by Han Dongfang and Lucas Klein

During the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which would culminate in military action against the protesters on June 4, a railway worker in Beijing named Han Dongfang was one of the organisers of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation (BWAF) in an attempt to form an alternative to the government-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). After the demonstrations were put down, Han was labelled as a “main instigator and organiser” of the “counter-revolutionary rebellion,” and he turned himself in. He spent twenty-two months in prison, contracted tuberculosis and was released to the U.S. in April, 1991, to undergo medical treatment. In August, 1993, Han attempted to return to China, but was arrested in Guangzhou and sent to Hong Kong, where in the spring of 1994, he founded an NGO called China Labour Bulletin to advocate for democracy and workers’ rights.

CLB monitors China’s factories and sweatshops, conducts outreach to labour organisations internationally and in China (including the ACFTU) and publishes booklets with titles such as Protecting Workers’ Rights or Serving the Party: The way forward for China’s trade unions and The Hard Road: Seeking justice for victims of pneumoconiosis in China. In the twenty-five years since its founding, CLB has evolved to the changes in the workers’ movement in China and internationally; today, faced with crackdowns on civil society labour activists in China, CLB is increasingly focused on holding the ACFTU accountable to its members, providing legal assistance to workers, tracking worker activism and workplace safety on its Strike Map and Work Accident Map and in sharing the knowledge and experience gained through the development of workplace collective bargaining in China’s factories with workers in other countries (for more, see https://clb.org.hk/).

I met Han in January, 2011, in CLB’s cramped headquarters, then in a small high-rise in the Sheung Wan district of Hong Kong—a neighbourhood of tea diners, convenience stores and apothecaries in the shadows of property development, law firms and investment banks of Central. My original plan was to ask about social movements, China, their interrelationship and the changes to both he had seen since 1989, with follow-ups on more recent events such as the previous year’s Honda strikes and the suicides at Foxconn, supplier to Apple and Dell. Before I could press record, he told me he wasn’t interested in rehashing the past. Still, his interview narrates a history from the 80s to the present moment that touches on not only Honda and Foxconn but on recent social unrest in the face of corruption and tainted milk products, as well. He also meditates on the significance of a statement by Liu Xiaobo, another important figure for social movements in China, who would die six and a half years later.

Han speaks in Beijing-accented Mandarin peppered with occasional English (which I have transcribed in italics). His excitement and knowledge push his mind faster than his words, and he speaks, as many labour organisers do, person-to-person, in self-reflexive bursts rather than in grammatically complete units of thought. In transcription and translation, I have smoothed this into more legible sentences, still trying to suggest his spoken style. He spoke nonstop for nearly an hour before I was able to ask a second question. Afterwards, he told me that he enjoyed the opportunity to speak at length and connect and organise various elements of his thinking. This interview was originally commissioned for XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, but the journal ended publication before the interview could be printed. What follows is a shortened version of the transcript.

—Lucas Klein, Hong Kong

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Lucas Klein: What can you say about Chinese labour and social movements, now and leading up to the Tiananmen Square Massacre of June 4, 1989? What are some differences between then and now? And how did we get where we are?

Han Dongfang: In terms of social movements and the 80s, 1989 was my first time participating in anything—I hadn’t had any social movement experiences beforehand, and ’89 happened so suddenly. My general sense of the 80s was of an atmosphere of freedom, economically, socially, politically even morally. The beginning of “Reform and Opening Up” just after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), well, you’re going to feel most excited, the freest, immediately after a period of stagnation. A whole series of translated works came in about the West, and though I only read a few, and forgot most of what I read anyway, my memory of the 80s is of a very open and lively period. Of course, it’s relative. In absolute terms, it was nowhere as lively as it is today, but in those days, it felt like a lively, exciting time, compared with what had come before, which was the Cultural Revolution.

