In China, Democracy Must Begin On The Factory Floor
Our guest author today is Han Dongfang, director of China Labor Bulletin. You can follow him on Weibo in Chinese and on Twitter in English and Chinese. This article originally appeared on The World Post, and has been reprinted with permission of the author.
After 35 years of economic reform and development, China’s Communist leaders once again find themselves on the edge of a cliff. With social inequality and official corruption at an all-time high, China’s new leaders urgently need to find some way of putting on the brakes and changing direction.
The last time they were here was in 1978 when, after the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, the then leadership under Deng Xiaoping had no option but to sacrifice Maoist ideology and relax economic control in order to kickstart the economy again.
Unfortunately, the party relaxed economic control so much that it ceded just about all power in the workplace to the bosses. Workers at China’s state-owned enterprises used to have an exalted social status; they had an “iron rice bowl” that guaranteed a job and welfare benefits for life. Some three decades later, that “iron rice bowl” has been completely smashed and the majority of workers are struggling to survive while the bosses and corrupt government officials are getting richer and richer.
The country has gone so far to the other extreme that, if it is to maintain its legitimacy as the ruler of China, the Communist Party will once again have to make sacrifices and concessions. This time, it needs to sacrifice social control rather than economic control. Of course, the party will not permit broad political freedom in China, but it