China's Factory Workers Are Becoming More Restive

SYDNEY: Its been chiseled into the minds of Chinese bureaucrats they must maintain social stability to climb the career ladder. This amounts to a license for clamping down on any sign of disturbance. Increasing numbers of strikes have been met with vigorous suppression. About a third of the reported protests in the country over the past year are over labor issues. Most are staged by workers from Chinas countryside who migrated to cities in search of work. They make up about 60 percent of Chinas industrial workforce, providing almost all the workers in the export industries that fill stores around the globe with goods. Guangdong Province, just north of Hong Kong, contains the biggest concentration of such factories in China and has witnessed the largest surge in worker protests