gained little relative
to others while their livelihoods became less secure. 59
As portrayed in
gongzilian
statements, China was a country in deep trouble: 'the country is
trapped in internal and external debt crises', 'the people's
standard of living is being lowered by heavy taxes and
uncontrolled inflation'. 60 One satirical rhyme, of the type very
popular during the movement and almost certainly read out several
times over the
gongzilian
broadcasting station, was printed up and distributed by the
organization. It describes China under Deng's reforms (we make
only a token attempt to make the translation rhyme): 61
The Third Plenum said get rich faster, but the people's pockets have not swelled, and cats black and white have gotten fatter.
Opening to the outside world, importing foreign capital, foreign debts have gotten larger, private bank accounts have prospered.
Bank notes and treasury bonds bear interest, and food subsidies are 7.50, but prices shoot upward like a rocket.
The reforms are doing fine, we won't give up the policy, but foreigners don't move to China, while the burned-out flee overseas.
New hotels have gone up and changed the city's face, but the people still lack decent housing space.
The cause of all this? Incompetence and corruption among China's leaders: 'vast poverty is not dealt with; the national wealth is handled in secret; funds can't be found for education; there's a craze for banquets at the top; the fate of the nation and people has soured; and all this due to corruption at the top'. 62 All of China's problems appear to be due to the fact that the country's reformers don't know what they are doing or where they are going:
'China is well known as one of the most backward countries in the world, yet Deng tries to fool us by manipulating the media into believing China has a high GNP. Why are we so poor and backward? What are the excuses? Why have the bureaucrats become more incompetent and corrupt in recent years? You bureaucrats have made a mess of China; where are you taking us? Its not enough to say you are feeling for the stones as you cross the river; what about those of us who fall in and drown? We've had 10 years of reform and we don't know where we are going. The bureaucratic cats get fat, while the people starve'.63
In our interviews with gongzilian members we were able to explore further the way in which the organization's activists evaluated the reforms. The former head of the logistics department felt that the reforms had not been fully carried out, and therefore did not have much to offer workers.
The reform was not a successful one, it was a reform without an outcome. They did it halfway and put on the brakes. The one benefit of the reforms was that it let workers, peasants and other people with little education know what the outside world was like, what workers and unions were like in capitalist countries... After the reform, we realized a lot of things clearly. We're not so dumb as before, and slowly we stopped obeying the factory managers... People recall Mao's time, when things weren't expensive. I think that if Deng Xiaoping were 20 or 30 years younger, the reform could be carried out better. After the reform, we have refrigerators; but look, what are we going to put in them?... And the refrigerators are bought with loans anyway... In the city they lay you off and send you home with only 3 months' living expenses, and still expect you to be grateful to the Party... Especially young guys like me, we think about the Guomindang. Before this movement we used to say that we'd never seen the Guomindang, and we don't know how bad they are. The Communist Party is so good that we can't eat well. Of course we didn't talk like this on the streets, only in our own homes when we were drinking together and letting off steam (Activist # 1).
After some probing, our gongzilian informants admitted that despite the severe inflation of recent years, living standards had not actually declined since the Mao era for most of them. But the expectations built up by reformers that things would continue to improve had been dashed in recent years by the inflation. What most rankled them was that as the reforms went sour for workers in the last half of the 1980s, cadres had continued to enrich themselves.
After the reform and opening up, the main shortcoming has been that the state has become a free world for those with power and money, but the ordinary people can meet with disaster, and don't have a chance to benefit. Even my grandmother says, those who are officials and those who have sons who are officials can count on their sons to take care of them, but we ordinary folks have to rely on our own sons and daughters. Now we even have restrictions on having children. To give birth, you have to have a quota; when your time comes, if you can't get pregnant what are you going to do? So, after reform and opening up, those who can go through the back door, those with special privileges gained. The gap between people got larger, and it felt unequal. People think, why is it that if we work equally hard, those with power can become so much richer? (Activist #1).
To the activists of
gongzilian
, and indeed to many ordinary workers, it was no accident that as
the reforms stagnated and workers' prospects flagged, officials
continued to enrich themselves. In their pronouncements on the
economic reforms, the workers of
gongzilian
articulate a folk theory of inflation that ties together price
rises, political dictatorship and official corruption into a
single, interrelated complex. In the views of these workers,
inflation is not the result, as some economists would have it, of
a two-tiered price system or of insufficient scope for free
market activity. It is due directly to the fact that China is
ruled by incompetent, corrupt and self-serving dictators. 64
This was not a position arrived at by activists of
gongzilian
after a period of participation in the democracy movement. The
very first line of the organization's very first handbill reads:
'Because of the long-term control of a dictatorial bureaucracy,
inflation has flown out of control and people's living standards
have declined steadily'. 65 Our
gongzilian
informants explained to us that things like steel and machines,
both imported and domestic, are sold at inflated prices because
officials demand higher prices, out of which they take their cut.
