Chinese authorities have released Zhang Jingsheng and Li Wangyang, trade union organisers in Hunan province, who were jailed for their part in the 1989 workers’ protests against the Tiananmen Massacre.
Both were originally jailed for 13 years but have been set free two years early. The Hong Kong based Information Centre on Human Rights and Democracy said that it believed that the early releases were a result of trade union agitation in the USA around the recent Congress decision to grant China permanent normal trade relations with the USA.
Although this underlines the importance of international solidarity campaigns, it should not be forgotten that the release of Zhang and Li also comes after two years of rapidly escalating working class mobilisations inside China which have now reached their highest peak since 1989.
In that year the workers protested at the corruption and oppression associated with Deng Xiaoping’s early market “reforms” and took strike action against the massacre of the students and workers in Tiananmen Square.
Zhang, who had already been imprisoned for his part in the democracy movement of the 1970’s, was a worker at the Shaoguan electrical engineering plant in Hunan who was active in establishing an independent workers’ union in the provincial capital, Changsha, and in the resistance to the military crackdown that followed the massacre in Beijing.
Li was a worker activist involved in setting up an independent union in Shaoyang City, also in Hunan province, in 1989.
Today, workers across China are protesting and organising against the completion of Deng’s “reforms” by Jiang Zemin and Zhu Rongji which have brought massive increases in unemployment and the cost of living and the destruction of the principal gains that the working class made after 1949.
In those struggles, more activists like Zhang and Li will take up the fight against the Beijing bureaucracy and their allies in the multinational corporations and out of their campaigns a new labour movement will be built.