The question as to whether to engage official Chinese institutions in “dialogue” (known in diplomatic circles as “constructive engagement”) is not confined to the trade union movement. It is the subject of a current debate in government and business circles (even though in the latter it has never been much of an issue unless unions, NGOs and consumers made it one) as well as in all organised groups in civil society. In addition, it is an issue of deep concern, for different reasons, to the trade union movement in Hong Kong, the Chinese democratic opposition and the ACFTU. The way it will be resolved has serious consequences for individuals, for organisations and for the labour movement as a whole. For this reason, it is necessary to deal with it in some depth.

The argument against “constructive engagement” (which not only applies to China but to any dictatorship or police state, such as the Soviet bloc in its day, South Africa under apartheid, or Burma and Indonesia now, to speak only of the post-war period) is that “dialogue” confers recognition, and therefore legitimacy, on the partner in dialogue. If this partner is part of the government machinery of an oppressive regime, such recognition will strengthen the regime and its capacity to oppress its people.
It is nonetheless generally accepted that governments need to maintain inter-state relations regardless of the form of government or the regime of the countries they deal with, although there are more or less temporary exceptions also to that principle. As for business, despite views to the contrary in the business community itself, it is accepted that certain social, political and moral responsibilities also apply to its activities: these are made explicit in a number of codes of conduct, including the ILO’s Tripartite Declaration of Principles on Multinational Enterprises. Even though such principles are generally honoured in breach rather than in observance, heavy pressures have occasionally been exerted on companies not to invest in dictatorships in order not to strengthen them economically (f. ex. South Africa or Burma) and their argument that business was value-free and neutral have been rejected by unions, NGOs and in some cases even by governments.
In the case of China, Wei Jingsheng had this to say in a recent interview: “They say that Chinese only yield to quiet diplomacy. Sometimes that’s true. But now the Communists have raised this principle to the standard of all diplomacy. Furthermore, the Chinese government can critique the West and its governments all it likes, but the Chinese reject any criticism directed at them as interference in their own sovereignty. Therefore Beijing is exercising increasing influence in the West and Western people don’t understand how much their own governments are being corrupted by Chinese practices – which benefit big businessmen.” (The failure of the European Union to submit a resolution critical of China’s human rights record at this year’s session of the UN Commission on Human Rights is a perfect example. However, not only governments are contaminated: the servile second-guessing of the Chinese leadership’s wishes by media tycoon Rupert Murdoch is another good example of what Wei means).
“Western diplomats say they have been assured by Chinese leaders that they will increase human rights. But that means they have entrusted the Chinese people to leaders who have absolutely no interest in human rights.” Wei also said. As to Western businessmen, they should be aware that China is in an economic crisis. “It’s not something that may happen later. It’s happening now. Huge numbers of unemployed, strikes and economic disappointment: they may lead to great violence inside China. By helping authoritarian governments like China with military and economic assistance, by helping them get over crises without demanding political change, the West is also helping to prop up authoritarian governments all over the world.”
Whatever the consequences of the policies and actions of government and business and their respective responsibilities, the position of civil society institutions is different still, inasmuch as they carry additional responsibilities derived from their mandate.
In the case of trade unions, that mandate is clear: it derives from their reason for existence, which is to defend the interests of their membership and, from the origins of the trade union movement to the present day, this has carried with it the obligation to work for progressive social change, to defend freedom and justice and to defend democracy, not only as a final goal but as a permanent social process and as a working method ingrained in the movement itself.
It may be useful to recall what the Constitution of the ICFTU has to say in this respect. Its preamble states:
“Believing that freedom of thought, expression and association must be translated into actual conditions affecting the lives of the workers and their relations with their employers, public or private, and with the state, the ICFTU proclaims the right of individuals: to social justice and the opportunity to lead a full and decent life; to work and choice of employment; to security of that employment and of the income deriving from it; to adequate protection of their lives and health in all occupations; to mutual protection of their interests, through forming and joining trade unions which shall be free bargaining instruments and which derive their authority from their members; and to democratic means of changing their government.
“The Confederation, proclaiming the right of all peoples to full national freedom and self-government, will support efforts toward creating conditions for the realisation of this right at the earliest possible moment.
“The Confederation affirms that universal well-being based on free labour and economic democracy together with social justice and security are foundations on which to build lasting peace, and that the denial or restriction of these rights is an affront to human dignity and a threat to peace.
