Officially recorded "mass incidents"--a deliberately vague term for strikes, demonstrations and riots numbering from 25 participants to tens of thousands--grew from 10,000 to 87,000 from 1994 to 2005, the year when officials started to keep the tally secret. In 2008, the first year of economic crisis, there were 127,000 mass incidents, according to a leaked report. The pace has nearly redoubled in 2009 as 58,000 incidents broke out in the first three months of the year.
(...) The affected workers are part of the "new working class," just one generation separated from farm life, migrating to boom cities and construction sites at a rate of nearly 10 million per year since market reforms began in 1978. In the export sector's biggest center, Guangdong province, 20,000 factories closed in the last quarter of 2008, according to ChinaWorker.info editor Vincent Kolo.
(...) As long as struggles against national oppression are separated by chauvinist ideology from class struggles--and as long as sharp divisions still exist between workers who are registered as rural or urban--the explosive strength that has developed at China's grassroots will continue to suffer the weaknesses of local and sectional isolation.