After 1989, though, we entered a decade of—there’s no better way to put it—a decade of terror. All of society, from those in power to the populace, was in a state of terror. For the populace were afraid after such a bloody suppression, of course. To be in a state of terror was normal. And the rulers were afraid, too, since they’d never experienced anything—from the time the Communist Party came to power—never experienced anything resembling a popular movement they couldn’t control. A lot of people at that point, in ’89 and ’90, had no confidence in the Party, so for something like this, for them to use such repressive tactics, the legality of which was clear—which is to say, its legal foundation was shaken—well, they were in a state of fear, too. So this dual fear, or what you might call an omnipresent fear, brought the entire decade of the 90s to a very dark place. I don’t want to say this is the fault of any one person—honestly, if you put Wen Jiabao or Hu Jintao in charge then, it would have been no different. It was a historical phenomenon. And a new wave of discontent and of inequality was brewing amidst this darkness in the 90s, forming into corruption. The corruption of officials in that decade was more severe than it had ever been, all as a result of fear. Because nobody but nobody had any confidence whatsoever in the power of the Communist Party. Not even the cadres themselves—high-level, mid-level, low-level—they had all lost faith. Instead, it was “Hurry, get some money, because who knows when this is all going to end?” Such dead-end psychology was clearly present in those who have power, where the corruption of power and the operations of power entering the economy made them lose control.

At the same time, you have reform of the state-owned enterprises, and the corruption of that reform process, coming up against the workers’ best interest. For instance, in reform you have layoffs—so who’ll be laid off, who won’t be, what kind of severance do you get if you’re laid off? In just a few steps, the privatisation process, or what’s called “stockholder ownership” or being “on the market,” everything is much more blatant. Original management borrows money from national banks, become the main stockholders, buy out the corporations and turn themselves into capitalists—but it was never their money! It was the country’s money, just their clout and connections (guanxi). So they become bosses with the country’s money, and the way they treat workers is infused with the attitude of bosses. With this in mind, you can see how social relations could undergo such a great change. On the one hand, workers, whether with the ideology of the nation or the ideology of the Party or some other ideology, still believed they were living in a worker-led, a working class-led nation. They were still saying the working class leads the Communist Party, but the reality was something very different. The leaders of corporations became capitalists, but without ever admitting it legally or ideologically to confirm those kinds of social relations. “You’re just workers, and I’m just a capitalist. You work for me, therefore, you depend on me,” just like in capitalist societies—to which the workers could say, “No, actually, you depend on us.” But instead, you have a fundamentally uncertain awareness of social relations, a state of confusion. On the one hand you have the Communist Party, a “worker-led party,” in power, but on the other hand, you’ve got managers-turned-capitalists becoming members of the Party, becoming Party Branch Secretaries. So political power and economic power have completely intermingled, and not just theoretically.

This is even scarier, that an individual can be both a capitalist and a member of the Communist Party or even Party Branch Secretary, because your exploitation of workers comes from multiple identities. That of course leads to workers’ anger and opposition. But, if at the same time, the object of your opposition, the object oppressing you, is in charge of multiple powers—economic and political, to which you could add ideological—then it takes on its own form. By the end of the 90s, for instance, opposition to layoffs—”I was laid off but didn’t get sufficient severance,” or “I was cheated into a forced layoff”—because most of them were in state enterprises, which they could still say were “worker owned”—the workers would identify as working class with their lips, but in the fact of their actions, these workers never had any duty-bound obligation for protest, in which you say, “I have no choice but to protest, no alternative, so the working class must unite.” Because the fact was that the working class at that time did have an alternative—”treat me a little better and I’ll leave you alone,” or “give me a better severance package than that guy,” or … I’m not sure how to describe it, since it was still a kind of class antagonism, relatively speaking. Relative to what? Well, relative to last year, where Honda workers were on strike, and textile workers in Hebei and Henan on strike after that. When workers strike today it’s very different from in those days; now you have the strange situation where in their minds they don’t consider themselves working class—they’re called “peasant migrant workers,” so they wonder, “Am I a worker? I’m not sure …” But the obligation to protest, and the spirit and the determination in the way workers protest, it’s actually much stronger today than what you had in the 90s when workers still believed that they constituted a working class.

