00:00:02

Hong Yu

This is the Nordic Asia podcast.

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00:00:07

Hong Yu

Welcome to the Nordic Asia Podcast, a collaboration sharing expertise on Asia across the Nordic region. I'm Hong Yu Liy. A PhD candidate in sociology at University of Cambridge, currently in virtual residency at the Nordic Institute of Asia Studies, NIAS. My research looks at the use of new technology at work and its impact on industrial relations in China. I'm delighted to be joined today by Dr. Bill Taylor, who is an associate professor at the Department of Public Policy, City University of Hong Kong. Bill teaches political, economic philosophy, policy, Chinese politics, as well as employment relations in China and Hong Kong. His research focuses on collective Labour right within countries in Asia, especially China, and aspects of state and employer control, labour process and labor resistance. Previously, he worked on the China-EU Human Rights Dialogues and has briefed a number of government delegations to Hong Kong and currently works with local labor NGOs. Bill is also the co-author of the book "Industrial Relations in China". Today, we have invited Bill to talk about his latest research on the new union movement in Hong Kong in relation to its potential impact on industrial relations within the broader context of local politics and the emerging localism in Hong Kong. Thank you very much for joining us today.

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00:01:27

Bill Taylor

Thank you Hong Yu.

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00:01:28

Hong Yu

I think it is timely to start our conversation by talking about the unusual silence of the 1 May International Labor Day this year in Hong Kong. Long before the handover to the Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the International Labor Day had been a special occasion for union leaders in Hong Kong to campaign for a better labor protection, such as retirement benefits and workplace gender equality. And this is the second continuous year that we have seen no marching nor any kinds of public activities took place in Hong Kong. So let me start by asking you, Bill, where have this union leaders gone? And do you know, what are they planning right now?

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00:02:03

Bill Taylor

I'm sure they are planning what they're going to read whilst they're waiting in detention centres for trial. So why people haven't been able to march and not just on May Day, but other commemorations such as June 4th, the Tiananmen massacre, is because there's been a political crackdown. Basically, it's the way of saying it. A crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong. And trade unions have, as they have in many places, taken the brunt of some of this backlash from the authorities. So, two trade union leaders, present or last head of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions and a previous head of the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions are currently awaiting trial for their involvement in political demonstrations, y ou might say protest, but they're basically demonstrations to highlight issues related both to civil society and particularly workers interests.

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00:03:00

Bill Taylor

And so that's why it's especially quiet. It's also very difficult because in Hong Kong, for a protest to take place, people have to apply to the police to give the letter of no objection, which means you cannot hold such a protest unless the police agree to it, which is quite strange, given 1977 when the police did their own demonstrations and occupied the streets during a backlash against trying to crack down on corruption within the police force. Having said that, it has traditionally been quite easy to get letters of no objection, and that is how Hong Kong has basically managed civil affairs for 40 or 50 years until 2014, when there was a large civil movement. And then that settled down a year later and then 2019 it started again where the conflicts became quite a violent and the police trying to suppress these political movements, these political marches, and eventually they just don't give these letters of no objection. And in other cases, they have given the letter and then withdrawn it. And in 30 minutes later, they come in with a tear gas. That's why people are not protesting. They can't.

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00:04:15

Hong Yu

What you have mentioned is actually quite worrying. So has the May Day demonstration always being controversial, or could you also give us a bit information about the historical developments of unionism in Hong Kong and what makes the recent movement different from the past?