In foreign trade, our informants appeared convinced that imported
materials fed the domestic inflationary spiral because the
children of top officials used their fathers' powers to gain
monopoly positions in order to extort high prices on the domestic
market. Inflation, in other words, has its roots in the corrupt
exchange that permeates domestic trade in producers' items and
foreign trade in all items. This is the understanding of
inflation that lay behind the
gongzilian
claim that 'The country is victimized for the sake of a small
minority, and the people pay for it'. 66
This folk theory of inflation may help to unravel a puzzle that
some have observed in the democracy movement: why it was that a
working class, whose primary economic concern was inflation and
disposable income, responded so sympathetically to a student
movement whose main charge against the government was corruption
and lack of democracy.
The Estrangement from Party Reformers
Given its views, it will come as no surprise that
gongzilian
had no heroes in the national leadership - at least ones still
living. Despite the fact that Hu Yaobang was almost never
mentioned in handbills, our informants testified quite
convincingly that Hu was indeed greatly respected, and sincerely
mourned by ordinary people. It was not, of course, because Hu had
played an important role in rehabilitating intellectuals during
the 1980s, but rather because reputedly he alone among the
current leadership, and more than Mao Zedong had, showed his
concern for the common people by travelling widely throughout the
country, especially to disaster areas and districts mired in
poverty. The reverence for Hu Yaobang strikes us as the product
of retrospective myth-making: as he became a symbol of all the
virtues lacking in much of officialdom, his legend grew.
Zhao Ziyang and Deng Xiaoping are held in much less esteem. In
fact, they and the entire reform faction were considered to be no
better than the other leaders of the party:
When gongzilian was active, we didn't want Deng Xiaoping, and we didn't want Zhao Ziyang either. Although he came to the square and cried, we felt he did it with a motive. We opposed official corruption, and his sons were corrupt... There are people who divide the government up into factions: the reform faction, conservative faction, new authoritarian faction, moderate faction, etc. ... The way I see it, the Communist Party is all one faction, the 'harm the people faction' [ hairen pai ]... Some of the people in the government are good, but who's good and who's not I don't know. On the square I thought that the reformers' starting point was good, but what have the reforms brought the people? The reformers and Deng Xiaoping breathe out of the same nostril. When you go to work do you ride a bicycle or ride in a car? What do you have in your refrigerator at home? Reform has brought a crisis; the reformers know that even more clearly than Deng Xiaoping. You screwed up the reforms, and now you want to take advantage of the movement to shift the blame to another group. No way. Whom do we oppose? We oppose you! (Activist #1).
Gongzilian
's opposition to the reform faction was rooted in the economic
grievances that helped spur them to action, and their trade
unionism was in fact an effort to protect themselves from what
they saw as the unpredictability and insensitivity of the
reformers' program. The organization's consequent unwillingness
to differentiate among the Party leadership in the midst of the
political struggles of May left them estranged from the
pro-reform intellectuals who participated in the protests, and
from many of the students, who sought to buttress Zhao's forces
after it became apparent that he was seeking to differentiate
himself from Deng and the hard-liners. As this became evident
during the week of the student hunger-strike,
gongzilian
warned in one of its handbills, 'Politicians who are trying to
make use of the democracy movement or the students are warned'.
67 If one reads the 'warning' carefully, it appears to be aimed
more at the students and intellectuals than the leadership
factions.
Our
gongzilian
informants reported that the workers were wary from mid-May
onward about getting involved in leadership struggles and being
used and discarded in the process. They saw their movement as
being for workers' rights, not for or against any leadership
faction, and they certainly were unwilling to support the faction
that they saw as their main tormentors. 68 They also began to
lose their patience when the students on the square began to
change their attitude toward Zhao Ziyang and the people around
him.
No sooner had Zhao Ziyang gone [to the square] and cried, the students' words changed. Now they were saying that Zhao Ziyang was going to be removed from power, that Zhao Ziyang was good, that we should protect him. We immediately said in our broadcasts that, throughout the movement, we have never demanded the removal of any one person or the promotion of any one person. If you've made a mistake you should admit it to the people. The ordinary people want to see if your accomplishments or mistakes are greater... At the time, we thought that Zhao Ziyang came to the square to deceive people, because he knew he was through. A worker spoke at our 'democratic forum' and said that we don't consider that any man who sheds tears must be a good person. If Zhao Ziyang hadn't come, what would you be doing now? You would still be yelling 'down with Zhao Ziyang'. Li Peng went [to the square] too, but he didn't shed any tears. If Li Peng had cried, what would you be saying now? (Activist #1).
