 she's on her way. And Dan, you have a way of like signaling us when we have a certain critical mass of people to get going I assume or do we just start at the stroke of eight? No, I'll give it a you know give it a few minutes. And you were able to see as people come on. I think so yeah okay. Okay I'll click the button now then. Very good. Alive. Good evening or good morning as you are joining us or good afternoon from different parts of the world. We're very delighted by the robust response that we've had to this webinar to discuss both the conditions of the struggle that is emanated around the JSEC Technology Factory campaign starting last August and most importantly to focus on what it is possible for people to do if they're interested in trying to promote the labor rights, the academic freedom and the rights of association for Chinese workers and Chinese students. We will wait for a few minutes before we get going for people to join the webinar. So you have come right on time we thank you and we just ask you to wait patiently for a couple of more minutes. So I think we will get started. I'm sure people will be continuing to join for a while. My name is Ellen David Friedman. I am going to be hosting the webinar and I first would like to thank Labor Notes for providing this platform for us. We're doing the outreach that made this webinar possible and thank our associate at Labor Notes, Dan DiMaggio for handling the technical aspects of this webinar. Let me quickly run over the agenda. This call we hope the last one hour and what we hope to accomplish is I will take about five minutes to give set the context for what we understand by Chinese activism and labor activism at this moment in history. I will have then be the honor of turning this over to Michael Ma who is a colleague of ours in Hong Kong with the organization SACOM which is Students and Scholars Against Corporate behavior which has been playing a central role in organizing the solidarity campaign and then as a point of personal pride my son Eli Friedman who is a professor at Labor School at Cornell's field of research is Chinese labor. Michael is going to give us sort of the history, the events of the JASIC case. Eli is going to help us understand what steps people have taken both here and around the world to try and offer response and then we would like to give the last half hour of our call for questions and conversation. Please feel free to type questions in either to the text box that you will see on the right-hand side of your screen or on the bottom banner of your screen is a Q&A box that can go in either place and we hope to take as many you know as many questions as we can possibly handle. So let me let me establish a little context for this we got to see who the participants were that were registered for this call it's quite impressive includes a wide range of people work in unions in academia grassroots activists people do international solidarity some people with quite a long history in the field of kind of labor others we have no idea so I will hope to do justice to some of the basic conditions that we operate under it will be for some of you China as I think people know has a single trade union it is a it is a department of the state the all China Federation of trade unions it does not represent workers in any notion that most of us would have it primary function has been historically to organize labor for production purposes labor organizing in China cannot go on outside of the trade union unfortunately it also cannot go on inside the trade union as we will see in this case of the basic struggle and this is not a unique case where workers came to recognize that the conditions of employment required some response to gain protection from exploitation they went to the trade union and were told they couldn't be helped and then you will hear what happened after that so the union is really not a factor here nevertheless as many of you are well aware workers you take matters into their own hands and for decades there are every of the year every month here after year hundreds and hundreds of strikes and forms of labor protests that are not strictly speaking legal are strictly speaking illegal the government often does not respond very repressively who is strike unless they are concerned that for certain features of the strike that may present some trouble for them let me just step back for a moment to get a bit of historical context there was a period under the previous leadership in China the presidency of Hu Jintao about 2003 to 2013 which many of us now understand to have been a period of great liberalism it wasn't absolutely obvious at the time but it became very clear once Xi Jinping became president so up until 2013 there was it was still very constrained but there was lots of opportunities for students or workers either trade unionists for scholars researchers labor journalists and labor lawyers to engage in some inquiry to meet one another begin to think about what what would be a system of industrial labor relations in China that might be sensible given political economy and its history it was a promising period of time and I know there are people on the call as we did spend time in China then in a fairly optimistic mood but that changed in 2013 and what we have seen since then has been a very very steady closing down of channels of communication closing down of opportunities for research closing down of opportunities for organization and for communication between different groups between scholars and students and workers and trade unionists so we now find ourselves at this unusual moment of this Jasek struggle which has had a very very unusual set of conditions for it that have not been seen in China for many many years which is that university students from elite universities prestigious universities in various parts of the country who had begun to recognize that the official ideology that Marxist ideology of the state actually was inconsistent with their understanding as they started to read Marx themselves and also to look around