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00:04:32

Bill Taylor

If we go quite far back, perhaps to the 1920s, the government role is always very important in this. There's a view that Hong Kong has a laissez faire government, non-interventionist government, but it's never been precisely that. And arguments going back to the 1920s when there was a growth in trade unionism, there's a growth in worker interest and there was a movement away from what had been the traditional labor organizing way in much of China and also in Hong Kong, which was gangs. Which is a labor gang system where a person employs other people in the contract relationship and then they sell that gang to the docks or whoever, they buy them, and quite a lot of the different elements have come, use the same labor gang system. And they're extremely exploitative because Hong Kong is basically a refugee society. All the people in Hong Kong, particularly if we leave the new territories, are refugees almost entirely from different parts of China, and they flow into Hong Kong at different times, so these gangs always had a ready supply of extremely cheap, extremely vulnerable labor. Going back to the 20s and 30s that the Hong Kong government was concerned that wages were being suppressed. And so they actually encouraged, t hey didn't sponsor, but they encouraged some early unionization. And this was to some degree and to try and head off the fear of the Russian form of revolution. But that evolved and they actively consulted these labor organizers and they tried to encourage an improvement in labor standards. In the post-war period y hey tried to do that again. But it's more when we talking about late 1940s into the 50s, what we have is the development of a very polarized system or structure of industrial relations in Hong Kong in which we have the pro Beijing wants to become the Federation of Trade Unions, FTU, and the TUC, which was the trade union Congress, which was a Taiwan or Republican based. So you had this left wing base, radical base and this Republican base, which mirrors what was happening in China really long after the communists take power, w e don't have the elimination of private capital really until officially in 1956, but has a hangover really until the end of the 50s. So you had some replication of what was happening in China, in Hong Kong in a microcosm of this conflict between our Guomindang, which is pro Taiwan leaders and the communist leaders.

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00:07:20

Bill Taylor

And it was played out in Hong Kong. And then you had from really the 60s onwards, a growth of independent, none politically aligned group often associated with Christian religion, evangelical ideas coming in, which formed later something called the CIC, the Christian Industrial Committee. And their concern was really initially dealing with the tens of thousands of young people who were ending up in factory work and homeworking. As Hong Kong became the first of the little tigers, it became the first real powerhouse in Asia, outside Japan and South Korea and Taiwan, Malaysia. They all, not followed the Hong Kong example, but they start to develop soon after that. So this Christian Industrial Committee became very concerned with what was happening to this growing working class who are often illiterate, a nd if they spoke Cantonese, they often spoke a different dialect. But there was a lot of people from other parts of China which you can still see in the new territories where I live. You know, you walk along the promenade and you can hear four or five different languages spoken, particularly amongst older people. And these represent the different refugees who came at different times, not just during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s w hen the population doubled, population actually doubled at least twice. It doubled in the 1950s and then again in the 1970s. So this politics of being two highly politicised camps and then this third growth of trade unions has marked out right to the present time w hat this idea of the politicization of trade unions and the politicization of the working class to fit into wider geopolitical interests.

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00:09:14

Hong Yu

I think it is very interesting what you have mentioned about how the changing attitudes of government from supporting union movement in Hong Kong to nowadays becoming more hostile to unions formations and union leaders. I was wondering, how do you perceive the impacts of the new unions movements in Hong Kong's industrial relations today?

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00:09:37

Bill Taylor

What you're referring to, really, is that there's been, if you like, a fourth camp seemed to have appeared. So in the 2019 there was this renewed social protest movement against what was a law trying to be passed by the local government to make extradition of suspects. So not therefore criminals. Those these often politically get deliberately confused, but suspects to Taiwan following the murder case in which a boyfriend murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and then fled back to Hong Kong a nd there was no extradition treaty between Taiwan and Hong Kong. And so the government wanted to pass such legislation. Sounds perfectly reasonable, but it's a very good indication of how Hong Kong people feel, i s that included in the treaty was extradition to China, as it were, the mainland China. And that kicked off of a fuss because it meant that people could be taken to China for political crimes. Hong Kong is a, as I said, a place of refugees. It's also a place that has the only dissidents from China living and contributing to society here. People like Han Dong Fan who set up the only independent trade union in 1989 and was imprisoned and ill treated for his trouble.

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00:11:03

Bill Taylor

He lives in Hong Kong and runs an organization here, but also other people, Lee Cheuk-yanf was in Beijing during the massacre in 1989 and he turned to Hong Kong. He can't go back. He's legally a dissident. So with the extradition changes that would allow China to say, well, we want these people back to go to China and stand trial. So people didn't like that and there were mass protests, including well over a million people in peaceful marches. This, however, is like many of these disputes. I was looking back at the democracy movement in Korea before I looked at China I looked at the history of the development of the labor movement in Japan in the late 19th century before the rise of fascism there. And these issues are very complicated. So it was a touch paper for a whole lot of issues, including the problem that we have almost no laws to protect trade unions, no laws to protect collective bargaining, to the point that until last year, if you were unfairly dismissed by your employer, for example, you were organizing trade union activities and the employer dismissed you, which they are not allowed to do, it's illegal to victimize a trade unionist. The court could only reinstate you to your job if the employer agreed, so in other words, you can fire somebody for trade union activity and they stay fired even though it's illegal to do so. So those sorts of things is an indication that although I said the government in the 1920s was quite keen on trade unions as a counter to the extreme exploitation, the British government, colonial government and since then is extremely pro-business. On the other side, the trade unions have been seen by many as being caught up in politics. Even the new Confederation of Trade Unions, which grew out of, in part the Christian Industrial Committee and was established in 1990. It was focused on trying to change the laws, which is understandable.