So what we can see here is a development, the step after privatising state-owned enterprises is having foreign-owned and locally-owned private corporations, which when added to the privatised formerly state-owned enterprises means that over half of China’s economy is privately owned. This puts society in its elemental form, where workers work for a boss, and it can be much clearer as far as awareness goes. Boss—workers. So where’s the government? At this point, following a clarification of identity—”I’m a worker, you’re a boss”—the role of government has gradually gotten clearer, as well. Take the attitude of any local government towards striking workers in the past five years or so as your point of reference. Ten years ago, for instance, or even seven or eight years ago, strike-leaders would be arrested and sentenced to two or even three years in prison. But in the last five years, if no one’s causing physical injuries or, say, burning cars, then arrests are going to be quite uncommon. And if anyone is arrested, they’re usually released with just a warning. Held for fifteen days and let go. And in the past two years, you don’t even have that happening.

So what does this tell us? The government too has figured out the roles of capital and labour, because their respective interests have become more clearly embattled. The workers figured out—they didn’t need anyone to educate them—that “I have to buy things every day, but prices keep rising, and I don’t have enough money, so what am I working for? I need a raise!” This is a natural class-based reaction. The government sees workers demanding a raise, but in fact there’s been no change in the way the bosses treat the workers. So this triangular relationship had become a vicious circle—workers are exploited, they protest and demand higher wages, the state attacks the workers, threatening social and political stability, while the bosses just sit back and laugh, just keep making their money. It’s not like they sympathise with the government. And the workers hate the government! So the government sees that for many years they’ve been using the legality of their own power, the price of their power, to pay for the bosses, which then depresses the price of workers. Under these circumstances, the government wants to extricate itself from capital–labour relations, and so you see the gradual transformation of the role of government. In the past, in the era of state-owned enterprises, the state was the biggest owner. Any worker protest, even those targeting management, the state saw as an opposition to authority, which represented the state, and so must be suppressed (also, management was directly state-appointed, so protesting management was protesting the state, with local governments representing the central government, all as one body—that was their point of view). And the government played this role in the midst of privatisation, too, still attacking workers. While managers became millionaires and billionaires overnight. This wealth and this poverty—workers’ poverty—were directly interrelated, of course. “Your wealth is the reason I’m poor.” That was clear.

So when you look at the historical relationship between industry and benefits, when you look at social relations and the changes in bilateral capital–labour relations within industries, and structural changes in the economy where mostly state-owned enterprises were privatised, you see everyone’s best material interest becoming more important. But when you focus on best material interests, well, the government has its own best interests, too. There’s the interests of capital, the interests of the workers and the interests of the state. Everyone is looking after their own interests, and everyone’s making calculations. But the state’s calculations of what’s in their best interest are quite important. In the past, the state wasn’t concerned with any of that; if there was unrest, the state thought, “I’m the ruler, and I’m not going to let this happen under my watch—even if you’re protesting against him and it’s got nothing to do with me, I still won’t allow it.” But now it’s different. “If you protest against him, what’s that got to do with me? If he oppresses you, that just makes him look bad. So go on and fight.” Nowadays, we have to see the state as neutral in the capital–labour relationship.

Of course, there are other roles—society isn’t just a capital–labour relationship. There’s the environment and its effect on citizens (which includes government officials and bosses, too, as well as workers and peasants, so the victims are everywhere). That’s also a matter of best interest. Land, too: peasants’ land is a big problem, and, of course, this has directly effects local governments, at the level of the county or the province as well as the district or city. For the lowest of government officials, they trade their direct interest—meaning power and real-estate development—at the detriment of the peasants. This forms into a conflict that creates a pressure that the state, since it’s a direct beneficiary, cannot extricate itself from. If peasant land were really just between real-estate developers and the peasantry, then the state could make a clean break, but it is the state’s right there in the middle of it. It’s deeply invested, not only in terms of wealth but in terms of the personal interest of individual officials. So their handling of land then meets the people’s opposition. That builds up more pressure than what can be created by workers on their own. We used to believe that worker opposition could create the most pressure, since the Communist Party was supposed to be the party of the working class, and such opposition would overturn the foundation of their legitimacy. But, in fact, as we see in the makeup of the National People’s Congress—80% of whom are government officials, with 20% made up of capitalists and industrialists, CEOs of various corporations, with a symbolic seat or two given to workers and peasants—they don’t have to worry about a fight between workers and capitalists making any threats to their authority. This systemic contrast is quite clear: are you standing in front of capitalists representing worker or standing in front of capitalists representing workers? If you don’t consider this, and look only at the government’s attacks on workers and so forth, then you’re just looking at surface-level changes.

