China

[This 2004 film shows that little has changed.]

December 23, 2011 -- A new report by Hong Kong-based Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior (SACOM) reveals the terrible working conditions endured by workers who produce many of the toys that will be enjoyed by children in the Western world this Christmas.

[Image: A golf course development on Hong Kong’s Hainan Island.]

Review by Mat Ward, Green Left Weekly
February 13, 2011 -- When a Billion Chinese Jump — How China Will Save the World, or Destroy It, By Jonathan Watts, Faber & Faber, 2010. 485 pages, $32.95. http://site.whenabillionchinesejump.com

When Jonathan Watts was a child growing up in England, he used to pray that all the people in China would not jump at once, lest they send the earth spinning off its axis.
Little did he realise that China had already jumped, with Chairman Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in 1958. Back then, Mao declared war on nature with the goal of eventually securing an economic growth rate greater than that of Britain.

[Pictured: Jabil Circuit factory in Guangzhou, China.]
July 4, 2010, Green Left Weekly -- On June 29, the US-based National Labor Committee released a report documenting the illegal and harsh sweatshop conditions at the Jabil Circuit factory in Guangzhou, China. At the factory, more than 6000 workers — many of them illegal temporary workers — produce hi-tech products for US companies HP, IBM, Intel, Cisco and Jabil.
The report, which can be read at www.NLCnet.org, found the workers at the Jabil factory work 84 hours a week.

Workers on strike outside the Tianjin Mitsumi Electric Co Ltd factory in Tianjin, July 1. Photo: Signalfire.org.]
July 4, 2010, Green Left Weekly -- On July 1, striking workers at a Japanese-owned electronics factory in the Chinese city of Tianjin stalled production for a third day and vowed to continue their fight until bosses agreed to better pay and conditions, the Morning Star said that day. It is the latest in a spate of work stoppages to hit foreign transnationals operating in China.

[At least a dozen workers at Foxconn, the company that manufactures the iPhone for Apple in China, have committed suicide in the past year, putting a spotlight on China’s workplace practices. Image: Photochopz.com.]
By Chris Maisano -- June 20, 2010
The next time someone tells you that Marx or Marxism is outdated because capitalism is not as exploitative as it was in the 19th century, just crack open your copy of Capital, turn to the chapter on the working day, and compare its vivid depiction of the brutalisation of the British working class to the state of the working class in China today.

June 6, 2010, Green Left Weekly
It’s been dubbed the “suicide express” by Chinese media, LabourStart.org said in an appeal to support workers in a Chinese factory at which there has been a spate of suicides by its workforce.
“Twelve workers, all between 18 and 24 years old, have committed suicide, at the production facilities of Foxconn Technology Group, a Taiwan-owned enterprise based in Shenzhen, southern China.

Ash Pemberton, Green Left Weekly
10 April 2010 -- At the failed December United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, the issue of population control was put on the agenda by the delegation from China.
China Daily reported on December 12: “Population and climate change are intertwined, but the population issue has remained a blind spot when countries discuss ways to mitigate climate change and slow down global warming, according to Zhao Baige, vice-minister of National Population and Family Planning Commission of China.”

Martin Hart-Landsberg
[Reprinted from Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal. A version of this article previously appeared in the South Korean journal, Marxism 21.]
February 2010 -- The consensus among economists is that China’s post-1978 market reform policies have produced one of the world’s greatest economic success stories. Some believe that China is now capable of serving as an anchor for a new (non-US dominated) global economy. A few claim that the reform experience demonstrates the workability (and desirability) of market socialism. This paper is critical of these views.

By Edward Wong/International Herald Tribune
November 14, 2008: Wang Denggui, father of three, arrived more than a year ago in the palm-lined streets of this southern Chinese town with a single goal: toil in a factory to save for his children's school tuition.

By Peter Boyle
As the US, Japan and Europe slide into recession, the leaders of many smaller countries are desperately hoping that continued strong growth in the Chinese economy, which has contributed about 15 per cent of world economic growth in recent years, might save them from this meltdown.
There's hope and then there's hard facts. Recently the latter has replaced those desperate hopes with terror. A measure of this was the November 4 decision of Australia's Reserve Bank to make a bigger than expected interest rate cut. Any temptation by holders of large mortgages and other debts in Australia to reach for the champagne was killed by the realisation that this decision, in the words of one business correspondent, "was a recognition by Australia's top policymakers that the Chinese economy is no longer providing a firewall to insulate the Australian economy from the international crisis".