Communism is not a state of affairs to be established, not an ideal to which reality must adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. (Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)
In view of the extensive size of both domestic and foreign sectors of the economy and the presence of market forces in both, class conflict continues in China. However, remarkably, under the Communist Party, conflict does not take an antagonistic form, as in a society in which capital has supremacy. In a transitional state, the Communist Party can advance a socialist model through its political command over the economy. Through central planning, the PRC mediates this contradiction. Hence, the position of the Communist Party is that the current âprincipal contradictionâ focuses on raising living standards of the Chinese people and addressing unbalanced and inadequate development.
1 The Chinese Transitional State
The PRC Constitution establishes the elements of the transitional state as it strives toward socialism. In doing so, the Chinese transitional state must pivot to respond to the principal contradictions while also serving the working class as it develops a socialist mode of production. Concomitantly, Chinaâs trade union model operates under the guidelines that Lenin and Mao specifyâprioritizing the working class through the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). The Federation is duty bound to carry out the Communist Partyâs directives and respond to the demands of the working class laboring in all sectors of the economy. The CPC Constitution directly recognizes that class contradictions remain in the PRC but in 2022 they are no longer the principal contradiction.
owing to both domestic factors and international influences, a certain amount of class struggle will continue to exist for a long time to come, and under certain circumstances may even grow more pronounced, however, it is no longer the principal contradiction. (The State Council 2022)
The Communist Party sets policy through adjusting the economic policy in accordance with changing domestic and global political economy. Transitional states have had to defend hard-won state power. On the other hand, it has been necessary to interact with the world capitalist system to develop their productive forces. Moreover, transitional states must endure and counter the challenges of a sequence of oppositional forces within the world capitalist system that form the principal contradictions, notably neoliberal capitalist globalization. Neoliberalism represented the fundamental adversary from the 1980s to the present, and the Chinese state and CPC were compelled to respond to global pressures to defend their development project. China, governed by a communist party, has remained relevant in a world system dominated by counter-revolutionary forces.
Chinaâs economic accomplishments have been made possible through the alliance between the CPC and the working class. This book demonstrates that the ACFTU has been more decisive in advancing the conditions of the proletariat than other countries of the periphery with âfreeâ trade unions imposed by the legacy of the imperialist core, forcing trade unions to abide by capitalist principles.
Chinese workers are dedicated members of their trade unions and the Communist Party without seeing this as an antagonistic relationship as both CPC and ACFTU complement one another to improve the conditions of the working class. The PRC transitional state permits government and non-public enterprises, and both political forces and market forces are developing the economy. To be sure, this presents complex choices and the CPC must make difficult decisions on the path forward. For example, the dilemma of how to use generated surplus: for immediate consumption or investments in production to generate future consumption. State-owned enterprises are under the direct or indirect control of the party. In SOEs, the Communist Party represents workers through the ACFTU and sets policy through managers. Undoubtedly, conflicts of interest can occur when workers are seeking to improve their conditions by appealing to an SOEâs management, which also includes representatives of the
Western anti-communist Labor research has constructed a false binary between the era of Mao Zedong and his successors. It neglects to take account of the significant challenges that China has confronted from its foundation as an undeveloped agrarian state in 1949 till now. In Ten Crises: The Political Economy of Chinaâs Development (1949â2010), Tiejun Wen disputes this perspective and contends that, throughout its history, the Chinese state has encountered crises which have challenged the stateâcapitalâworker relationship. According to Wen (2021), Chinaâs economic crises have not been ideological or political but rooted in endogenous and exogenous factors which have no bearing on the socialist perspective of the CPCâs leadership. Rather, they were genuine contestations which have concretely appeared, and which state and party leaders were compelled to address.
2 Western Critiques of the Chinese Labor Movement
The ACFTU is the largest national labor federation of unions in the world, which on the surface appears similar to other national trade union federations in structure, organization and form. The ACFTU is among the oldest labor organizations in the world, having been founded by communists more than a hundred years ago in the 1920s and subsequently outlawed by the Chinese Nationalist Government in 1927. When the CPC gained power in 1949, the ACFTU was reestablished as a trade union with limited functions though, as the country transformed from a semi-feudal peripheral economy into an industrial economy integrated into the world economy, it took on an ever-larger role in representing workers in the workplaces. China is typically viewed as a socialist economy which transformed into a neoliberal market economy following the Mao era, but it is crucial to recognize that, since 1949, the country has been industrializing in response to a succession of economic crises and the challenge to modernize. Thus, from 1953 to about 1960, China placed greater reliance on the industrialized Soviet Union for economic development. In contrast to the strict demarcation of economic policy between Maoâs era (1949â76) and the post-Mao, Deng Xiaoping/Xi Jinping era (1978âpresent), it is far more accurate to depict the PRC as experiencing a series of ten crises, as Tiejun Wen (2021) contends.
[a]ctively exploring ways to encourage the lorry drivers, online taxi drivers, couriers and riders to join trade unions. Implementing online applications for union membership, and innovative service contents and service models; (2) Initiat[ing] consultations with industry associations, head enterprises or representative organizations on piece-rate unit prices, commissions, labour quotas, labour protections, rewards and punishment systems in the industry.
In addition, the ACFTU is initiating applicable laws, regulations and policies through pilot projects to prevent occupational injuries; and implementing legal services which directly apply to platform work and to resolving disputes which may arise between management and workers in the digital sector, while providing vocational and jobs-skills training and even mental-health support services (Wei & Wang 2024, 42).
Even if workers are not organized in these challenging digital sectors of the economy, Chinaâs union density rate (measuring the share of the platform economyâs workers who are in unions) is about 25 percent when in the rest of the world barely any workers in the sector are members of trade unions. In addition, the ACFTU is fostering legislative changes to improve working conditions. Workers in emergent digital sectors of the platform economy, logistics, ride hailing and so on have only recently become the object of organizational efforts by grassroots unions in major urban centers (including Guangzhou, Shenzhen and other large municipalities), but this mobilization on multiple levels is a remarkable achievement.
