SAVAGE FORM OF CAPITALISM: Chinese factory workers risk limbs to hold jobs

BY TIM JOHNSON
FREE PRESS WASHINGTON STAFF

SHENZHEN, China — The Pingshan People’s Hospital in the thriving industrial city of Shenzhen has a ward devoted to hand injuries.

In one room, Yan Kaiguo, 23, cradles his bandaged right hand. April 8, a machine at an electronic circuit-board plant crushed part of his index finger.

Yan feels lucky he lost only part of his finger, down to the first knuckle. He’s confident he’ll get back his job, which pays about $96 a month.

“Every day, we get five or six cases like this and sometimes over a dozen,” said a hand surgeon at another large Shenzhen hospital, who asked that neither he nor his hospital be identified for fear of reprisal from city officials. “Most of the machines are old and semiautomatic. The workers have to put their hands into the machines.”

In a grim replay of the industrial revolution in the United States and other countries, industrial machinery will crush or sever the arms, hands and fingers of some 40,000 Chinese workers this year, government-controlled news media report. Some experts privately say the true number is higher.

A majority of the accidents occurs in metalworking and electronics plants with heavy stamping equipment, shoe and handbag factories with leather-cutting equipment, toy factories and industrial plastics plants with blazing hot machinery.

In Shenzhen’s hospital wards, maimed factory workers nurse mangled hands and forearm stumps. They tell of factory managers who’ve removed machine safety guards that slowed output and of working on decrepit, unsafe machinery. Workers toiling 100 hours a week grow dazed from fatigue, then lose their fingers to machines.

Local officials routinely overlook appalling safety conditions, worried that factory owners will relocate. They send mutilated migrant workers back to distant rural villages, shunting the burden of workplace injuries onto poorer inland provinces.

The workplace carnage is bitterly ironic in a communist country founded on principles of protecting downtrodden workers and peasants. Karl Marx, were he alive, would probably see an echo of the labor conditions in mid-19th-Century England that gave rise to his communist principles.

Chinese Communist Party leaders are so eager to maintain high economic growth and to create jobs for tens of millions of potentially restive Chinese that they now preside over a savage form of capitalism. It’s one in which maimed migrant workers can readily be discarded. Independent labor unions are banned. Workers are placed in front of machines for endless stretches.

But labor monitors say foreign companies that relentlessly demand lower prices and U.S. consumers who gobble up low-cost goods contribute to the problem.

Zhou Litai, a lawyer who represents hundreds of workers maimed or killed on the job, said foreign consumers should be aware that some “Made in China” products “are tainted with blood from cut-off fingers or hands.”

Former U.S. Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., long an advocate of worker and union rights, called the Chinese record on worker safety horrendous.

“Worker safety is a very important issue in the free trade debates, because, if you go to places like China, worker safety is not considered a priority, and as a result there are far too many worker deaths.

“If we continue to move in the direction of these same new trade regimes, you’re going to see more and more workers injured and losing their lives, and that’s one of the issues that’s in the forefront in the discussions.”

Smaller factory owners have no leverage with global buyers and are always worried they’ll be replaced by other suppliers, so they try to make money rapidly, said Chen Ka-wai, the assistant director of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, a watchdog group that monitors working conditions on the mainland.

Stories of dismembered workers are numbingly similar. Usually, the migrant worker is a recent arrival to one of China’s coastal industrial zones. He or she takes any job offered, no matter the conditions. With no safety training, the worker is assigned to an unfamiliar machine.

Wang Xuebing, a 19-year-old from Hubei province in central China, came to Shenzhen and got a job in July in a metalworking plant. A month later, his foreman escorted a work crew to a different factory owned by a friend and “asked me and two coworkers to operate a metal mold machine,” Wang said.

The machine made casings for air conditioners, using tons of pressure to mold sheeting. Wang said the machine went on the fritz but was rigged to work again.

“When I placed a metal sheet in the machine, it pressed down. My hand was severed. I lost consciousness,” Wang recalled.