“As an organisation fervently upholding the principles of democracy, it will champion the cause of human freedom, promote equality of opportunity for all people, seek to eliminate everywhere in the world any form of discrimination or subjugation based on race, religion, sex or origin, oppose and combat totalitarianism and aggression in any form. It pledges solidarity with and support to all working people deprived of their rights as workers and human beings by oppressive regimes.”
In the following chapter, the ICFTU declares its aims to be, among others:
(b) to seek universal recognition and application of the rights of trade union organisation;
(c) to further the establishment, maintenance and development of free trade unions, particularly in economically under-developed countries;
(e) to undertake and co-ordinate the defence of the free trade unions against any campaign aiming at their destruction or at the restriction of their rights or at the infiltration and subjugation of labour organisations by totalitarian or other anti-labour forces;
(j) to protect, maintain and expand the system of free labour and to eliminate forced labour everywhere.”
Given that the totalitarian nature of the Chinese regime is generally recognised and not in dispute in any serious organisation in the free trade union community (ICFTU, ITSs, ETUC and their affiliates) and given that the nature of the official Chinese labour movement, the ACFTU, as an organ of the Chinese state is also not in dispute, one presumes that the organisations which have followed and promoted “constructive engagement” policies with respect to the ACFTU while subscribing to the above principles must have had overriding reasons to do so, at any rate after 1989, when the international trade union movement decided to freeze all contacts following the repression of the democracy movement.
Either they must believe that their “dialogue” with the ACFTU actually advances the fundamental and commonly accepted principles of the free trade union movement, or else they must have extraordinarily powerful reasons which lead them to disregard these principles in order to achieve another objective deemed more important than adhering to principle. In either case, one would expect them to recognise an obligation to explain their policy. The key questions in explaining trade union “dialogue” with state-run trade unions in a dictatorship have to be: for what purpose? and at what price?
One argument, for example, often refers to the size of the country and of its population as a sufficient reason to maintain or resume official contacts. Yes, as de Gaulle said: “China is a big country, inhabited by many Chinese”. However, it is no larger than it was when “constructive engagement” was not an issue, for example in 1989 when China was declared out of bounds. No one has suddenly been struck by the fact that China was a very large country and has developed new political insights from this recognition. Besides, since when did the size of a country legitimise a dictatorship? Are dictatorships in small countries worse than in large countries? And what has changed since 1989? Did the government apologise to its victims or to their relatives? Did it admit that its crimes were mistakes? And is there a prescription on political crime?
A second line of argument goes: “all governments and TNCs are going there”. An amalgam is often made between the conduct of states, companies and unions, as if they were comparable. As we already saw, there is a fundamental difference between the responsibilities of governments and business on the one hand, and of trade unions on the other.
Democratic governments maintained embassies in Nazi Germany and companies from democratic countries invested there. Whatever one may think of this, it did not lead anyone in the trade union movement, least of all the representatives of the genuine German unions in exile and in the underground, to maintain that this was a reason to establish relations with the Nazi labour front (DAF). No-one in the trade union movement advocated “constructive engagement” with the Spanish fascist syndicates even as millions of tourists were visiting Spain every year; in fact, when a delegation from this organisation appeared at a workers’ group meeting at the ILO in 1974 and refused to leave, the entire workers’ group walked out and met elsewhere. And what would the persecuted and jailed Japanese trade unionists, and there were social-democrats among them, have thought if the International Federation of Trade Unions in 1938 had decided to “constructively engage” the labour front of the military dictatorship, the Sangyo Hokokukai?
A third line of argument (sometimes related to the size issue) goes: “you can’t isolate China”. This is a false argument. The alternative for the trade union movement is not between “constructive engagement” and “isolation”. The fallacy here is to treat “China” as an undifferentiated whole (thus accepting the official view that the government speaks for the people) and not to recognise that, as in any dictatorship, there is a struggle going on between the government and the people, and therefore a choice to be made and sides to be taken. Organisations that send high-profile delegations to visit the government and any of its subsidiary agencies, such as the ACFTU, may well isolate themselves from the people, in this instance the workers, and those who support unofficial organisations may well isolate themselves from the government. Which is worse?
A second point to be made here is that a lot depends on the terms of “engagement”, even within the framework of official contacts. For example, when programs of visits are not negotiated beforehand and a delegation goes on sight-seeing visits rather than visit a prisoner in jail, it conveys the wrong signals about the seriousness it attaches to human rights violations.