It’s especially hard for people in our position to make appropriate policy decisions. Where’s the focal point? The point of rupture might not be the real focal point. So when you push for social progress, remember Liu Xiaobo’s statement, “I have no enemies.” I was so moved when I read that. Liu Xiaobo’s declaration struck me as a model of thinking, for both the future and the present of China, regardless of whether you’re a government official or a commoner, a worker or peasant or merchant—we are not enemies. This is never about eradicating anyone. If China is going to find a path into the future, we are all on that path. We should be clear about these relations—otherwise, there will be no path forward; if we want to be free of the cycle of history we’ve never been able to break out of, that cycle of protest, despot, protest, despot, then we have to do concrete things, but how do we regard the government, and how do we regard the capitalists? Not as enemies, but as fellow-travellers. The government imprisons many people who disagree with them, but you have to understand what it means to have no enemies at a religious or philosophical level. You can’t just rely on your emotions, for instance, to decide whether the government is an oppressor or a fellow-traveller when you’re trying to build a workers’ movement. We have decided that we’re all fellow-travellers, and you can’t count anyone out, not even the government or the capitalists. Once that fundamental mindset has been established, if there’s a new law, we can’t dream that it will be perfect, but rather hope to push for that law to be applied more fairly—just more fairly than it used to be, is all. Of course, the fairer the better. But you can’t say that if it’s hasn’t reached a certain point of fairness then the government is evil. Rather, we say, “Look at the progress!” As for the bad parts, well, everyone can see it. But we try to emphasise the good parts, and how we are going to use the good parts. For instance, in 2008, they passed two new laws in Shenzhen, called The Shenzhen Implementation Measures for the PRC Labour Union Law, which wrote collective bargaining into law for the first time, giving unions both the right and responsibility to enter into collective negotiations with the owners.

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LK: You’ve mentioned Liu Xiaobo saying, “I have no enemies.” How do you advance your position, if you don’t have an enemy? Or do you see a difference between an “enemy” and an “adversary”?

HD: If you begin at one point and keep pushing forward, you don’t need to see anyone as your enemy. For instance, a boss-controlled union, you just peel off layer after layer like an onion, and it will emerge. This is how we avoid creating enemies, avoid the logic of defining our enemies, avoid taking part in a social movement based on defining enemies. This is how we’ve operated for the past several years, and from which we have had many successes. We experience what Liu Xiaobo meant when he said “no enemies,” not only morally or politically, but in the praxis of a social movement. This is especially valuable and practical in social movements in modern China. After what happened last year with Foxconn and Honda, Guangdong Province created a new law concerning Regulations on the Democratic Management of Enterprises, which added rights such as collective bargaining, worker-representative negotiation, union negotiation … Well the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce was livid, and they organised a strong lobby to go to Beijing—not just Guangdong, but Beijing as well, so a two-tiered lobby—to demand that the Guangdong Province People’s Congress not pass this law. And they put out a full-page ad in opposition to the law in Guangzhou, to keep corporations from engaging in collective bargaining. Knowing that the ACFTU wouldn’t do anything, we decided to come up with an ad to respond to the Chamber’s ad. Within three days, we had our own half-page ad in the Hong Kong Economic Journal in support of Guangzhou’s adoption of the collective-bargaining law, with detailed supporting evidence.