Western research on the ACFTU is uneven and lacks rigor and in most instances ignores statistics and data compiled by the Chinese government as well as reports by the ACFTU and its provincial, district and street-level affiliates. Most analytic and interpretative perspectives are derived from Western Labor Studies and sociology literature. Certainly, some have conducted research but there are few dependable Western sources on the Chinese labor movement available. China Labor Studies sociologist Ching Kwan Lee (2007) formulates a critique of trade union activity under market socialism through ethnographic research interviews from the late 1990s to 2003, a period of extensive change from an agrarian economy to market socialism. The conclusions, which seem predetermined, are not nuanced nor do they take into consideration the immeasurable necessity for the ACFTU to respond to social dislocation and unemployment. The primary aim is to discredit the trade union federation. Not once does the book provide evidence of positive trade union responses
Western Sinologists are fixated with âthe spectacleâ of the mass demonstration and rally against the party and state rather than protests directed at foreign multinational firms, which have steadily advanced in the 21st century. To diminish working class activism in China, Lee conjures the term âcellular activismâ in Against the Law (2007) to imply that most activism is directed at local authorities rather than the CPC and the Chinese state. To be sure, Lee is correct, but âcellular activismâ may reveal support for the PRC and opposition to changing the nature of the socialist state. Directing protest against local authorities is the most effective technique to gain concessions and represents a form of âbottom-upâ unionism or âorganizing from below,â terms applied by Western Labor scholars to identify best practices in union organization.
3 Occupational Safety: United States and China
A significant problem with Western Labor Studies is its propensity to identify shortcomings and policy concerns as they occur and not to update the research when the ACFTU responds to labor market transformations. In the real world, institutions respond upon learning and absorbing information and then afterwards enacting and implementing policies directly. Moreover, unlike in the US, the ACFTU in China implements policy which will remain unaffected by electoral shifts. Thus, in the US, when the Democratic Party holds power, the National Labor Relations Board and other government institutions may issue policy directives but often they never come to fruition due to a later shift to the Republican Party, which selects anti-labor officials and adjudicators. Five
an average of 16 workers died each day from traumatic injuries at work, totaling 5190 in the course of the year. Add to that figure an estimated 120,000 deaths annually from occupational illnesses. In 2021, employers reported almost 3.2 million workplace-related injuries and illnesses. But because under-reporting is so common, it is believed that in private industry alone, the toll of work-related injuries and illnesses is somewhere between 5.4 million and 8.1 million each year. (Felsen 2024, 133â134)
According to the American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), in 2021 (the last year a report was published, due to the absence of sufficient inspectors) it would take OSHA 190 years to inspect the 7 million workplaces under its jurisdiction in the US due to the shortage of staff. Due to hiring freezes, OSHA cannot be considered a serious workplace safety monitoring and enforcement agency (AFL-CIO 2023). Fatality rates in the US are rising, and, in most cases, OSHA is unable to document violations, especially in those industries which are most dangerous: agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, logistics, mining and other extractive industries. A disproportionate share of fatalities is among Black and Latino workers. Without explanation, from 1970 to 2020, only 128 criminal cases involving worker deaths have been prosecuted under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, an inexplicable average of 2.56 cases a year (Felsen 2024).
Conspicuously the US is not a signatory to the hallmark ILO resolution promoting occupational safety and health worldwide (C155, the Occupational Safety and Health Convention of 1981), a convention which has been ratified by China, Cuba, the Russian Federation, Vietnam and Laos. In contrast, the major
Undeniably, most China Labor Studies scholars in the West have a general interest in solving the perceived problems but most make blanket assertions outside the parameters of what is possible and the limitations of what is impossible. A blind spot among Western scholars is the failure to consider the shift of the working class from agrarian labor to urban industrial work. The share of Chinese urban workers has grown from about 10 percent to over 65 percent in just 35 years. Even if China Labor researchers recognize the magnitude of urbanization, most largely pay no attention to the challenge posed to the CPC and ACFTU of incorporating nearly 1 billion people into urban areas. Instead, they point to the shortcomings of the CPC and the trade unions and focus on the deficiencies of specific segments of the Chinese working class under market socialism (Solinger 2022). To a fault, practically all China Labor scholars engage in cryptic terms without explanation. For instance, the term âparty-stateâ is used disparagingly without explaining that China is in fact a state dominated by the Communist Party and the ACFTU and must abide by directives advanced by the CPC. The inference is that China should have a multiparty system and unions with a range of political perspectives. Using a Leninist perspective, the working class party must retain authority and trade unions retain discipline in supporting the party in which they are affiliated. In most states, party and trade union discipline is a virtue as it contributes to accountability to a workerâs state.
Western Labor scholars mock the sincere effort to modernize an agrarian workersâ state into an urban advanced workersâ state, drawing on anti-communist code that is meaningless for all but those who strive to study China. For instance, Western Labor Studies scholars like Dorothy Solinger use the term âregimeâ to describe the Chinese government and âstrongmanâ in place of Chairman Mao Zedong. One can only conclude that there is both
The perspective contradicts numerous studies in the West showing that the Chinese workers movement was both militant and more democratic (Pringle 2011). Tim Pringleâs account of the innovative experiments of the ACFTU in 2011, driven by the working class, is no longer accentuated as positive commentary on the trade union federation is verboten in the Labor Studies literature (Pringle 2011).
Much of the Western literature is drawn from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or research and secondhand accounts about workers. Some researchers use official Chinese government statistical research, but the data is slanted to demonstrate an erosion of working class economic conditions over the past two decades; a view which is wholly incorrect, not just on the basis of flawed interpretations of Chinese sources but also due to a failure to acknowledge even Western accounts of a dramatic improvement in standards of living. The main narrative is to disparage China for its exploitation of the working class, though there are variations on the theme. Some scholars, who typically wish to demonstrate the erosion of the conditions of the Chinese working class and the rise of an authoritarian state under the neoliberal reforms and so forth, share a common position with the neoconservatives in the West that Chinese workers are highly exploited and that their conditions are worsening as the ACFTU fails to represent their interests. Slightly more realistic scholars are more charitable, conceding that the ACFTU has reformed itself in response to
Paradoxically, the ACFTUâs critics comprise a disparate patchwork of opponents, from the far right to the far left, including corporate opponents of trade unions in China and right wing economists, Labor Studies researchers in the West, NGOs, and opponents of the Chinese state more generally, including Western trade unions. A primary opponent of the ACFTU is the Western left, including anarchists, autonomists, social democrats, Trotskyists and, incongruously, those who claim to be supporters of the legacy of Mao Zedong and the Chinese Revolution, and even some who are self-described anti-imperialists.
