A Bulletin of Free Labor in China Ends Publication

It’s disappointing to learn that Hong Kong’s China Labor Bulletin, which describes itself as “dedicated to promoting and defending workers’ rights,” is folding its tent. Yet the closure is a reminder that the cause of Free Labor is a sleeping giant that could — we’d like to think will — in the long run upend the dictatorship at Beijing. It was, after all, the democratic stirrings embodied by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement that set in train the fall of Soviet communism.The Bulletin had been founded by a critic of the communist regime, Han Dongfang, who worked on China’s railways before he was swept up in the pro-democracy movement that culminated in 1989 at Tiananmen Square. That was the “first time the Chinese people themselves directly faced the regime,” he later explained. After the crackdown, Mr. Han said, “the people lost trust and they lost hope. My dream broke that day.”Yet it’s testament to Mr. Han’s down-to-earth advocacy that he rejects the moniker, all too readily bestowed by the press, of “dissident.” He “won’t be labelled that way,” the European Trade Union Institute reported. He deems the term “too intellectual, too highbrow.” He has no pretensions to being “a self-appointed Lech Walesa of the Far East,” the Institute adds. “I never urged the workers on to political action,” Mr. Han says in his memoir.Instead, as a “hard-headed country-boy,” the institute reported, Mr. Han “just wants to do his little bit to improve workers’ living and working conditions.” Three years after Tiananmen stifled a generation’s hopes for democracy, Mr. Han was exiled to Hong Kong where he founded the Bulletin “with the aim of persuading the poorest workers of the benefits they could reap from organizing collectively,” the Institute reported.Under Mr. Han the Bulletin “closely monitored some of China’s biggest labor disputes,” the Times reports, and “secured compensation for workers with grievances against their companies.” The Bulletin, too, “regularly updated a map of labor strikes across the country,” per the Times, and “published reports on companies and industries with known labor concerns.” The shutdown is due to what the Bulletin calls “financial difficulties and debt issues.”The real cause of the Bulletin’s death, though, is growing repression by President Xi’s regime, which has since 2020 been stifling dissent at Hong Kong. The Bulletin had “faced increased scrutiny in recent years amid a broader crackdown and silencing of civil society” at the former British crown colony, the Times reports. That’s a betrayal of the spirit of Chinese democracy kindled by the first president of the Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen, a New York Sun contributor.Just weeks ago Mr. Han was urging fellow regime critics to “keep our faith up at this abnormal time and continue our important work,” per the Associated Press. The justice of that cause is underscored in a recent dispatch in the Editors by Ira Stoll, who explains how wages for China’s working classes are kept artificially low in part because “unions” in China “represent the interest of the Chinese Communist Party, not the interest of the factory workers.”Mr. Stoll adds that “anyone who tries to create a real union in Communist China risks getting thrown in prison by the Chinese Communists.” As under Soviet communism, that repression underscores the hypocrisy of the People’s Republic’s claims to be a “workers’ paradise.” It speaks, as well, in Mr. Stoll’s telling, to the absurdity of thinking any kind of “free” trade is possible with a regime like China’s.If Mr. Han eschews Walesa’s mantle, he doubtless knows how Solidarity deployed democracy to dissolve tyranny. These columns have long touted how Walesa’s work with Lane Kirkland, Thatcher, Reagan, and John Paul II “won the Cold War — by driving through the beating heart of Soviet communism the stake of Free Labor.” The same spirit likely animates Mr. Han, though he warns that “in China, you take political action at the risk of prison or even death.”

A Bulletin of Free Labor in China Ends Publication

A Bulletin of Free Labor in China Ends Publication

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