A friend just introduced me to an interesting and potentially important cluster of Chinese websites. I’m thinking of calling it the Hammer Network (at the risk of sounding like I’m talking about the 1980s American rapper with big pants). The url of the main site in this cluster is chuizi.net, which means hammer, as in the hammer & sickle. The name of the section of this site functioning as a sort of homepage is called Workers’ News, but that’s so boring & easy to confuse with other sites. Another site in the cluster, listed at the bottom of each page as the owner of chuizi.net, is honghuacao.com, which means Chinese milk vetch - a medicinal herb whose flower is much prettier than its English name. That’s apparently some kind of obscure metaphor that no one I’ve asked is familiar with.[1. One guess is that this is a reference to Lu Xun's use of yecao (weeds, literally "wild grass") as metaphor for the masses. In that sense, honghuacao (literally "red flower grass") would seem to imply the left wing of the masses. Searching the web for symbolic attributes of the Chinese milk vetch, it is associated with perseverance, because it can survive in infertile soil with little sunlight or rain.] In any case, I’ve decided not to call it the Chinese Milk Vetch Network for Workers’ Solidarity

All these sites are registered in mainland China, but none of several well-connected leftists and labor activists I’ve asked have heard of this cluster, except for the one who ran across it, and she has no idea who’s behind it. Some of these sites are linked to more well-known left sites, such as Utopia & Research on Chinese Workers, but I haven’t run across any external site linked to the Hammer Network (including Utopia, which has links to over 160 sites!).

I can’t find the number of visitors to any of the websites.[3. There is a link at the bottom of each page to a "Statistical Report on the Hammer Community" on 51.la, but I can't figure out how to find any statistics on it, even after registering - let me know if you do.] Workers’ Forum lists 371 registered users, and Honghuaocao Workers’ Rights-Protection Consultation Network lists only 58. But many of the hundreds of forum threads list between 1,000 and 4,000 views, so obviously somebody is using these websites.

Where these sites differ from other Chinese left sites is that they seem more interactive and oriented toward facilitating mutual aid among workers and their supporters. The general orientation is clearly Maoist, which is pretty much the only oppositional perspective readily available to Chinese workers besides liberalism - generally (and rightly) seen as an ideology of dissident elements in the ruling class that increasingly overlaps in important ways with the CP’s present ideology (Dengism, for lack of a better word).[2. There are a few other political currents in China, but most are limited to academic circles and don't have much to say of interest to workers. It should be kept in mind that, in China today (perhaps due in part to the illegality of independent political organizations or journals, combined with the limited access to other theoretical/historical currents from abroad), both liberalism and Maoism are to some extent more like political vocabularies used to make a variety of conflicting arguments, rather than the closed ideologies they tend to be in other countries. For example, among Maoists, most are nationalist but some are rigorously internationalist or even anti-state. And whereas most Maoists simply call on the ruling CP leaders to "put China back on the socialist path," and others want to form a new party and overthrow the ruling CP, a few regard "mass organizations" (modeled on the autonomous rebel groups of 1967-68) as the new vehicle of revolution, instead of the party. Also, these websites show how contemporary Chinese Maoism adopts concepts from liberalism, such as "rights-protection" (weiquan). Of course there are many workers who aren't sure what they want, other than "justice." But in any case, oppositional perspectives tend to be shaped by these three main orientations and their vocabularies.] I suspect these sites have some high-level connections in the CP, otherwise you’d think they would have been blocked or shut down before achieving even this low level of popularity, considering the level of interactivity and the radicalness of views expressed in the forums. On the other hand, the mutual aid promoted by these sites is mainly oriented toward enforcing China’s labor law against unscrupulous bosses - an approach the state generally accepts or even promotes at the central level.

The layout is a little confusing. The homepage of chuizi.net is also a distinct section called Workers’ News, which has several sub-sections in addition to separate sections listed alongside it, some leading to sections of chuizi.net, others to other websites. (It’s possible the strange layout is due to concerns about certain sections being more likely to be blocked or shut down.) The main sections listed on the homepage are:

Workers’ News (chuizi.net)

Workers’ Forum (chuizi.net/?action-bbs and chuizi.net/b)

Workers’ Rights-Protection (honghuacao.com)

Workers’ Photos (chuizi.net/?action-uchimage)

Workers’ Blogs (chuizi.net/?action-uchblog)

Mutual Aid Q & A (chuizi.net/m.php?name=wenda)

Workers’ Web (maopai.net - this means “Maoist” and the site is also called “Mao Portal”)