4 Measuring the ACFTU by Western Metrics
This chapter asserts that Labor critics of the ACFTU are engaging in Western institutional metrics of and perspectives on work, labor, unions and even class which are inapplicable and superfluous to Chinaâs labor regime. Moreover, and consequentially, the ACFTU and its provincial, municipal and street (local level) affiliates are placed in a catch-22 dilemma by Western Labor Studies scholars, who mostly oppose the Chinese state and apply standards incongruous to the developing political economy which no other country even approaches. Further, most critics condemn the PRC for an erosion of conditions from the Maoist era even as, on every measure, prosperity has flourished in the aftermath of the shift to the market economy. For example, Chinaâs labor regime is castigated by some for high levels of unrest and by others for having too little. By way of illustration, in Against the Law, Ching Kwang Lee contends that labor militancy is expansive but is circumscribed and does not spread into a social movement which destabilizes and implicitly overthrows the Chinese socialist system (Lee 2007).
Leeâs view is that work stoppages, strikes and general social upheaval necessarily contribute to improved wages and working conditions. Thus, all things being equal, higher social discontent and work stoppages are a dependent variable for higher standards of living and working conditions. Such Labor critics do not distinguish the historical practices and path dependence of state policies
Neglecting how all capitalist states seek to engender business profitability, stability and social cohesion, Leeâs portrait represents almost all Western Labor Studies literature in presupposing that labor militancy by definition contributes to improved conditions. However, when one examines strikes and labor unrest in the West, one finds a record of failure. For example, when the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike in August 1981, President Ronald Reagan sacked all workers involved within 48 hours, and the union was decertified 2.5 months later. Of the 13,000 PATCO workers, only 10 percent who did not go on strike remained in their jobs, despite the fact that the union had endorsed Reagan for president and most members were armed forces veterans (McCartin 2012). If Reagan could dismantle a professional union, the course was set for the erosion of unions throughout the country. By 2023, a year of labor mobilization and upsurge in the US, only 6.0 percent of all private sector workers were represented by trade unions, a decline from 6.8 percent in 2022 (BLS 2024).
An examination of three major strikes in the global South between 2005 and 2013 demonstrates that Chinese workers were not fired, imprisoned or killed for engaging in strikes, in sharp contrast to practices in most developing countries, especially India and South Africa (Ness 2015; Pun 2005).
Consequently, whether genuinely or not, Western opponents of the ACFTU are invested in demonstrating that the Federation is ineffective and lacks autonomy from the Chinese state without considering that an institutional form of class conflict was formed in 1949 and continues to this day. Certainly, low wages and conditions cause labor unrest and union responses to address the problems. Thus, the terms âparty-stateâ and âparty-unionâ are proffered to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the ACFTU due to its affiliation with the CPC. Instead, an accurate assessment of Chinese labor organizing and the ACFTU is holistic, denoting bottom-up demands from workers seeking remedies and top-down outcomes and resolutions fostered by the ACFTU. In turn, the ACFTU frequently anticipates and identifies labor market changes and their impact on workers. In reality, opponents are responding to the presence of a strong and effective union which seeks to alleviate and improve workersâ wages, working conditions and social insurance.
5
To recognize the efficacy of the ACFTU, it is necessary to assess labor organizations worldwide, a question addressed in Chapter 3. Since the early 20th century, Labor scholars have recognized the significant connection of working class strength to strong labor based political parties.
While trade unionâpolitical party alliances have been considered positively, Labor Studies scholars make an exception for the significance of labor based parties in socialist countries; and, since 2000, Chinese unions have been inexplicably excluded from calculations of the organizational power of the working class, despite the fact that they have a robust labor federation which is affiliated with the labor based CCP. Rather, the ACFTU is derided and scorned by most Labor Studies scholars because it is linked to a political party, despite it far exceeding Western trade unions in promoting working class interests. While it is important to consider the ACFTU within the context of a socialist state, when one compares todayâs trade union federation to Western trade union models from the past, the ACFTU is decidedly more effective.
In 1900, the Labour Party in the UK was founded by the Labour Representation Committee and affiliated with the Labour Party to elect 13 of the 39 members of the Labour Partyâs National Executive Committee. In addition, members of labor unions today are ex officio members and often delegates of the Labour Party. The UKâs TUC, the national labor federation, predated the formation of the Labor Party and, even if it is not unequivocally affiliated with the latter, has historically been the primary force exercising power and influence over Labour Governments in Britain. Its constituent unions have participated directly in the party and almost always endorse its candidates in elections (Allen 1968).
At its apogee in 1946, almost all unions in Britain were affiliated with the Labour Party. Though membership declined marginally with the partyâs embrace of neoliberalism under Prime Minister Tony Blair (1994â2007), taken together, British as well as European trade unions are synonymous with their labor-based parties. Irrespective of government policy and the rise of neoliberalism, UK trade unions have not broken their relationship with Labour as it drifts to the right on labor conditions but have reluctantly remained aligned with the party (Hyman & Gumbrell-McCormick 2010). Trade unions in general must not criticize and mobilize against their federations and labor-based parties. In those instances when trade unions have denounced Labour Governments, they have risked expulsion from the federation, as was the case in 2004 when the Labour Party of Britain expelled the RMT (National Union of Rail Maritime and Transport Workers) and several other trade unions for
Generally, with several exceptions, a similar pattern of loyalty despite bitterness against the trade union federation appears in Western Europe and North America, with the notable exception of the US, where the Democratic Party frequently breaks with working class positions advanced by trade unions. In the wake of the decline of trade unions and the support of the Democratic Party for neoliberal policies, the US working class have had no institutional representative. Consequently, workers are supporting populist Republicans.
What happened to work and workers as the state-managed capitalism of the postwar eraâthe postwar settlement, as it is sometimes calledâwas replaced by neoliberal capitalism? What are the losses, the gains if any, and how, if at all, can the losses be recovered? Are growing inequality, widespread precarity, stepped-up market pressure on wages and employment conditions, the intensification of work, declining social protection and mounting tensions between work and family life inevitable or incurable, or can they ⦠be mitigated? In short: can remedies be found for the ailments of a neoliberal labour regime, and how exactly should they be conceived and applied? (Dukes & Streeck 2023, vi)
To diminish this challenge to social cohesion and living standards which neoliberalism has created, it is necessary to craft a form of industrial citizenship. Dukes and Streeck, who are not China scholars, dismiss the countryâs trade union model in a few sentences as the antithesis of industrial citizenship without even examining its state owned enterprises (SOEs) and widespread union membership, direct elections and labor participation in decisions (2023, 75). Yet, their concern is focused on the West, where unionization has disappeared,
Most Labor Studies scholars evaluate trade unions exclusively from the narrow Western perspective with a preconceived notion that workersâ organizations must resemble those of the US. This view fails to consider the numerous forms of labor representation present outside the West. Moreover, this defective perception does not seek to augment the power and influence of unions but maintains a constrained and inflexible notion that union democracy is synonymous with independence from political parties and the state. Paradoxically, unions with the highest rank-and-file participation are linked to parties which seek to define state policies. If oneâs definition of the ideal trade union is to have weak and ineffective influence and highly circumscribed capacities to bargain and negotiate with employers and influence state policy, the US model is best.
