Chinese workers are in a worse situation than they were in 1989.
“We will fight together, advance and retreat together,” concluded Qiu Zhanxuan in a video his comrades released on May 4,2019. Qiu was the former leader of a Marxist student association at the prestigious Peking University. He had prepared the digital testament to be released in case he disappeared.
Qiu did disappear in late April after he’d dared to call for a united front between students and workers, 30 years after the infamous Tiananmen Square crackdown. He had previously been arrested and then released in December 2018 on his way to a mark Mao Zedong’s 125th birthday.
This came after students from Peking united with striking workers at the company Jasic Technology, whose attempts to form a union were blocked in July 2018. Students from Peking University, but also Renmin and Tsinghua universities, travelled to the south of China the following month to support the aggrieved workers. They were arrested, some released, and others, such as Qiu, have since disappeared.
It was students based in Peking who began protesting in April 1989 after the sudden death of Hu Yaobang, the reform-minded former Communist Party of China secretary-general. They called for political reform and democracy, but also for more social freedom and equality. Progressively, workers joined the movement all across China. Initially they weren’t welcomed by the students, who feared their movement would be diluted, but they soon realised that all Chinese citizens were fighting for the same cause: the realisation of the socialist ideal in the form of a more democratic and equal society.
The students’ peaceful hunger strike in Tiananmen Square ended on June 3 and 4 when more than 200,000 troops were sent in to suppress what the communist regime saw as a counter-revolutionary riot. It’s estimated anywhere between hundreds and thousands or protesters were killed.
Today again, the same issues are at stake, that of equality and justice in a society which hasn’t achieved the socialist dream, but instead become a fierce capitalist market. With economic growth in China stagnating and as President Xi Jingping’s promise of a “China dream” becomes more distant for many of the 300m Chinese workers, student agitation could jeopardise the regime’s stability.
