Chinese Employers Accused of Goon Hiring

By WILLIAM FOREMAN
Associated Press Writer, January 6 2008

SHENZHEN, China (AP) — Huang Qingnan lifts his hospital sheets and shows a long scar below his left hip. His right thigh needed stitches and surgeons fought to mend muscle and tendon gashed in his calf.

The 34-year-old labor activist was stabbed repeatedly by knife-wielding thugs, one in a series of attacks that experts and workers’ rights advocates fear may signal a worrying new trend – privatized intimidation.

Once it would have been the communist government going after activists such as Huang. Today, he’s less worried about the government and more about gangsters he believes are being hired by China’s rough new capitalists to cow troublesome workers.

“The attack happened so fast,” Huang said, lying in bed on the 19th floor of the Shenzhen Second People’s Hospital. “It lasted just a minute or so, but I lost so much blood that I blacked out. Everything went blank.”

A week before the November assault, another Shenzhen labor activist, Li Jinxin, was badly beaten, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily, a state-run newspaper. The paper said at least two others had been attacked around the same time. Shenzhen is a southern boomtown in Guangdong, one of China’s most prosperous and industrialized provinces.

Chinese companies have used thugs to attack enemies in business disputes, but rarely against labor groups in big cities, said Anita Chan, a research fellow at Australian National University.

“I think Guangdong will be in big trouble” if the trend develops, she said. “It will create a type of culture of violence, similar to what you find in Latin America.”

The atmosphere in Shenzhen started getting tense in September, Huang said, when his group began informing workers about a new law that takes effect Jan. 1 and is expected to be the most significant change in Chinese labor rules in more than a decade.

It sets standards for labor contracts, the use of temporary workers and severance pay. It gives employees who have worked at a company for more than 10 years some protection against unjustified dismissal.

Huang’s group, called Dagongzhe or “Worker,” passed out pamphlets explaining the law and held workshops in its tiny storefront office in a dusty industrial zone, an hour’s drive from the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Shenzhen.

“Some factories noticed that Dagongzhe has been educating the workers and causing problems for them, so they sent people to smash up our office and target me,” Huang said.

On Oct. 11, four men carrying clubs stormed into Dagongzhe’s office at about 7 p.m. and smashed a glass door before speeding away on two motorcycles, the group said.

On Nov. 14, four pipe-wielding men showed up at about 4:30 p.m. and began smashing glass, desks, chairs and other office items, said Lin Weihua, an office worker who witnessed the attack. The men didn’t bother to wear masks, and fled in a white minivan.

“They all had flat-top crew cuts. I don’t think they were from around here,” Lin said. “And only one of them spoke, and he said, ‘We’re going to make it so that you won’t be able to turn on your electricity,’” a slang expression for running someone out of business.

Six days later, at about 3 p.m., Huang was chatting with a friend and watching a mahjong game when he says two men stabbed him from behind, inflicting six wounds. He fought back, and a bystander threw bricks at the attackers before they fled on motorcycles, he said.

“These were real professionals,” said Huang, a man with shoulder-length who speaks almost in a whisper.

Huang, a farmers’ son, left school after junior high and became a construction worker at 17.

He moved to Shenzhen in 1996, drove trucks worked in a pasta factory. His face and body are covered with burn marks which he says were inflicted by rival workers using sulfuric acid in a “revenge attack” which he is unwilling to explain.

In 2000, he joined a group that helped injured workers and that later evolved into Dagongzhe, educating workers about their rights.

Liu Kaiming, who runs the Institute of Contemporary Observation, another Shenzhen labor group, said authorities know who attacked Huang but won’t do anything “because the government doesn’t care much about the case.”

Shenzhen police didn’t return calls from The Associated Press.

Huang expects to recover but be left with a severe limp. “I’m not afraid of anything, because my work is meaningful,” he said. “But from now on, I’ll be more careful.”

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