Introduction
In the summer of 2018, workers at Jasic Technology in Shenzhen attempted something rarely seen through to the end in China: they consulted the official trade union federation, received verbal encouragement, collected signatures according to procedure, and applied to form a union of their own. What awaited them was dismissal, beatings, and detention. As news spread on social media, left-wing young people — Peking University graduate Yue Xin and Sun Yat-sen University master’s graduate Shen Mengyu among them — formed a solidarity group and travelled south, speaking outside a police station and singing the Internationale as they demanded the detainees’ release. Before dawn on 24 August, riot police raided the group’s lodgings and took away about fifty people; arrests then spread to cities across the country, and left-wing student societies at several universities were disbanded or forcibly reorganised. The Jasic incident stands out because the workers and their supporters carried the banner of Marxism throughout, invoked China’s Trade Union Law and constitution, and kept their demands strictly within labour rights — and were suppressed all the same. It has become a landmark case for understanding the tension between labour organising and China’s official union system.
Background: Jasic and the workers’ demands
Jasic Technology, founded in 2005, develops, manufactures, and sells welding equipment. Listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, it operates plants in Shenzhen, Chongqing, Chengdu, and elsewhere; its Pingshan plant in Shenzhen employed about 1,000 workers. According to AsiaNews and other outlets, workers there had long complained of a punitive regime of fines, illegally altered shifts and forced overtime, and withheld or underpaid wages, social insurance, and housing-fund contributions; workers said they were treated “like slaves.”
Institutional context matters. In China, a workplace union is legal only under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), and grassroots unions are usually dominated by management, making bottom-up organising attempts rare. After the December 2015 arrests of labour NGO staff in Guangzhou and elsewhere, the space for labour activism had been narrowing steadily. China Labour Bulletin counted more than 1,860 strikes or worker protests across China in the twelve months to August 2018. It was against this backdrop that the Jasic workers resolved to build a union strictly by the book.
What happened
The trigger. In April 2018, worker Yu Juncong complained in a factory WeChat group about being forced to spend rest breaks on compulsory “fitness walks” — eight hours over five days. By his account, a team leader beat him for it, and on 10 May he was fired. His co-workers took the case to the Pingshan District Federation of Trade Unions. According to the workers’ open letter and multiple media reports, district union staff initially told the workers they could form a union themselves to resolve the problems. The workers began organising, and by 12 July, 89 workers had signed union application forms.
Management pushes back; the union reverses course. In June, the company convened its own “employee representatives’ assembly,” excluding the candidates the organising workers had nominated, while organising leaders were fired, reassigned, insulted, and threatened. The district union and local authorities withdrew their earlier support and declared the workers’ organising illegal. According to an open letter the lead workers issued on 21 July, from 16 July onward the organisers were beaten or dismissed one after another.
The 20 July clash. On the morning of 20 July, dismissed workers who tried to return to work were carried out of the factory by more than a dozen security guards; one was knocked to the ground. More than twenty workers were taken away by police that morning. At noon, workers and supporters protesting outside the Yanziling police station were detained as well. They were released on the afternoon of 21 July. On 22 July, the workers returned to the station entrance, demanding the legal right to form a union and punishment for those who had beaten them, and sang “Unity Is Strength.”
The 27 July mass detention. On the afternoon of 27 July, thirty workers and supporters protesting at the station were detained again. Human Rights Watch recorded that 29 of them were criminally detained on suspicion of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” of whom 15 were later released; Chinese Wikipedia puts the number arrested that day at 30 (23 men and 7 women). Released detainees told reporters they had been threatened with death in custody and pressed to confess (Reuters; Human Rights Watch); Radio Free Asia later reported that some detainees said they had been handcuffed behind their backs, beaten, and slapped.
The solidarity group and social mobilisation
The 27 July arrests ignited a nationwide solidarity campaign. On 29 July, Peking University students including Yue Xin published a letter of solidarity; similar letters followed from Tsinghua University and elsewhere. One letter was deleted within three hours, by which time it had been read tens of thousands of times; another open letter gathered more than 2,000 signatures. Students at more than twenty universities issued statements backing the workers, and over a hundred scholars — including sociologists Pun Ngai of the University of Hong Kong and Qiu Linchuan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong — signed a petition calling for the detainees’ release. Left-wing networks such as the Utopia website also mobilised: Voice of America reported that the solidarity contingent it organised numbered around 1,100 people, and Wu Jingtang, a worker leader from the 2009 Tonghua Iron and Steel unrest, publicly called for support.
