Thursday, October 18, 2007

Trade union not yet fully forgotten in China


Since the beginning of last year the acronym ACFTU, standing for All China Federation of Trade Unions, has been on my internet radar screen. That means that every time media use that acronym, and Google picks it up, I get to see it. For much of the past 18 months that happened quite a lot as Wal-Mart got unionized and the Chinese trade union seem to play an important role in building up Hu Jintao's harmonious society.
But in the past two months much showed up at my radar screen, but no longer the ACFTU. The bureaucrats of this trade union seemed to have picked up their old business of drinking tea. Only today, Sun Chunlan of the ACFTU made clear that the foreign companies were not yet off the hook and he union would go on setting up chapters at the foreign companies. The fact that only the Washington Post picked up her warning and none of the Chinese media might indicated that not everybody agrees with that line.

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