the country and notice the inconsistencies between the ideology and what was actually happening workers and not surprisingly seen this happen many times in history students become ideologically woken up and they go to work in factories they meet workers and they join into their struggles in ways that are both supportive and also to try and help them develop their tactics for struggle so that happened here the result was as you will hear in more detail that there was a fierce fierce crackdown by the state both against the workers at the Jasek factory and against who had taken who had taken up their cause I'll just finish by saying there have been solid solidarity efforts ongoing since that time we have felt as we often feel in working in ways in China somewhat helpless to try and make an impact this is a very competent a very powerful authoritarian state does not want to see any alliance between students and workers intervene to prevent that so with that I'm going to turn this over to Michael and Michael ask you to just give us the facts of the case and help people understand the sequence and who has been affected and in what ways and again for people joined late I'm sorry Michael Ma works with an organization in Hong Kong or he is joining us called students and scholars against corporate misbehavior or Sakong Michael thanks so much cool thanks Ellen for during the introduction I hope I'm speaking a lot you know because there are you know so many participants in this webinar and I'm so surprised that people from all over the world are concerning this issue and also wanting to pay attention and also show support of this very progressive and devoted students and workers who defend for basic workers right in China so like as I mentioned I'm going to talk about the case like specifically and also talk about some of our observation during our period of support and concerns of this issue so my first of all Jason is a company in Sunja China the southern part of China so Jason is a company that make routers for giant like companies for some like shipbuilders for steel machines for boilers and other you know giant purpose so the company has been having a very mean management in their factory in China in Sunja China where it has been having a lot of complain but before the J6 struggle in 2018 happened there were not like very large scale struggle or labor strike happened in the company before so this this J6 struggle happened in May 2018 from a group of workers who tried to unionize themselves so the group of workers were having a lot of complain in the company and they were trying to tackle this problem by setting up a trade union under the framework of the official legal ACAPU Chinese single trade union system so they asked for the permission of the higher level the district level trade union and the district level trade union did approve their request and allow the name to form the trade union to start forming the trade union in the factory so the workers in the factory start you know collecting signature trying to organize the first workers congress in order to set up a trade union that truly represent the workers unfortunately this act alerted the management of the factory and there was in the management of the factory start trying to build up a yellow trade union that you know of course for the interests of the company instead of the workers and this act was later recognized by the district trade union the district trade union betrayed the workers and said like I didn't let you to organize your own trade union so the workers who attempted to form the trade union where we were fired and they of course didn't give up they they started having contacts and also a lot of black speeches outside the factories but later on many of them were arrested by the local government so since then a lot of students from top universities in China including packing university renming university packing language universities at else more than 16 universities with more than a dozen of university students launched a petition to support these workers who tried to unionize and also a they call that like j6 support group a physical support group were formed in Sun Jian students from all over the country and also workers from surrounding area arrived the area of the j6 factory to form the support group in order to you know support this workers who tried to defend for their basic workers rights so the support group have more in size of like 100 people composed of students workers and also some other activists from you know different part of the country so they started together and started to do out lots of online publishing and also online mobilizing more and more people were concerned and learned about this issue and many people have showed the support so this you can imagine definitely make the government feel uncomfortable because the network is so large and also they are they're mobilizing ability was so strong they can mobilize people from all over the country so in 24th of august they faced the j6 support group faced the first crackdown and mass arrest or 20 events we would say so at midnight there was that around like 1 a.m. when the group of supporting members were resting in a house the riot police broke the door broke into the house and arrest more than 15 students workers and also other supporters excuse me so since many of these support group members are from universities and they actually from those student groups marks a student's society and also other students labor group in the universities despite the frontline crackdown this universities are groups are also facing lots of suppression in the campus for example they were having difficulties to renew their uh uh uh society registration and also many students uh activists and many students executive members were um were having lots of difficulties uh when they had class or when they were summoned by the uh management of the university and they have like hours and hours of talk telling them not to go to singe anymore and not to make trouble you know put in for trouble anymore so uh