We demand that the corporation open all of its figures and documents on production, finances and management!
　　We demand that the corporation be genuinely nationalised under a democratic socialist plan of production!

日期：2008-8-9　23:10:45

　　Hukou – China’s apartheid system
　　Sat, 9 Aug 2008.
　　China’s one-party state is authoritarian towards its people but libertarian towards capital
　　Vincent Kolo and Chen Lizhi
　　Whereas life for China"s poor majority is micro-managed through an oppressive system of permits, surveillance and penalties governing where they can live, work or study, and how many children they can have, capital enjoys one of the most deregulated environments in the world. China"s one-party state is authoritarian towards its people but libertarian towards capital.

　　Tough controls apply especially to the mingong or "peasant-workers" who migrate in huge numbers from the poor inland provinces to work in the coastal manufacturing regions. These migrant workers are the backbone of the "new working class", drawn together by the process of capitalist globalisation. From around 30 million in 1982, their numbers rose to 53.5 million in 1995 and 140 million in 2004. Today, there are an estimated 200 million in this "floating population" – the largest mass migration in world history. Sichuan with a population of 87.5 million, for example, exports 11 million workers to other parts of China – one in eight of its population. The devastating earthquake that struck this province in May 2008, leaving 87,000 dead and five million homeless, again highlighted the terrible plight of the mingong. Sichuanese are likely in even greater numbers to leave the province in search of work in order to rebuild collapsed homes. Six weeks after the quake, at the end of June, the government suddenly added a further 1,125 people to its list of more than 17,000 missing. The numbers jumped when migrants began reporting missing relatives to authorities after making the long trek home from elsewhere in China.

　　Migrants are forced to take the most menial jobs in construction, as domestic helpers and sex workers, and on the vast assembly lines in exporting regions such as the Pearl River Delta in Guangdong province. They make up a majority of China"s 109 million-strong manufacturing workforce. Their labour has transformed the economy of China and especially coastal provinces like Guangdong, which in GDP terms ($390 billion) has overtaken Norway and Saudi Arabia. The mingong have transformed the skylines of major cities like Shanghai and Beijing, where they make up four-fifths of the workforce on construction sites. And it is mainly mingong who built Beijing"s glittering Olympic infrastructure: the arenas, the new television centre, the opera house, all the new roads, bridges and subway stations. "The Beijing Olympics is being built on migrant workers" sweat and blood," stated chinaworker.info, when a subway tunnel caved in killing six migrant construction workers in April 2007. Their bosses, from a city government-owned construction company, initially tried to cover up this disaster by impounding workers" cell phones to prevent them calling the police. This was just one of several fatal accidents on the same 25 km subway line. Reports in the foreign press that ten workers died while working on Beijing"s National Stadium, the "Bird"s Nest", have been denied by Chinese officials who concede however that two workers have been killed. In a rare interview with building labourers at the "Bird"s Nest", a French TV documentary team asked one worker if he was proud to be working on the project: "Not specially," was his response. "Those with money are proud," added his workmate, "we are poor"! These migrant workers told the interviewer they were paid between 40-60 yuan per day, a wage that rose to 80-100 yuan per day for the most dangerous jobs on the highest parts of the new stadium.

　　Hukou – systemic discrimination
　　China"s mingong are discriminated and strictly policed under a residential permit system resembling South Africa"s now defunct apartheid. The hukou or household registration system was introduced by Mao Zedong in 1958, during his ill-fated Great Leap Forward. It was designed to keep the peasants on the collective farms and thereby guarantee food production, preventing an exodus to the cities. Under this system, Chinese society is divided into two groups – "the haves (urban households) and the have-nots (rural households)," as China Daily put it. Without a "city" hukou you are not entitled to housing, healthcare, education, or other services under the control of a city government, even if you pay taxes and have lived in the city for years. There is little flexibility in this system – people retain their "agricultural" or "non-agricultural" status throughout their lifetimes. China"s mingong therefore suffer the same problems and discrimination as "illegal" and "paperless" immigrants in western countries. In each case they are exploited by capitalism as cheap labour. Only in China"s case this discrimination takes place in their own country – nominally a "People"s Republic". The injustices of this system are widely acknowledged, and its critics are many. Zhang Chewei, of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, says the hukou system "denies migrant workers their fundamental right as a Chinese citizen to be treated equally".

　　The household registration system has played a crucial role in the development of China"s sweatshop capitalism. Without this system acting as a "sluice gate" for migrant labour, China would have experienced the same explosive growth of shanty towns as in other parts of the neo-colonial world. The hukou system underpins the systemic and very profitable discrimination of the mingong by factory owners, police and local authorities, functioning not unlike South Africa"s infamous "pass laws". But unlike the South African system, the hukou is not based upon ethnic categorisation, and its operation is therefore less transparent. Around 300,000 hukou police officers and other paid agents oversee the system and collect information on residents under their jurisdiction (police work that is being revolutionised with the latest computer chip technology as we have already seen). The operations of the hukou system are a state secret, and publishing information about its workings can result in imprisonment. Just 26.1 percent of China"s population, around 350 million people, possess the coveted non-agricultural hukou. The remainder, more than 950 million people, have largely been excluded from China"s urban-based economic boom.