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China vervolgt arbeiders
Zing Jeman - 20.01.2003 11:34
China vervolgtYao Fuxin en Xiao Junliang. Hun misdaad: aanzetten tot vreedzaam protest van arbeiders.In Liaoyang in Noord-Oost China hadden ze enkele tienduizenden arbeiders aangezet om op straat te komen om achterstallige lonen te eisen. Ze kloegen ook de massale ontslagen aan in de regio, naar aanleiding van fabriekssluitingen. China reageert met keiharde repressie.
China last week dashed hopes that a leadership change would bring its citizens less repression and expanded rights of speech and assembly. The government put on trial two men who could be sentenced to death for urging workers to peacefully demand wages they were owed.
In December, the regime allowed democracy advocate Xu Wenli to leave jail for medical treatment and exile in the United States. U.S. officials had pushed for years for the release of Xu, a key activist in the late-1970s democracy movement who spent 16 years in prison before being freed. His release could have been a prelude to better treatment of critics of the Communist Party.
However, Beijing, which often releases one big-name prisoner and then arrests others who are less known, chose to tighten the screws on potential successors to Xu. Last week, labor leaders Yao Fuxin and Xiao Yunliang were charged with subversion and tried in a one-day proceeding. They await a judge's verdict. Observers say the death penalty is unlikely, but several years in jail is not, as thousands of other dissidents have found.
Yao and Xiao's crime was rallying tens of thousands of workers last year in Liaoyang, a down-at-heel northeastern city in China's rust belt. Laborers complained of unpaid wages, lack of pensions and abrupt factory shutdowns that caused massive unemployment. The protests lasted for days, until police broke them up and arrested the ringleaders.
China's considerable economic progress has been uneven. Privately run businesses replaced many state-run enterprises and made a new class of millionaires. But tens of millions of workers laid off from unproductive state-owned factories found no safety net when the promise of lifetime jobs and benefits from the state was shattered.
Political progress has lagged far behind economic advances. The state-owned media report only the government side in labor disputes, if they report at all, and China bans independent unions, mindful of Solidarity's role in opposing Poland's Communist government.
In November, China replaced its top political leaders peacefully for the first time in a century, bringing to top posts a generation not steeped in the Maoist revolution. The transfer of power is still a work in progress, but younger officials led by President Hu Jintao surely do not intend the broad repressions of the past to be China's future.
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| Read more about: vrijheid, repressie & mensenrechten | | supplements | | | kapitalisme | 20.01.2003 14:22
Dat krijg je ervan..
Ik vraag me af waarom die china "aktivisten" zich niet inzetten voor de arbeiders hier in nederland...
| | China aktivisten | Leo - 20.01.2003 15:02
Dat kunnen die twee Chinese aktivisten niet meer, die zitten in de gevangenis in China. Overigens, ik wist niet dat China zich al kapitalistisch noemde...
| | | 21.01.2003 13:33
kan dat zomaar, een bericht vol onzin en leugens over communistisch China op Indymedia?
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