Chinese City Publicly Shames Migrant Workers Who Protested Unpaid Wages: By Chun Han Wong in The Wall St Journal, Mar 18, 2016 at 8:29 pm HKT
Beijing: At the behest of a local court, eight suspects were paraded onto a stage before hundreds of onlookers in southwestern China this week, each flanked by a pair of police officers as they prepared to face the music.
The suspects are construction workers, arrested after staging a protest over unpaid wages in the city of Langzhong in Sichuan province last August. Heads bowed, they listened impassively as a court official read from their case dockets.
The charge: obstructing official business. The verdict: guilty. The sentence: six to eight months in jail.
Wednesday’s spectacle, described as a public sentencing rally, was meant to cow and educate. The masses instead responded with righteous fury.
Many Chinese recoiled from the humiliation of pitiable migrant workers in a much-reviled and largely disused judicial practice. Legal experts, journalists and laymen alike launched into caustic criticism of the Langzhong court, calling its rally barbaric and an egregious violation of due process.
“Under the law, a court handling a criminal case should issue the verdict in ‘open court,’ and not in a public sentencing rally,” Yue Yaoyong, a veteran public prosecutor and legal journalist, wrote on his verified Weibo microblog.
This incident shows that “there’s a long road ahead to establishing ‘rule of law,’” Mr. Yue wrote. “The legal professionalism of our judges and prosecutors is still sorely lacking.”
Activists, too, harshly criticized what they saw as the government’s attempt to intimidate workers and discourage them from exercising their rights.
Labor unrest has surged in the past year amid China’s economic slowdown, prompting Beijing to urge stronger steps to curb unpaid wages among migrant workers.
“The migrant workers only resorted to extralegal methods after exhausting lawful means to claim their unpaid wages,” Zhang Zhiru, a labor activist in southern Guangdong province, wrote in a public petition circulated on social media.
In such cases, “employers and supervisory agencies are the ones who first break the law and act with impunity, before migrant workers do any wrong,” Mr. Zhang wrote. “To spare the former and punish the latter is an extreme injustice and a form of collusion between officials and businesses.”
The Langzhong Municipal Court, which publicized the rally on its website, has since removed its online notice on the event. A spokeswoman for the court directed queries to the municipal propaganda office, which on Friday issued a statement acknowledging public criticism of the rally and said an investigation was underway.
Public sentencing rallies were once common in China, staged since the 1950s as symbolic “shaming rituals” to educate citizens and deter crime. They had also featured prominently in nationwide “strike hard” campaigns, first launched in 1983 to curb violent crime and vice. Today, some local authorities still stage such rallies, albeit sparingly, and almost always in cases of serious felonies and drug trafficking.
In Langzhong, the sentencing rally featured banners urging “rational efforts in seeking unpaid wages” while denouncing the “crime of severely obstructing social-administrative order,” local television footage showed. The audience mainly comprised middle-aged and elderly people, segmented by signposts denoting their respective residential districts.
The case against the eight construction workers stemmed from a protest in late August, when more than a hundred laborers gathered at a housing project in Langzhong to demand back wages, local media reports said.
Officials say two subcontractors, surnamed Zhang and Qi, misled the workers by saying their contractor wasn’t willing to disburse their wages, according to an account published by the Langzhong propaganda office. The duo then directed them to protest near a tourist attraction in Langzhong, the propaganda office said.
Protesters “blocked traffic, assaulted police officers, and severely disrupted social-administrative order,” the propaganda office said in a statement, adding that the unrest “severely affected Langzhong’s tourism image.”
The eight workers were handed jail terms of six to eight months, though two of them had their sentence suspended because their wrongdoing was deemed to be less serious. None of them could be reached for comment.
“To educate the public on how to lawfully protect their rights, the Langzhong Municipal Court held a public sentencing rally in the district where the crime took place,” the Langzhong propaganda office said.
Few on social media bought that explanation. “Don’t take the public for fools. You think the people don’t understand your purpose in using public sentencing?” a Weibo user wrote in response to the propaganda office’s statement. “Let me tell you this: public sentiment is not to be bullied!”http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/03/18/chinese-city-publicly-shames-migrant-workers-who-protested-unpaid-wages/
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