30 workers protest in China -- you call this a riot??? Even at 1,000 people, a protest is a helluva lot different from a riot. Birdbrain.
If anything, this is a BIG PLUS for the region, because it indicates that democracy in China is a matter of time.
cnn.com
Jobless protest over unpaid wages in China's Wuhan
10 January 1998
Web posted at: 00:13 JST, Tokyo time (15:13 GMT)
BEIJING, Jan 9 (Reuters) - In China's first reported labour unrest
this year, about 30 laid-off workers at a troubled factory in the
central industrial city of Wuhan demonstrated over unpaid wages,
officials said on Friday.
The workers took to the streets of Wuhan on Thursday demanding
the payment of wages owed them from 1996, said an official of the
Wuhan Communist Party Committee.
The protesters, who said they were hard up for cash ahead of the
coming Chinese New Year, which starts on January 28, drew a
crowd of more than 1,000 people and caused traffic jams, the
official said by telephone.
"Officials from the Wuhan government came and persuaded the
workers to negotiate a satisfactory solution with factory leaders
and the demonstration was dispersed without conflict," he said
from Wuhan, about 1,000 km (620 miles) south of Beijing.
City government officials refused to comment. A Hong
Kong-based human rights monitoring group, quoting witnesses, put
the number of demonstrators at 1,000 and said the protest drew as
many as 30,000 onlookers.
The Information Centre of Human Rights and Democratic
Movement in China, in a statement faxed to the media, said police
had dispersed the rally peacefully and without arrests on Thursday
evening.
According to the centre, the protesting workers were sacked two
years ago when a leather bag firm took over their materials factory
and sold off its assets. A similar demonstration last August had
resulted in the payment of one month's back pay.
The Wuhan party official dismissed the centre's account of the
scale of the protest, but said the factory was unprofitable and had
had frequent disputes in the past.
"This was only an internal problem of the plant, and they are quite
common," the party official said.
A rash of similar squabbles throughout China's "rustbelt" regions
have underscored the social price of Beijing's ambitious plan to
make state-owned firms sink or swim in a market economy.
As Chinese ministries flesh out plans for reforms of key industries,
officials have called for tens of thousands of layoffs in sectors
including steel, machinery and metals.
Top officials have urged attention be paid to the plight of "xiagang"
workers -- those who are suspended from state work units but still
paid a fraction of their wages.
In December, some 300 to 400 textile workers in Hefei, capital of
the central province of Anhui, staged a sit-in outside provincial
government offices to demand new jobs.
That protest followed one in Yibin in the southwestern province of
Sichuan in which at least 150 people took to the streets to demand
that retirees be paid overdue pensions.
Copyright 1997 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. |
