China’s Leaders Confront An Unlikely Foe: Ardent Young Communists

Pockets of student-worker unity in China have been causing problems for authorities, but how does a government deal with activists who claim to stand for the very ideals it worked so hard to teach them?

While only a small minority of students are involved, they represent a leftist critique of Chinese society that seems to be gaining traction on college campuses, partly because the authorities have been more hesitant to suppress it than other political discussion.

This fascinating piece from the New York Times tells the story of student solidarity with workers at a welding equipment factory in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong. Employees at the Jasic Technology factory were prevented from forming an independent union in July and some were later arrested for organizing a petition.

Students travelled from across China to stage protests at the treatment of the workers and call for them to be allowed to form an independent union—labor organization in China is only supposed to happen under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions.

“What we are doing is entirely legal and reasonable,” said Chen Kexin, a senior at Renmin University in Beijing who took part in the protests. “We are Marxists. We praise socialism. We stand with workers. The authorities can’t target us.”

According to the author of the piece, Javier Hernández:

…some in the party seem uneasy about the proliferation of student groups devoted to Marxism and Maoism, apparently worried that their calls for greater economic equality and worker rights could undermine China’s modern-day embrace of capitalist markets.