Talks about Migrant Workers at the Two Sessions

In early March, the annual ‘Two Sessions’ of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress (CPPCC) convened in Beijing. On 5 March, Prime Minister Li Keqiang addressed the NPC. In his speech he reiterated once again the determination of the government to tackle the issue of wage arrears besetting migrant […]

Supreme People’s Court Boasts about Arrest of Lawyer

During the ‘Two Sessions’, Zhou Qiang—the President of the Supreme People’s Court— presented his annual report about developments in the work of the courts over the past year and plans for the year to come. In the very first section of the speech—entitled ‘ensuring state security, punishing crime, and protecting human rights’—Zhou Qiang singled out […]

Further Job Cuts in the Coal and Steel Industry Announced

China’s annual economic growth in 2016 reached the expected target of 6.7 percent, with the creation of more than thirteen million new jobs in cities and towns. Still, at the beginning of 2017 the employment prospects remained worrying, as China continued to rein in its overcapacity in heavy industries such as steel and coal. In […]

Foreign NGOs Law Enforced

On 1 January, the controversial Law on the Management of Foreign NGOs’ Activities within Mainland China came into force. To clarify matters in the midst of legal and procedural uncertainty—the list of agencies allowed to supervise foreign organisations and the areas these organisations can work in was only released at the end of December—in early […]

Strikes at Multinational Companies in China

The last quarter of 2016 witnessed a series of strikes among the employees of several multinational companies in China over ownership changes. First, on 8 November, dozens of employees went on strike at a bottling plant owned by Danone in Guangzhou that had just been sold to a local company after learning that the French […]

Meng Han Sentenced

On 3 November, Meng Han, the last of the labour activists detained in the crackdown of December 2015, was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-one months in jail by the Panyu district court in Guangzhou. While detained, Meng Han was denied access to his lawyer, and his parents were repeatedly harassed in their apartment by […]

Parents of Left-Behind Children Face Prosecution

According to an official survey on the migrant population in China in 2016 released in mid-October by the National Health and Family Planning Commission, around sixty-one million children—more than a third of whom are younger than seventeen—currently live in the Chinese countryside without the daily care of their parents, who have migrated to other areas […]

Tougher Rules for Ride-Hailing Businesses in China

In October, some of China’s largest cities—including Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Tianjin, and Hangzhou—rolled out new regulations on internet-based ride-hailing businesses. China has thus become the first country in the world to create a formal legal framework for the sector. The regulations limit the pool of drivers and vehicles, citing concerns about traffic and […]

Xi Stresses Party Leadership over State-Owned Enterprises

On 11 October at a high-level national meeting Xi Jinping reaffirmed the centrality of Party leadership over China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs). According to the official Xinhua News Agency, Xi emphasised that under a stronger leadership from the Party—‘the root and soul’ of SOEs in his words—SOEs should serve to implement the decisions of the Party, […]

Mine Blasts Kill Dozens

On 27 September, a gas explosion in a coal mine in Ningxia took the lives of twenty miners. Similar explosions killed thirty-three miners in the municipality of Chongqing on 31 October, twenty-one miners in Heilongjiang province on 29 November, and thirty-two miners in Inner Mongolia on 3 December. More recently, on 5 December a gas […]

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