Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (21 page)

Yao took Pang’s letters to a shop to be typed up, printed, and photocopied, along with a notice announcing the date of the protest. In their homes, the workers made paste by boiling a mixture of water and flour, and then, in the middle of the night, they set out on bicycles with stacks of the papers. They worked in pairs in the dark, targeting worker neighborhoods across the city. Xiao was responsible for one not too far from Liaotie. His partner watched out for the police while he pasted the letters on walls and telephone poles. It was cold, and he could see his breath in the air as he hurried, trying to prevent the glue from freezing. He wore plastic bags to protect his hands, and brushed an extra layer of paste over each letter to make it more difficult for police to tear down. By the time they finished, it was 3
A.M.

The workers continued to hold meetings, sometimes in factory buildings, sometimes at Yao’s store. Xiao emphasized the need to maintain order in the crowd and prevent tempers from flaring during the protest. Any rash or illegal behavior, he worried, would give the police an excuse to move in. Finally, as the date of the protest approached, the workers discussed a subject that had been nagging at them. What would they do if the police began arresting them? A contingency plan was drafted. The workers considered Xiao, Yao, and Pang their top leaders, but now they made a list of more than forty other workers active in the movement who agreed to take their place if anything happened to them. If police arrested Xiao, Yao, and Pang, another team would take over and lead protests demanding their release. And if those workers were also arrested, another group would step up, and then another and another. At least, that was the way it was supposed to work.

E
VERYTHING SEEMED POSSIBLE
after the first exhilarating day of the protests. As workers from factories across the city poured into the streets, in numbers greater than he had ever expected, Xiao was seized with excitement. Some of the workers carried banners with the names of their factories, others with slogans denouncing corruption. Xiao saw parents marching with their children and pedicab drivers offering rides to the weak and elderly, and he felt proud to be walking among them. As he stood in front of the crowd, delivering a speech outside the courthouse or reading one of Pang’s letters through a bullhorn, he was confident that the long struggle of the workers of the Liaoyang Ferroalloy Factory was nearing a successful conclusion.

Emotions ran high the second day, too. The highlight was a speech that Yao gave in front of city hall. He was standing on a platform, his arm cradling an elderly woman, the widow of a fellow worker. Tears ran down both their faces as Yao raised his voice in anger. “We devoted our youth to the party, but no one supports us in old age!” he cried. “We gave our youth to the party for nothing!” The crowd of tens of thousands was silent, transfixed by his words, and when he finished speaking, it broke into thunderous applause.

After they accepted the government’s offer to negotiate, the Liaotie representatives were ushered into a plush conference room on the second floor of city hall. A deputy mayor, the police chief, the chief judge, and ten other municipal officials sat on one side of a table, and the twelve worker leaders sat on the other, Xiao, Yao, and Pang among them. The atmosphere was tense but the discussion cordial. The deputy mayor promised to address the workers’ complaints if the protests ended, and the police chief pledged that no one would be arrested. Yao told them that the workers were willing to work with the government and would be satisfied if it kept its promises. Xiao raised the issue of corruption, arguing that if corrupt officials and managers were punished, the city’s factories would thrive again. Others discussed the unpaid wages and benefits. At the end of the meeting, the deputy mayor said the government needed more time to respond, because the mayor and party secretary were out of town, presumably attending the Congress in Beijing. But he assured the workers their concerns would be addressed, and their allegations of corruption at Liaotie fully investigated. Encouraged by these conciliatory words, the workers agreed to call off the protests and give the government time to act.

Xiao left the two-hour meeting feeling good about what they had accomplished and optimistic. State media outlets were maintaining a blackout on news of their protests, but foreign news organizations including the Voice of America had reported them, and so Xiao was convinced that party leaders in Beijing were also paying attention. Reviewing the day’s events in Yao’s store that evening, other worker leaders from Liaotie agreed that a pause in the demonstrations made sense. People were exhausted after two days of marches and protests, after all. But the worker leaders also decided they would not wait indefinitely. At a large meeting the next day, the workers agreed that if the city did not respond within six days, they would take to the streets again—before the end of the parliament session in Beijing.

The first three days passed quietly. On the afternoon of the fourth, one of the Liaotie managers summoned Xiao and told him the deputy mayor wanted to meet with him in private. Xiao did not want to go alone, and instead brought Yao, Pang, and a fourth worker representative with him. A government car whisked them to city hall. The deputy mayor was an older man named Chen Qiang, a tall, bookish bureaucrat with glasses and a dark complexion. He had impressed the workers in the meeting earlier in the week, because he spoke to them without the patronizing, condescending tone most officials used when addressing workers, and he spoke to them again now in a sympathetic voice.

“Old Xiao, I hope you’ll put the brakes on this movement as soon as possible,” he said. “Don’t push it any further. Your problem is already an international one now. Overseas, they’re calling you labor leaders.”

Xiao understood exactly what he meant. In the mind of a party official, it was not good to be a “labor leader.” The party regarded labor leaders as threats.

“I hope you’ll stop doing this, because we understand this is serious,” Chen continued. City officials were willing to continue meeting with the worker representatives, he said, but the protests needed to stop.

Xiao knew Chen was delivering a message on behalf of the government, but he sensed that the deputy mayor was genuinely concerned. He assumed that meant others in the government were pushing for a crackdown despite the police chief’s no-arrests pledge. Perhaps, he thought, the decision had already been made. Still, he could not imagine backing down. The city had not yet taken any action to address their concerns. The next protest was scheduled to take place in two days, and the workers had already begun posting notices around the city. Xiao thanked the deputy mayor, but said to him, “We can’t rush out and tell everyone not to protest just because you told us not to.”

