The implications of the Shanghai truckers’ strike

The three-day strike last week by thousands of Shanghai truck drivers over rising fuel prices and fees has once again raised fears in ruling circles in China and internationally about the prospect of a broader rebellion of the country’s massive working class.

After police intimidation and arrests failed to end the protests, Shanghai municipal authorities announced a reduction in port fees, rather than risk the strike spreading to other workers. The protests came to an uneasy end last weekend, but none of the underlying issues has been resolved.

The world’s major corporations are acutely aware that global production and profits are heavily dependent on the exploitation of Chinese cheap labour and any disruption to the flow of parts and finished products could have calamitous economic impact. As the New York Times warned on Thursday, China’s “export juggernaut has been fed by highly efficient factories, low-cost labour and a fleet of container ships”, but a weak link is the trucking system that connects factories to seaports.

Despite heavy government investment into infrastructure, the cost of trucking in China’s two main export zones—the Yangtze River Delta near Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta around Hong Kong—is far higher than in the US, even though Chinese drivers earn as little as 25 cents per hour.

As a result, independent truck operators are squeezed. Despite the rising cost of fuel driven by higher international prices and cutbacks to government subsidies, factory owners refuse to pay more to truckers. With 10 million trucks on Chinese roads, there is a vast oversupply of drivers competing for hauling orders.

The truckers’ strike is symptomatic of the extreme social tensions throughout Chinese society. As around the world, rising prices for food and fuel are impacting on working people throughout China. A new Asian Development Bank (ADB) report found that global food prices increased by 40.4 percent from June 2010 to February 2011, with sugar up 85.9 percent, cereals by 67.9 percent and edible oils by 65.9 percent.

The ADB report concluded that, if food prices increased by 10 percent this year, an additional 64 million people in developing countries in Asia would fall below the poverty line of $1.25 a day. Many of those will be in China, where an annualised food inflation rate of 11.7 percent was recorded in March. Chinese workers are also being hit hard by rising housing costs—the product of rampant property speculation.

The misnamed Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which presides over the country’s frenzied and unstable capitalist development, regards any independent movement of the working class with trepidation. Millions of workers joined student demonstrations in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and other cities in 1989 because of anger over rising prices and official corruption.

Everything in China is writ large. The army and security apparatus that violently repressed workers and students in Tiananmen Square is substantial, but is dwarfed by the Chinese working class which has grown in size and as a proportion of the population over the past 20 years. The latest census puts the urban population at 665 million people or nearly 50 percent of the total, up from 298 million people or 26 percent in 1990.

via www.wsws.org

Comments

[Alain]

While I am reluctant to celebrate human suffering, this is perhaps a good sign that the system is undermining itself across the globe. And as it consumes itself, the prospects for a new order will emerge. My fear is that many of us (myself included) will suffer needlessly to bring this about.

[Jocelyn]

yes, Alain, you are right. but a new order will not necessarily be a *better* one. I realize you prob recognize this but it baffles me how societies will wait until the last minute, hanging on to survival by a mere string before they are willing to think and act, proactively. I have the disintegration of unions in mind, and how we are just watching them blow away, along with the rest of the *middle class*. Perhaps this is the only way things will change. but i doubt it will be for the better.

[Alain]

Thanks for the comment Jocelyn. I agree - especially here in the US. While this is a cliche by now, the disconnect between real deprivation and the ruling elites will lead to something. And whatever this something is, will probably be transitional and worse. I think we collectively are looking for whatever that something might be. And clearly the end of public sector unions will hasten the change.