Frictions with the Student Movement
The students' sympathy for Zhao Ziyang was one of the last of
many differences between the student protesters and the workers
of
gongzilian
. Despite their alliance on the square, educational and class
differences continually hampered their relations. The students
were not, after all,
laobaixing
. They exhibited a wariness about the articulation of economic
demands by other groups, and wanted to keep the movement
exclusively under their control. These differences, and the
students' growing attraction to the elite's factional struggle,
underlined a sharp class distinction in the politics of dissent:
the students understood elite political discourse, were
themselves a tiny elite, and many would probably become officials
in the future. It was natural for them to be attracted to the
elite's manoeuvring. For the workers of
gongzilian
, however, this was a game that was bewildering, alien and
potentially dangerous. The student's attraction to the politics
of Party factions kindled in the workers of
gongzilian
a lingering doubt about whose side the students were really on.
From the outset of their movement, and continuing well into
martial law, the students made a self-conscious effort to
maintain their 'purity' (
chunjiexing
). This meant, in practice, that they limited their politics to
moral questioning of the authorities, seeking to speak as the
conscience of the nation, striving to maintain public order and
production, while keeping off to one side any 'narrow' economic
and group interests that might potentially disrupt their quest.
This quest for purity led to their early practice of marching
with hands linked to prevent others from joining in. During the
occupation of the square, the quest for purity was physically
represented by a series of concentric security circles that
protected the inner circle of hunger-strikers and top student
leaders from curious onlookers and potentially disruptive
groups.69
Despite the remarkable success of the students' tactics through
the middle of May, the activists of
gongzilian
found this exclusivity frustrating: 'Some people wanted to go
over and talk things over with the students, but before we could
say a couple words, the student picket corps came over and chased
us away. At that point we didn't want to stir up trouble, and
were unwilling to set ourselves against the students'. The
gongzilian
activists saw the same treatment being given to the Construction
Workers' Union, which for a period was located at the eastern
reviewing stand: 'The students were especially unwilling to meet
with them. The student pickets were always driving them away...
In reality, a lot of people have this attitude toward
construction workers from the villages, saying they're convict
labourers' (Activist #1).
A final manifestation of the student's insistence on purity was
their refusal to allow
gongzilian
to locate within Tiananmen Square proper. The leaders of the
workers, harassed by the management office of Tiananmen, and
feeling vulnerable to police surveillance and arrests in their
isolated location across Chang'an Avenue from the main part of
the square, were rebuffed on at least two occasions in their
efforts to relocate. It was only on 30 and 31 May, with student
numbers dwindling and military action seemingly imminent, that
the students felt threatened enough to allow
gongzilian
into the square to help protect them.70
As the movement progressed,
gongzilian
activists began to feel that the student leaders were
insensitive to their demands, and moreover obstructed their
efforts to win rights for workers.
On the 28th, gongzilian advocated a closing of all factories and shops. If it was impossible to go out on strike, the workers could still stage slowdowns. To strike is our right, to uphold justice and protect our own interests. Workers from a lot of work units supported our strike call. Workers said, we simply aren't willing to work for them any more. But the students wouldn't allow us to strike. They tried every possible way to convince us not to...The students said, this is our movement, and you have to obey us. They didn't let us do it. The workers couldn't take it, that's why we had to have our own organization. By the end, after 28 May, we didn't advocate sympathy for the students anymore (Activist #1).
Behind this perceived insensitivity, gongzilian activists also began to feel the sting of class snobbery.
The students were always rejecting us workers... They thought we were uncultured. We demanded to participate in the dialogue with the government, but the students wouldn't let us. They considered us workers to be crude, stupid, reckless, and unable to negotiate (Activist #1).
The same kind of class distinctions, of course, were observed in the legal organs' treatment of protesters with different degrees of social status after the June crack-down. Intellectuals and students tended to get lighter punishments and less physical abuse, while workers could expect execution or long prison terms, and beatings under interrogation. However moved they might have been by the students' hunger-strike, the workers felt that they were risking much more by their activism than most students.
