Worker Rights

Hiring practices that discriminate against ethnic minorities have continued in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR), according to Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC) monitoring of job recruiting announcements from the past year. The CECC found employment advertisements posted on government Web sites that reserved positions for Han Chinese in civil servant posts, state-owned enterprises, and private posts, indicating direct government involvement in discriminatory practices, as well as implicit government endorsement of and failure to prevent discriminatory practices in private hiring. The practices contravene provisions in the PRC Constitution and in Chinese laws that forbid discrimination.

Chinese officials have warned of increasing "social unrest" in 2009 and have called for strengthening public security in the run-up to several significant anniversaries and amid the country's economic downturn. Security officials reportedly plan to use the "valuable" and "successful" experience of security measures deployed during the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games to increase security controls in 2009, according to a January 6 People's Daily article and a January 13 South China Morning Post report (subscription required). Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu called on public security officials to acknowledge the "grave challenge of maintaining national security and social stability" ahead of the 60th Anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China in October this year, as reported in the People's Daily article.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government recently announced steps to increase the number of "bilingual" elementary school and preschool teachers in the region, according to several reports from XUAR media. As noted by the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in its 2008 Annual Report (via the Government Printing Office Web site), educational policies described as "bilingual" by the XUAR government have placed primacy on Mandarin Chinese, undercutting provisions in Chinese law to protect ethnic minority languages and promote their use in XUAR schools. The XUAR's "bilingual" education policies have affected the career prospects of ethnic minority teachers, who face Mandarin language skill requirements if their primary teaching language is an ethnic minority language.

The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) government continued this year to force students to participate in controversial "work-study" programs, but have restricted students in junior high school and lower grades from participating in cotton-picking activities. According to a September 19 Tianshan Net article, the XUAR Department of Education issued a circular this fall stopping all students enrolled in the state's compulsory nine years of elementary and junior high school education from picking cotton in work-study programs. The XUAR government discontinued this form of work-study because central government funding for rural compulsory education, which doubled in 2008 over the previous year, meets XUAR schools' funding needs, according to the report.

Reports of the employment of underage workers in factories in Shanghai and Wuhan emerged in October, according to October 6 reports from Civil Rights & Livelihood Watch (CRLW) and Radio Free Asia, as well as an October 21 report from the Hong Kong-based China CSR and an October 9 entry from a well-known Chinese blog. In Shanghai, a 15-year-old laborer died from wounds suffered at the hands of coworkers at a pipe valve factory earlier this year, while a local blogger exposed several cases of child labor in Wuhan factories in October. These reports follow a child labor scandal in Guangdong that attracted international attention in late spring of this year.

Shenzhen city issued the new Temporary Measures on Residency Permits on May 22. The measures introduce a number of reforms to the city's household registration (hukou). (See the Congressional-Executive Commission on China's Topic Paper and Hukou Reform chart on China's Household Registration System for more information on the hukou system).

According to a July 21 Reuters report and a July 24 Agence France-Presse (via Yahoo News) report, Beijing authorities launched an anti-pollution campaign that month to halt construction and close factories in the city, leaving migrants who had worked on Olympic projects jobless and forcing them to leave the city or find work elsewhere. A March 12 Human Rights Watch report documented severe exploitation of migrants who lack household registration and work for Olympic construction sites, including failure to provide insurance and social services, faulty or non-existent labor contracts, and unpaid wages.