Labor historian Marcel van der Linden comprehends a world system beyond the rich countries where labor unions had become phlegmatic even before the institution of neoliberal reforms which eroded their representational and bargaining capacities and promoted a fear of challenging management and engaging in strikes and other job actions. One consequence of weak unions is that workers in the West have decreasing interest in joining them.
One of the great paradoxes of the current era is that the worldâs working class continues to grow, while, at the same time, many labor movements are experiencing a crisis. The absolute and relative growth of the global working class and its increasing interconnectedness might suggest that the world labor movement is growing stronger. Nothing could be further from the truth. Traditional labor movements are in trouble almost everywhere. They have been severely enfeebled by the political and economic changes of the last 40 years (van der Linden 2023, 315â316).
Still, the fact that most workers in rich Western countries are not even members of trade unions may also denote that unionization does not have significant consequences on wages and conditions. In addition, state social welfare systems which unions advocated for on behalf of the working class in the West paradoxically diminished interest in union membership. In short, though neoliberalism has produced inequality and intensifying socioeconomic conflict through rising populism and xenophobia, it is also obvious that labor in Western Europe, North America and other wealthy states
However, van der Linden is another scholar who shares the implicit but unsubstantiated perspective that all labor conflict in China, which must always be positive, occurs outside the ACFTU as the latter is linked with the CPC, rather than recognizing the holistic connection between rank-and-file workers and the trade union. In a footnote, he cites a British citizen who works for Multinational Monitor, an anti-CPC NGO in Hong Kong. Once more, a potentially sympathetic labor historian is subscribing to a position that all labor disputes must end in conflict, even in a socialist state. But van der Lindenâs predisposition to oppose the ACFTU is evident in how he views the PRC as a âcapitalist economy without independent trade unionsâ (2023, 317) like those which formed in Europe and North America in the 19th century.3 He is an independent historian who agrees with the monolithic anti-ACFTU position among Labor scholars and does not address the question of why a party based labor movement is supposedly ruinous for China but not for the rest of the world.
6 Strengthening Unions through Party Affiliation
Robust and disciplined trade unions affiliated with labor-based parties were the primary factor in the growth of unions in the 20th century. The decline
The scolding of China has also given rise to the dangerous rise of rhetoric which is appropriated by right wing populists and the US national security state. The main assertions are that China is a capitalist country which only claims to be socialist to mislead its working class, and that the ACFTU is not a union. The shibboleth that China is capitalist is formulated by liberals, social democrats, sectarian Trotskyists and doctrinaire non-revisionists who maintain a utopian, even religious, conviction devoid of an understanding of historical materialism. Consequently, some share the position of the US State Department on China (Friedman et al. 2024). Their bald assertion (shared by the US State Department, National Endowment for Democracy and the Central Intelligence Agency) is proffered that China is the fount of opposition to its own working class and ecological sustainability, oppresses women activists and imprisons ethnic minorities. Worse, they believe international solidarity is only advanced through opposing the Chinese imperialist enemy. Are we to believe that this diatribe is a form of balanced scholarship? This âleftâ position has serious repercussions which sustain military spending, support economic sanctions and economic nationalism, and contribute in Western Europe and North America to the disturbing growth of xenophobia against migrant workers there who form a significant potential demographic for unions to organize (Gumbrell-McCormick & Hyman 2013; Ness 2023b).
Most Labor scholars consider the labor based political party emerged in the 20th century to strengthen the influence and power of labor unions and their members. Political parties of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the West were considered essential for strengthening working class power against greedy private sector businesses which had exploited workers without restraint. Consequently, socialist and communist parties in North America and Europe formed and contributed to a dramatic increase in wages, living standards and working conditions (Dubofsky & McCartin 2017; Lichtenstein 2013; Taylor 1989).
Most trade unions in Europe and beyond are directly affiliated with political parties, or what is commonly designated a labor based party. In the US, however, the AFL-CIO is considered an interest group and is not linked directly to a political party even if most of its constituent national unions endorse the Democratic Party, which itself does not view the AFL-CIO as a direct affiliate. Rarely do national unions endorse the Republican Party (viz International
Yet, the book argues that the ACFTUâs connection to the CPC confers on its members superior economic and bargaining power. For the CPC, the working class not the capitalist class is the decisive and most significant constituency. Therefore, the ACFTU and its members are given precedence over capital in almost every dispute.
In 2010, the wave of labor mobilizations against primarily private capital posed a major challenge to the ACFTU and the CPC leadership, forcing it to decide whether to uphold its support for the working class or shift support to public and private capital. Most of the Western academic literature critical of China documents strikes and labor insurrections in the period from 2010 to 2013 but does not scrutinize how the Chinese state and the ACFTU responded to the actions as they were unfolding, or to the formulation of policy in reaction. Would the ACFTU, CPC and Chinese state support capital or workers?
7 Too Little Unrest or Too Much Unrest
In the aftermath of the strike wave of c.2010â13, critics of the ACFTU, the CPC and the Chinese state engaged in a contradictory debate. Like many other NGOs, the now defunct CLB thrived on distorting facts about the Chinese working class, inflating the number of strikes and job actions for the consumption of foreigners to oppose the Chinese state. In its final years of existence before it folded, the CLB did little more than encourage transparency in democratic elections for union leaders even as most unions in the US did not even hold elections, and when they did, the outcome was typically undemocratic due to manipulation of electoral procedures (Harris et al. 2007).
Labor studies scholars and NGOs share a perspective that too much labor unrest revealed a direct challenge to the Chinese Communist state: If workers engaged in strikes, they were opposed to their employers, their trade unions, the CPC and the Chinese state.
