On 26 September, the Panyu district court in Guangzhou held separate hearings for labour activists Zeng Feiyang, Zhu Xiaomei, and Tang Huanxing. Zeng was sentenced to three years imprisonment, suspended for four years, for ‘gathering a crowd to disturb social order’, while Zhu and Tang received prison sentences of eighteen months, suspended for two years, […]

On 19 June, hundreds of residents in the southern fishing village of Wukan, Guangdong province, returned to the street five years after protests had flared up against official corruption and land grabbing. The protesting villagers demanded the release of Village Chief Lin Zuluan, who had been detained on 18 June for his persistent advocacy for […]

After the passing of the Charity Law and the highly controversial Foreign NGOs Law earlier this year, over the summer, the Chinese authorities have continued to move forward with the revision of legislation related to the management of civil society organisations. Since June, the Ministry of Civil Affairs has issued draft registration and management regulations […]

In mid-July, China’s National Bureau of Statistics issued a report warning that sustaining economic and wage growth will be a challenge in the second half of 2016. In particular, the report cited industrial overcapacity in the state-owned coal and steel sectors, and declining agricultural prices as contributing factors. In the first half of this year, […]

In July, the struggle of Walmart workers in China entered a new phase. Early that month, Walmart workers at retail stores in Nanchang, Chengdu, and Harbin staged wildcat strikes against the company’s new working hour system. Dozens of workers from each of these stores participated in the strikes, holding signs, and chanting slogans inside the […]

On 17 July, Chinese labour activists commemorated the second anniversary of the death of Zhou Jianrong, a forty-nine-year-old worker at a Hong Kong-owned footwear factory in Shenzhen. Two years ago, Zhou committed suicide by jumping out of her dormitory after being fired for her role in organising a strike. Since May 2014, Zhou and her […]

On 16 June, Lu Yuyu and his partner Li Tingyu, chroniclers of protests in China on their website Wickedonna, were detained in the southwestern city of Dali, Yunnan province, where they lived. They are accused of ‘picking quarrels and provoking troubles’, a charge that is often used to silence activists in China. Since 2012, the […]

On 31 May, prosecutors in Inner Mongolia announced the indictment of seventy-four people for the killing of seventeen mine workers. The killings were for the purpose of faking mining accidents in order to blackmail mine owners running unlicensed operations into paying compensation. The compensation payments ranged from five to eight hundred thousand yuan. In a […]

On 16 May, Walmart announced a new flexible scheduling system—the so-called ‘comprehensive working hour calculation system’—to be implemented across its retail stores in China, and asked its employees to sign a written declaration in which they agree to the new system. In contrast to the current standard eight-hour working day for fulltime workers, with the […]

On 28 April, the National People’s Congress, China’s legislative body, passed the long-awaited Law on the Management of Foreign NGOs’ Activities within Mainland China. The new Law, which comes into effect on 1 January 2017, fills a grey area in the Chinese legal system, stipulating that any foreign group wishing to operate in China must […]