Zhu Qiang came to the Pearl River Delta region from inland Sichuan province in early 2002. March 2 of that year, he got a job making industrial plastic and shopping bags. Two weeks later, while working a 16-hour shift, he lost his right hand.

“We were extremely tired. We were nodding our heads, almost asleep,” Zhu said. “My hand got tangled with the plastic and got burned. I was rushed to the hospital. There was no way to save my hand.”

For the loss of his right hand, 22-year-old Zhu was given about $4,800. China’s state-owned media mention more frequently the staggering number of workplace injuries, especially in the region that includes Shenzhen, near Hong Kong.

“There are at least 30,000 cases of finger losses each year in the Pearl River Delta factories, and the total number of fingers being cut off by machines is over 40,000,” the China Youth Daily, a state-owned national newspaper, said in a short report March 13.

Chinese media call Yongkang in coastal Zhejiang province the “finger-cutting city.” Yongkang’s 7,000 small factories make tools, and some 1,000 workers in those factories lose fingers or hands each year, the Metropolis Express newspaper said Feb. 18.

“The majority of them will be immediately fired by the owners,” said the Web site run by the Communist Party’s national newspaper, People’s Daily. “The compensation for each cut-off finger is 500 yuan,” or about $60, roughly a month’s salary.

For a young person, losing a hand spells doom. With as many as 20 million healthy people clamoring for jobs each year, factory owners never hire disabled people. Dismembered workers are condemned to destitution and often loneliness.

“With no money, it’s hard to find a girlfriend,” said Sun Hongyuan, 28, a worker who lost his right hand several years ago.

In Washington last month, the AFL-CIO petitioned the Bush administration to demand that it pressure China to increase wages and improve working conditions. Acting under a 1974 trade law, the labor group said Chinese workers suffer “staggering rates of injuries, illness and death” because the nation unfairly scrimps on workplace safety and denies a series of worker rights. The administration has until early May to rule on the request.

In China, laws abound, but enforcement is often lacking.

“China has a series of laws protecting workers’ rights and interests. They are probably better than in some Western countries. But they don’t apply it, particularly at the local level,” said Zhou, the labor lawyer.

By Ching-Ching Ni
Los Angeles Times

JIAXING, China – Until a few months ago, Zhou Yichao’s goal, to get a good job and support his widowed mother, seemed well within reach.

He had just taken the public-servant exam and scored among the very top. His face-to-face interview could only help his prospects, as the 22-year-old knew his potential employers would be impressed with his tall athletic build and good manners.

Then his application was rejected on the basis that he tested positive for hepatitis B, a liver disease he never knew he had. With few exceptions, Chinese government agencies legally may weed out candidates based on the health of their liver.

Zhou bought a fruit-carving knife, found the two officials who rejected his application and stabbed one to death and seriously wounded the other.

Today Zhou sits on death row.

But instead of outrage against an intentional murderer, Zhou’s name has become the rallying call of a national movement against discriminatory hiring practices and the lack of legal redress.

“The outcome of this case could affect the entire future of people with hepatitis in China,” said Bi Xuejun, Zhou’s attorney. “Unfair discrimination against a whole segment of society could push some people to commit extreme antisocial acts. This is a serious social problem. Zhou has basically sacrificed his own life to bring attention to this issue.”

More than 120 million people, about 10 percent of the Chinese population, are chronic carriers of the disease, many of whom like Zhou do not show any symptoms of infection and should not pose a threat to their co-workers.

Hepatitis B is spread through the exchange of bodily fluids, such as contaminated blood, unprotected sex, shared needles and between infected mothers and their newborns. It is not contagious through casual contact such as shaking hands.

Full-blown hepatitis B causes liver failure and death. Nearly a million people worldwide die from the disease every year, about one-third of them Chinese.

Like HIV/AIDS, there is no cure for the illness. Unlike AIDS, however, hepatitis B is preventable with a simple vaccine. While the Chinese government is stepping up efforts to immunize newborns and gradually reduce the overall infected population, inoculating the entire population has proved far tougher, advocates say, than tolerating widespread discrimination.