this uh this um this crackdown continued until early november until another wave of arrest uh happened so uh in early november more than 15 unionist official workers in the acfp the single triumphant in china and some uh workers in the workers center uh around jc factory graduates students who supported the workers and also some other activists were arrested in different cities of china because of their participation in the jc uh struggle so you can imagine like the government were having a list they know that we are supporting the workers and it's not just because you are now you're currently in sunjan but because you have participated they know you and they found you in your home country uh in your hometown i mean so um this is the second crackdown the activist space and um after that uh more and more students were having trouble in the university uh one of the leading marxist group in the university which is the packing university marxist society were falsely reformed by the by the uh university the university uh falsely changed or the executive member of the student group replaced the original one with some new one who can be controlled by the university and also those new ones have never been participating in the uh in the marxist society but instead have been harassing the original marxist society members uh because of the university order so after the reform of the um falsely reform of the marxist society a student called jen jen jen who's uh who was supported by jen jen workers were uh expelled from the university and also a lot of students were um summoned uh and fostered to watch a confession video quote unquote confession video of those activists who were arrested earlier so activists who were arrested earlier uh in the video uh said that they were um they they feel so regret about what they did they think that the country uh has been doing very good has been trying very hard to settle the workers problem say like um they didn't um they didn't understand what they do and they were influenced by others influenced by some group of people who have political agenda blah blah blah like that so these activists were forced to make confession uh in front of the camera and then the authorities using this video to push away or to threaten other student activists outside to stop you know the whole campaign um and because of this uh like very annoying video the students uh they um secretly record the whole confession video and also translate the ads into english and publish the ads and soon the students were arrested as well on 21st of january so uh like up till now there are still more than 40 people uh being detained because of this issue for two uh students and for two workers um excuse me so this is like the basic timeline of the issue uh if you're interested you can actually go to uh a facebook page that uh set up by our organization called global support for disappeared lap test activists in china and you can see a information package present very clearly the timeline and the whole issue um so i was talking about the fact but uh uh this is actually a very unique and important labor rights issue happened in recent china and i would like to talk about some of our observation and some of our um analysis of this issue so first of all i would talk about like how is it different from um some previous labor struggle happened in the southern china the pure worth of data so first of all a very unique feature of this j6 record is that that is very local it was initiated within china previously a lot of labor struggle had in pure worth of data were um having some involvement from uh hong kong angio because a lot of hong kong angio have been doing a lot of groundwork uh in pure worth of data setting up a trade i mean like a worker center setting up different community center that supports workers uh in you know in labor struggle or in like injury cases or in other different kind of labor issue so previously a lot of labor struggle in pure worth of data have a background or had the association of hong kong angio but this time the j6 struggle is a very local thing it got its support from local students local workers the involvement of uh hong kong angio like saco and others supporting hong kong angio hadn't fairly late relatively and also we are not you know in the very core of the decision-making pym we are supporting but the whole thing was initiated and functioned by um by the local chinese mainland chinese activists secondly just like what alan has mentioned um the association of workers and students in this j6 struggle was very very strong i would say this has a background that is uh progressive student groups in universities have been doing very great work for for about a decade so for example the marxist society in packing university they have been organizing different activities including reading groups including uh this set and also they have been doing infestigation in their university for their backup cleaning attendants or security guards in their campus they have been working together to actually walk into the community of the workers and also in the summer break they always do undercover factory investigation or in factory experience they work in the factory as in the ordinary workers they apply them working in the factory as ordinary ordinary workers and then they recall what we see in the factory they um they they try to feel how it how it is like to be a frontline factory workers even though they are very elite they are very elite universities so uh these students have been doing a lot of work with their campus workers and also they know a lot of workers from the factory and according to multiple no they also know some workers personally in josec factory so the association because of their previous earlier very good work and also uh the another observation is that i mean like difference is that uh this time they are having a very strong ideology they are having a very strong marxist ideology we can see that from their uh language from their promotion from their mobilizing materials they always ask to compare