On 5 August 2010, more than 33 miners were trapped deep inside a mine, causing many to fear for the worst. However, remarkably, 17 days later, the miners were found to be still alive, to the relief and joy of their families and countrymen. After reading news stories of the events and watching video, one couldn’t help but be struck by the stark contrasts with Chinese post-incident report coverage:

Recently in Shaanxi province, 118 migrant workers – who were mainly from Hubei province – were beaten by 300 thugs while staging a protest to get back their back pay at a railway bridge construction project near the historic city of Xi’an. In total, thirty workers were injured, nine severely. But strangely, what has attracted attention to their case is not the horrific scale of violence used by the employer, but the way the dispute was eventually settled.

As Foxconn was staging its elaborate song and dance show yesterday to convince the world that, after a string of suicides earlier this year, everything was now fine and the workers in its Chinese factories were happy, a Hong Kong activist group released a report on a lesser known factory where appalling work conditions have clearly not improved. In the last year alone, more than 60 workers at Elec-Tech International, a manufacturer of small home appliances, have been injured, many losing fingers and hands while operating antiquated and dangerous machinery at the company’s plant in Zhuhai, according to the report by Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM).

It is not just the infamous game show contestant, Ma Nuo, who would rather have a BMW than a bicycle. There are about 140 million legal drivers in China, nearly half of whom got their license in the last five years. Being able to drive is seen by some as just as valuable a skill in China as speaking English or writing software, it is something that opens doors for you. It is a sign of ambition and foreword thinking.

“I would rather cry in a BMW than smile on the back of my boyfriend's bicycle”. This statement made by a female contestant, Ma Nuo, on a popular dating show has caused condemnation and controversy in China’s blogospere. Ma claims that she was taken out of context, but in any case, she gave a face and a name to rampant materialism, degeneration of values, and the notion that many young people will do anything to join China’s rising affluent elite, who have already become the world’s second largest buyers of luxury goods.

Chongqing plans to spend over 300 billion yuan ($44.28 billion USD) on “the ten people’s livelihood issues” (民生十条) over the next year and a half. Of this whopping amount of money, 130 billion yuan will be spent on “resolving rural residents who enter the city’s hukou status” and 70 billion on public housing. Billions of yuan will be spent on increasing farmers’ incomes, micro-loans, health services, rural health care, school security and other programs. Also, notably, 5 billion yuan will be spent on education for “left behind” children. (See Xinhua’s chart for full breakdown).

Two weeks ago, a truck carrying 17 migrant workers skidded and crashed, killing three workers and badly injuring the other 14. Just two days earlier, in the same city, another worker being transported along with a pile of building materials on the back of an open truck was killed after being impaled by a metal bar. But this was not a small city in central or western China, this was Singapore, supposedly one of the most advanced and modern cities in the world.

It was hoped that Zhang’s high-profile intervention in the Xiao case could help give a slither of hope to an impoverished man who has spent more than 80,000 yuan on medical expenses and has consistently had officialdom interfere in his case in order to help the local coal baron Liu Xing’an. Sure enough, on 26 June a representative from the Sichuan Federation of Trade Unions came to Xiao’s hospital bedside to give him a check of 2,000 yuan of condolence payments (慰问金) , which, lo and behold, happened to also make a nice photo-op. The trade union also claimed that since November of 2008 they had been following the Xiao Huazhong case, and that they had passed on the relevant information to higher-level leaders.

China and South Africa are of course historically, socially and economically very different but the similarities in the development of strike action in Durban in the 1970s, where one strike led to more than one hundred others, and the strikes in the Pearl River Delta today do invite examination.

As the week-long strike at Honda Lock faded today, the picture that emerges is one of a relatively healthy and dynamic system of labour relations, albeit one that is still far from ideal. Emboldened by the success of strikes at two other Honda components plants, the workers at Honda Lock had asked for a wage increase of around 70 percent. After protracted negotiations and intense pressure from the workforce, management finally offered an increase in pay and benefits of around 20 percent. This, combined with attempts by management to recruit new employees, was enough to convince the majority of workers to return to the production line on Monday morning.