DISCUSSION
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August 15, 2010
Workers Let Go by China’s Banks Putting Up Fight
By ANDREW JACOBS
BEIJING — These are heady days for China’s state-controlled banks. Last month, the Agricultural Bank of China made its stock market debut, bringing in $22 billion for the largest public offering ever. A sister government-run bank, the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, now has the highest stock market value of any bank in the world.
But the windfalls have created an unusual problem for China: white-collar unrest. A few days after the Agricultural Bank went public, dozens of former bank employees stealthily gathered outside the headquarters of the country’s central bank. There, after distributing small Chinese flags, they quickly pulled on red and blue T-shirts that read, “Protect the Rights of Downsized Bank Workers.” By the time they had unfurled their protest banners, the game was over.
Within minutes, a flock of police officers had swept everyone into five waiting public buses. By 8 a.m., when the People’s Bank of China opened its doors for business, the only sign of the rally was a strand of police tape.
During the past two years, these unlikely agitators — conservatively attired but fiercely determined — have staged similar public protests in Beijing and provincial cities. They have stormed branch offices to mount sit-ins. A few of the more foolhardy have met at Tiananmen Square to distribute fliers before plainclothes police officers snatched them away.
Strategizing via online message boards and text messages, they speak in code and frequently change cellphone numbers. Their acts of defiance are never mentioned in state-run news media.
According to one organizer, a scrappy former bank teller named Wu Lijuan, there are at least 70,000 people seeking to regain their old jobs or receive monetary compensation, a sizable wedge of the 400,000 who were laid off during a decade-long purge.
Like many other state-owned companies, the banks slashed payrolls and restructured to raise profitability and make themselves more attractive to outside investors.
“They tossed us out like garbage,” Ms. Wu, 44, said before a recent protest, scanning fellow restaurant patrons for potential eavesdroppers.
"All we’re asking for is justice and maybe to serve as a model for others who have been wronged.”
For a government determined to maintain social harmony, the protests and petitioning are vexing. Compared with farmers angry over seized land or retired soldiers seeking fatter pensions, the bank workers — educated, organized and knowledgeable about the Internet — are better equipped to outsmart the public security agents constantly on their trail.
“What the government fears most are people capable of organizing, and the bank workers have discovered their power,” said Renee Xia, international director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. “The sad thing is that they’re not going to succeed because the more organized you are, the more harsh the government’s reaction.”
Protest organizers are often thrown in “black jails” — extrajudicial holding pens — where they are sometimes beaten before local police officers arrive to take them back home. The recalcitrant and unrepentant sometimes end up in labor camps, where they can spend up to three years without being prosecuted for a crime.
The years of fruitless protest and economic hardship have taken a toll. According to an informal tally by protest leaders, dozens of former bank staff members — most of them unsuccessful at finding new jobs — have committed suicide.
“To be middle-aged and live off your elderly parents is humiliating, and it can become unbearable,” said Huang Gaoying, 49, a teller who was dismissed from the Industrial and Commercial Bank known as I.C.B.C., in 2002.
Even if their numbers are smaller, the former bank employees are not unlike the millions of factory workers shed during the effort to restructure inefficient state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s. In the years that followed, they, too, clamored for redress but were eventually silenced.
In 2000, the Supreme People’s Court put an end to any hope that the legal system might adjudicate such disputes, saying that plaintiffs from state companies had no standing in Chinese courts.
Like the laid-off factory workers, the former bank employees have no independent trade union or association to take up their cause.
Yi Xianrong, a scholar at the Financial Research Center, part of the state-backed Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the bank workers were unfortunate victims in the necessary revamping of a bloated and inefficient sector.
“In a centrally planned economy, people were put into certain units without regard to need,” he said. “It didn’t matter if you actually worked or not.”
By Western standards, the banks were — and arguably still are — overstaffed, a legacy of their role as the pillars of China’s socialist financial system.
Mr. Yi was not particularly sympathetic to the complaints of the former employees, saying they signed and accepted buyout packages. Many of the workers would disagree, saying they were often forced to accept paltry compensation, sometimes just two or three years before planned retirements.
In interviews with nearly two dozen of the aggrieved, the pattern of dismissals was roughly the same. Workers over 40 were singled out first and there was no room for negotiation. (At I.C.B.C., the standard buyout was about $370 for every year worked.) Those who refused an offer were simply let go without compensation.
Asked to comment on the plight of laid-off workers, the banks — I.C.B.C., the Bank of China, the Agricultural Bank and China Construction Bank — declined.
The story of Ms. Wu, the protest organizer, is typical. Hired just out of high school by an I.C.B.C. branch in central Hubei Province, she said she received numerous “model worker” commendations and had expected lifetime employment.
In 2004, as the bank prepared to issue stock, she was among 160,000 employees laid off. The compensation offered, she said, was unacceptable. “After 20 years at the bank, I thought I deserved more,” she said.
The six-year odyssey — some might say obsession — has included lawsuits, the petitioning of China’s top leaders and the storming of the branch president’s office, which turned into a brawl and led to a brief jail sentence for Ms. Wu.