“Chinese know a lot more about AIDS because at least there are campaigns that teach people about how it is spread,” said Zhang Xianzhu, another graduate rejected by a state employer after his hepatitis B test. “But there are no campaigns to educate them about hepatitis, how it’s caught and spread. And because it is not as deadly as AIDS it has totally been neglected.”

Under the old cradle-to-grave socialist system, individuals were assigned job units and few employers bothered to check the medical health of someone they couldn’t fire anyway.

In China’s new capitalist-style economy, only the very best, or physically fit, are chosen for jobs in a nations where between 100 million and 200 million are out of work and 2 million new college graduates join the job market each year.

Height, marriage and health status can be considered by employers in China. Under the circumstances, a positive hepatitis test can mean no job.

To cope, some cheat, hiring healthy people to take the required physical, or hop from job to job to avoid detection. The lucky ones go overseas, where privacy laws forbid employers to ask such questions. Many more go back where they came from, usually rural areas where they try to forget they ever earned a college diploma. Some resign themselves to a life of farming or other manual labor.

But social discrimination and medical ignorance also go beyond the job market.

A new Web site for hepatitis carriers is filled with horror stories. According to one mother who is herself a carrier and had passed it to her child, her local kindergartens refused to accept anyone who tests positive for the virus. After several rejections at various local schools, she had no choice but send her 3-year-old to live with her grandmother in the countryside.

Afraid to betray their health status, some carriers never date or marry. Others keep it from their spouse.

Zhang filed the country’s first discrimination lawsuit against the government.

“I wanted to do something for this community,” Zhang said. “I know it is not easy for the people to sue the government and many people are afraid to do it. But I did it because there are so many people like me locked out of jobs and rotting in their little dark corners of the world. We face a crisis of survival.”
Posted by: Los Angeles Times at April 9, 2004 09:00 PM
————
Unfortunately, Zhang only won this lawsuit by name. The local court did nothing about his employment request. The judge also avoided to comment whether blood test aimed to kick out all hbver in any feild is right or wrong; or whether it’s a form of discrimination.

All large companies in mainland still require the applicants to undergo a blood test to see if he or she is HBV positive. carriers of HBV have no chance to be accepted into any companies. The only way to pass is to cheat. What a pity.

want to know what’s insane? a government’s police that’s indirectly killing millions of lives.
Continue reading →

I’m losig my faith. I’ve always wished China to become democratic someday. It is the way the world is heading, China can not be singled out. Or can it? I never thought China should go through another civil war so I always hoped that CCP will gradually reform itself. Yes, that’s perhaps incredibly naive but for a long time that was my hope. Now i’m losing it. read today’s new york times article on china and democracy. I will copy and pasted it here for those who don’t have an account.

A Democratic China? Not So Fast, Beijing Leaders Say
By JOSEPH KAHN

Published: April 8, 2004

BEIJING, April 7 – When asked why China, with its surging economy and rising power, has not yet begun to democratize, its leaders recite a standard line. The country is too big, too poor, too uneducated and too unstable to give political power to the people, they say.

The explanation is often delivered in a plaintive tone: China really would like to become a more liberal country, if only it did not have unique problems requiring the Communist Party to maintain its absolute monopoly on power for just a while longer.

The case of Hong Kong suggests it could be a great deal longer.

Hong Kong, a former British colony that came under Chinese control in 1997, is a tidy, small place by Chinese standards. Its six million people are extensively educated, multilingual and heavily Westernized. It has a low crime rate, a nimble economy and a remarkably accommodating population that has proven pragmatic and subdued under both British and Chinese rule.

At $24,750 in per capita annual income, its people are about 25 times wealthier than their mainland compatriots and the 15th most affluent population in the world, according to a World Bank tally. It is also by far the richest place in which citizens do not have the right to elect their own leaders, with Kuwait, its nearest competitor, ranking 34th.