the workers situation the workers social status the workers material status back then in the early social estate of china and nowadays they ask why if you say china as a social estate why are workers nowadays having such a poor working condition or social status and when they try to unionize themselves according to the law totally complying with the law why are they facing all this crackdown from the from the state from the government while the you know the capitalist while the other companies are having so many people in the country receiving all the tax reduction receiving all the benefits in all different uh aspects so uh these are some differences so uh the josec struggle compared to previous workers struggle in pure alpha delta and lastly i would like to talk about uh some economic background of the struggle so this struggle didn't pop up from nowhere we always believe that this happening uh under a macro background of the chinese economic development so many of you might know that um the chinese economic development have slowed down in recent years a lot of factories have moved to either southeast asia for example especially for the garment industry or for the toy making industry or this lighter lighter industry they moved to southeast asia right now in asia and all the other some other manufacturers they moved to inland china let's say zheng zhou et cetera et cetera like boxcom or other electronics factory so uh the factories that that remain in sinjian are a very very difficult type they are struggling to survive and the government also understand this so this is the economic the government and the company are very conscious that they they are not able to afford a better working condition of workers that imply a higher labor cost and also they are definitely not happy to see the labor activism is going stronger and more powerful in the area so uh excuse me so uh when the workers and students start going together especially when the students are having such a large flexible powerful national network that are able to mobilize a lot of students and workers to sinjian in a very very short period of time this definitely alerted the government and making it very very wary because you can imagine today this happened in sinjian and they can mobilize hundreds of students to support these workers things happened in pianjin in shanghai in different cities tomorrow students can still mobilize these people and they're going and it's going to accumulate because when if the students and workers have the first successful experience they will definitely gain more confidence and they're definitely going to do more and more work attract more and more people to involve in this activism totally what we want to see but totally not the government want to see so they have to crack down the students and workers at the very beginning so we can see that uh in this jade struggle the number of arrestee is very very large the period of arrest of the detain the detention is very very long and also the students outside nowadays are still facing a lot a lot of suppression and trouble from the university from their own parents and also from the government students like zhan zhen zhen were expelled which is extremely extremely rare before student activists are usually um relatively safe and protected so and and also we know that not only zhan zhen zhen but a lot of other students are having lots of trouble now outside the outside inside the universities and also the government apparently very obviously have ordered the university to suppress the student organizations inside the university because these student organizations has way too many excellent student activists and also labor activists and also we can see that the crackdown is not only only jasic supporting work but also if you have rat news five other activists who have never participated in the jasic struggle but they have have been doing very good work in the pre-war for the delta area to support collective bargaining including wei jun zhan zhiyu and the other labor activists were also arrested and detained till now uh since january this work uh this this labor activists did not participate in the jasic struggle but they were still detained at this point we believe that this because the government is really alert because of the jasic struggle and they want to eliminate any potential risk potential harm in the eye before anything happens the government understand that during the economic downturn they cannot stop the workers from organizing strike or uh you know like uh organizing struggle because this is natural they can't stop them because they are their workers they just struggle because they have difficult time but they can i mean the government can stop the activists from escalating the struggles so they have to control the most inferential the most active activists at this point before everything's happened michael i'm gonna i'm gonna have to stop you there so we can um have enough time for the the rest of the discussions right but that was a superb job at packing in uh lots of important detail about these struggles um i i just will take a minute to raise one question that came up in conjunction with your presentation someone you've been released and is she safe this is one of the leading activists from the marxist group and the answer is no it's not been released and there's no reason to believe that she's safe um for those of you who joined us late we've just heard from michael ma with uh sock home students and scholars against corporate misbehavior in hong kong has been playing a very critical leading role in the solidarity work in this campaign and now we're going to turn it over to elie freedman a professor at the labor school at cornell whose field of specialty is chinese labor and he's going to talk a bit about the response that has emerged uh to these events thank you and i first want to thank labor notes for for taking us on it's it's a really it's great that we can reach so many people all over the world on this very important issue i'm going to keep it extremely