This is quite an opportunity for a social movement, especially a social movement in opposition to a dictatorship—how can you publicly post an advertisement stating support of the government? To some, this would be inconceivable, if not a crime of morality: a dictatorial government with countless political prisoners, and you give a public show of support after they do just one good thing? But we made a conscious decision to act this way, to demonstrate that in our social movement, there are no enemies. We don’t nominate an enemy to be eradicated, with some notion that we could establish fairness and justice later. Instead, on the road toward social justice and social change, we see everyone as a fellow-traveller. This is how I always put it: take some guy who does ten harmful things each day and not one thing that’s helpful; and then one day he does eight harmful things, but still nothing of any help to anyone—do you say, “Shit, you committed eight harmful acts!” or do you say, “Hey, good for you for committing two fewer harmful acts! How about even fewer still?” Maybe this guy didn’t even realise he did two fewer harmful acts—maybe he just didn’t get around to causing so much harm that day. But, if all of a sudden, he gets praised, my belief in the core human goodness of people, or what we Chinese call the heart of mercy—it’s like lighting a gas stove: you can’t guarantee that the gas of goodness is going to catch each time, but that doesn’t mean that if it doesn’t catch, then there’s no gas—so maybe after a while this guy is only going to commit five harmful acts in a day, and still no helpful acts. Do you say “Shit, you’re still committing five harmful acts, you bastard!” Or do you say, “Hey, three fewer harmful acts! Great!” And still later, maybe there’s one helpful act in the midst of five other harmful acts. Sure, he’s still a bad guy, but if you change your perspective, you see that he’s making progress.

Well, this is an extreme example, and nothing quite like this ever happens in the world, but for us at China Labour Bulletin and for me individually, when we plan our strategies and look at China and look at the thought and logic beneath our working strategies, this is our entire operating philosophy. We don’t attempt to put tags on people, like the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, for instance, and say, “Enemy!” Well, no. Why not? Because even the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, in all their interminable greed—they’ve gone too far. And in doing this, they give the provincial government of Guangzhou and the government of China an excellent lesson, which is, bosses are insatiable. “They can keep on eating forever and never feel full, so if we have to keep taking care of them, we’ll be paying the political price forever; they will never be our friends.” To be friends it has to be mutually beneficial, but once it’s gone so far, for the sake of some image of social stability, where the government hopes that factory workers will negotiate on salaries, with a stimulus to consumption and an increase in the domestic market, looking for a peaceful means other than strikes to increase workers’ salaries—and yet the bosses start panicking, so of course the government sees that the bosses can’t be counted on. So the bosses ended up doing something in our favor, at least in terms of practical effect. Even though the result for the moment was that Guangzhou put this law on hold, in the long term they pushed things forward. And if it hadn’t been for their opposition, then Chinese unions wouldn’t have had such a clear argument, such clear grounds, which everyone could see in such a dramatic environment. And we’d been saying so from the beginning, in our reports and publications and radio broadcasts, but the results hadn’t been so great. But with them working against us, the drama was great—much more than we could have done in a year otherwise. So we should be thankful.

So having a social movement philosophy of no enemies has turned out to be effective for our work. In the 80s, which felt like a period of great mental activity, or the 90s, which were a time of darkness, workers might self-identify as workers but without the backbone, as we say, of class awareness. But when the main body of the economy is privatised, class awareness grows anew, because society as a whole is profit-oriented, from government to workers to bosses to peasants, neighbour to neighbour, in the communities—for pollution and environmentalism, for taxes, society is totally motivated by profit. Some people call this idealism becoming realism, but it’s also a step towards waking people up. Someone like Zhao Lianhai, starting the online Home for Kidney Stone Babies in protest against the melamine-tainted milk in 2008, for which he was sentenced to two and a half years—no one would ever have considered him a social movement hero, but his son got sick, simple as that. Otherwise he would never have become anything. The characteristic of social movements in the past decade is that they’ve become focused on profit, too. But what this means is that social struggle will be very hard to suppress. People’s political fear has shrunk, and in some people—people like Zhao Lianhai—it’s nearly gone, and the impulsiveness of his protests will not be suppressed by political pressure. Sometimes our friends say that if Zhao Lianhai can be convicted—whereas in ’89 it would have taken burning tanks and soldiers killed for a conviction, now you can get thrown in prison for trying to make sure your son can see a doctor—then it’s worse now than it was in ’89! Well, logically, this stands, but in terms of history, in terms of reality, it’s false. And we have to keep from falling into the trap of our own logic, our own logical game-playing, to keep from looking for safety amidst the certainty of our own logical fallacies. We have to step outside of that logic and walk into society, face society, before we can see clearly.

