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.

China Labour Bulletin is cited extensively in this article The Long March of China's Trade Unionists by Ursula Gauthier in the French magazine, Le Nouvel Observateur. 29 July 2011, No.2438. Copyright remains with the original publisher.

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”?

The Shenzhen government has withdrawn regulations issued 1 May that would have effectively criminalized migrant worker protests demanding the payment of wage arrears during the run-up to and duration of the World University Games.

The death of Pan Jie, a 25-year-old auditor at the Shanghai branch of PricewaterhouseCoopers, last month ignited a vociferous debate in the Chinese media on the work pressures felt by young urban professionals.

For a long time it seemed to some that China's lack of independent labor unions was an advantage. Wages stayed low, and Chinese industry didn't have to worry about strike disruptions. This was always a disadvantage for workers. But now the costs of this strategy for employers and the government also are coming more sharply into focus, thanks to a four-day truck drivers' strike in Shanghai last month.

In what is reportedly the largest collective wage agreement ever negotiated by a Chinese trade union, 450,000 catering workers in the central city of Wuhan will be guaranteed a monthly wage at least 30 percent higher than the city’s statutory minimum wage, currently 900 yuan in urban areas and 750 yuan in the suburbs.

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.