For decades, the government had turned a blind eye to companies’ failure to pay contributions, thus allowing them to inflate profits, but the sudden policy change—due to pension funds running short of money—is causing upheaval by once again shifting the burden onto workers. Besides companies closing down, many others simply reclassify employees as part-time workers, for whom social security payments are not mandatory. Not surprisingly, the sudden introduction of new regulations without accompanying measures and protections is widely opposed by the workers themselves. In this context, workers have chosen strikes as a last resort to defend wages and benefits.

Factories in Crisis, Workers Abandoned

Behind the cited figures lie stories of struggling factories and workers left to fend for themselves. Kaiyi Paper Packaging in Guangzhou [1], with over one hundred million yuan [€12.5 million] of annual production, suddenly declared bankruptcy after new pension contributions would have eroded all profit margins: hundreds of employees found themselves without pay for months and with the owner disappeared. In Shanghai [2], Guoli Automotive Leather offered redundancy packages judged by the workers themselves as “the lowest in the city”, whilst in Hebei [3] over one thousand employees of Aerospace Zhenbang, linked to major national space programmes, took to the streets after months of unpaid wages. These cases show how the crisis spares neither small private enterprises nor strategic companies.

Recurring Patterns of Protest

The reasons for the protests repeat themselves consistently: unilateral wage cuts, redundancies without compensation, forced transfers to other provinces without compensation. In Dongguan [4], over two thousand workers at Maorui Electronics went on strike over the company’s refusal to provide compensation for the transfer of production; in Guilin [5] workers at BYD [6] demanded the application of minimum wages from major urban centres instead of the lower county rate, but obtained no results due to intervention by local authorities. These episodes reveal a common dynamic: companies are shifting the risks of the crisis onto employees, compressing labour costs to the limit of survival.

Growing Collective Consciousness

The series of strikes highlights another fact: the growing collective consciousness among workers. At Shenzhen Advanced Semiconductor [7], around one thousand employees obtained compensation above standard levels thanks to four consecutive days of organised protests. In other cases, such as in textile or clothing industries, mobilisations lasted for days, a sign of growing cohesion and greater determination to claim social and contractual rights. These forms of action do not arise as an ideological choice, but as an immediate response to living conditions that have become unsustainable.

An Industrial Sector Under Pressure

The overall picture is that of an industrial sector under strain, where employment stability appears increasingly fragile. In thirty-three days, nine of the twenty-two factories involved have already declared bankruptcy and the others find themselves in precarious conditions. The compulsory social security policy, theoretically aimed at expanding protections, translates in practice into unsustainable pressure for small and medium-sized enterprises, which close or shift costs onto workers. For workers, instead, the result is exposure to the risk of losing not only wages but also any pension guarantee, fuelling a vicious circle of precarity and conflict.

A Warning Bell

This wave of protests constitutes a warning bell for the entire Chinese production system. Whilst on one hand it highlights contradictions between social policies and the economic sustainability of enterprises, on the other it shows how the working class is no longer willing to passively accept unilateral sacrifices. For many, strikes are no longer seen as extreme and isolated gestures, but as legitimate and necessary tools to resist the compression of rights. It is predictable that these mobilisations will continue in the coming months, signalling that the manufacturing crisis is not only a matter of orders and costs, but above all of dignity and daily survival for millions of workers.

Desperate Acts of Protest

Moreover, monitoring of news and images circulated on Chinese social media shows a clear increase, in this period of August and September, in protests over non-payment of wages, often months in arrears. These are not organised strikes, but desperate actions: workers climbing onto factory rooftops threatening to throw themselves off, in a desperate plea for attention. Official data is lacking, which the Chinese regime tends to conceal, but the frequency of these episodes closely recalls a phenomenon already seen elsewhere, such as in Italy in 2009 during the global crisis, starting with the symbolic struggle of workers at Innse in Milan [8].

Andrea Ferrario