Another important element is the internet. The internet formed into a layer beyond the layer of pragmatic society. A space, a space that the government has wanted to control from the beginning, has put so much energy into trying to control, even if they know that they’re fighting a losing battle. No dictator could ever win this battle, controlling the internet. And fighting this losing battle, they’re gradually signalling the retreat, retreating step by step—they could never give up or give in all at once, of course. But bit by bit they’re backing up. And we have friends who say, “See—it used to be that reporters would get arrested or sentenced after writing big articles, but now any old blogger can get thrown in jail, therefore the government is worse than it used to be.” And again, you have a logically-sound fallacy that just doesn’t bear up to reality. So the internet must not be ignored, must be put into use, since realistically, with three or four hundred million internet users, how could the government control all those people?

Finally, there’s the issue of how we look at ourselves. How are we going to keep from falling into a situation of believing, for instance, “I am Jesus.” No, you’re just a man. A man with all sorts of flaws. Everyone in social movements, or even connected to social movements—bosses and us and workers and lawyers and the government and judges and journalists, everyone—we’re all people. There are no angels here. No angels, and no devils. It’s easy to indulge in a fantasy and say, “What I do is righteous—fighting for justice—therefore I am an angel, and therefore he is a devil because he’s a capitalist who exploits his workers, and the government is a government of devils, because they don’t uphold fairness, and this is a war between angels and devils.” But I’m afraid that’s not true. It’s just a contest between humans. A contest over best interests. The workers’ movement is just a movement on the level of best interest. That’s where it starts, and how to move forward is a different issue. We have to define ourselves according to reality, but at the same time, we also need to have something like a concept, a principle, to encourage us onward. Without that, it gets hard. Without that, it’s very hard to overcome difficulties, and at any moment we risk giving up. So maintaining balance, of course, is a very important issue.

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LK: Do you have anything to say about China from an international perspective—whether in regards to labour conditions in foreign-owned factories such as Foxconn or Honda, or the United Steelworkers’ suit against China in the WTO or …?

HD: I wouldn’t want to presume to understand everything, but the way I see it, in terms of my observations of China and understanding of the government, is that international actions are always based on what’s going on domestically. This is especially true with the Chinese government, that there’s not a unified international policy that could ever be independent of domestic issues. Especially in the economy—regardless of whether you believe what Marx said about the economic substructure determining the superstructure—things in China certainly follow this theory. Over the past thirty years, the political and legal performance, policy changes, behavioural changes, it’s all a reflection of changes in the economy. Add to that globalisation, China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, and so on, and you see that the behaviour of China on the international stage is directly shaped by China’s domestic economy.