brief so we can have more time to focus on q and a but i just want to emphasize to begin with why i think international solidarity is particularly important for this movement and the reason as we've already heard is that the jacic conflict has become extremely sensitive within china and it cannot be discussed on the internet it can you know perhaps in in private conversations people can express their views um but there have been students who've been expelled from university who've been kidnapped literally just you know thrown in the back of cars and disappeared um simply for expressing their views on this even for people who didn't um actively participate in the movement in shenzhen so it is impossible for people there to speak up about it now if you know of course we are all well i presume most of the people watching anyway are outside of mainland china um although if there are participants from mainland china than i welcome all of you um when we think about sort of pressure points um there are they are few and far between um as we've already heard the trade union in china is not a genuine trade union um and there are very there are not substantive international trade union links um the employer a jacic technology certainly doesn't care they're not they're not vulnerable to sort of you know naming and shaming a type of campaign the chinese government is is pretty resistant um i think that there are that we should make efforts to try to pressure them um but we don't have um a lot of sort of measures sort of course of measures that we can take against the chinese government um so i think we should pursue those to the extent that they exist um but they're they're kind of limited in scope um on the other hands we've noticed that universities present a potentially interesting point of leverage and i'm speaking now uh sort of from personal experience some of you may have heard about a step that cornell's school of industrial and labor relations took this past fall to suspend a student exchange program we had with renmin university uh in beijing and we did that in response to the university's ongoing repeated and egregious violations of their students academic freedom going so far as to actually be complicit in in a kidnapping of their own student um when we suspended um that relationship and i'm not going to give details about it be happy to go into that in the q and a when we suspended um that relationship it generated a major response in china it's difficult to get um the chinese government and the media to actually respond but that happened so the the state media had to write an article about it they responded to it by saying that we were actually following um the lead of donald trump which um my colleagues found pretty amusing um but uh the minister a ministry of foreign affairs had to address it and they were clearly quite concerned and i think that the reason that they um were concerned is this universities in china particularly elite universities such as uh renmin university pking university nanjing university there's some of the places that have been most repressive towards left-wing students who were involved in the jayson case and other forms of labor activism um they're under a lot of they have sort of competing imperatives right now one of those imperatives is to maintain ideological control and that's why they're cracking down on their students the other imperative that they have is to become so-called world-class institutions and to internationalize to develop closer ties and more substantive ties with foreign universities but there's a tension there because these universities are continually continuously and repeatedly um contradicting the values of other universities right which is at least you know you know for most universities outside of china have to at least um claim fidelity to things like academic freedom even if they themselves don't always uh protect it so i think that there's a possibility to kind of put pressure on this tension between chinese universities uh imperative for political control and to internationalize um and try to push them to either stop repressing their students or to pay some sort of um symbolic price you know i want to also just note that direct work or to worker solidarity of course would be wonderful um and would presumably be the foundation of any um more transformative movement i think in the current conditions um it's unfortunately extremely unlikely to be able to develop those although we should um where those sorts of possibilities exist um we do think um that you you know unions um outside of china have some limited capacity they can't call the a c f t u um and get a response most likely um but there may be other ways that they can exercise power symbolically or that they can contact a university or government um contacts that they have outside of china and use that to sort of mobilize um some sort of pressure um so i'm going to leave it at that again in the interest of time um and i i believe that michael is going to talk about some concrete uh action possibilities um and then we'll open it up for q and a michael somehow you yeah uh you have gotten sideways i don't know how that happened but yeah so um yeah thanks elie for introducing what you have been doing very quick to work and uh just like what elie has mentioned we believe that the universities in china are now playing a very important role not only because they are still cracking down the students activists inside the university but also we want to guarantee that uh this uh students organizes organizations and also societies in the university that create a lot of elite activists and also very progressive activists uh would have a space to survive in the future so despite a lot of work uh you know uh elie and also other people in academia have been doing in the in the campus we also like to invite you every one of you should participate in this department to send an email to the education department of the chinese government because this uh department is you know like the um higher level management of the