The future face of China captured in a perfect NYT headline
Thursday, June 24, 2010 at 12:10AM 
David Barboza (frequently brilliant) piece in NYT with perfect, crystalizing headline:
In China, Unlikely Labor Leader Just Wanted a Middle-Class Life
Story comes out of the recent strike at a Honda factory.
The dynamics here are also perfect:
Tan Guocheng is hardly a self-styled labor leader. Age 23 and introverted, he grew up among rice paddies and orange groves far from China’s big factory towns.
But last month, an hour into his shift at a Honda factory in the southern city of Foshan, Mr. Tan pressed an emergency button that shut down his production line.
“Let’s go out on strike!” he shouted. Within minutes, hundreds of workers were abandoning their posts.
Colleagues described Mr. Tan’s leadership as an uncharacteristic act of courage; Mr. Tan said he simply wanted a pay raise. Regardless, he has helped touch off a wave of strikes at Honda plants and other workplaces in China that are still playing out in surprising and significant ways.
Though Mr. Tan has since been fired by Honda for “sabotage” and moved back to his village, striking workers at another Honda plant less than 100 miles away in Zhongshan marched in the streets on Friday and made a new demand: the right to form an independent labor union.
“This is a remarkable development,” said Anita Chan, a labor expert at the University of Technology in Sydney. “Most strikes in China tend to be about not being paid or being mistreated. This was different. The workers were demanding very high salaries. And they want to elect union leaders democratically.”
The two-week strike at Mr. Tan’s plant forced Honda to shut down its four assembly plants in China and to eventually offer 1,900 workers in Foshan a 24 to 32 percent pay raise. That got to the heart of Mr. Tan’s complaint.
Leaving his home in central China four years ago, Mr. Tan had hoped that working on an assembly line for a global company like Honda would be his path to a middle-class future.
But the pay was meager, he says, and inflation ate away at his earnings. And last January, when Honda offered to increase his $175 monthly salary by a mere $7, Mr. Tan, who planned to marry soon, was distraught. It was not enough money to buy a house or raise a child.
“I couldn’t understand how they could give us so little,” he said. So he decided to fight back.
This is a story about what China becomes when it's all grown up and industrialized.
There will be countless more Tans in this story, and they will be the best thing that's ever happened to the country.
God bless the fellow for just wanting what he's due.
Reader Comments (3)
You know I was just wondering why they maintain such a large army since they never fight anyone. I forgot about internal control. A billion people. A billion restless people.
"Workers of the World, Unite!"
Good point, Ted. I taught for 2 years at WuYi University in Jiangmen which is somewhere in between Foshan and Zhongshan. One of the Chinese professors secretly expressed your exact sentiment. He said something like, "The Chinese people must be ruled with a hard hand because all hell will break loose if they are given freedom." His statement haunts me to this day.