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00:13:15

Bill Taylor

If you have laws where it's virtually impossible to function as a trade union and it's easy to dismiss somebody, you don't have to give a reason for dismissal. All you have to do is pay them the statutory minimum, which is usually a month's wages but can be less, and you don't have to give a reason for dismissing them. So it's very difficult to prove that you're being dismissed because you're pregnant or because you refused to sleep with the boss. It's basically a so-called buyer's market. So, understandably, the Confederation of Trade Unions got very much caught up in trying to change these laws. And so what had happened in the 2019 was unions had formed, which were in much part trying to be independent from these political pro Beijing or pro democratic, pro authoritarian or pro democracy. But what many of them were initially interested in doing was trying to affect the election process of the chief executive. Hong Kong has functional constituencies and it has a partially, a functional electorate of the chief executive, who's a very powerful figure in Hong Kong political system. It's the same as the governor, really, and the trade unions were given under the electoral system, some electoral seats in order to have influence o n that election, same as doctors say, most people living in the new territories and so on, and so some of the unions set up in order to try and increase the number of democratically orientated trade unions that quickly was shut down by a movement of the setting up of literally we're talking about a couple of hundred of these unions being set up.

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00:14:59

Bill Taylor

The pro Beijing camp set up thousands of trade unions and blocked that. And it became very clear very early on that these new unions forming were not going to change the political landscape. So many of them had already been forming within the idea that they would be democratic in a new form. They weren't going to focus on getting involved in national politics or city politics, depending on your political color. Instead, they were going to be democratic in terms of working with their membership. So they were going to be participatory democracy, not electorial democracy. And so they were very focused on listening to and being taking their agendas, their actions, their strategies, and not from the leadership, but through discussion with membership. And this was rather new in Hong Kong. Now, this is debatable, Apo Leong who's a long time commentator and NGO activist within the community, thinks that these new unions are not really new, that many of the old unions drives union growth. There was a similar internal Democratic element within them. But I think what's new about this one is that they have tried to not direct membership's views, but to respond to them. Now, there's something special about this. A democratic union that is a union that follows the membership wishes is a very dangerous organization because its bottom up led and many trade unions that have responded in this way have been instrumental in political change in other countries. Again, we go back to South Korea. Early example of that was I can't pronounce his name properly, but Jeon Tae-Il in in 1970, who committed suicide by self-immolation in Seoul on that bridge. It took another 10 years for the democratic movement to develop and another six years for mass worker movement to lead, really to the collapse of the authoritarian regime in South Korea. The martyrdom of the early movement, the learning of the early movement is represented still in the Korean trade union movement today, and capitalists are just as worried about that as authoritarian dictators.

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00:17:29

Hong Yu

Thank you for your elaboration. I was wondering, how do you see the future of unionism in Hong Kong and where do you see it is heading?

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00:17:38

Bill Taylor

I think there's a lot of people in Hong Kong really worried and interested in this issue from both political colours. The new unions themselves are facing a difficulty because they did their work in an open atmosphere. They had their chat groups and their use of social media. But since the introduction of the national security law, many of those trade unions have either gone quiet or they're using less open forms of communication. And so they've taken a real hit and they weren't prepared for the national security law. And the implications that being non patriotic. And when I say non-patriotic, I mean not being openly patriotic, so is not enough to just be quiet. You have to demonstrate your patriotism. Many of them are worried that their activities are illegal if they even question the government and because they are open systems in which they listen to their membership, it's easy for them to be caught simply by a member saying that something that is critical of China or critical of the police or critical of the leadership in Beijing.