A fourth line of argument sometimes heard is: “the Cold War is over.” This is brought up on the mistaken assumption that the opponents of “constructive engagement” are inspired by anti-Communism, and that what bothers them about the ACFTU is primarily that it is an organisation sponsored by a self-described Communist state (or “socialist” in the Stalinist sense of the term). That is not the issue at all. The issue is that it is an institution of a state, whatever its political label, that is oppressive of workers and hostile to any genuine expression of workers’ interests. The fact that it calls itself a “trade union” merely adds insult to injury. For that very reason, those who oppose “dialogue” with the ACFTU also oppose “dialogue” with the Indonesian FSPSI, which is an agency of a dictatorship originating in the bloodiest massacre of Communists of the post-war period. Significantly, the ACFTU maintains a close and cordial relationship with the FSPSI.
By analysing the mission reports of the organisations which sent delegations to China, in some cases resulting in longer-term co-operation agreements, some motivations and explanations emerge that are less primitive and can be a matter for serious discussion. Typically, such reports come in three parts: a mission statement sometimes (not always) stating the reason for the delegation; a descriptive part which reports what the delegation saw and what it was told by its Chinese hosts, and a conclusion, sometimes containing policy recommendations. Let us look at the arguments for “dialogue” that can be gathered from these mission reports, explicitly or by implication.
One is the need to gather information about the situation (wages, working conditions, labour/management relations, the role of the ACFTU, policies and operations of transnational corporations). The problem with this is that factual information on any of these points is readily available on the outside. Most of it is public knowledge and whatever is not can be acquired from numerous institutions specialising in the observation and analysis of Chinese affairs, with a wide range of political approaches. None of this requires top-level contacts with the ACFTU leadership or other representatives of the government, much less “high level missions”.
In general, it is striking how little effort is made by organisations sending delegations to China to gather serious and comprehensive information from available resources beforehand, even if only to prepare their own delegations.
Another motivation is the belief that democratic trade union organisations may be able to change the ACFTU for the better through contacts. One delegation, for example, detected “a strong wish in certain sections of the ACFTU to become more independent” and suggested that “support for that tendency through contact with alternative models of worker organisation could be more beneficial than isolation.” Another union said that one of the purposes of its mission was to “advance democracy in China through contacts with the trade unions there” and its leader remarked that “more democracy can also grow out of the enterprises.” That is an argument that deserves serious consideration.
In any mass organisation in any dictatorship country there are bound to be individuals and even groups, in general fairly low in the hierarchy, who are becoming impatient with the permanent balancing act forced upon them between the pressure from below and the policies imposed from above, who have genuine sympathy for the workers they are supposed to represent, who would support them if conditions were right and who therefore aspire to a more independent role for the trade unions. There is no doubt that such groups and individuals also exist in the ACFTU.
In the past, the ACFTU has not always been a monolithic whole. Before 1989, the research department of the Trade Union School in Beijing had a tradition of independent and unorthodox thinking. In 1989, at the beginning of the democracy movement, the ACFTU expressed some support for the students who initiated it. The banner of the ACFTU appeared amidst the million demonstrators who walked through the streets of Beijing in mid-May. When the student hunger strike was on, the ACFTU even donated CNY100,000 to the students, and it can be assumed that the dismissal of Zhu Hanje, ACFTU general secretary, at the end of 1989 resulted from that donation. It was not until June 2, practically on the eve of the massacre, that the ACFTU was brought in line and started denouncing the WAF.
Although the ACFTU, like the other mass organisations, was brought under tight party control after 1989, it may be assumed that the impact of the current economic and social crisis has not left the organisation untouched, and it is more than likely that new pro-democracy and pro-worker tendencies are arising in it, particularly in the provinces and enterprises where workers’ pressure is strong. The articles recently published in the “Workers’ Daily”, as well as the increasing nervousness of the party and the PSB (see above), may reflect some these pressures.
Three considerations must, however, be kept in mind:
(1) The ACFTU remains a subordinate organisation under tight party control, with no autonomy whatsoever. Because its place in the state machinery is a particularly uncomfortable one, right at the heart of the social contradictions of the system, under pressure from party, managers and workers at the same time (the unions are “undergoing a real psychological crisis” the “Workers’ Daily” wrote on December 22), its cadres often complain about having to “face more regulations”, about “needing more respect from managers”, etc. This does not have to mean that the organisation is getting more militant, only that its cadres are becoming more frustrated with their situation as the importance of the ACFTU in the state bureaucracy actually declines. Also, it cannot be excluded that certain cadres are telling foreigners what they want to hear. Therefore caution should be exercised in evaluating such critical comment: it does not have to mean that the ACFTU is getting ready to play an independent role. And, wherever sincere democrats may be in the ACFTU structures, they are certainly not found among the top leadership which meets with visiting high level missions from abroad.