But the uncertainty factor is the extent to which China’s growth over the past few decades has been reliant upon depressed wages, which not only help Chinese, Hong Kong / Macau or international capitalists turn a profit, but which also go into government coffers. But that hasn’t turned into public service, so what are China’s large reserves for? This question is a real headache for the Chinese government, because workers are trading in a part of their depressed wages so government reserves can become American debt. This is a real double-edged sword. I’m not an economist, and a lot of economists are only pretending to understand things, anyway, but foreign policy and economic policy, which includes natural resources, petroleum and so on, it’s all much more complicated than it used to be. Compared to, say, ’89, their motivations aren’t as simple. In ’89, it was pure politics. The government was isolated, so it had to find a way to re-enter the arena of international politics, re-enter international society. It had to make a lot of deals. I ended up becoming one of those deals. It’s not an investment to release a couple people for returns on patriotism, but when foreign leaders pay a visit—”you pay a visit, it makes me look good, so I release a few more prisoners.” But now this game is done. With globalsation and the material rise of China, with China’s reserves and the rest of the world’s debt under Chinese control, on the one hand you see these things tying China down to all this debt, making it unable to move, but on the other hand it creates a great sense of arrogance. “I do whatever I want, damn it!” It’s all very complex, but what it results in is China no longer needing to play those political games of the ’90s. A lot of international human rights organisations, a lot of politicians in the West looking at the situation of human rights in China, they tend to overlook this, still assuming international pressure to be effective. But it no doesn’t work anymore. Regardless of whether you’re the United Nations Commission on Human Rights or the Committee on Freedom of Association in the International Labour Organization, the Chinese government doesn’t care about you at all.

So we need a new direction. Which means that we have to go back to talking about China’s domestic situation. That is, for quite some time now we’ve been working according to this false supposition that the Chinese government still cares about international pressure. This is why I haven’t personally gone to Geneva for six or seven years. That’s the amount of time it’s been that I’ve understood, little by little, that we need to establish our influence in China. It’s hard, of course, and at times even looks impossible, but that’s why it needs to be done. Otherwise, we may as well just give up and do something else, or live in what I was just describing, inside that “little logic” of rational arguments that crumble as soon as you step outside and take a look at reality. We have to make a choice, and that choice must absolutely be to plant our feet in China. Or else there’s no way out. For me, of course, if there’s no way out it’s no big deal—this isn’t me being arrogant, I’m trying to be responsible—you know how many people helped me in ’89, and some of them I don’t know if they died in Tiananmen or what—but I feel like I have a responsibility to do whatever can be done to the utmost of my ability. If you see the possibility for action at any moment, you have to take action. I’ve been very lucky. We’ve been quite successful.

So when I look at the international situation, I try to base it on praxis, and the development of the Chinese labour movement. This is why I haven’t once accepted the invitation of any American union to oppose China’s entry into the WTO, and have never participated in any boycott of Chinese goods, at least since it became clear to me—in the past I would, in the 90s, for instance, I was in that state where I thought that you should boycott Chinese goods, that Most Favoured Nation status should be opposed, and so on—but as I came to understand more, no. You should never deny that you once were an idiot—everyone at some point has to be an idiot, that’s not what matters—what matters is whether you’re still an idiot now. What’s important is whether you’ve improved. When you see the facts, and still don’t admit it or still don’t make adjustments, that’s when you find yourself being an idiot forever. I’m pretty lucky in that that isn’t me.

Most of what goes on in Washington, frankly speaking, is just protectionism. I don’t mean that as a value judgment, or to say it’s right or wrong—the responsibility of American unions is to protect jobs for American workers—and, of course, for a lot of people it comes from good will and morality, or what you might call consumer complaints. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to take part. Because I also hope that Chinese workers have more jobs—so why would I want Chinese products to be boycotted? More Chinese products means more jobs for more Chinese workers. And, of course, this gets back to the issue of fairness in international trade: mass sale of cheap products has a direct effect on someone else’s rice bowl someplace else. We’re always trying to strike a balance between best interest and ethics, which is always a live question, and the fact of live issues is that they mean difficult choices. And social movements are a part of life. So what we need to do is change the treatment of workers in the production of Chinese products. I don’t want to see Russian Shock Therapy happen in China, where China would undergo a period of pain, followed by struggle, followed by protest, followed finally by change. Instead, I want a painless, or relatively painless, rising up and protest. This is the direction we’re developing in now.

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LK: You say you need to plant your feet in China, but you’ve been in exile in Hong Kong for nearly two decades. Given all that’s changed in the Mainland since then, if you had the right to return, would you want to go back, or do you think that you can do better work here in Hong Kong?

