Saturday, April 14, 2007

Prof. Liu's ignored call for justice

Liu Cheng
Recently professor Liu Cheng, one of the academics who has been working on China's new labor law, returned from a lobby tour in the United States. He supported the pro-labor forces who accused US pro-business organizations of eroding the Chinese draft labor law for their own interests.
Liu has been one of the moderate forces in the Chinese discussion on the labor law, compared to some of his colleagues in Beijing. When I visited his office at the end of last year (I have never met Liu personally) and discovered both the Chinese and foreign discussion on the labor law were following different tracks. So getting Liu to the US seemed a good idea.
Yesterday I got a powerpoint presentation with his arguments, but initially I decided to ignore the issue here on this weblog, since compared with the past, it did not entail really new arguments. And a Chinese professor lobbying the US in favor of a Chinese law could have been a nice story when he left, but this was old news.
So, I decided mainly to inform the members of the Shanghai Foreign Correspondents and told them they could get a copy of the presentation if they were interested. Now, I'm 30 emails further and it looks like some people are getting a bit excited. Also for the people at Shanghai Amcham Liu's lobby tour was news and they are supposed to be on top of that discussion. I'm mainly amazed that one of my emails seems to be much more effective than a lobby tour in the US.
So, if you are to interested in this presentation, do drop me an email.

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