China Power | Economy | Politics | East Asia

Tiananmen Is Not Just China’s Story

The 1989 crackdown reinforced a political order that made independent worker organizing nearly impossible. The effects have been felt across the global economy.

Protests at Tiananmen Square, Beijing, China, Jun. 2, 1989.

Thirty-seven years ago, I was a middle school student who took to the streets of China, alongside hundreds of thousands of people. The majority of those who died in the resulting military action against protesters were not students. They were workers – ordinary citizens. I have never forgotten that.

After the crackdown, China increasingly relied on economic growth to maintain political stability and state legitimacy. In the process, a society built on surveillance, censorship, and political control gradually took shape, and was steadily strengthened through economic growth and technological advancement. Millions of people learned the same lesson: that silence is safer than honest speech.

I have spent more than three decades investigating labor conditions inside Chinese supply chains, and confirmed a pattern. When a society has no space for free expression, the pressures of economic growth often fall most heavily on those with the least power to resist them. 

The consequences became especially visible during China’s state-owned enterprise reforms in the late 1990s. Tens of millions of workers lost their jobs as state industries were restructured. Entire communities were transformed, and countless families experienced economic hardship. Yet despite affecting the lives of tens of millions of workers, opposition remained fragmented and was quickly contained before it could develop into a broader national movement.

China’s lower labor costs and faster production were what transnational capital wanted, and the political order that emerged after Tiananmen was what made them available. 

Tens of millions of migrant workers, many of them parents of young children, left their homes to labor in factories. Millions of children grew up in rural villages, seeing their parents for perhaps a few days each year. More than three decades later, the economic miracle built on family separation and low wages remains fundamentally unchanged. 

But workers did not stop resisting. In 2018, nearly three decades after Tiananmen, workers at Jasic Technology in Shenzhen attempted to form a trade union in accordance with Chinese law after growing frustrated with fines, excessive overtime, abusive management practices, low wages, and poor working conditions. Students from more than 10 universities across China traveled to Shenzhen to support them. Police eventually detained around 50 people. Many students were sent back to their schools or hometowns, put under surveillance, or forced into admitting their “mistakes.”

This was one of the post-1989 cases in which students openly supported workers. It revived memories of Tiananmen. 

Every year, China handles millions of labor and employment disputes, while activists continue to face arrests and NGOs are shut down. Most cases are quietly contained........

© The Diplomat