That night, when Xiao, Yao, and Pang briefed other Liaotie worker leaders about the conversation, they concurred with the decision. Workers from factories across the city had united behind them, and both the foreign media and the party leadership in Beijing were paying attention. It had taken the Liaotie workers years of hard struggle to get to this point, and they wanted to keep the pressure on until the government made real concessions.

The next morning, the government made its move. Yao Fuxin went out early to purchase goods to stock his convenience store and never returned. At first, no one knew what had happened. The police denied they had arrested him, and because party officials had ties to organized crime, his family worried that he had been kidnapped or worse. Xiao raced around the neighborhood, searching for his friend. He found his moped discarded on the side of a road, and a resident told him that he saw three men seize Yao and take him away in a car. None were wearing police uniforms, but Xiao decided the workers needed to act on the assumption Yao had been arrested. As the news spread, people responded with outrage. The worker leaders convened an emergency meeting at Liaotie that night, but there was no need for debate. They all agreed to push ahead with the next day’s protest—and make Yao’s release their top demand.

Few of the worker leaders went home after the meeting. Most stayed with friends or relatives, because they were worried police would try to break up the protest by rounding up all the organizers. Xiao bundled himself up in a thick cotton coat and hid in one of the factory’s abandoned buildings. He found an empty room on the second floor with a broken window that afforded a view of the moonlit street below, then curled up in a corner of the cold, dirty floor. His body ached when he woke at sunrise the next day and set out to lead the protest. “At the time, my mind was clear,” he said. “All I could think was I needed to get Yao out, even if it meant risking my own life.”

The turnout was even larger than it was the first day, when as many as thirty thousand had marched, and there was a new, angrier edge to the demonstration as throngs of workers demanded the release of one of their own. The protesters hoisted banners denouncing Yao’s arrest, and elderly workers wept as they sang “The Internationale” and cursed the party. Xiao and Pang rallied the crowd outside the public security bureau, and Yao’s twenty-five-year-old daughter picked up the megaphone and demanded the police come out and tell them where her father was. Antiriot and paramilitary police surrounded city hall again, and in a sign that party leaders in Beijing were worried, a team from the Xinhua news service was sent to the scene with instructions to file internal reports about the demonstration.

The day ended without any response from the government, so the workers resumed the protests the next morning. Xiao spent the night in the abandoned building again, but he knew the police would eventually find him if they wanted. When he returned home after the second day of protests, they did. Instead of arresting him, though, they took him to a meeting room in the local police station. Four men were waiting—the precinct police commander, a security official from Liaotie, and two city officials—and they made an unusual request. They wanted Xiao to take a vacation in Yunnan Province, on the other side of the country. They had already purchased plane tickets for him and his family, and they put them on the table in front of him.

“As long you take the trip and forget about Yao, we’ll let bygones be bygones,” one of the officials said. “If you’re short of money, that’s easy to take care of, too.”

Xiao told the men his conscience wouldn’t let him enjoy a vacation while Yao was in prison. “If you want to find someone else, fine, but I can’t,” he said.

The official gave him another chance. “We’re going to squash you if you don’t go. This is the last time we try to change your mind.”

Xiao knew that his family didn’t support what he had been doing and wanted him to stop. He knew that it would be tough for them to make ends meet if he were arrested. But he stood firm. The entire conversation at the police station lasted less than ten minutes.

It was cold and raining the next morning, and only a few thousand workers showed up for the protest. As they demonstrated outside city hall, a paramilitary police commander used a loudspeaker to declare a curfew under martial law and order them to disperse. Hundreds of armed officers suddenly moved in and split the workers into two groups. Xiao and Pang were in the smaller one. As they marched home, plainclothes officers grabbed Xiao and stuffed him in a car before the workers could react. The police had a tougher time getting Pang. The workers formed a wall around him, trying to protect him, but the police surrounded the group and slowly tightened the circle, picking up workers and tossing them aside like garbage. As the injuries mounted, Pang offered to just turn himself in.

T
HE DAY AFTER
the arrests, the government announced a concession: it would investigate the charges of corruption and begin distributing half of the back pay owed the Liaotie workers. At the same time, though, it warned that “a tiny minority of people with ulterior motives” would be held responsible for the demonstrations. The Liaotie workers’ movement was at another crossroads. With Xiao, Yao, and Pang in prison, a second tier of worker organizers was supposed to take the lead and organize protests to get them out. But it never did.

One of the men who failed to rise to the occasion was Chen Dianfan, the worker who had proposed that the protesters carry the Mao portrait. A stocky Liaotie employee in his sixties, he had worked alongside Xiao, Yao, and Pang since the first days of the protests, and he was considered one of the most enthusiastic and reliable of the labor organizers. But after the arrests, he disappeared. Months later, workers told me they believed Chen had been paid off by police. He landed a comfortable job in the cafeteria of one of the Liaotie plants, at a time when men half his age were struggling to find work and other labor activists had been blacklisted. Workers treated him as a pariah. Faced with the prospect of abandoning his family and going to prison, or living with the shame of abandoning his friends and fellow workers, he appeared to have chosen the latter.

Several months after the protests, I called Chen and tried to arrange an interview with him, but he said that his phone was tapped and that he couldn’t meet me in person because he was under police surveillance. When I asked if it was true that police had paid him off, he replied, “I can’t answer your questions.” Before hanging up, though, he said he still supported Xiao, Yao, and Pang, but was too frightened to continue with the protests. “They were candid and straightforward men, and all they wanted was welfare payments and better treatment for our workers. They were treated unjustly,” he said. “But you have to understand, I came under intense pressure from above after they were arrested. I was told I would be sent to prison if I dared do anything similar.”