11/8/2022 0 Comments Wechat emoji 8 points communistIt was the biggest mass arrest of workers for three years. Then, last July, he read online about the arrest of 29 workers and activists who had tried to register a union at a factory belonging to Jasic Technology, a manufacturer of welding equipment. Luke threw himself into leftist student organising on campus, speaking to and supporting the many cleaners, cooks, guards and rubbish collectors working there. “I had a really strong wish,” he remembers. The women were the children of workers, as he was, and were about the same age. As he applied acrid-smelling adhesives to the cardboard, he turned over the “tiny coincidences” that separated the lives of the young women from his own, as a student at one of China’s most celebrated universities. I thought, this capitalist mode of production can turn people into feudal serfs,” says Luke (not his real name). The boss of the workshop had brought them there from their hometown, and they did not know when they could go back. Unlike him, they had not had the opportunity to finish school. What startled him most were the hands of the dozen young women living in the workshop, which were “swollen like radishes” from the cold. There, he put together cardboard packages for 12 hours in a below-freezing room with no heating. Along with 20 other young workers, he squeezed into a minivan with nine seats and was driven to a small workshop on the outskirts of the city. It was not in the countless hours of compulsory Marxism lectures he endured as part of the undergraduate curriculum, but during his first-year winter break in Beijing. Luke, an undergraduate student at one of China’s elite universities, recalls the day he became a committed Marxist.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |