Class struggle in the Peoples' Republic: Chinese students use crowd funding website to support worker activist in Guangzhou
When Chen Weixiang, a 22-year-old medical student from Sun
Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, heard in January this year about the dismissal
of local sanitation worker and labour
activist Yu Wucang, he decided to help.
Chen, who has been a long-standing
supporter of Guangzhou’s sanitation workers, and a group of fellow
students, used social media platforms to start a crowd funding campaign to pay
Yu’s salary. On 4 February, about 70 supporters put more than 3,000 yuan
into the account in less than six hours.
Chen pointed
out that contributors would get no financial benefit themselves and
that the campaign to support Big Brother Yu was purely about social justice.
Yu had been dismissed at the end of last year for his
involvement in a strike for higher wages by sanitation workers in 2013 and his
vociferous criticism of the employment system for sanitation workers in
Guangzhou’s Yue Xiu district where workers are divided into 18 different
administrative regions and regularly moved to different agency companies to
prevent them from obtaining unlimited-term contracts.
Following the successful fund raising, Chen and Ying Ying, a
student from the South China Normal University, went one step further and invited
the Guangzhou Civil Affairs Bureau to a “Chinese New Year Lunch” to talk
about Yu’s case and ask for his reinstatement. The Bureau unsurprisingly
refused, citing anti-corruption regulations as the reason.
Yu was offered his job back in January but only on condition
that he signs a letter guaranteeing that he will cease his labour activism and
no longer discuss sanitation workers’ rights on social media. Yu naturally
refused:
As citizens we have the right and the obligation to
supervise the government and to have our opinions heard. I am just a sanitation
worker and my voice is weak but I will continue to shout as loud as I can.
Yu continues to sweep the streets every day in protest at
his dismissal