CHINA’S export-processing factories have been hit by a wave of worker unrest raising the question of how this will affect long term prospects for the mainland’s growth model.
Last year saw more than 1,000 strikes involving plants with more than a hundred workers each in the fastest-growing province of Guangdong alone. This comes on top of tens of thousands of other protests across the country which are presenting Beijing with an unprecedented set of challenges
At one Japanese-owned factory in Shenzhen, across from Hong Kong, as many as 16,000 workers took part in a week-long protest in the summer, and, for the first time, laid out demands to form an independent trade union.