Once China's 'worst nightmare,' labour activist refuses to back down

Hong Kong: Han Dongfang was just another dot in a sea of agitated university students during the mass protests in Tiananmen Square 35 years ago when he suddenly jumped onto a monument to speak.

"Democracy is about who decides our salaries," Han, now 61, recalled shouting out to the crowd from the Monument to the People's Heroes in Beijing. "Workers should be able to take part in the decision."

It was one of the first times during the protests that anyone had mentioned workers. And it marked the beginning of Han's three-decade fight for their rights in China, a struggle that was almost brought to an immediate halt.

On June 4, 1989, just weeks after Han began his speeches, the People's Liberation Army fired on pro-democracy protesters in the square, putting a bloody end to the democracy movement and free speech in China.

The crushing response also disbanded the labor union he had helped create during the protests -- the first and only independent union since the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949. After Han was placed on a "most wanted" list, he turned himself in to face prison, where he served 22 months.

Today, Han is one of China's last remaining labor rights activists not in hiding. Stripped of his Chinese passport and kicked out of mainland China in 1993, he does his work from Hong Kong.

"I prefer to be open rather than to hide," he said from the windowless meeting room in the office of China Labor Bulletin, a nongovernmental organization that Han started in 1994.

His faith in the power of transparency has kept Han in Hong Kong, even though nearly all other China-focused civil society organizations have left since 2020, when Beijing imposed a national security law and dismantled the protections that gave the city its semiautonomous status.

Where his peers have essentially surrendered in the face of the crackdown, Han has pushed ahead, telling colleagues to operate as though everything they do and say is being monitored by authorities.

"I'm sure that the Chinese state security turned this organization's records upside down and inside out 50 times," Han said. "And Hong Kong's national security police, too."

After high school, the Beijing-born Han in 1980 joined the military, where he remembers being disillusioned by the fact that officers were fed chicken, while soldiers such as him got bread so dry "it could kill someone."

He then took a relatively well-paid job as an engineer for the state railways, where he was working in April of 1989 as students started protesting in Tiananmen Square near where he lived. Han joined them.

It was done mostly out of curiosity, he said. But as he listened to the students quote thinkers he had never read, and as he tried to relate their visions of democracy to his own life, he realized that workers could have a say outside of the Communist Party's system.

"It was a completely new idea that directly contradicted many years of propaganda about the working class being the leading class," he said.

Han took a leading role in an unofficial union that had begun to organize in the square called the Beijing Workers' Autonomous Federation.

After the Tiananmen massacre, the union was quickly declared illegal, and nothing like it has been allowed again. Ever since, Han, who is understated but not easily deterred, has been propelled by one goal: empowering workers to take collective action.

"That's my character," he said. "If you're born stubborn, you go everywhere stubborn."

His fervor led The New York Times to call him "the Chinese government's worst nightmare: a man who is less afraid of it than it is of him." At the time of that article, in 1992, he was still able to live in mainland China. He was expelled the next year, resettling in Hong Kong.

Under China's current leader, Xi Jinping, groups like his have been shut down and other labor activists jailed. But Han has stayed active -- and optimistic. He continues to believe it is possible to advance Chinese workers' rights through unions.

On paper, China has one of the strictest sets of labor protections in the world. Every worker has the right to join or start a trade union. In practice, every union must be associated with what is effectively a state-sponsored union: the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, a government body that typically works with companies when setting up unions. The employees have little power.

Han has tried to work within this stifling system, focusing on convincing branches of the All-China Federation to negotiate on behalf of workers instead of siding with management.

He has also tried to gain an assist from an unlikely source: Xi.

Worried about social unrest amid an economic slowdown, China's leader has called for the official labor union to do more to help low-paid workers.

"You can say that I'm helping Xi Jinping to hold officials accountable," Han said with a faint smile.

In the China Labor Bulletin office, bookshelves and tables are piled with books and brochures about Chinese labor law. Han and his team of a dozen employees meet once a week to talk about strikes and protests that surface on Chinese social media. They also use state media stories, police reports and images with clues like street signs to try to identify the names and locations of companies where the labor unrest is occurring.

Once they have identified a company whose workers need help, Han will call local union officials to try to get them to take action.

Han, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of China's labor laws, will remind the officials of their duty to make sure workers' needs are being represented.

The conversation can be heated because officials with the All-China Federation tend to look the other way when worker violations occur. Often, they are complicit when company bosses do things such as bring in private security to beat striking workers.

"When we call, we say, 'The law says this,'" said Han. "In some cases, they would say, 'If you really follow the law, all the factories in China should be closed.'"

His approach has achieved some successes, and over the years, China Labor Bulletin has been involved in some of the biggest labor disputes in China.

Last year, when a 20-year-old employee of an electronics factory was found dead in his dorm room after working for 33 days with little rest, local authorities made a "humanitarian" payment to the family.

Han contacted the local official union and the factory and warned them that the company, which had foreign customers, could be held responsible under a German law requiring companies to identify and fix human rights abuses in their supply chains. Eventually, the worker's family was paid an additional amount that was double the first payment.

To describe Han as willful would be an understatement.

During his almost two years in jail, prison wardens tortured him and placed him in a ward with tuberculosis patients even though he was healthy. He called it "hell" and "unbearable," but also "an achievement."

When Beijing released him because he had contracted tuberculosis and was near death, he traveled to the United States for treatment. He lost a lung. When he recovered, Chinese authorities told him to stay away; instead he tried to sneak back in, more than once.

On his last attempt in 1993, he made it to Guangzhou, a city 80 miles from Hong Kong, then still a British colony. Eventually, police dragged him back to Hong Kong.

He responded to the ordeal by setting up China Labor Bulletin.

Despite the past successes he can point to, Han said he feels powerless to help the victims of Beijing's current clampdown on China's decades-long property boom: the construction workers, painters, landscapers and others who have not been paid as companies went bankrupt.

Many workers are suffering, and some are protesting and speaking out, but there is little he can do. "We don't see any hope because the root of the finance is dry," he said. "There is no more water coming out."

"The scale is beyond anyone's imagination," Han said. "It's huge."