The prize for Most Misleading Headline of the Week goes to the China Daily last Friday for its proclamation “Migrant children to sit gaokao in cities.” If true, this would be the answer to millions of migrant workers’ prayers for their children who, have to return “home” to the countryside to take the national college entrance exam. Photo by emop, available at flickr under a creative commons license..

What happens when a Chinese construction company tries to bribe a senior government official in Botswana to turn a blind eye to structural problems discovered in a new school the company was building in the Okavango delta?

Zhao Lupo is a hero. The 40-year-old migrant worker from Anhui reportedly saved five people during the devastating rainstorm that hit suburban Beijing last week. But when he went to the local village disaster relief office he was told to get lost because local villagers had priority in the distribution of relief supplies.

Last week, London bus drivers, members of Britain’s largest trade union, Unite, voted by more than 90 percent for strike action during the upcoming Olympic Games to press their claim for a £500 bonus. At the same time, more than 80 percent of the taxi drivers in the town of Yueqing, near Wenzhou, went out on strike on the first day of the national college examination (高考) in a bid to draw attention to the unfair competition they face from unlicensed cabs.

Every year on Labour Day, China’s leaders make a big show of thanking the country’s workers for their endeavours and their contributions to the national economy. It is a well-rehearsed and rather tired publicity stunt not normally worthy of comment but this year Premier Wen Jiabao did something a bit more interesting. He visited bus crews and sanitation workers, two groups of workers who have been at the forefront of labour activism over the last few years.

In the United States, the “war on women” often garners banner headlines as activists try to halt the alarming rollback of women’s rights. In China, the erosion of women’s rights has been quieter but in many ways just as worrying. And in response, women in China too are increasingly willing to stand up to widespread and widely-accepted discrimination in the workplace and society in general.
 

Chinese President Hu Jintao’s four-day state visit to Cambodia this weekend marks the culmination of a massive surge in investment and trade that has transformed this impoverished nation. Take a drive along National Highway 3 or 4 out of the capital Phnom Penh and you will see vast tracks of new Chinese-owned factories and huge billboards advertising land for rent in Chinese.

If you ever doubted that most Chinese trade union officials are hopelessly out of touch with ordinary workers, you just have to read today’s Global Times. The English-language tabloid announced that the Shanxi Federation of Trade Unions had ordered the province’s 100,000 or so enterprise union leaders to publicise their phone numbers and other contact details in a bid to make the union more accessible to workers.