Other opponents assert that too little unrest reveals that workers are highly repressed and discouraged from striking by fear of government suppression
Taken together, it is essential to examine the limitations of trade unions and labor movements throughout the world. However, if the US is the archetype for unions, then the Chinese labor movement is far more advanced by almost every measure: organizing and mobilization, trade union density, work actions and the orderly and rapid settlement of disputes through labor courts, which almost always favor workers over managers. Even if the ACFTU is governed by a sclerotic bureaucracy, it at least has the will to improve conditions, and, crucially, Xi Jinping and the CPC are determined to inculcate and deepen community level participation, especially in the industrial centers of Guangdong,
Chinaâs working class has played the role of the main force in the development of the Party and the countryâs undertakings, the cause of the labor movement has made historic achievements, and the work of trade unions has realized all-round progress. Over the past five years, the masses of workers and workers have been concentrating with the Party and struggling with it and have demonstrated an era of boldness and courage in fighting hard battles and carrying heavy burdens in major tasks such as economic construction, scientific and technological innovation, poverty alleviation, rural revitalization, epidemic prevention and control, and disaster rescue and relief. The All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and trade unions at all levels have strengthened the ideological and political leadership of workers, pushed forward the reform of the construction of the industrial workforce, safeguarded the rights and interests of workers, maintained political security in the field of labor, deepened the reform of the trade union system, and increased the political, advanced and mass nature of trade unions. The CPC Central Committee fully recognizes the significant contributions made by the working class and the new achievements made by trade unions. The CPC Central Committee has high expectations for the new leadership of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.
It is necessary to strengthen ideological and political leadership, do a good job in the ideological and political work of workers, educate and guide the majority of workers to unswervingly listen to the Party and follow the Party, and ensure that the working class is always the most solid and reliable class foundation of our Party.
We should focus on implementing the new development concept, building a new development pattern, and promoting high-quality development, widely and deeply carry out various forms of labor and skill competitions, stimulate the enthusiasm for labor and creative potential of the majority of workers, and give full play to the role of the main force in all fields of all walks of life. We should vigorously carry forward the spirit of model workers, labor spirit and craftsmanship, give full play to the role of model workers and craftsmen as demonstrators and leaders, and inspire the vast number of workers to achieve their dreams through hard work, honesty and creativity. We should focus on the in-depth implementation of the strategy of developing the country through science and education, the strategy of strengthening the country through talents, and the strategy of innovation-driven development, deepen the reform of the construction of the industrial workforce, accelerate the construction of an army of knowledge-based, skilled and innovative industrial workers, and cultivate and create more great master craftsmen and high-skilled talents.
Insofar as the PRC is a workersâ state, the objective of the trade unions is to advance the immediate and long-term interests of workers rather than oppose their class interests, which are materially advanced by the CPC.
The working class and the broad masses of working people are the main creators of social wealth, and the promotion of more visible and substantial progress in the common prosperity of all people should be reflected first and foremost in the hundreds of millions of workers. Trade unions, as the representatives and defenders of workersâ interests, should earnestly fulfill their basic duties of safeguarding rights and services, focus on solving practical problems of immediate interest to the masses of workers, and pay attention to safeguarding the legitimate rights and interests of workers in new employment patterns. They should strengthen the democratic management of enterprises and public institutions, smooth the channels for workers to express their demands, guide workers to safeguard their rights and interests in accordance with the law, and promote the construction of harmonious labor relations.
Finally, the ACFTU is charged with deepening the reform of trade unions to advance the interests of the working class. The task of furthering the interests of the working class is enduring and at no point does it come to an endâjust as nature and material conditions are transformed through humans, the ACFTU must adapt to changes to defend the collective interests of the working
According to this narrative, the ACFTU is not a trade union in any shape or form but a repressive authoritarian organization which controls workersâ wage demands and represses all forms of dissent. This position is taken by almost all Western Labor scholars who view China in absolute terms and hold the country up to a high bar. As such, they argue that Chinaâs unions lack purity and legitimacy, despite established evidence even by opponents that the ACFTU is both independent from management and that rank-and-file workers elect their own leaders. Moreover, the Western scholars ignore the existence of Chinese labor laws which protect worker rights on the job and set wage rates on a municipal basis. On June 29, 2007, at a time when Western multinational corporations had attempted to exploit the emergent Chinese working class, composed of migrants from rural areas, the Tenth National Peopleâs Congress passed the Labor Contract Law, significantly expanding labor rights through initiating a process of private sector management responsibility towards workers. This migrant population has grown significantly as the urban economy has offered greater opportunity than rural areas. The migrant population numbered almost 300 million workers in 2024 according to the National Bureau of Statistics. Even as the urban workforce grows, migrant laborers have seen their wages and working conditions improve as the ACFTU encourages labor organizing and the state compels employers to adhere to labor regulations. Over nearly two decades, the improved wages and working conditions for workers have further stimulated urban migration at a higher rate than expected. By 2024, Chinese migrant workers employed in retail, logistics and hospitality accounted for 54.6 percent of the national workforces and the proportion was growing (Xinhua 2025a).
The Chinese state and the CPC have established a labor-dispute mediation and arbitration system at workplaces and adopted the Labor Contract Law which went into effect on 1 January 2008. The provisions of the law ensure employment is monitored by state authorities and enshrine the right to leave, workplace safety, enforcement of child labor regulations and prevention of occupational diseases (Labor Contract Law 2007; Xinhua 2025b). Chinese labor laws were expanded in 2008 to provide a range of protections to a migrant
William Brown and Xuebing Cao (2024, 169) offer a disdainful perspective on the ACFTU, the most critical element of which is that since Chinese unions do not resemble trade unions as narrowly defined by Western scholars, labor organizations in China are simply not unions but appendages to the CPC and the Chinese state. This insolent interpretation of the Chinese trade union movement applies a European and North American craft union definition drawn from the early 20th century. It does not even reflect the composition of most trade unions in the West in the 21st century. Moreover, this interpretation mistakenly claims that the ACFTU violates the official position of the ILO, the United Nations affiliate which builds tripartite working relationships between labor, employers and the state. In this way, the remit of the ILO is to integrate unions as an equal partner with employers rather than to isolate and separate them from official activities of the state. In this context, the ACFTU serves as an active and fully integrated trade union federation which is highly effective in representing workers against private and public management. Brown and Cao misleadingly apply ILO Convention 98 (which requires unions to maintain independence from employers), but they add that since the CPC controls the ACFTU the union is not independent.
Contrary to Brown and Caoâs assertions, it is the fastidious Chinese state and CPC which confer power on workers seeking to improve wages and working conditions. Why would the pretense of independence confer a higher level of democracy, even for a weak and ineffective union, if a strong employer were to reject the unionâs legitimacy as the collective bargaining representative of workers? Moreover, in collective bargaining, especially among state owned enterprises, workers participate directly in framing union demands under strictly enforced Chinese labor laws, a factor which is completely neglected by anti-Chinese Labor scholars. The Chinese government operates comparably to other states and adjudicates disputes between businesses and workers. Likewise, collective bargaining agreements must conform to the prevalent laws of the municipal, provincial and national governments. Jurisdictional power over labor is practiced in every state, but China critics argue that somehow the PRC has a higher bar because enterprises are owned by the state (i.e. the people).