You know, with students, it's nothing - they arrest you for a couple of days and let you go. But when we workers get arrested they shoot us... The government is ruthless toward us workers. And they say the workers are the ruling class. What a load of horseshit! The workers who were arrested [after 4 June] were all beaten half to death. We had a guy who hid a gun. Later he was arrested. The public security bureau brought him back [to his neighbourhood] to fetch his gun, and he was almost unrecognizable, his face beaten to a pulp and his lips looking like a pig's... About halfway through, a lot of us thought that we would be defeated anyway, and that the government would suppress us. But we couldn't break up. If we broke up we would be suppressed, and if we didn't we'd be suppressed. So we felt we might as well do it right, and let others know that there was a group of people like us, an organization like ours... The students thought they were very powerful. We workers always felt we were subject to domination, nothing like the confidence of the students (Activist #2).
As it became apparent that the end was near, the students who
remained in the square finally began to come over to the workers'
headquarters on their own initiative for discussions and began to
include them in their planning. Only after it was apparent that
military action was underway on 3 June, however, did they run
over to the workers' headquarters and ask them to call a general
strike. By then, it was too late: 'If the workers had stood up
first, it would have been a lot better. The students wouldn't
allow us workers to strike. At the very end it was too late; to
call out workers to strike at the end, nobody would go along with
it. They would feel hurt, like the students were treating us like
playthings' (Activist #1).
These frictions and frustrations had served an important role in
the development of
gongzilian
's organization and political outlook. The workers thought they
observed in the student leaders and in their movement many of the
faults of the nation's leaders and their political system:
hierarchy, secrecy, condescension toward ordinary people,
factionalism and struggles for power, and even special privilege
and corruption. In a fairly conscious manner, workers began to
define their own movement in opposition to the counter-example
across Chang'an Avenue.
In response to the students' exclusivity,
gongzilian
made it a point to declare in its charter that 'all may join
in', and in interviews members took pride in the fact that their
leaders would talk freely with city people of all walks of life,
and peasants as well, and that the 'democratic forum' of their
broadcasting station was open to any and all statements from the
audience. In response to the student attitude that the movement
was theirs, and that other groups should stay clear, fall into
line with the student's aims and willingly serve the student
movement in a subordinate role, the workers asserted in their
handbills that 'ours is a nation that is built from the efforts
of mental and physical labourers', 'the working class is the most
advanced class' and that 'the People's Republic of China is led
by the working class', which has a 'special role' in 'correctly
leading the democratic patriotic movement. 71 In opposition to
the hierarchy of the student movement - its leaders had titles
like 'General Commander', 'Chairman' and so forth - the workers
adamantly refused to bestow specialized titles, preferring
instead a collective leadership in which people were given
responsibilities, but neither titles nor the right to order
people about.
Gongzilian didn't have any 'general commanders'. If you weren't on the standing committee, then you were a member. If there was something to be dealt with, we just met and talked it over. We all just wanted to get something accomplished, nobody wanted to step forward and stand out from the others... [After a student leader joined us at the end of May] we were very happy. But he was always putting on airs of being our leader. Who would take orders from him! He didn't even consider that nobody had to be any more powerful than anyone else. Although we workers didn't have any education, we were very clear about that! (Activist #2).
Our informants stressed that their core of leaders were not
interested in exercising power: they had had enough of that sort
of thing in their factories. One said, 'we didn't have that kind
of consciousness', and another observed, 'what we were competing
for was to have our heads chopped off'. In the
gongzilian
provisional constitution, there was no mention of any individual
leadership posts, only a hierarchy of committees and methods for
electing and recalling members.
The workers also, as noted, thought they saw in the student
leadership the same kind of special privileges and financial
misappropriation that they hated in the government. It was widely
rumoured among workers on the square that the two top leaders
among the student protesters (they were married) not only had the
largest tent of anyone but also slept on a Simmons mattress; that
the size and quality of tents and sleeping mats were allocated
among student leaders according to their relative rank; that many
of the student leaders had electric fans in their tents. 72 The
students had taken in enormous sums of money in donations from
ordinary citizens and from abroad, and there were legendary
struggles to control these funds, This disgusted the workers.
We saw that the students had stumbled into chaos over money. They are capitalists; what they had was a lot of money. We are the proletarian class. We didn't want to screw things up on account of money, and bear the responsibility for shady dealings with money... We had our criticisms of the students' financial system. How much money the students received and how much they spent, to this day I don't know. You basically couldn't find the people in their financial department... We had two rules in our financial system. One, don't accept contributions of money. Two, if someone drops money off and leaves, count it immediately and as soon as you are done let everyone know how much there is and what you will use it for (Activist #1).
In contrast to the student leaders' perceived power struggles and competition for the media limelight and control over finances, the gongzilian activists prided themselves on the absence of continuous power struggles in their leading bodies. In contrast to what they saw as the student's over-intellectualized and moralistic approaches, gongzilian activists prided themselves on their ability to speak the language of the ordinary citizen.