packing university learning university and other universities then national universities so we would like you to send an email to the department telling not to suppress not to crack down the students activists anymore and they should stop expounding the student activists student activists have no guilt supporting the workers we have drafted the email uh i think then uh it's going to help sending the link out you just have to fill in your name your uh for example your university or your organization to show who are you then we can pressure the government to at least open up some space for activists inside china while a lot of people are doing more institutional effort in different part of the world thank you so much um we have been some answering some questions as they've come along i just want to point out that uh rich ablam who is a labor academic in california i believe it's santa barbara uh asked how is it possible to more effectively or to effectively use lists or networks that we have of labor academics and um i think based on the experience uh the elie described i'm sorry the experience that elie described between cormel and renmin university if you are an academic yourself if you are in academic networks um and you have colleagues that have direct uh relationships programs or shared research projects uh with chinese universities um and you can send a letter of inquiry or a letter of a censure or a letter of criticism um the main universities that michael mentioned uh that have been involved are the primary targets uh and we can we can list those again for you but it's not unreasonable if you have a relationship uh with a chinese academic or an academic program to say we have heard of this uh suppression of of uh academic freedom and suppression of students in other universities and ask them to comment on it okay um other questions um uh michelle chen asked uh michael if you can uh answer this question given the rollbacks when free expression and other civil liberties in hong kong has sakhom itself faced any pressures in terms of its solidarity campaign and advocacy from hong kong and are there tensions around the safety of hong kong based hong kong based activists who are in contact with or traveling to work with mainland peers thanks michelle a very good question um well first of all i would have to point out that the shield uh hong kong has or hong had uh as not as uh in fact uh in fact the board not as powerful as before you might have heard about the cosway bay bookstore uh incident that a bookstore owner who has been publishing some books that uh criticized the chinese documents were kidnapped in china and also a swedish citizen called wei minghai were kidnapped in thailand because of this cosway bay bookstore issue as well by the chinese government i mean kidnapped by the chinese government so uh it shows that hong kong is not hundred percent safe anymore and we are very conscious about that so far because of this jazzy struggle we did not uh face any uh physical assault yet but we have received some call from the national security asking uh why are you doing all this media work why are you organizing all these uh solidarity campaigns and else um they didn't you know explicitly tell you to stop and we know that you know we are on the list um but so far we are still uh like working on the campaign and we believe that um the space is still there but we definitely have to be careful because we can see that uh the rule previous the previous rules are not hundred percent effective anymore previously student activists inside the university current students are safe they will not fix out because of what they do but now they expound and we would not stay in hong kong activist staying in hong kong 100 percent safe anymore michael thank you um there have been several questions about uh jasig itself uh its ownership and its relationship to the chinese government and also the skill levels of the workers anybody like to comment on that um yeah i i read the questions um so first of all the skill level of the workers i would say uh the the skill level is still quite slow i mean the workers are not like technicians or they're experienced uh in certain um you know skills uh act back so they are ordinary workers ordinary frontline workers receiving um like close to the base of wage for their minimum wage i mean close to the minimum wage for their basic wage uh and the relationship of the jasig company to the government first of all this is a private company so this is not a state-owned company however the owner of the company who is called pan le he is a representative of the san jen cp people congress so more or less he can still stay he's the official and also the uh the head of the hr department who is called uh is a representative of the district people congress uh i would have to point out that this you know these positions are in relatively quite ill not a significant position but still you can see uh they are having some relationship with the government but we don't think this is the major or the core reason why uh the company can uh or the the issue is so sensitive in the eye of the government we don't think it is because it it is just because the workers are touching the uh the the benefit or the interest of of the boss who is a official but instead because of the student organizing a so powerful itself we've had a question about uh why has the ilo case been laid fortunately uh ictu the international trade union has uh has filed j6 fractal as part of the crackdown of the organizing in china however because of the very complicated procedure and also the very busy agenda of ilo the ilo committee of freedom of association still have not got the time to read relative materials so far so uh if things go well they can reveal the materials in march so in next week in next month and if things go well earliest uh the the intimate reports will be issued in coming november i know chinese document will have to respond to the report in coming november so uh will not be happening very soon thank you um there have been a