The term âtrade unionâ is misleading in the context of the Peopleâs Republic of China. The Chinese institutions described as such are unlike trade unions elsewhere in the world. ⦠Let us start with what Chinese trade unions definitely are not. They do not fit Webbsâ classic definition of a trade union as âa continuous association of wage earners for the purpose of maintaining or improving the conditions of their working lives.â ⦠That definition implies that the association is self-governing. Chinese trade unions are not; they are devoid of internal democratic procedures. ⦠Nor do they fit the International Labour Organizationâs (ILO) Convention 98, which specifies that trade unions must be financially independent of employers and other non-union organizations ⦠Chinese trade unions are wholly dependent for finance on levies of employers and on state funding. ⦠What makes their links with the state exceptional is that the only legal basis on which trade unions in China are permitted to operate is as part of a state agency, the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). (Brown & Cao 2024, 169)
The error and canard of the account is that the ACFTU is an official member of the ILO and is considered to engage in best practices of trade unionism. If the primary metric is decline and failure, then the Chinese model does not fit the Western model of trade unionism, where labor organization is in steep decline and new organization of workers is at a historic low.4 But by any contemporary definition of a trade union and a labor federation, the ACFTU is far more effective than other national unions in defending the rights of workers who are unfairly treated and is successful in increasing wages and working conditions. By contrast, most trade unions in the West have floundered and have extensive membership decline, eroding their influence in local, state and national politics. Even in the Scandinavian region, where union density had been
Practically all Western critics of the ACFTU deprecate China and the ACFTU as an abnormal and peculiar form denoted as a âparty stateâ, a term which is intended to represent the labor federation as an appendage of the CPC and the Chinese government, lacking autonomy and effectiveness, and bending to the will of the CPC on all matters related to the working class. In fact, as Xi Jinping stated in 2023, the trade union federation must focus on the demands of the working class as they evolve over time, improving wages and working conditions, and mobilizing members into constituent unions and improving workersâ wages and living standards For them, the term âparty-stateâ or âparty-state capitalismâ is code for all the undesirable elements which are attributed to the Chinese socialist market economy. Thousands of academic books and articles use the term time and again, to the extent that it has become insincere and meaningless. A recent seven page article in Current History, the oldest US journal of current events in continuous publication, uses the term âparty-state capitalismâ 31 times, as if it must be inscribed in perpetuity to inculcate a doctrine which will subjugate any other perspective (Pearson et al. 2021).
In labor relations, the term denotes: (1) the ACFTUâs lack of autonomy from the CPC and the state; (2) proscription of ACFTU officials deciding on decisive internal policies and external relations with SOEs and private sector firms; (3) exclusion of local level union leaders from bargaining with management; and (4) prohibition of workers to mobilize and participate in union decisions. This is a sweeping portrayal of an authoritarian and undemocratic system of representation, but even scholars who have articulated a more balanced perspective must, for fear of being ridiculed and excluded, adhere to the obligatory disparagement of laborâmanagement relations in China. Consequently, the accounts by the âparty-stateâ monolith of adherents undermine all efforts to engage in constructive criticism and dialogue which might improve conditions worldwide. The anti-China academic complex in the US and the West is a propaganda behemoth established to inhibit free thinking and independent perceptions. It is so vast that one cannot draw any other conclusion than that it is deliberately intended to target the credulity and naivety of Americans.
Twenty-four years have passed since Sun Yat-senâs death and the Chinese revolution, led by the Communist Party of China, has made tremendous advances both in theory and practice and has radically changed the face of China. Up to
now the principal and fundamental experience the Chinese people have gained is twofold.
Internally, arouse the masses of the people. That is, unite the working class, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie, form a domestic united front under the leadership of the working class, and advance from this to the establishment of a state which is a peopleâs democratic dictatorship under the leadership of the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.
Externally, unite in a common struggle with those nations in the world which treat us as equals and unite with the peoples of all countries ⦠and form an international united front. (Mao Tse-tung/Mao Zedong 1949, 415)
The term âparty-stateâ is ubiquitous in the labor literature and is in keeping with the path development from the revolution. It is the state and partyâs responsibility to mobilize the masses. But, in the West, the term is almost always used to demonstrate that there is neither politics nor democracy in China, which is supposedly controlled by the CPC despite ample and pervasive evidence that popular participation in the state, and especially in local communities and unions, is extensive. In the past decade, more scholars have recognized the democratic nature of the Chinese state as well as its commitment to maintaining a communist system directed at advancing the interests of the Chinese working class.
The market reforms which were advanced from the 1980s to the 2000s have contributed to opposition among social democrats, expressed primarily through Western literature about the declining conditions of the working class in an economy subject to an internal and international market from its inception as a socialist state. Almost all Western socialists have condemned China in the post-Mao era in league with Western imperialists who have condemned the country from its foundation for replacing the private market with a state-dominated economy. Those who rebuke China as a party-state are now universal and run the spectrum from left to right, even though the Chinese state has consistently improved its peopleâs standard of living since the establishment of the PRC in 1949.
One line of attack is that the Chinese labor movement is ineffective and powerless as it cannot exert power beyond the local level (as if a national strike wave is a necessary feature of worker power), overlooking the institutional structure of the state administration, where political action (such as setting wages) takes place on a local and regional rather than national level. For example, in the US, the national minimum wage is largely meaningless as it is so low that it cannot lift even wage earners without a family out of the poverty level
An example of this static and unqualified reasoning, and of an absence of nuance, can be found in an âargumentâ advanced by Labor scholars Kuruvilla, Lee and Gallagher. In From Iron Rice Bowl to Informalization (2011), they wrongly infer that Chinese industrialization eroded and subverted a strong and egalitarian economy which provided economic sustenance to all its citizens. Based on previous research, the authors certainly do not regret the shift from an autarchic socialist economy to what they inaccurately refer to as a market economy in the 1970s and 1980s, as they elsewhere embrace a capitalist liberal-democratic economy analogous to those of Western Europe and North America. This is a position shared by most but not all China critics.
Within a generation, urban China has moved from a highly protected âiron rice bowlâ system that guaranteed workers in state owned enterprises (SOEs) and collectively owned enterprises permanent employment, cradle-to-grave benefits, and a relatively high degree of equality to a market-determined employment system characterized by considerable variation in wages, welfare provision, labor law enforcement, and job security. The growing field of China Labor Studies offers rich documentation of this change in working conditions, enterprise and managerial reforms, systems of remuneration, patterns of labor disputes and unrest, class and gender relations, unemployment, and labor law reforms (Kuruvilla et al. 2011, 3â4).
