IN AN industrial zone near Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province in south-west China, a sign colourfully proclaims the sprawl of factories to be a “delightful, harmonious and happy district”. Angry steelworkers must have winced as they marched past the slogan in their thousands in early January, demanding higher wages. Their three-day strike was unusually large for an enterprise owned by the central government. But, as China’s economy begins to grow more sedately, more such unrest is looming.

The recent upsurge in worker activism in China is continuing into the New Year with five more strikes and protests in five different provinces getting media attention last week.

Protests have erupted over the last week in a wide range of industries and locations across China, indicating that worker unrest is far from confined to just the manufacturing heartland of the Pearl River Delta.

Thousands of workers have returned to work at a shoe factory in the southern Chinese industrial city of Dongguan, amid allegations of police brutality to quell their protests on Thursday.

Thousands of workers at a Taiwanese factory manufacturing shoes for brands including New Balance, Nike and Adidas, in China's Dongguan staged a strike protesting wage cuts and enforced redundancies, Ming Pao Daily reported on Friday.

Around 7,000 workers at a Taiwan-owned shoe factory in Dongguan took to the streets today, 17 November, in protest at salary cuts and the earlier dismissal of 18 managerial staff, according to posts on Tianya and a Southern Daily reporter’s microblog.

More than one third of the population of China’s most prosperous province, Guangdong, are migrants, according to the latest census statistics. Despite recent attempts by provincial authorities to better integrate Guangdong society, there are still 36.7 million migrants in the province, out of a total population of 104 million.

Companies in the manufacturing heartland of Dongguan are abusing the labour supply (劳务派遣) system to such an extent that it is now the primary cause of labour disputes in the municipality, government officials have warned. They cited the case of an enterprise in Tangxia township which employed 40,000 workers, all of whom came from labour supply companies, which in theory are only supposed to provide short-term and supplementary labour.

As a senior government official announced plans on 18 April to increase wages by around 15 percent annually, and double wages by 2015, a 20-minute clip was posted on the Chinese video sharing site Youku showing the harsh reality for teenage workers in a Dongguan factory.

A compelling portrait of migrant worker life in the Pearl River Delta shows that while conditions have improved for some factory workers, for others, that change has come too late. Photograph by Renon-san.