Home > China Watch
26 Oct 2010
by Admin
Who Is Helping the Victims
of the "Reform" (1)?
[1] [2]
On
June 22, 2010, the 60th anniversary of
the establishment of Workers’ Union of Shaanxi Province, Mr Zhang, the vice
president of the Shaanxi Union, posted an
article on union's official website,
citing that his organization had been
responded and would keep responding
positively to the call by Chinese
President Hu Jintao to “make sure all
workers having the rights to take part in
the union’s activities, access the
union’s information, participate in the
union’s decision-making process and
monitor the union’s performance (使广大劳动者的参与权、知情权、管理权、监督权得到更充分、更有效的保障)”.
“Let
it start from me and begin with a
practical matter at hand, no matter how
trivial that issue might be (要从我做起，从小事做起，从具体工作做起。),” declared Zhang,
sounding rather sincere to anyone who
reads his online post.
He
was not boasting. At the time of writing
his article, he was busying himself with
a not really trivial but extremely
practical matter at his hand that was to
ensure Mr Zhao Dongming (赵东民) to be convicted of
criminal offence and to be condemned to
years in jail. By then his union had
already successfully got Zhao detained
for 10 months without charge, and by then
he and his colleagues had already
witnessed, probably with satisfaction,
that Zhao had been repeatedly denied a
right to visit his wife who was gravely
ill.
What
crime Zhao committed that earns him such
strong hostility from the union officials
and such harsh treatment by the police?
Let’s
start from union boss Zhang and begin
with a practical matter raised by a group
of workers who demanded Zhang to take on
at hand.
It
was on June 15, 2009. In that morning the
union office was visited by 150
retrenched workers who believed they were
badly let down when they were laid off by
their respective state-owned factories
that were in the middle of the “reform”,
which in recent China normally means only
one thing – privatization of the
public enterprises and organizations and
institutions. They handed in an open
letter with a list of urgent issues that
they wanted the union to help them to
address and asked the union chief to sign
on an agreement that they would report
back the progress of their negotiation
with the related parties in ten days. The
agreement was signed on a paper slip and
the workers left the union building
without drama.
Ten
days later, the workers returned. This
time, they invited a lawyer coming with
them. The lawyer is Zhao Dongmin, a guy
well-known for his passion to provide
legal aid (often free of charge) to the
weak and the poor, for which he received
award from the authorities. But he could
not have envisaged by then that this time
his service would not earn him an acclaim
but a total destruction of his
professional career and his personal
life.
According
to the video clip that captured the
event, the meeting was orderly and
cordial in the beginning, and two union
officials gave a short welcome speech to
the re-visiting members. But when asked
what the progress was regarding the
issues they raised ten days earlier, the
officials hinted that they didn’t
believe they had to share the information
with the members. It was by then the
atmosphere in the meeting hall became
tense, and union boss Zhang thus emerged
in the scene.
Zhang
tried to bring the situation under the
control and asked the workers to elect a
representative to speak to him. Zhao
Dongmin was elected unanimously. The
union boss wasn’t impressed as he didn’t
seem to like to speak to a lawyer. In the
sharp verbal exchange between the two
men, the lawyer at one point reminded the
union boss that by law the workers had
rights to check how the job was done by
the union, and the union boss was clearly
very upset for being forced to take a
legal lesson.
A
month later, the lawyer was arrested and
spent more than a year in detention
without formal charge. During that time,
his distraught wife got ill, but the
pleas for him to see her were repeated
turned down; he was not even allowed to
visit her when she was dying, and was not
even allowed to attend her funeral. His
wife died in despair and poverty and his
kids were virtually left orphaned.
[1] [2]
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