The anti-China Labor scholars resort to scholarly misrepresentation which considers China in isolation, without comparing it to other countries. The evidence is based on selective and distorted information which gives a false idea of and manipulates Chinese government data sources through narrow interpretation of facts processed from international and even Chinese government sources, and misinterpretation of social phenomena through applying a static interpretative analysis rather than a historical and dynamic evaluation.
The number of labor disputes brought to the Labor Dispute Arbitration Committees (the legal entity set up to resolve disputes) sky-rocketed from 8,150 in 1992 to 135,206 in 2000 to 1,280,000 or so in 2010. Acting on their own with no help from the official unions, workers began striking in large numbers for better conditions in different parts of the country. In summer 2010 a strike by Honda workers in Guangdong made headlines around the world
when it produced a collective agreement with improved pay and benefits. (Freeman 2015, 10)
By contrast, uniformly disapproving Labor scholars in the West, who reflexively oppose the ACFTU and the Chinese stateâs response to industrialization, advance a sarcastic assessment of the federation as a malevolent organization resolutely opposed to improving the conditions of workers when Chinese labor was in a state of tumultuous transformation from a rural to an urban workforce. In short, at no time and place in human history has a population migrated in such great numbers as did that of modern China. If the state instructions could not keep up with this relocation, driven by a foreign private sector, opponents view this as a major transgression. But the industrialization of Britain, Western Europe and North America transpired over a period of 50 years or more and yet there is little criticism of unions there for not keeping up. According to Mingwei Liu, by 2009, for practical purposes, after little over a decade, workers in 92 percent of all Fortune 500 companies operating in China had been represented by a union affiliated with the ACFTU (Liu 2011).
The malformed union which failed to protect Foxconn workers in 2010 represents a significant failure of the ACFTU and the state to keep pace with the industrial electronics juggernaut and not a state policy to exploit workers. The ACFTU quickly responded by forming a labor union which would move swiftly to negotiate higher wages, reduce hours and enact workplace safety measures and improved living conditions for the migrant workers who produced smartphones for Foxconn. Nonetheless, fault finding Labor critics dismiss any improvements by levelling new charges. For example, China Labor scholars Jenny Chan, Mark Selden and Pun Ngai cite a New York Times article quoting an unnamed worker who stated in March 2015, without evidence, that: âNot many workers knew about the company union electionsâ at Foxconn (Chan et al. 2020, 192). Paradoxically, there is much evidence that most local union leaders in the US are not elected by a majority of rank-and-file members in the private and public sectors. Indeed, many workers do not even know they are represented by a union in the US despite the fact that they pay union dues.
Though it is true that the expansion of China as the workshop of the world and the driver of the massive rise in foreign consumption had given rise to higher levels of worker discord and direct action through strikes and dissent in the first two decades of the opening up, the antagonism and demands for improved conditions were primarily directed at foreign private firms and subcontractors which had violated workersâ rights (Ness 2014). There was also a call by workers for the ACFTU to vigorously represent their interests by engaging in direct action. Opponents of the ACFTU contend that the union was motivated by a desire to quell all forms of dissent, but if this cynical position was true,
China Labor critics charge the party-state with engaging in a range of mechanisms to dodge the traditional laborâmanagement contract, including the rise of third party contractors and the lack of direct contracts with employers, the use of interns and students as workers, and the rise of the digital economy, ridding business corporations of the obligation to provide the traditional laborâmanagement contracts. Each critique can be addressed through the passage of time, a necessity in any study. In each instance, the Chinese government, CPC and the ACFTU have responded effectively through pressing employers to directly hire workers who form a potential bargaining unit, reducing the use of interns at workplaces; a practice which is far more pervasive in the West, where students must pay for the privilege of working without pay. In fact, a recent study of student interns found that job training was a necessary prerequisite, which often leads to offers of employment (Yang, F. 2025). Finally, the primary private platform delivery technology firms have offered direct labor contracts to workers in the digital economy who principally are employed in logistics and especially as delivery operatives. In China, the major digital platforms (Metiuan, Ele.me and JD.com) have recognized digital workers in the platform economy as workers and have directly hired them with guaranteed wages, social insurance, improved working conditions and other benefits, including maternity insurance (see Chapter 6 for an examination of Chinese digital labor).
8 Challenging Chinaâs Labor Critics
While opponents of the Chinese labor movement use scant facts which are often drawn from secondary sources to debase the labor movement, social science research among scholars based in the West and in China provides evidence of an emergent labor movement which is responding to extreme geopolitical transformations advanced through neoliberal capitalism and to the demands of mobilizing a newly proletarianized workforce in urban areas. The critique of the Chinese labor movement presented by the vast majority of Western Labor scholars is nearly unanimous; but emerging scholarship since 2013 by leading Western and Chinese political economists attributes the rapid
If the ACFTU and its affiliated unions are as ineffectual and impotent as Western critics would have us believe, why have Chinese workers authentically won concessions from SOEs and private sector businesses, especially in the last 15 years from 2010 to the present?
The evidence of workers organizing victories among trade unions representing workers at a single enterprise or company on the municipal level is clear, based on archival and ethnographic evidence. Lin (2022) analyses the 2020 strike wave and finds that workplace elections influenced successful collective bargaining. He demonstrates that employersâ perception of workersâ power resources contributes to an unambiguous capacity for workers to prevail over them in wage disputes. Lin found that authentic, workplace collective bargaining occurred when unions had a powerful array of collective resources (including mobilization capacity, negotiation skills and collective consultation) which posed a threat to managers. A key variable was collective bargaining skills, which must be learned and practiced with the support of provincial and municipal governments.
