by Wei Jingsheng

Around the June 4 anniversary this year, I visited several Western European countries.  I noticed that both the Chinese and non-Chinese there have not reduced their interest in democracy in China.  It really was not as bad as some people have predicted.  Many friends said that it is partially because the ongoing situation in China has lit the fire of hope again.  Indeed, the development inside China could be far from the expectations of many.  The recent rising of the tide of workers' movements in China is one of the examples that people have been waiting for years, yet were gradually losing their confidence in.

Under the suppression of the powerful dictatorial machine of the Chinese Communist Party, for decades now the workers movement in China could not be developed.  There are several reasons.  The first is due to the existence of official "labor unions" under the Communist Party.  These organizations act as scabs for the Communist government.  The officials of these so-called "labor unions" are paid by the government and have become the main force in charge of monitoring and destroying the true labor movement.  When there is conflict between labor and the capital management, these so-called "labor unions" habitually will speak in favor of the government and the capital side.  They barely stand on the side of the workers.  During the recent workers' movements, there are some so-called "labor-union" officials who opposed the workers, and even physically had fights with the Honda workers.  These examples are a true reflection of the nature of the "official" side.
 
The second reason that labor organization became difficult is that after the Chinese Communist Party took over power it exposed its true nature of opposing the people.  For decades now, the Communist government has treated the workers' struggle for their rights as a political crime and has given severe suppression.  In the past sixty some years, there have been numerous spontaneous workers' organizations that were suppressed with the criminal charges of being "anti-revolutionary".  Their leaders were either sent to jail or were persecuted in other ways.  The workers' organizations without leadership were soon dissolved.

There are many other reasons as well, but the above two are the most important.  The Communist dictatorial rule and the wreck by these scabs has had the result that the Chinese workers could not be organized to defend their own rights.  This is exactly the main reason why the capitalists from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the other nations could find cheap labor in China.

Because these laborers who produce good products, the foreign invested businesses could receive excessive surplus value.  To keep this excessive profit, all the capitalists in the world united together in an effort to defend the existence of the dictatorial system of the Chinese Communist Party.  This system is an unbreakable food chain: big fish feeding on small fish; small fish feeding on shrimps.

For more than 20 years now, accompanied by the workers' movements, the Chinese democratic movements have been rising one after another and striven incessantly.  However, they are suppressed by the united power of the Chinese Communist Party and its Western allies.  Both labor and democracy movements are hard to stimulate and persist, and thus are teased by the others as "could not work".  The root cause of ineffectiveness is the existence of this international alliance.
 
This alliance has forced the majority of Western politicians to surrender themselves to the will of the Communist Party, to protect the interests of big business.  Even the labor organizations in the West are infiltrated by big business and are not concerned with workers movements in China.  This lack of support is another main reason why the Chinese labor movement has been in a depressed status for a long time.

However, Chinese workers who are suppressed too hard will naturally have a breaking point, to develop workers movements in seeking their own rights and interests.  Recently, the workers movement starting in the FoxConn factories in GuangDong spread rapidly all over China, proving that the Chinese workers need their own unions, and urgently need to be organized to defend their own rights and interests.  The emergence of leaders for the younger generation of workers has brought a chance for the Chinese society.  The wave of workers' movements, with its main desire of seeking pay raises now, will not only form rights-defending organizations but also mitigate the ongoing economic crisis happening inside China.  Both of these aspects are the hope for the Chinese society now.
      
Many people have noticed the rapid inflation in China, without paying attention to the relationship between this inflation and the deformed industrial structure in China.  Simply, the cost of labor is only a tiny portion of the total output value, while most of the produced value has become the profit of Chinese and foreign capitalists.  The majority of this profit went to investment in expanding production capacity, the financial sector, and the real estate market.  With the global economy in recession, much of these funds were exchanged into foreign currency and fled abroad.  The natural result is the oversupply of currency in China.  This is the root cause of the inflation.

To solve this problem there are only two methods, without a third.

The first is to raise the exchange rate of the Chinese currency, RenMinBi, and to abolish all sorts of non-tariff import barriers, in an effort to allow foreign products flow into the Chinese market while the currency flow out, in an effort to resume the balance of the Chinese market and to absorb the oversupplied active money.  This method must be accompanied by the second method, which is to raise the real income of the wage and salary earners, so as to rapidly expand the consumer market inside China in an effort to avoid the domino effect of a shrinking manufacturing.

When we try to apply these two methods, it will naturally reduce the excessive profit of both Chinese and foreign businesses.  However, only when the average profit has been reduced to a reasonable level, the Chinese economy could be stabilized.  Otherwise, the big rise and fall of these years will naturally amplify and ultimately cause the collapse of the economy.

Why has the Chinese Communist ruling clique taken all sorts of measures, except these two simple and effective ones?  The key is due to the excessive profit.  These profits have not only fattened these corrupted Chinese officials, but also corrupted Western politics.  This profit is the lifeblood for the very survival of the Communist rule.  If this wave of workers' movements cannot force the Communist Party to resume a normal economic structure, then only when the Chinese society has collapsed will we have an opportunity to put it back in order.

I am afraid that this is the last opportunity before the collapse in China.