Regarding democratic rights and trade union rights the position of the leadership has never varied. All foreign missions who dutifully brought up the issue of jailed trade unionists were told that no one in China is jailed for trade union activities, only for breaking the law: they were criminals who had a subversive political agenda. Even the hope that the mere mention of these cases would send a message to the political leadership may not be justified: on one mission, which included this reporter, the stenographer stopped taking notes as soon as the name Wei Jingsheng was mentioned.
(2) All informed observers concur that there is no possibility of the ACFTU evolving into an independent organisation by itself. In order for this to happen, there would have to be a serious division in the party and the emergence of a strong reformist-progressive tendency prevailing over the party conservatives, with repercussions in all state institutions: the army, the PSB, etc. and, in due course, also in the ACFTU. This is not an impossible scenario (in fact it is one of the possible best-case scenarios) but it assumes in any event that far larger forces than trade union organisations will be at work when this happens, and it is certainly not visiting foreign trade unionists who will influence the outcome of such political struggles.
(3) The question then arises: should one not prepare for that day by cultivating contacts as from now? In this respect, it is important to learn from the experience of analogous situations in the former USSR and in the Soviet bloc. Despite the fact that the collapse of the Soviet system was totally unforeseen by Western trade union organisations (at any rate within the time frame that it actually happened) and caught all of them by surprise, there are Western European trade unionists who will today in all seriousness claim that their own past contacts with the Soviet and Eastern European state trade union structures contributed to the emergence of the present democratic trade union movement.
There is absolutely no evidence to substantiate this claim. On the contrary: the official contacts between Western European unions and those of the Soviet system, like the contacts between certain social-democratic parties and the ruling Communist parties of the bloc, were conducted on the assumption on both sides that the Soviet system would continue virtually unchanged for a hundred years. The ambition of the “constructive engagers” of that time was not to change the system but to “secure peace”, in some cases to promote trade, and for the Communists among them, to actually prop up the system. The democratic trade union opposition in the USSR and elsewhere in the bloc received virtually no support before Solidarinosc arose in Poland. The strike wave in the USSR in 1962 and the general strike in Novocherkassk which was crushed militarily by the KGB with thousands of deaths went unnoticed by the Western trade union movement. The repression of the Hungarian revolution of 1956 and of the democracy movement in Czechoslovakia in 1968 caused an outcry of indignation (like Tiananmen) but it did not take long for East/West trade union diplomacy to be back on track in the name of “realism”.
When an independent and democratic trade union movement eventually emerged throughout the former Soviet bloc, it came as a by-product of cataclysmic changes in which trade union diplomacy played no role whatever. Even where the new democratic trade unions emerged through the reform of old structures (CMKOS, MSZOSZ, CITUB, etc.) their leadership was composed of entirely new people who had no history of previous contacts with the Western European trade union movement and owed nothing to those contacts.
Other comparisons that have been made to justify “constructive engagement”, like support that was effectively given to unions in South Africa under the apartheid regime, are entirely disingenuous. Any well-informed, experienced and honest trade unionist will recognise that the conditions under which anti-regime trade unionists had to operate in apartheid South Africa, formidable as the South African police might have been, were easier than the kind of repression facing workers who were trying to do the same thing in the Soviet bloc in the past or in China today. In addition the trade unions in South Africa with whom we engaged were not themselves instruments of the very repressive state they were struggling against.
As in the former Soviet bloc, changes in China will come from the inside, through the struggles of the Chinese people and of the Chinese workers, as the economic and social contradictions of the system make it unworkable and force changes in the political regime. They will certainly not come as a result of exchange visits between top leaders and cadres of the ACFTU and the democratic trade union movement. When the change comes, as it eventually must, then the democratic trade union movement must be ready to support and assist the Chinese workers in every way it can. In the meantime it has a responsibility in not delaying that day, even by minutes, by conferring credibility and legitimacy on their oppressors.