Relative to workers from workplaces without union presence or with inactive unions, both union-covered non-members and union members in workplaces with active unions earn higher monthly income, are more likely to have a written contract, be covered by social insurances, receive fringe benefits, express work-related grievances through official channels, feel more satisfied with their lives, and are less likely to have mental health problems. (Booth et al. 2022, 975)
It is interesting to understand how the institutional features of the Chinese union affect workersâ welfare in a largely privately owned economy. This shift to a market-oriented system has been accompanied by dramatic industrialization fueled by a strong supply of cheap labor from rural areas. (2022, 975)
The Supreme Peopleâs Court (SPC) issued a judicial interpretation on Aug 1, clarifying that any contractual agreement that excludes social insurance contributions is invalid. ⦠The SPC emphasizes that paying social insurance is a legal obligation for both employers and employees, noting that the clarification is a result of some employers evading payments and some employees opting out of the system in practice. âFor example, weâve found a few companies not contributing to social insurance in order to reduce labor costs, with some workers requesting employers to provide the social insurance contributions directly to them as subsidies in order to receive higher wages,â said Zhang Yan, a judge in the top courtâs First Civil Division. She reiterated that Chinese courts should support claims by employees who request for termination of their work contract or seek compensation due to the employerâs failure to contribute to social insurance. Wu Jingli, deputy chief judge of the division, also stressed the importance of paying social insurance, as legally enjoying social insurance benefits is a fundamental right for each worker, adding that
the interpretation will be effective from Sept 1 (The Supreme Peopleâs Court of the Peopleâs Republic of China 2025).
Workers did not have the right to waive their right to social insurance and could terminate their contracts if their employers did not pay and claim severance pay from the employer. The ruling, which almost immediately took effect on September 1, 2025, significantly contributes to the decline and eradication of precarious labor and non-standard employment agreements, an unprecedented achievement in the global South and rare in rich countries of the North (Qingyang & Chendi 2025; Xinyi 2025).6 The convergence of evidence rooted in actual fact demonstrates that the conditions of the Chinese working class are improving as a collective social force which is formalized through employment relationships and the support of the ACFTU. It is worth mentioning that the ACFTU had applauded the Supreme Peopleâs Court decision, noting that the interpretation unmistakably concludes that non-payment of social insurance is prohibited even if the worker negotiated with the employer an independent agreement which excluded the benefit.
9 Conclusion
The preliminary findings of this chapter are that the Chinese state is genuinely responding to working class interests, often identifying workplace exploitation in advance and implementing strategies to reach out to the new Chinese urban working class which has emerged in the last generation. These initiatives are only growing in scale and capacity under the leadership of Xi Jinping, who in the autumn of 2014, a year after his election as general secretary of the CPC, reprimanded the ACFTU for not responding effectively to the growing demands of the internal migrants who formed the largest segment of Chinaâs working class. The evidence also shows that the Chinese state, whether or not called a âparty-state,â is seeking to stimulate economic growth in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis by developing new technology and infrastructure, and that this is contributing to higher standards of living.
The WFTU was formed in London at the close of the Second World War in 1945 by anti-fascist and socialist unions sympathetic to the USSR and the Third International. It was initially organized by 53 national and international organizations representing some 60 million workers comprising a range of unions, from the Congress of Industrial Organizations in the US to the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in the UK. A majority of the unions were and remain sympathetic to communism and socialism, including the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of the USSR, the General Confederation of Labour in France, the Chinese Federation of Labour and Confederation of Labour, and the Confederation of Workers in Latin America. The onset of the Cold War in the late 1940s culminated in 1949 with the split of Western trade unions away from the WFTU into the US-dominated International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), as a political and labor front against communist trade unions which formed a significant part of the WFTU. After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the WFTU declined to a nadir of 48 million workers in 2005 but has since relocated to Athens, Greece, as its membership has increased to 105 million, a large majority of whom are in countries of the global South (WFTU 2024a). Since the end of the Cold War, the ICFTU (now the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC)) has deprecated the WFTU as a communist organization which failed to transform into a liberal or social-democratic international organization. Yet ITUC has maintained a Cold War ideology even after its end in 1990 through its staunch opposition to trade unions that did not join its support for Western capitalism and opposition to all existing communist states. ITUC enjoys far greater resources, in part because a large share of its membership resides in rich Western societies of the global North, has the capacity to employ representatives at high wages and enjoys an active presence through international sectoral labor federations. But the WFTUâs opposition to privatization, economic inequality, informal and precarious labor and poverty has significant purchase among the rural and urban working classes of Africa, Asia, Latin America and poor countries more generally. In contrast to the ITUC, the WFTU does not support Western imperialist states of Western Europe and North America, which are viewed as engaging in extractive policies which do not contribute to development but instead foster pervasive poverty, economic imperialism and neocolonialism.
The ILO convention regulates all forms of economic activity in the workplace, and all signatory countries are subject to penalties for non-compliance. ILO Occupational Safety and Health Convention 1981 (No. 155) calls on all member states to formulate, implement and periodically review a coherent national policy on occupational safety in the light of national conditions and practice, and in consultation with the most representative organizations of employers and workers, occupational health and the working environment, aiming to prevent accidents and injury to health arising out of, linked with or occurring in the course of work, by minimizing, so far as is reasonably practicable, the causes of hazards inherent in the working environment. The convention also protects workers from disciplinary measures because of actions properly taken by them in conformity with the policy. Employers also bear responsibility for paying all costs associated with implementing the policy (ILO 2025).
A principal of the organization is a Hong Kong nationalist, Au Loong-Yu, who both expresses repugnance for Chinese nationals as well as opposition to the larger and better funded China Labour Bulletin (CLB) and its leader. The latter, Han Dongfang, has a checkered and dubious political background as an operative for the US government and is a recipient of funds from the National Endowment for Democracy, an arm of the US State Department. Both organizations are now defunct as their critiques have been addressed by the ACFTU as it responded to the emergence and growth of market socialism. In June 2025, CLB officially disbanded (Yu et al. 2013). Effectively, the failure of the anti-China labor NGOs in Hong Kong to resonate with the Chinese working class played a significant part in their closure, along with the end of US government funding.
Trade union membership in the US declined from 10.0 percent to 9.9 percent from 2023 to 2024. In the private sector, union membership was just 5.9 percent according to official statistics, where private sector union membership declined by 184,000 workers in 2024 (BLS 2025).
In 2023, Anders Kjellberg documents a decline in trade union membership in each of the four Nordic states from 1990 to 2021: Sweden declined from 81 percent to 70 percent, Denmark declined from 76 percent to 63 percent, and Norway from 67 percent to 50 percent. In Finland, trade union density declined from 76 percent in 1990 to 59 percent in 2019 (Kjellberg 2023).
According to the Chinese newspaper Economic Observer, âTaking urban employee pension insurance as an example, data from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security shows that by 2024, the number of employees participating in urban employee pension insurance will be 387 million, an increase of 7.88 million from the previous year. In contrast, the âNinth National Workersâ Team Status Survey Reportâ released by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions in February 2023 shows that the total number of employees nationwide is approximately 402 millionâ (Economic Observer 2025).