HD: A right like this, it’s take-it-or-leave-it. But you have to look at the practical effects of an actual social movement. In that case, really, I should be thankful to the Chinese government for sending me here to Hong Kong, for driving me here in 1993. Otherwise, I’d probably have been imprisoned two or three more times in the past seventeen years, and might even be in prison today, or who knows what I might be doing. Whether I’d have come to such an understanding of myself or have my present awareness of my work and the circumstances in China, or whether we could have helped gain compensation for so many workers, what’s certain is that the behavior of the government has had some unintended positive results. It’s very hard to say.

Last year, I said to someone, I might be one of the ten dumbest people in the world, but I’m definitely also one of the ten luckiest people in the world. I’ve barely ever come across anyone as lucky as I am. Ending up in Hong Kong in ’93 was very lucky. Of course, at the time I was upset, saying, “I’m a Chinese citizen, damn it! I have a Chinese passport, and I’m being exiled to Hong Kong!” Looking back with a sense of history, however, it was probably my fortunate moment.

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LK: This is the old Chinese story about the famer who loses his horse, and it turns out to be a good thing.

HD: Right. Things rarely have just one side to them. Look at some of the other sides, and you might just find some of them to be a bit more realistic. From one angle, things look quieter, less volatile. From another angle, you see some opportunities. My colleagues and I are constantly emphasising that our main responsibility is to keep looking for, and finding, hope. Find hope amidst despair. This is the example I always give: if we were trapped in a coal mine underground, with who knows how many of us still living, in need of leadership—take the recent case in Chile for example—do you keep telling yourself, “We’re done for! It’s all over! We’re going to die!” or do you say, “I believe there’s still hope”? Even if you’re not even sure yourself. If you confirm those hopes, then you’re not only encouraging people spiritually, you’re giving them practical to make it out alive.

So this is what we have to keep repeating to Chinese workers and peasants, that even though they might think they’re living in darkness, with a corrupt legislature and government, they still need to believe in that core of human goodness. If there’s an evil judge who only settles one case a year, with only one case pertaining to a fair and just society every year he might always favour the boss and never care about you, but if he’s got ten cases a year, he’ll think hard—because it’s all there in the public record—and if he’s got twenty cases, well then for at least one case he wouldn’t dare not rule in favor of the workers. And as long as there’s that one case, that light at the end of the tunnel, as we say, then you know that it’s not only that one judge who can change for the better, but that in one transformation he could affect everyone who sees it. And everyone will say, “Wow, who knew that such a case could turn out this way?” And when quantity becomes quality, this is how society makes progress. It’s one of our principles. As much of a principle as when we say, “We have no enemies.”

Han Dongfang (b. 1963) is the Executive Director of China Labour Bulletin. Originally a railway worker in Beijing, during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which would culminate in military action against the protesters on June 4, he was one of the organisers of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation (BWAF) in an attempt to form an alternative to the government-run All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). Eventually exiled to Hong Kong, in the spring of 1994 he founded China Labour Bulletin as an NGO to advocate for democracy and workers’ rights. Dongfang’s work as Executive Director of CLB includes broadcasting interviews with workers and trade union officials on Radio Free Asia. He remains active in promoting global solidarity, and in particular South-South solidarity. He has lived in Hong Kong with his family for the last 25 years. See CLB’s website for more details.

 

Lucas Klein is a father, writer, and translator, as well as assistant professor in the School of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong. His translation Notes on the Mosquito: Selected Poems of Xi Chuan (New Directions) won the 2013 Lucien Stryk Prize, and his scholarship and criticism has appeared in Comparative Literature Studies, LARB, Jacket, CLEAR, PMLA, and other venues. Other publications include October Dedications, his translations of the poetry of Mang Ke (Zephyr Press and Chinese University Press, 2018), and contributions to Li Shangyin (New York Review Books, 2018), as well as the monograph The Organization of Distance: Poetry, Translation, Chineseness (Brill, 2018). His translations of the poetry of Duo Duo, forthcoming from Yale University Press, recently won a PEN/Heim Translation Fund grant. (Photograph of Lucas by Zhai Yongming.)