When railway conductor Zhu Chunsheng discovered that he had been secretly demoted while at the same time being required to perform additional duties, he decided to fight back with an unusual strategy.

Just like China’s massive foreign debt holdings, China’s workers’ movement is an economic reality that is now too big to ignore. What China’s 800 million workers want and what they get will impact not only on the cost of consumer products in the West but on the development of the market for international products and services in China. It could also, in the long run, affect the development of workers’ rights globally.

Strikes and riots are now pushing China's official trade union into properly defending workers' rights, writes CLB director Han Dongfang in The Guardian. How should international unions respond? Photograph by SJ Photography @flickr.com

What explains China’s differing approach to protests by workers and dissidents? Why did the Communist authorities capitulate so readily to striking workers while rights activists are subjected to “the harshest clampdown since the crushing of the Tiananmen democracy movement in 1989”?

China’s only legal trade union organization, a tool of Communist Party control long scorned by workers as a shill for big business, is experimenting with a novel idea: speaking up for labor.

The Guangzhou authorities plan, within the next three years, to establish new regional trade unions that would cover nearly all workers in the city's automotive and several other industrial sectors, the official media reported on 15 April.

Despite recent increases in the minimum wage, the nearly 100 million young migrants who drive China’s factories are still earning around half the income of urban residents, according to an extensive survey by the All-China Federation of Trade Unions. The survey of 1,000 enterprises, published on 21 February, found that migrant workers under 30 years of age earned 1,748 yuan per month on average, compared with the 3,047 yuan per month earned by urban residents.

Apple found more than 91 children working at its suppliers last year, nine times as many as the previous year, according to its annual report on its manufacturers. The US company has also acknowledged for the first time that 137 workers were poisoned at a Chinese firm making its products and said less than a third of the facilities it audited were complying with its code on working hours.

In many ways, Lan Yimin represents the new generation of Chinese factory workers. She wants fair working conditions. Time off to socialize. And a job that pays enough so she can open a milk tea business one day.

The outbreak of strikes at foreign-invested enterprises in China during the summer raises significant questions about the future of China’s industrial work force, and highlights a number of tensions at play. The questions involve different sectors of Chinese society, including business; government, including the state-controlled labor union; the All-China Federation of Labor Unions (ACFTU), and the work force. The core question is how the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) will adjust to stronger demands from China’s workers, perhaps supported by a newly more active ACFTU – and the extent to which those demands are seen by the CCP as being at odds with the party-state’s fixation on maintaining social stability above all else. To complicate the picture further, central government support of more vigorous union activity may conflict with local governments’ concern to increase investment in industry.