As a slight digression this is a reason why most of the universities in Hong Kong are cutting their ties with their students unions, under the reason that if the student union does or says something that is seen as against national security, seditious or whatever, the university itself may be in trouble. And one thing about this national security law is it's a Chinese law as opposed to a Hong Kong law. So it's defined and understood in a very vague way. Chinese view of law is that law is a political, it's part of the the Russian communist view, that nothing is above politics and law is a political process. So under this way, then laws are also political. So, rule of law in Chinese system really means laws according to political convenience or political practice, and that shouldn't be seen as a negative thing. Looking at it from a traditional Leninist viewpoint when it comes unstuck is when you try to equate that with a Anglo-Saxon liberal law, which is an idea that a law is an absolute rule of 'do and don't' a sort of negative legal system in which you can do anything unless the law says you can't. Now imagine where you have a situation where what you can't you don't know what that is. You have to guess what. It is not based on case law, but based on the latest instructions from the leadership. That's why people are so frightened in Hong Kong and it affects unions in particular, although many people think it's the politicians that worry the Democratic Party, pro Democratic camp obviously is in deep difficulties at the moment, but trade unions are also in a difficulty because trade unions ultimately are the core of a working class movement. It is how the Russian Revolution got going.

Whilst Mao depended on the peasants, it was the Shanghai trade unions and Guangdong trade unions that delivered the success of the revolution in urban areas. Russia collapsed because of Solidarnosc in Poland and so on. Trade unions are extremely dangerous, so control of trade unions is really important. So this leads us back to the organization that I've neglected for a while, which is the Federation of Trade Unions in Hong Kong, which is closely associated with the All China Federation of Trade Unions in China, which is one of the three mass organizations of the party. So it's a party organization along with the Youth League and the Women's League. And so we should see the FTU as really an extension of the ACFTU and it has followed the ACFTU. Whether there's a formal link or not is not clear, but it certainly practices - if we go back from the 1940s onwards, ACFTU use line on international relations is mirrored in the edicts and position of the FTU in Hong Kong.

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00:22:11

Bill Taylor

So now there's officially really no opposition. We have National Socialism in Hong Kong, the FTU should be the leading force to organize workers. It doesn't work that way because the ACFTU in China is traditionally criticized by e veryone in China as being useless because it doesn't organize workers, it has great difficulty because no one has enthusiasm to join the organization. Why would I join the ACFTU if I'm an activist, I want to join the party. Why would I talk to the subordinate when I can join in the boss? So the ACFTU has been very weak, extremely weak. So the FTU's problem is how would it have strength? So one way having strength is the same way the CTU did was join in political parties. Well, if we're in a post political party situation, there's only one party, what it's role? So the FTU is stuck as to whether it's going to follow the kind of Leninist line of a working class movement in Hong Kong that it controls or each going to be the new China dream, Xi Jinping, which is a capitalist system, in which case it has to follow the line of the capitalist group associated with the DAB, perhaps the liberals, if they can change their leader. And so then it's stuck that it's irrelevant. And so we're in a situation of the same problem as in China, that we have a gap in which the workers told how to think, but they're not represented. And that doesn't go well in capitalism because workers will always form their own organisations. In the end, they always have. And so the non-representational is a danger to the CCP. It's a danger to local capitalism. It's a danger to the FTU.

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00:24:08

Hong Yu

So for what you have said, what does it matter for ordinary workers in Hong Kong?

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00:24:13

Bill Taylor

The ordinary workers in Hong Kong are a different profile of working class now than they were 30 years ago. It's a significant change. We've been used to an idea of refugees coming to Hong Kong. Capitalism depended on a ready supply of workers coming here, very often with no money arriving off the boat, off the train, or by illegally coming over the border and getting in touch with kinship networks, f amily members who've made it to Hong Kong before that refugee population meant that basically self-sacrifice people will put up with almost anything. That's why we have global migrations of refugees. People will die, literally, to ensure that their children have a better life. And Hong Kong has had this view that there's something called the lion rock spirit. You come to Hong Kong, you get into Kowloon, you get under or over that mountain that separates the new territories, separates semi-China from the real Hong Kong, which is Kowloon, even more than on the island. And you arrive there, you've made it.