Finally, several organisations have stressed the need to establish some sort of connection with operations of transnational corporations in China. This is certainly a serious problem and a matter of legitimate concern. Foreign direct investment in China rose to USD45.2 billion in 1997, up 8.5 percent compared with 1996 levels, and although the forecast for this year is a decline in FDI, China remains the second largest recipient of FDI after the United States. A large number of TNCs have invested in China and their operations there are out of the reach of the international trade union movement. One union which sent a high-level mission to China in 1994 stated: “we must prevent the transnational corporations from gaining a competitive advantage through social and environmental dumping.” The question is whether maintaining contacts with the ACFTU is a solution to this problem.
In the first place, very many TNC operations (foreign-invested enterprises, or FIEs) do not even have an ACFTU union. For example, statistics from 1995 showed that the rate of ACFTU membership in FIEs in Guangdong was only 22.4 percent. Out of 14 FIEs visited by an investigating team that year, information on union membership was not available from three and the ACFTU was only present in five of the remainder. In the other six enterprises the workers said that they had no union and that they did not even know what a union was. According to a survey of Chinese workers in British-Chinese joint ventures, published by the British Journal of Industrial Relations in 1996, 6 percent of the workers interviewed commented positively on their union and 60 percent had never heard of it. These are only two examples among many.
That, however, is not even the main problem. The main problem, as anyone who understands the function of the ACFTU in the state apparatus must be aware of, is that even when there is an ACFTU union in an enterprise, it is in general controlled by the authorities and the management and cannot be a useful counterpart to a democratic trade union. In an interview in 1994, Klaus Zwickel, president of the German IG Metall, reported that “trade unionists at VW in Shanghai clearly appeared more confident than those in other enterprises” and surmised that this was “surely the consequence of frequent contacts with the colleagues from Wolfsburg”. However, The position in 1997 at the VW plant in Changchun is that all contact between the German and the Chinese staff is prohibited (for example, Chinese staff are prohibited from using the same car as German staff and, if caught, may be fined anything from CNY50 to 100). This may not apply in Shanghai and it could be interpreted as a confirmation that such contacts do have a positive effect since the authorities are afraid of them, but it also confirms that the authorities have the means to put a stop to contacts that do not serve their purposes.
The simple fact is that ACFTU “unions” are not unions in the normal sense of the word. This is often glossed over in mission reports when phrases are used like: “the plant is claimed 99 percent organised with around 90 full-time officers all elected by secret ballot” or: “the ACFTU has succeeded so far in organising 42 percent in all joint-ventured and private enterprises” as if “organised” had the same meaning in China as in a country where free trade unions operate. International co-operation between unions only makes sense if it can ultimately affect management conduct and policies. This is only possible when organisations on both sides are accountable to their membership and capable of defending its interests, not when one side is accountable to the state and to management and is not free to act against management. When did relations with labour organisations in the Soviet bloc ever contribute to a joint action against a transnational corporation?
Nor should there be any illusion about the long-term effect of receiving delegations of ACFTU representatives on study visits, training courses etc. Obviously any Chinese participants in such visits will be selected by the authorities and controlled by the PSB. One can always hope, of course, that among the many seeds sown one will end up growing and flowering under favourable conditions, but that does not make a lot of difference in the great scheme of things.
A last word on the nature of contacts with people living under totalitarian regimes and police states. It is a fact that they are human. Even Stalinist bureaucrats can be human, if they do not happen to be professionals of terror (who are also found in other regimes). Many trade unionists from democratic countries, who are normal human beings functioning in a democratic environment, have discovered, sometimes to their surprise, in Hungarian wine cellars or in East German saunas or over a glass of brandy for breakfast in a Yugoslav hotel or, why not, at a lavish Chinese meal in Beijing, that the people in front of them were ordinary human beings like themselves: they like a drink, they like to crack a joke, they may have to take pills against various ailments that befall human beings, they may have bad teeth, they may take pride in their children and they have emotions.
This common humanity is a thread of hope that links all of us together. But our mandate as democratic trade unionists imposes on us the difficult responsibility to make sure that it does not become a thread of complicity which is the negation of hope. It is the tragedy of totalitarian regimes that they do not allow human beings to live and act according to their humanity. The people across the table have a role and a function and officials of democratic trade union organisations are supposed to relate to them in that role and in that function. So, in such situations, spare a thought for the young women who burned to death in the factory fires, for the trade union activist who gets regularly beaten up in the “re-education through labour” camp, for the worker who is frog-marched around the factory yard for not meeting production targets and who the people across the table from you cannot defend even if they wanted to. Some of them might tell you, if they could speak without fear, that they are deeply ashamed of it – because they are human beings too, just like yourself.