China - Thousands Strike in First Month of 2012 & What Looms Behind China’s Growing Urbanization

Thousands Strike in China in First Month of 2012

By Epoch Times

Eight thousand workers from the Japanese-owned Fonda in Nanning, Guangxi Province went on strike on Jan. 16. (qq.com)

The first month of the year in China has seen tens of thousands of people strike and protest against poor working conditions, overdue wages, or insufficient pay levels. By Jan. 22 there had been reports of at least 10 strikes and large-scale protests across China since the beginning of the year—almost one every two days. Many of the incidents involved thousands of people—in one case up to 8,000.


On Jan. 1, a protest was held by thousands of residents in Anyang City of Henan Province. According to Yahoo News, the protest was against the sudden closure of several large Investment & Guarantee Corporations.  The closures caused one in five families in the area to lose their investments, sparking suspicion of collusion between corporations and the authorities.


On Jan. 4, ten thousand workers from the Panzhihua Iron and Steel Group in Chengdu marched to demand a wage increase, according to Apple Daily.  The authorities deployed 1,000 police to suppress the march and dispersed the crowd after a confrontation of several hours. Videos of the altercation were uploaded to the Internet.


On Jan. 7 workers from the Chengde City Qianlong drink industry Co., Ltd. conducted an appeal. According to Oriental Daily, hundreds of workers of the Hebei Province company, which had just been acquired by the Levono Group, carried banners and marched on township authorities to call for better conditions; they claimed that their employer failed to pay overtime or a year-end bonus. Radio Free Asia provided a live video of the incident.


On Jan. 9, over 500 workers from the Qingdao Yellow Sea Rubber Factory went on strike. According to Sound of Hope Radio Network they were protesting delayed payment of social security and housing money.
On Jan. 10, nearly a thousand sanitation workers from Shenzhen Luohu District went on strike.


The next day, on Jan. 11, more than 1,000 workers of a Hong Kong-owned toy factory in Dongguan asked for a wage increase—and demanded to be paid three months in overdue wages. The authorities deployed a large number of police.


Three thousand Muslims in Jinjiang, Fujian Province, protested against land confiscations on Jan. 12, according to Radio Free Asia. They were apparently inspired by the success of villagers in Wukan; Chinese authorities sent more than 1,000 anti-riot police to suppress the crowd. More than a dozen villagers were arrested or injured, according to reports.


Two thousand workers of Changhe Automobile, Chang’an Group went on strike on Jan. 13, according to vidoesuploaded to Youtube. A large number of armed police were sent in, just in case.
On Jan. 14, 4,000 workers from Sanyo in Shenzhen protested against lack of compensation, striking and blocking the road to demonstrate.


Eight thousand workers from the Japanese-owned Fonda in Nanning, Guangxi Province went on strike on Jan. 16. According to Radio Free Asia, a worker said on his Weibo, or microblog, account that the local government sent 1,000 police to maintain order.


A thousand workers from Xuzhou Meritor Axle Co. Ltd. in Jiangsu went on strike on Jan. 17. RFA reported that the workers asked for a rise of the wage, but were refused by their boss.

What Looms Behind China’s Growing Urbanization

China’s urban population has passed the 50 percent mark, according to China’s Bureau of Statistics. This is the first time in Chinese history that the urban population exceeds the number of people living in the countryside. And while the regime touts urbanization as the engine behind China’s future economic development, analysts say there are problems with the statistics.


“Urbanization exceeding 50 percent means China’s thousands of years of history as an agricultural society is about to begin a new era,” a Jan. 17 China News Network article quoted from a report by Li Peilin, Director of the Institute of Sociology at China’s Academy of Social Sciences.


Li also said that after industrialization, urbanization will become the engine behind mainland China’s future development.

Statistical Manipulation

Urbanization in mainland China is not a natural growth process, but a forced one, and some of the statistics are fabricated and give a distorted picture of the new city dwellers and their future prospects, according to some analysts.


Cheng Xiaonong, a China affairs researcher at Princeton University, questions the validity of the official statistics. He says the so-called urbanization is just a statistical trick, whereby in many places, towns have been upgraded into cities, and villages renamed as districts, suddenly turning the countryside into an urban area.


“Looking at China’s map, many county seat towns have been renamed as cities. After changing the name, lots of rural populations suddenly become city populations,” Cheng told Voice of America (VOA) in a Jan. 17 report.

Migrant Workers

According to a Tianjin.net report on Jan. 18, some mainland scholars say it would be more accurate to calculate China’s urban population by counting only those who are registered city household, rather than counting the total city population.


The [huge numbers of] migrant workers who are in a city but don’t enjoy the benefits of a city, can’t be considered part of a city’s population, the report said.


Therefore, when the urban population was said to have reached 47 percent, some scholars estimate the actual number should have been 40 percent, with the rest being fabricated.

Forcing Farmers off their Land

In a Nov. 23, 2011 report, Beijing Times—one of the country’s most outspoken newspapers--quoted Gan Zangchun, deputy inspector at China’s National Land Bureau, saying that government land acquisition has created “fake urbanization.”


Princeton University’s Cheng Xiaonong also remarked on this in his VOA interview. He said in lots of places in China farmers are forced to live in towns.


Citing Chongqing as a typical example, Cheng said, “[Party chief] Bo Xilai has been promoting a policy of moving farmers into towns--building apartments and moving farmers into them--and treating this as urbanization.”
Cheng said urbanization isn’t about calculating statistics, but about farmers being able to move into the city and gaining the same level of treatment that city residents get.


“If farmers can never obtain the same benefits city folks have, then the 160 million migrant workers in China will never become [real] urban residents,” Cheng said.


Cheng added that urbanization is generally accompanied by economic growth. In other countries, urbanization happens naturally, but in mainland China, urbanization is the result of the Chinese regime forcefully pushing farmers off of their land.


“If you pull on a plant to make it grow faster and pull the roots out of the ground, can the plant still grow?” Cheng asked.


Professor Patrick Chovanec at Tsinghua University School of Economics and Management also warned of this issue. “Mainland China’s policy makers have used urbanization as an excuse to build many buildings, but didn’t think about how to turn all that into an economic advantage for sustainable development,” he told VOA on Jan. 17.


In the U.S., the urban population exceeded rural population in 1920.


Renowned online commentator Yu Fenghui said on a Sina blog: “China is only at the 1920 U.S. level. It’s not really something worth getting excited about.”


Yu went on to say that as China’s urban population grows, it will bring along lots of resource shortages related to employment, education, retirement, and housing. Low-income growth, lack of social benefits, and inflation will add additional hardships.

Throughout China’s major cities, many impressive looking high-rise apartment buildings are nearly empty. Housing in Beijing and Shanghai is priced at 20 times the average city dweller’s annual income, and throughout China 85 percent of city residents who need a new house cannot afford one, according to a Dec. 29 Epoch Times report.

Read the original Chinese article.