Now it's up to you. No one will help you. The government won't help you. Friends and relatives will give you a start. It's sort of the American twentieth century dream. You know, you get here, you die in the gutter, you get fabulously rich. It's up to you. And we have lots of these cases of, you know, self-made people who are the entrepreneurs, the billionaires. We have more Mercedes per square kilometer in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world. We have more billionaires than anywhere else in the world. We also have fantastic inequality. And that's always been. Whereas Europe has seen inequalities lessen and then grow again, in Hong Kong. It never went away. But, because of the growth, many people were persuaded that if they work hard, they could get on in whatever field.

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00:26:16

Bill Taylor

Since China moved to capitalism from the 1980s, things have changed. Less people are coming to Hong Kong, China, the mainland Guangdong province speak same Cantonese has become a competitor. The economy has slowed down. Hong Kong has become a financial capital. There's very few people needed to make financial decisions. Few years ago, a friend of mine, we were both doing a program at Harvard together, and she works for a major garment company, one of the largest in the world. And she was showing me around where she works and a friend who had been with us from South Korea and a man held the door open for us as we were going up to the office. And she said that guy made more money last year for our company than the 10000 employees that we employ. He made it on the stock exchange. He was a financier. So financiers don't need a lot of people. They just need a lot of money to play with. And Hong Kong is highly dependent on finance.

So what's happened to the working class is that wages have frozen, wages have not gone up since the 1990s. This idea of self reliance had some you could give some examples before now, it's very difficult to have examples. Young people don't have a future unless they get an education which they have to buy and they get into white collar jobs very often, ironically, government, government related jobs, the working class are stuck. Many of them will for a decade or so were able to go and work in China as supervisors. Even those sorts of jobs have gone well. Go and work in Vietnam, as I've done work in Vietnam, as supervisors and those jobs start to go. So the ordinary people are really now more interested in having collective organization than they were in the past. That's why unionization rates in Hong Kong are not high - between 20 and 30 percent. But they never declined like in other localities. So the working class, the Left Behind group in Hong Kong, and they're very educated, articulate, and so they're a problem to the government. If they're not, their interests are not dealt with. So the government has tried to deal with it by social policy, trying to provide social welfare. But capitalists don't like that. So there's been a capitalist control government from the colonial era till now. And so it's been very difficult for them to provide meaningful social welfare to the local population.

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00:29:01

Hong Yu

Thank you. My last questions for you is, I know that many people in the Nordic region, they are paying close attention to the political situation in Hong Kong, particularly concerning the continuity of social movement. I was wondering, what do you want to say to them? And for those who just learned about this topic, why do you think they should know more about these issues?

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00:29:22

Bill Taylor

To answer the last one first, why should people know more? Hong Kong is just in one way the latest example. The moment in Hong Kong we have the Independent Film Festival, which is a festival where the Civil Society Organization has sponsored films. It's very sort of middle class, very avant garde films. And this year it has nothing to do with national security law. It has a program on the Czech Republic during the communist era. Well, if you look at your Prague Spring and Czech Republic, you can see the connotations of wishful thinking, perhaps that something may spark here. But to discuss that is against the national security law. So it is illegal for me really to answer your question with anything meaningful. So I think the reason to study Hong Kong is Hong Kong represents an alternative to the Nordic model. There is a potential that Hong Kong as part of China, will introduce a different form of capitalism eventually, which does seem to be in Xi Jinping mind. But he's not an economist. He's a military specialist, but a more like Keynesian social Democratic model. This is certainly a way that some have discussed. And the idea that was in Deng Xiaoping's mind that you need to have a bit of capitalism in order to get enough wealth, that you can introduce a social democratic laws. The alternative, however, is that it just becomes a despot, that it becomes an autocratic regime. And many of us have been ironically concerned by the suspension of the terms of office for the the head of the Chinese Communist Party. And we will find out next year whether Xi Jinping carries on or steps down. And that's used as a kind of litmus test when we think we know the results. But it's a sort of litmus test of whether China is going to go along with the social democratic route or whether it's firmly set on a route that Germany went down previously.

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00:31:36

Hong Yu

Thank you very much, Bill, for sharing your insights with us. You have been listening to the Nordic Asia podcast with me, Hong Yu Liu and Dr. Bill Taylor, associate professor at the Department of Public Policy at City University of Hong Kong.

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00:31:51

You have been listening to the Nordic Asia podcast