The banks are so powerful that they can enlist the local police to keep an eye on the most troublesome employees, often following them to Beijing, where their protests and petitioning can prove embarrassing for executives back home.
“The head of my branch said he would never give me my money and spend any amount to fight me to the end,” Ms. Wu said.
After her husband divorced her, Ms. Wu moved to Beijing with her teenage son to be closer to the country’s leaders, who she believes would force the banks to make their former employees whole, if only they knew. She lives in one of the so-called petitioner villages on the outskirts of the capital and survives by collecting recyclables or working as an artists’ model.
In the days after the protest, as the other detainees were released, Ms. Wu remained in custody. Her son, Xiao Yang, 22, said the police searched the family’s home and left with her computer’s hard drive. He said he had the feeling she might not be coming home for a long time.
“She is a very stubborn person,” he said. “I’m definitely worried about her, but there’s nothing I can do.”
Lim Xinhui contributed research.
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
American children of the 19th century had a reputation. Returning British visitors reported on American kids who showed no respect, who swore and fought, who appeared — at age 10 — “calling for liquor at the bar, or puffing a cigar in the streets,” as one wrote. There were really no children in 19th-century America, travelers often claimed, only “small stuck-up caricatures of men and women.”
This was not a “carefree” nation, too rough-hewed to teach proper manners; adults deliberately chose to express new values by raising “go-ahead” boys and girls. The result mixed democracy and mob rule, assertiveness and cruelty, sudden freedom and strict boundaries. Visitors noted how American fathers would brag that their disobedient children were actually “young republicans,” liberated from old hierarchies. Children were still expected to be deferential to elders, but many were trained to embody their nation’s revolutionary virtues. “The theory of the equality” was present at the ballot box, according to one sympathetic Englishman, but “rampant in the nursery.”
Boys, in particular, spent their childhoods in a rowdy outdoor subculture. After age 5 or so they needed little attention from their mothers, but were not big enough to help their fathers work. So until age 10 or 12 they spent much of their time playing or fighting.
The writer William Dean Howells recalled his ordinary, violent Ohio childhood, immersed in his loose gang of pals, rarely catching a “glimpse of life much higher than the middle of a man.” Howells’s peers were “always stoning something,” whether friends, rivals or stray dogs. They left a trail of maimed animals behind them, often hurt in sloppy attempts to domesticate wild pets.
And though we envision innocents playing with a hoop and a stick, many preferred “mumbletypeg” — a game where two players competed to see who could throw a knife closer to his own foot. Stabbing yourself meant a win by default.
Left to their own devices, boys learned an assertive style that shaped their futures. The story of every 19th-century empire builder — Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt — seems to begin with a striving 10-year-old. “Boy culture” offered training for the challenges of American manhood and a reprieve before a life of labor.
But these unsupervised boys also formed gangs that harassed the mentally ill, the handicapped and racial and ethnic minorities. Boys played an outsize role in the anti-Irish pogroms in 1840s Philadelphia, the brutal New York City draft riots targeting African-Americans during the Civil War and attacks on Chinese laborers in Gilded Age California. These children did not invent the bigotry rampant in white America, but their unrestrained upbringing let them enact what their parents mostly muttered.
Their sisters followed a different path. Girls were usually assigned more of their mothers’ tasks. An 8-year-old girl would be expected to help with the wash or other physically demanding tasks, while her brother might simply be too small, too slow or too annoying to drive the plow with his father. But despite their drudgery, 19th-century American girls still found time for tree climbing, bonfire building and waterfall-jumping antics. There were few pretty pink princesses in 19th-century America: Girls were too rowdy and too republican for that.
So how did we get from “democratic sucklings” to helicopter parents? Though many point to a rise of parental worrying after the 1970s, this was an incremental change in a movement that began a hundred years earlier.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, middle-class parents launched a self-conscious project to protect children. Urban professionals began to focus on children’s vulnerabilities. Well-to-do worriers no longer needed to raise tough dairymaids or cunning newsboys; the changing economy demanded careful managers of businesses or households, and restrained company men, capable of navigating big institutions.
Demographics played a role as well: By 1900 American women had half as many children as they did in 1800, and those children were twice as likely to live through infancy as they were in 1850. Ironically, as their children faced fewer dangers, parents worried more about their protection.
Instead of seeing boys and girls as capable, clever, knockabout scamps, many reconceived children as vulnerable, weak and naïve. Reformers introduced child labor laws, divided kids by age in school and monitored their play. Jane Addams particularly worked to fit children into the new industrial order, condemning “this stupid experiment of organizing work and failing to organize play.”
There was good reason to tame the boys and girls of the 19th century, if only for stray cats’ sake. But somewhere between Jane Addams and Nancy Grace, Americans lost track of their larger goal. Earlier parents raised their kids to express values their society trumpeted.
“Precocious” 19th-century troublemakers asserted their parents’ democratic beliefs and fit into an economy that had little use for 8-year-olds but idealized striving, self-made men. Reformers designed their Boy Scouts to meet the demands of the 20th century, teaching organization and rebalancing the relationship between play and work. Both movements agreed, in their didactic ways, that playtime shaped future citizens.