So why then did Beijing decide this week to revoke Hong Kong’s leeway to chart a course toward local democracy, which many there felt was guaranteed in a series of laws that govern its special status under Chinese rule?

Some analysts say it is Beijing’s leadership that lacks the requisite conditions, or perhaps the confidence, to allow its people a greater say in their own affairs.

“The problem for China is not legal. It is not whether Hong Kong society is capable of handling democracy,” said Shi Yinhong, a political expert at People’s University in Beijing. “The problem is that if Hong Kong holds direct elections now, it will probably elect people who are not loyal to Beijing.”

“Frankly speaking,” Mr. Shi said, “that is something Chinese leaders are not ready to accept.”

Democracy has long been a distant and distinctly foreign concept in Communist China. Even during the pro-democracy Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, the idea was so vague to most student leaders that they expressed it by building a papier-mâché Goddess of Democracy that resembled the Statue of Liberty. Democracy was like Hollywood, Ellis Island and tricorner hats.

It is not like that now. Democracy is an immediate and direct threat to China’s leadership in Hong Kong and also in Taiwan, two places it considers vital to its security and prestige.

Beijing considers Taiwan part of China. But the island has been drifting further away from mainland control with its democratic development over the past 15 years.

China’s leaders view Taiwan’s president, Chen Shui-bian, as determined to make Taiwan an independent country in a legal and internationally recognized sense, an outcome they have repeatedly warned will lead to war. Despite those concerns, Taiwanese voters gave Mr. Chen a second term in office in last month’s presidential elections.

China once viewed Hong Kong as a golden goose that would share capitalist expertise while demonstrating the motherland’s rising power by returning to the fold. When Deng Xiaoping negotiated the terms of its return to Chinese rule with Britain in the 1980′s, the promise of allowing the territory to democratize in the first decade of the 21st century seemed safely distant and risk free.

Now, after last year’s mass street demonstration against a national security bill China wanted to impose and follow-up protests demanding greater local control, Hong Kong has joined Taiwan as a political crisis preoccupying the top leadership.

In Mao Zedong’s day, the problem would have been solved easily enough, by calling democrats counter-revolutionaries and mobilizing the masses to silence them. But China faces a conundrum today. It does not have a revolutionary ideology that its own leaders believe is superior to democratic rule. The masses are too busy making money to be mobilized.

So officials search for reasons why the time is not yet right, or the conditions are not yet suitable, or the procedures are not yet finalized. They present themselves as sympathetic to the democratic impulse who are troubled only by questions of implementation.

The coup de grâce in Hong Kong’s case was delivered in the form of a legal interpretation of the Basic Law, the constitutional framework governing Hong Kong, by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress in Beijing. The interpretation consisted of microscopic legal language in which Beijing allotted itself a much greater role in deciding Hong Kong’s future political system. Top leaders have never squarely ad dressed the larger political issues involved.

For China, democracy is like the law and human rights. As it seeks to create a world-class economy and increasingly demands equal treatment with the United States in world affairs, it has embraced democracy, legal reform and human rights as desirable and even inevitable. It amended its Constitution in March to explicitly guarantee human rights protections for the first time.

But its promises, so far, are good only to the extent that these ideals work to enhance Communist rule, not to undermine it.

“The party sees these things as tools,” said a prominent Beijing lawyer who has frequently clashed with authorities in court. “If the tool works, use it. If the tool does not work, find another way.”

it’s true CCP had admitted they wanted democracy but because of this and this, it’s just not possible right now. i wonder will it ever be? if HongKong is not ready for democracy then who is? excuse after excuse… altho i’m still not 100% sure how china will handle democracy at this moment, it’s getting more clear that CCP will never embrace the idea. quoting richard: It all goes back to the the first emperor: government’s role is to keep itself in power, not to do favors for its population. So democracy scares them shitless, as well it should.

one sentence in the article made me want to laugh and cry at the same time:
In Mao Zedong’s day, the problem would have been solved easily enough, by calling democrats counter-revolutionaries and mobilizing the masses to silence them.