number of questions about uh what are the kinds of tactics that we would consider to be effective in this period of time um i i think that our best understanding is now this is a two-part answer one is one of the tactics that might be effective we only know based on seeing response and the only tactic that has shown any response so far from the government was when the relationship was severed between cornell and renman university and it elicited an incredibly strong response which is why some of us think that focusing on this question of academic relationships is so important uh as we know most universities in the u.s now have some kinds of partnership programs of some sort of chinese universities it is beneficial uh to students in both countries it's beneficial to investors in both countries um these relationships they'd like to maintain i believe that they will be sensitive if this was to a trend that would spread so we i think we encourage people to pay attention to this um see whether academics that you know have have partnerships are aware of them on universities and send letter begin to send inquiries to their counterparts in the chinese universities um there have been some suggestions uh putting into the chat group i think what i would say about those is that the second criteria about what is effective is what are we able to do uh the solidarity movement outside of china is very small um are limited numbers of people that are paying attention to this issue yet and so we need to take realistically how we can apply our um our density and their influence um i'm going to go to some other questions um um somebody wants to know whether it is possible to conduct a social audit on the jacic company from buyer companies under the global value chain does anybody like to respond to that um i guess i can share a little bit so despite the uh supporting of jacicstrados.com you know our daily all the way we work is to do undercover investigation in different factories including boxcon including the factories of h&m sarah and also other international leading brands uh so like first of all we we think that uh social auditing is usually not very effective because there are too many loopholes that the company and the factories can can use to hide their problems we have received multiple reports that the auditors are um are not we're we're not seeing what's the daily operation are they were showed another phase of the factory workers won't not to tell the truth workers are given multiple answers you know so we don't think social auditing we have not we we have been seeing that social auditing is not an effective way and um so we feel like undercover investigation is always too much better but in this case we don't think the investigation in the factory is that important at the stage anymore because the situation the working condition in the factory is very obvious because we have a lot of workers who have been working in the factory for a long period of time we know how poor is the factory but the problem now the students and workers are facing are not from the factory it is from the government so i don't think i think this beyond the factory level yeah connected to that a question was asked about um what it means to the labor movement and to the organized student groups that there has been change in the two term limit this is the two term limit for the president of china and the broader agenda of shijing ping in comparison with other more recent uh chairman my question is directed to the state rhetoric or is there a total suppression of any opposition even within the ccp i think that is probably beyond the scope of our call but um if either of you would like to comment certainly it has had a chilling effect yeah go ahead i think that that there's um a couple relevant points the first is is that it is an indicator of a broader sort of a hard authoritarian turn um shijing ping right and it's ever been a liberal democracy but it is it has hardened quite significantly um over the past couple years against workers against students against feminists against lawyers and of course there's the mass internment of Uyghurs and other other minorities in Xinjiang so across the board there's been a hardening and i think that the elimination of terms limits is is an indicator of that but one of the things that i do think is relevant for us is that part of this hard repressive turn has been framed in ideological terms is about reinforcing marxism and about reinforcing socialism and i think that one of the reasons that they have been locked down so hard on these students is because it reveals their the communist party's marxism to be a complete farce and so it makes them look really bad so one of the other things that has happened internationally that that has elicited something of a response i think that was a boycott of the world marxism conference which is a conference held uh it has been held twice in china they're planning another one at some point in the future um and and some of us on this call and others have helped to organize a boycott where we got prominent a leftist to sort of preemptively say we're boycotting this conference because your version of marxism um is uh is false it is and is against the interest of the working class which is pretty basic to you know most understandings of marxism we got some very prominent people to sign on to that including uh david harvey slavoj zizek noam chomsky and that you know definitely made something of an impact so i think that for for those of us in terms of thinking about strategy um pointing out it it leaves them somewhat vulnerable in terms of thinking about you know what is marxism what is socialism um and i think that that does provide at least a rhetorical opening for us and for other sort of uh you know leftist around the world thank you uh ila there is a question now um about the acf to you acf to you is part of the wf to you which also includes some unions that are both members of the icf to you and wf to you for people that don't know this is historically the trade union federations