Does the overprotected child articulate values we are proud of in 2014? Nothing is easier than judging other peoples’ parenting, but there is a side of contemporary American culture — fearful, litigious, controlling — that we do not brag about but that we reveal in our child rearing, and that runs contrary to our self-image as an open, optimistic nation. Maybe this is why sheltering parents come in for so much easy criticism: A visit to the playground exposes traits we would rather not recognize.
There is, however, a saving grace that parents will notice this summer. Kids are harder to guide and shape, as William Dean Howells put it, “than grown people are apt to think.” It is as true today as it was two centuries ago: “Everywhere and always the world of boys is outside of the laws that govern grown-up communities.” Somehow, they’ll manage to go their own way.
________________________________
A National Endowment for the Humanities fellow at the Massachusetts Historical Society who is writing a book on the role of young people in 19th-century American democracy.
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
But President Xi Jinping has targeted Mr. Zhou in an extraordinary corruption inquiry, a first for a Chinese party leader of Mr. Zhou’s rank, and put his family’s extensive business interests in the cross hairs.
Even by the cutthroat standards of Chinese politics, it is a bold maneuver. The finances of the families of senior leaders are among the deepest and most politically delicate secrets in China. The party has for years followed a tacit rule that relatives of the elite could prosper from the country’s economic opening, which rewarded loyalty and helped avert rifts in the leadership.
Zhou Family Ties
Fri
13
Nov
2015
Are Languages Products of their Environment?
DISCOVER MAGAZINE published this very interesting article:
Languages Are Products of Their Environments
The characteristics that make each language unique may actually be adaptations to the acoustics of different
environments.
Tue
03
Jun
2014
The Case for Reparations
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
By Ta-Nehisi Coates
May 21, 2014
Chapters
- I. “So That’s Just One Of My Losses”
- II. “A Difference of Kind, Not Degree”
- III. “We Inherit Our Ample Patrimony”
- IV. “The Ills That Slavery Frees Us From”
- V. The Quiet Plunder
- VI. Making The Second Ghetto
- VII. “A Lot Of People Fell By The Way”
- VIII. “Negro Poverty is not White Poverty”
- IX. Toward A New Country
- X. “There Will Be No ‘Reparations’ From Germany”
Mon
02
Jun
2014
A Look At 19th Century Children In The USA
PHILADELPHIA — DINNER with your children in 19th-century America often required some self-control. Berry stains in your daughter’s hair? Good for her. Raccoon bites running up your boy’s arms? Bet he had an interesting day.
As this year’s summer vacation begins, many parents contemplate how to rein in their kids. But there was a time when Americans pushed in the opposite direction, preserved in Mark Twain’s cat-swinging scamps. Parents back then encouraged kids to get some wildness out of their system, to express the republic’s revolutionary values.
The New York Times
Sunday Review
By JON GRINSPAN MAY 31, 2014
Mon
21
Apr
2014
Investigating Family's Wealth, China's Leader Signals a Change
From The New York Times
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and JAD MOUAWAD
APRIL 19, 2014
HONG KONG — His son landed contracts to sell equipment to state oil fields and thousands of filling stations across China. His son’s mother-in-law held stakes in pipelines and natural gas pumps from Sichuan Province in the west to the southern isle of Hainan. And his sister-in-law, working from one of Beijing’s most prestigious office buildings, invested in mines, property and energy projects.
In thousands of pages of corporate documents describing these ventures, the name that never appears is his own: Zhou Yongkang, the formidable Chinese Communist Party leader who served as China’s top security official and the de facto boss of its oil industry.
Write a comment
Cupid (Tuesday, 17 August 2010 22:35)
The indignant and outrageous staff will overwhelm my pure soul
after reading it twice, if the things really happened as the contributor stated, i think China will no more a democratic , civilized and humanistic country. however, every coin has two sides and one thick cloud may eclipse all the sun, we must analyze and look into the problems and contradictions before we make a conclusion, we should not arrive any conclusion rashly or abruptly, or you wii be an idiot without perception. so just deal with problems with dialectic method of analysis which is always acceptable and sensible .
If the bank ICBC is really so brutal and snobbery, i think it is her fault to treat workers just like a rabbish, so where is the huam dignity and basic huamn right. as a girl put in, she was fired after worked in ICBC for couple of decades due to downsize and the worker over 40 will be resigned without any room to explain and give some compensation. i am terribly sorry to hear that, just encounter this situation bravely and present a petition to the SC and CBRC wich will give you a reason, the ICBC will not so powerful after all. at the same time, you must treat this thing with a peace mind, it is normal for the institute to downsize due to economical restructuring just as some workers fired by other company due to economical downturn , they are also the live person, there are also many manage-level person will reduced to be a common as company bankruptcy, so you could not make easy things complicate and disrupt social order . what you said above , i rarely heard of it before, may be there is stll one of the majority was expelled by the bank duo to bad work performance or other self reasons. so they just attack the bank and ferment the public to blackmail. i do not know it clearly , what i said it is not 100% sure, may be i will go to check online or though other channels.
all in all , one clap doesn't make a applause. China is still a great country in the world , there is no absolutely perfect thing . i hope everything will be clarified.