The Jasic Workers Solidarity Group — students, recent graduates, and workers — based itself in Shenzhen and Huizhou, rallying outside the police station, giving speeches, and handing out leaflets. On the afternoon of 30 July, fifteen representatives led by Shen Mengyu delivered an open letter to the Pingshan district party secretary; after reading it aloud they were forcibly summoned by police and, according to reports, released that evening. On 6 August, about eighty supporters rallied outside the Yanziling police station, among them more than forty Communist Party members and retired cadres; Zhang Qinde, a retiree from the Central Policy Research Office with 47 years of party membership, told the crowd they must “stand with the working class and advance and retreat together with the Jasic workers.” On 1 August, Amnesty International called on the authorities to respect workers’ freedom of association and release the detainees; the same day, Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions members and allies marched to Beijing’s Liaison Office in solidarity. On 19 August, Yue Xin published an open letter to the Party Central Committee and General Secretary Xi Jinping demanding the release of the arrested workers and students and an investigation into local “evil forces,” while stressing that the group’s members stood firmly on the ground of Marxism and the working class. On 22 and 23 August, supporters in Beijing delivered petition materials to the ACFTU’s petition office and to the All-China Women’s Federation.
Meanwhile, an official track ran in parallel: on 2 August, official unions at the Guangdong, Shenzhen, Pingshan, and sub-district levels moved into the company and set up a union preparatory group chaired by the Pingshan union’s vice-chair. On 20 August, the company union held its first congress and elected nine committee members — a union formed under official direction, alongside and instead of the workers’ own.
The raid and the arrests
Shen Mengyu’s disappearance. On the evening of 11 August, after dinner with her father in Huizhou, Shen Mengyu was forced into an unmarked car by three unidentified men. The Daya Bay police announced on Weibo that her parents had taken her away and that it was “an internal family dispute; there was no kidnapping.” Yue Xin publicly challenged that account, noting that the four surveillance cameras on the main road at the scene had “suddenly all broken.” Later reporting indicated that Shen was in fact held under surveillance in a Shenzhen hotel, watched in rotation by state security personnel.
The 24 August raid. At about 5 a.m. on 24 August, large numbers of shield-carrying riot police stormed the solidarity group’s lodgings in Huiyang, Huizhou. Human Rights Watch, Reuters, and other outlets put the number taken away at about fifty; Chinese Wikipedia counts roughly ten workers and fifty students. According to The New York Times, as police broke in, the students held hands and sang the Internationale. The same day, solidarity members Gu Jiayue and Yang Shaoqiang were taken away in Beijing, and Guangdong police travelled to the capital to seize editors of the left-wing journal Red Reference, among others implicated in the campaign. Fu Changguo, a staff member of the Dagongzhe (Migrant Workers’) Centre, had already been detained on 10 August. Most students still at university were sent home in batches within two days and placed under surveillance by police in their home localities; graduates and workers were held separately.
Further waves. On 9 September, more than ten workers and students who laid flowers and sang the Internationale at the Mao Zedong statue in Shaoshan, Hunan, were taken away by local police. On 9 and 11 November, more than a dozen people were seized in at least five cities: Peking University graduate Zhang Shengye was abducted on the PKU campus — witnesses said passers-by were beaten too — and, in Shenzhen, police detained two grassroots ACFTU union officials who had helped the workers apply to form a union and advised them on the law. On 30 November, Huang Sha, a lawyer representing Jasic workers and activists, was taken from his Shenzhen home by unidentified men. By the end of November, 32 workers and activists remained in custody or missing, the solidarity group told Human Rights Watch; Radio Free Asia later counted at least 44 people forcibly disappeared or criminally detained across the waves of arrests from July 2018 to January 2019. In December 2018, nearly five hundred people co-signed a letter to Public Security Minister Zhao Kezhi demanding the detainees’ release.
Individual cases and their outcomes
The four workers. Liu Penghua, Yu Juncong, Mi Juping, and Li Zhan were formally arrested in early September 2018 on the charge of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” (contemporary reporting indicates Liu was arrested first, on 3 September, while the other three were initially held under house surveillance before being formally arrested as well). According to Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), a year later the four remained in custody, denied access to lawyers, and no public trial outcome had emerged; a February 2021 report by the rights website Weiquanwang still noted that “nearly two years on, there is no news of the case.” In May 2019, six United Nations human rights experts wrote to the Chinese government about the Jasic case.
Fu Changguo and the Dagongzhe Centre. Fu Changguo, the Dagongzhe Centre staffer whom Xinhua named as the instigator, was detained from 10 August 2018 and released after more than a year in custody, according to subsequent academic research; the centre was shut down, and its legal representative, Huang Qingnan, was taken from his home in Fujian to Shenzhen and criminally detained, according to Ming Pao.
Yue Xin and others. In January 2019, police circulated a “confession” video featuring Yue Xin, Gu Jiayue, Shen Mengyu, and Zheng Yongming, which state security officers showed to a number of activists in an apparent effort to intimidate them (Central News Agency, citing the solidarity group). Yue Xin had been missing since August 2018; in August 2023, Hong Kong’s Photon Media reported that she had been released and was working and volunteering with a library-related NGO. The whereabouts of Gu Jiayue and several others after their detention were not publicly reported for a long time.