um wf to you were from the communist countries icf to you from the capitalist countries are there any possible unions that would lend their good offices to communicate on this issue and has the acf to you taken any separate public position that is separate from the government and or the party on this issue i asked because from working in vietnam we sometimes saw a diversity of opinions existing but they are not usually publicly expressed anybody like to either do you like to address that i think i can share a bit about what i saw and maybe i'm not sure i feel i am sure that he has a more all-round observation so uh the acf to you the acf to you uh has a double uh goals or identity uh some people always say that acf to you is useless they never think about workers right i don't i don't actually uh agree that they never think about workers if you think about workers but also on the other hand it is a party's entity it has another uh mission it has another uh uh aim or a higher aim that it has to maintain the stability of the party and the country so when these two goals have uh contradiction or have crashed they they write the stability of the party or the state like previously we can see that since uh like earlier uh years of this decade uh the uh sumjong trade union has tried to introduce some reform uh or has tried to promote the collective bargaining but after uh like the step down of that very specific trade union leader the whole trial or the whole reform concept were refold and also uh you know it is much more conservative now i think it is first of all because of the step down of the former trade union leader and also on the other hand it is because of the downturn of the economic development but when it comes to very specifically currently is there any trade union inside the acf to you framework that are willing to speak out for the jacic workers no there's not so i wouldn't just just like very last part and you know where three uh workers in the trade union in the acf to you and were arrested because they tried to be helpful workers and we can see most the results of if you are inside acf to you and you come to help the workers so you know i yes no i i just wanted to add that final point um and just to emphasize that that there were two local level officials within the trade union structure who who were arrested and and you know that was a way of the government indicating that um they had made a mistake in essence by initially telling the workers that they could hold a union election because they they had done that and then they reversed their position and that's when things really are sort of intensified so um you know there are apps you know as in vietnam there are absolutely lots of people in the acf to you who see what's going on and they don't like it but institutionally they are not in a position where they can speak out publicly on it so i can tell you with a hundred percent certainty nobody at the national level leadership nobody at the provincial level leadership in guangdong is going to openly speak out i'm afraid you still have me yes you froze up for a minute but please continue so if you know if there's anyone who has connections to unions or to you know international union federations that have linkages to the acf to you you absolutely should make your position be known it's important that they hear that this is a problem and that you see what's happening and that their silence speaks volumes but really all you can do in this instance i think is to make a sort of is to make a statement but you can't go in with any expectation that they're going to actually do anything about it because they're structurally incapable of of doing anything about this particular case i think we will wrap up maybe with this final question is there any sense of solidarity across the various movements for worker and human rights on the mainland since the government's recent attack but many different groups appeared to be escalating uh from the crackdown in shinjiang to suppression of feminist protesters to clampdowns on the press etc our labor groups aligned with or collaborating with other types of activism um i think i can answer that one pretty easily the answer is no it is very very dangerous for anybody to link up or any groups to link up that's precisely why the government has become so enraged about the connection between the students and the workers so this is um we appreciate you raising the point labor suppression is not the only form of suppression of civil liberties and human rights going on in China by any means but it is not possible for the the victims of this repression connect with one another tragically um we have reached one hour a couple of minutes uh over um let me just sum up by saying that we will uh follow up uh we will send out to people who were registered for the call um a list of resources that have come up here um both background information about jasik uh various websites that are carrying news and also solidarity efforts and we'll welcome you to join those um once again to uh invite any of you who are interested in keeping in touch with us uh please do so um i'll give you the name you can write to uh and demaggio who has been our um uh who has been our moderator here or our technical moderator i mean um if you would like to get in touch with any of us and don't know how to do that directly uh please send your inquiry to dan and he will get it to us um we want to get once again want to thank uh both michael uh i hope everyone appreciates the the risky nature of the work that he and others in sacoam and in hong kong are doing they feel the very very serious threat very close by to them and this is this is an enormous courage uh to do this work um thank you elie i think the example of taking an institutional step um and showing that there is for some consequences uh to the actions the chinese government takes has been incredibly important uh labor notes thank you again for providing this platform thanks everybody for joining us tonight and uh let's let's try and stay in touch good night