All-China Federation of Trade Union Vice-Chairman Sun Chunlan’s comments that the union should be on guard against “foreign and domestic hostile forces that seek to use some enterprises experiencing difficulties to infiltrate and harm migrant worker ranks” have sparked controversy and have been widely questioned on the blogosphere by many incredulous netizens.

Hundreds of Chinese construction workers are picketing their embassy in Bucharest claiming they have not been paid by the Romanian contractors who recruited them. After Romania joined the European Union in January 2007, thousands of Romanians sought out better paid jobs in western Europe. To fill the gap in the labour market, labour exporters in China shipped over 4,500 construction workers to the building sites of Bucharest in 2008 alone.

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) has come out with a series of recent policy goals and policies designed to help workers get through the current financial crisis and maintain social stability. But, these policies, however well intentioned, continue to reinforce the ACFTU’s misplaced identity. Meanwhile, an ACFTU vice-chairman has warned about foreign and domestic enemy forces using the economic crisis to infiltrate and cause damage to China’s migrant workers.

The TV Show “Sexy Beijing”, available at Danwei, recently produced an episode about what the dating scene is like for migrant workers in Beijing. As the episode shows, dating, much like education and health care, is another aspect of life in which migrant workers and urban residents often operate in different spheres.

Roughly 20 million migrant workers have lost their jobs as a result of the financial crisis. Xinhua quoted a senior official in Beijing on Monday as saying that about 20 million of China's migrant workers had already returned home after losing their jobs as the global financial crisis took its toll on the economy.

CLB previously reported on the Guangdong procuratorate’s instructions to go easy on “ordinary” corporate crimes, while putting severe restricitions on workers rights. Among other things, the instructions put limits on law enforcment’s ability to freeze enterprise owner’s bank accounts and detain enterprise owners, while at the same time encouraging authorities to use the law to attack those who hurt enterprises’ lawful interests and various crimes related to influencing production. Perhaps most ominously, reports that inluence an enterprise’s reputation will not be allowed.

In order to remind the Chinese government about its responsibility to provide for justice and support for the millions of former State-Owned Enterprise workers who lost their jobs in the haphazard restructuring process that took place at the end of the 1990’s and the beginning of the 2000’s, CLB wrote a submission for China’s upcoming human rights review to take place on February 9. China’s human rights record will be reviewed by the UN Human Rights Council in a process that is called the Universal Periodic Review (UPR). The main goal of the UPR is to improve the human rights situation in every UN member country by assessing a state’s human rights record according to universal criteria.

A 69-year old man robbed a young female university student at the Beijing Railway Station. During the robbery, he encouraged the victim to cry for help. This was the second attempt he made to get himself arrested within half an hour. He was arrested and sentenced to two years imprisonment, but he was not satisfied with his “light” punishment fearing that he cannot support himself outside.