Desperate Chinese workers 'threaten suicide as ultimate protest'
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Version 0 of 1. Desperate Chinese workers are willing to attempt suicide to make their protests heard, according to an article on the GlobalPost website. The article, by Robert Foyle Hunwick, presents such protests as something close to a cultural phenomenon. "For some in China, suicide is the ultimate form of protest," he writes, pointing to an incident in Beijing where about 30 men, reportedly taxi drivers from China's northeast, gathered in one of the capital's upmarket shopping areas and drank pesticide en masse. The men, from Suifenhe in China's Heilongjiang province, appear to have staged their protest against a local law that compelled taxi drivers to join a state-owned management company and outlawed freelance driving. None of the men died, according to a police statement, but the incident ensured their grievances were aired on social media. Foyle Hunwick goes on to catalogue other Chinese protest-suicide attempts, including one in August 2013 by 21 people from Heilongjiang province after a railway company failed to provide the protesters' children with the public-service jobs they were promised. These incidents are reminiscent of the attempted mass suicide of workers at the Foxconn factory in Wuhan in January 2012, when about 150 employees of the Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company threatened to throw off a factory roofs, reportedly over wages and working conditions. Foxconn, which produces electronics for Sony, Apple and Nintendo, had already seen 18 workers attempt to throw themselves to their deaths in 2010. Fourteen of those workers died. Foyle Hunwick quotes one Foxconn worker as saying that for migrant workers "Our use of death is simply to testify that we were ever alive at all". Blogger Fausta Rodrigues Wertz, writing on Da Tech Guy Blog, highlights the article and attributes the fatal protests to Communism which she says "describes the erasing of the individual". China has had a tradition of its citizens travelling to Beijing to petition the country's leaders, typically appealing against decisions by local authorities, seen as a 'last resort'. Millions of complaints are filed each year, but few are ever resolved. |