The campus purge. On 26 December 2018 — the 125th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s birth — Qiu Zhanxuan, president of the Peking University Marxist Society, was taken away by police on his way to a commemoration; the next day the university forcibly “restructured” the society, with none of its previous members among the new leadership. Renmin University’s New Light Civilians’ Development Association was deregistered in January 2019; Beijing Language and Culture University’s New New Youth Society was closed; Nanjing University’s Marxist reading society ceased operations in March 2019. PKU student Zhan Zhenzhen was forcibly expelled for taking part in the solidarity campaign.
Spillover to labour NGOs. In January 2019, five veteran Shenzhen labour activists — Zhang Zhiru, Wu Guijun, Jian Hui, Song Jiahui, and He Yuancheng — were arrested, in what was widely seen as the crackdown’s extension into the labour NGO world. After a closed-door trial, Zhang and Wu were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment, suspended for four years, and the other three to eighteen months, suspended for two years; all five were released on 24 April 2020 (Reuters; China Labour Bulletin).
What each side says
Xinhua and official media. On the evening of 24 August, Xinhua published an investigation, “Behind the ‘rights protection’ of workers at Shenzhen Jasic Technology,” arguing that the incident had been instigated by the unregistered Dagongzhe Centre, funded by the Hong Kong-registered organisation Worker Empowerment, which Xinhua said was backed by Western NGOs, and that Yu Juncong and others had clashed with police at the direction of Fu Changguo. A Global Times commentary the same day insisted that “rights defence must not leave the track of reason and legality,” and suggested that some wanted to use the Jasic case as a lever to pry at China’s social order.
Jasic Technology. In a statement on 29 July, the company denied obstructing the formation of a union, said the dismissed workers had been let go in accordance with the law, stated that a union was being established, and condemned online accounts as “malicious defamation.” It did not respond to Reuters’ further requests for comment.
Those named, and the supporters. Worker Empowerment issued a statement on 27 August denying that it had organised or funded the Jasic workers or their supporters, and said the Dagongzhe Centre had not taken part in organising the actions either. The solidarity group declared that its actions had nothing to do with “foreign forces” and that its demands were confined to enforcing the Trade Union Law and labour law. Writing in Ming Pao, sociologist Pun Ngai argued that the Jasic case “should have been an opportunity for trade union reform in China, but the authorities’ handling of it squandered that opportunity.”
International reaction. In October 2018, Cornell University terminated a partnership with Renmin University of China, citing Renmin’s punishment of students who had supported the workers as a suppression of speech and academic freedom. In November 2018, the Financial Times reported that more than thirty left-wing scholars, including Noam Chomsky and John Roemer, were calling for a boycott of the World Congress on Marxism held in China. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International repeatedly called for the release of all detainees.
Impact and aftermath
The Jasic incident triggered the largest purge of labour and left-wing youth activism since 2015. Left-wing student societies were systematically dismantled, and university club governance was tightened across the board in the years that followed; labour NGOs such as the Dagongzhe Centre and the Qingying Dreamworks social-work centre were closed, further shrinking what remained of the Pearl River Delta’s labour NGO scene. For the workers, the attempt to form their own union failed, and an officially directed company union took its place — an outcome that goes to the heart of the dispute: how much of a legal right to organise survives when it may only be exercised through official channels. Scholar Jenny Chan, writing in The China Review in 2020, treated the Jasic struggle as a paradigmatic case of the contradiction between worker self-organisation and China’s official union system. No worker–student solidarity campaign on a comparable scale has appeared in China since; but whenever labour conflict and youth unemployment return to public discussion, the Jasic incident is still invoked.
Sources
- Chinese Wikipedia, “佳士事件” (Jasic incident), including its timeline and cited reporting by Voice of America, Radio Free Asia, BBC, and Deutsche Welle
- English Wikipedia, “Jasic incident”
- Human Rights Watch, “China: Release Workers, Student Activists,” 3 December 2018 (via ecoi.net, document 1453411)
- Reuters, reporting on the Jasic incident (July–September 2018) and “China releases five prominent labour rights activists” (May 2020)
- Xinhua, “Behind the ‘rights protection’ of workers at Shenzhen Jasic Technology” (24 August 2018); Global Times commentary (25 August 2018)
- Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD), updates on the detained Jasic workers and supporters (2019); Weiquanwang monthly report on prisoners of conscience (February 2021)
- Made in China Journal, “Jasic Strike Paves the Way for Yet Another Crackdown on Labour NGOs” (2018)
- Eli Friedman, Pun Ngai, et al., “A Precarious Worker-Student Alliance in Xi’s China” (academic paper)
- Jenny Chan, study of the Jasic struggle, The China Review 20(1), 2020
- Dui Hua Human Rights Journal, coverage of the Jasic incident (2020)
- Cover image: Wikimedia Commons (see file page for license)