WUHAN, China -- A volatile tide of anger is rising among workers in China's faltering state industries, a tide that could swell into the next major round of political instability here.
While China's overall economy booms, two-thirds of its state-run enterprises -- long hampered by inefficiency and overstaffing -- aren't making money.
With state subsidies drying up and pressures for market-oriented reforms mounting, millions of urban workers have been laid off from their jobs with no pay, or with just the promise of a small fraction of their regular salaries.
In general, these workers -- particularly the old and unskilled -- are the losers in the vast economic changes sweeping through China, and they're not happy about it.
Workers are also angry over official corruption, which appears to be growing at virtually every level, and inflation, which has been galloping along in major Chinese cities at an annual rate of 25 percent to 40 percent.
Over the past year, China's state-controlled news media have reported on an increasing number of strikes, labor disputes and worker demonstrations. An official report issued last week says that the incidence of arbitrated labor problems this year is running 66 percent ahead of last year's.
But Chinese labor activists say that this year alone there have been hundreds of sizable strikes and worker protests outside Beijing -- all unreported in the state media.
In Wuhan, a large center of heavy industry along the Yangtze River in central China, "there's been some kind of [labor] incident every other month," says a cab driver who was laid off last year along with hundreds of other workers at the Wuhan Knitting and Dyeing Factory. "Up to now, these incidents have been managed in one way or another, but there will be a big explosion soon," says the driver, whose name cannot be used for fear of official retribution.
"The crisis will be even worse than June 4," he says, referring to the bloody 1989 military crackdown on the student-led protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. "If the country won't or can't help its workers, they'll be furious. And no soldier would shoot them because in almost everyone's life, there is a worker."
The cab driver, now in his 40s, has been Communist Party member for more than two decades. But in recent years, his loyalty has been worn thin: "The system's not working. It's letting workers starve, putting them under pressure. If I knew that all this would happen, I'd rather we have the Kuomintang," the Chinese Nationalists who fled to Taiwan after losing a civil war with the Communists in the 1940s.
