Two new strikes have halted production at Japanese-owned automotive components and assembly plants in Guangzhou. Workers at NHK-UNI Spring (Guangzhou) went on strike Tuesday, after workers at Denso (Guangzhou Nansha), which supplies fuel injection equipment to Honda and Toyota, walked off the job on Monday demanding higher pay and better benefits.

Following the lead of Jiangsu, which announced a 12 percent increase in the minimum wage this month, several other municipalities have indicated they too will raise the minimum wage this year. The cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou and Dongguan have all separately indicated that the time is now right for an increase in the minimum wage, frozen by central government order on 17 November 2008.

Han Dongfang talks to Dai Deshu, a 67-year-old former tailor from Chongqing about the long and painful struggle of thousands of elderly artisans and handicraft workers discarded during the process of economic reform.

Ten years after the adoption of the International Labour Organization’s Convention on the Elimination of the Worst Forms of Child Labour on 12 May 1999, there is little evidence that the Chinese government, which ratified the convention in 2002, is making a determined effort to tackle the problem.

The massive landslide at an iron ore mine in rural Chongqing on 5 June 2009, which may have killed more than 70 people, has once again highlighted the dangers China’s mines pose, not just to miners but to nearby communities and the environment as well.

Table of Contents

Part one: Those left behind

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Part one: Those left behind

Part two: Under the same blue sky? Rural migrant children in urban China

In late October and early November 2008, primary and middle school teachers from several rural counties and districts in Chongqing staged a series of strikes demanding higher pay. Han Dongfang talked to three teachers about the strikes and their frustration at the lack of government action.

Two major strikes over the last two weeks have shown that some local governments and managements have still not learnt important lessons from the privatization of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) at the turn of the century. The protests at the state-owned Golden Emperor Group textile plant in Chongqing’s Fuling district on 13 and 14 April, and the former state-owned Yimian textile factory in Baoding, Hebei, in the first week of April erupted for precisely the same reasons as in the majority of SOE privatization disputes a decade ago: wages arrears, inadequate compensation for lay offs and the misappropriation of assets by management.