The difference between us and the students is that when we talked to the city people and workers, we talked about such practical questions as clothing, food, housing, farming and so forth... A student asked me, wouldn't you like an even higher level of democracy? I asked him what he meant, and he gave me a long speech. I told him, stop talking, please. The more you talk the more confused things get (Activist #1).
The gongzilian activists we interviewed stressed repeatedly that they were oriented to 'getting things done' ( gan shishi ), not personal ambition or power struggles, nor moralizing or speech-making, because the needs of the working class were practical. In our interviews with them, a common refrain was that their desire to 'accomplish something practical' was repeatedly frustrated by the orientation of the student-dominated movement.
A lot of people came up to us and said, your words aren't hollow; when we listen to the students talk we can't understand them. Students wanted democracy, freedom, peace, reason, non-violence. They were always shouting that the status of intellectuals was too low. But they never brought up the workers. And they didn't answer the questions that the workers put to them... They were always talking about awakening the suffering masses, but the ordinary folk aren't stupid. They know what's right and what's wrong. What we need is to get going and accomplish something (Activist #1).
Conclusions
Previous assessments of the Beijing Workers' Autonomous
Federation that stressed the organizational limits of the
movement are by no means wrong. It is certainly true that the
union was a product of the political paralysis occasioned by the
student demonstrations and the occupation of the square. Its
leaders and activists did not know one another before they came
together on the streets. The organization never established
branches in places of work, and therefore it was unable to
coordinate walk-outs from factories at crucial points in time.
However, considering the lack of sympathy displayed by the
student leaders, and their repeated attempts to rein in the union
movement, it is remarkable how far this band of dissident workers
was able to go within the space of a few weeks. The organization
of
gongzilian
coalesced very quickly once the decision was made to forge ahead
in mid-May. It received considerable material and moral support
from the city's workers, and was able to marshal significant
resources within a relatively short period of time. The workers'
movement grew most rapidly after the declaration of martial law -
precisely at the time that the student movement began to melt
away and play a less decisive role in events. This in itself was
unprecedented, and no doubt greatly alarmed those officials who
favoured a violent crack-down. The military operation of 4 June,
launched despite the rapidly dwindling numbers of students and
citizens on the square, was probably motivated in large part by
these officials' mortal fears of a workers' insurgency.
Most significant, however, was the organization's populist
mentality.
Gongzilian
never attempted to play the elite game of moral posturing. It
did not attempt to influence inner-party power struggles on
behalf of any favoured faction.
Gongzilian
did not pin its hopes on Party leaders; in the workers'
estimation, the reform faction and its intellectuals were all
just part of the elite. To their way of thinking, all of the
elite were privileged; none of them had the workers' interests in
mind. Despite the students' struggle against the bureaucrats,
which the workers supported whole-heartedly, the workers found
that the students exhibited the same lack of concern and
condescension toward the ordinary folk, and the same seeking
after power and privilege, as the Party leaders. Like certain
strains of mass radicalism during the Cultural Revolution,
gongzilian
was profoundly anti-elitist and anti-bureaucratic. Yet the
workers' populist rhetoric in 1989 was blended with new political
conceptions: institutional restraints on managerial power in
workplaces, within a framework of union representation and
collective bargaining, and, more vaguely, a role for an
independent union in national policy-making and an
institutionalized right to 'supervise' the Communist Party's
exercise of power.
One obvious moral to be drawn from the short history of
gongzilian
is that future democratic movements will be crippled unless this
obvious barrier between students and intellectuals on the one
hand, and ordinary working people on the other, is broken down.
But, more importantly,
gongzilian
highlights a glaring omission in democratic thought in China -
whether of the establishment or dissident variety. How shall
movements for democracy mobilize ordinary citizens, and how shall
workers be incorporated into such a movement and into the new
order they seek? There is a strong strain of elitism in Chinese
'democratic' thought that questions the desirability of including
ordinary people in the political process. 73 This strain is no
doubt reinforced by precisely the kind of political orientation
exhibited by
gongzilian
- one which is at the same time openly disrespectful of
intellectual authority and doggedly independent. If the future
path of political change in China shall be one of gradual reform,
gongzilian
suggests a flaw in reformist thought in China in the 1980s.
Despite vigorous economic growth and improvements in living
standards, workers appear to be moving toward a more active and
potentially disruptive role in the political life of their
country. The submerged working-class populism that burst briefly
to the surface in 1989 will persist so long as reform politicians
and their intellectual advisers continue to debate only ways of
motivating workers through rewards, punishments, and the threat
of unemployment, while continuing to ignore the growing desire of
workers to be treated as full citizens in their workplaces, if
not in the state as well.
Shatin, Hong Kong
4 June 1992