Special Section for Liu Hanhuang[4. Liu Hanhuang is a 26-year-old migrant worker from rural Guizhou who killed two of his former Taiwanese bosses in June, in a row over compensation for the loss of Liu's right hand while working in a hardware factory in Dongguan, after nearly a year of negotiation and Liu's attempted suicide. He has become an internet hero among workers and the left in China. There is a popular campaign to reduce his sentence - as Deng Yujiao's sentence was reduced due to popular pressure a few months ago - but at this point I'm not sure if the campaign has had any affect. There seems to be no English news on the web about the campaign (typical of both Chinese state media & liberal Western media). But there is an English petition - started by a Taiwanese human rights group - here. In over a month it has garnered only 79 signatures! I have no idea how many people in China support him or have even heard of him, but I was surprised that only 513 people had taken this anonymous poll in a Hammer thread with over 4,000 views (95.32% or 489 people voted that Liu's sentence should be commuted). This is the only poll I can find on the web, but you can find dozens of writings expressing support for him. There are also several Chinese petitions but they are blocked.] (chuizi.net/b/thread-3201-1-1.html)

Each of these sections or websites has sub-sections (some being links to yet other websites). To make things even more confusing, the Workers’ Forum seems to have two different homepages: chuizi.net/?action-bbs can only be accessed from Workers’ News; under that, every section returns to chuizi.net/b as its homepage.

It’s only there (chuizi.net/b) that you find an “about us” section, and the wording seems to imply that Workers’ Forum started out as a separate website. Established in 2006, the administrators have changed several times, along with the content.[3. Quite unlike the CSG website, which has been administered solely by poor JJ since he set it up in 2002 (?), whose content has been barely updated since 2006 due to everyone being busy with other things (including the two issues of CLR), while completely changing its site design at least three times and its url once (due to our old url having been hijacked). Now that we've got a new, more user-friendly design and we're recruiting new people to help with the site, we hope it will revive and even surpass the glory of its heyday circa 2004-2006.] “Finally,” Workers’ Forum says, “we’ve settled on the present site design and operating principles.” Namely, “Workers’ Forum is a non-profit public welfare website created by a group of social youth [社会青年] and independent scholars [民间学者]. Now it is mainly maintained by a few volunteers… Our mission is to serve workers and promote the workers spirit of solidarity, mutual aid and perseverance [进取].” And that’s all it says. But it does list a few “allied sites”:

Maoist Portal (aka the Workers Web listed above; 3 mirror sites are listed here, presumably in case one gets blocked)

Honghuacao Rights-Protection Mutual Aid Network (honghuacao.com)

China Polls (tpiao.cn - also listed as a main section under chuizi.net/b - contains hundreds of polls with open commentary - the most popular presently being about Liu Hanhuang)

Nine Maps (9ditu.net & two broken mirrors - contains detailed maps of numerous cities in China & elsewhere with no commentary, but with links to chuizi.net/b as “9 Maps Community,” and links to a thread about Liu Hanhuang)

If you didn’t read my footnote 4, by now you may be wondering who Liu Hanhuang is. In case you missed it, here it is again (if you read it, skip this paragraph):

Liu Hanhuang is a 26-year-old migrant worker from rural Guizhou who killed two of his former Taiwanese bosses in June, in a row over compensation for the loss of Liu’s right hand while working in a hardware factory in Dongguan, after nearly a year of negotiation and Liu’s attempted suicide. He has become an internet hero among workers and the left in China. There is a popular campaign to reduce his sentence - as Deng Yujiao’s sentence was reduced due to popular pressure a few months ago - but at this point I’m not sure if the campaign has had any affect. There seems to be no English news on the web about the campaign (typical of both Chinese state media & liberal Western media). But there is an English petition - started by a Taiwanese human rights group - here. In over a month it has garnered only 79 signatures! I have no idea how many people in China support him or have even heard of him, but I was surprised that only 513 people had taken this anonymous poll in a Hammer thread with over 4,000 views (95.32% or 489 people voted that Liu’s sentence should be commuted). This is the only poll I can find on the web, but you can find dozens of writings expressing support for him. There are also several Chinese petitions but they are blocked.

I originally planned to briefly introduce several of the ongoing workers’ struggles reported and discussed on the Hammer Network, but it’s taking me too long to do that. It would be better to devote individual posts to each incident. Not sure how many I’ll get around to blogging about, but I’ve already started one that I hope to finish and post in the next few days.

One thing to note, in case you want to use these websites, is that the Workers’ News section is almost entirely about other countries (the Ssangyong struggle in South Korea is given prominence on the main page), and most of the reports on China don’t deal with workers’ struggles (the only one I see on the main page is about Tonghua[6. See my previous post about the Tonghua steel workers' victory.]), or even workers. So the Workers’ Forum seems to be the place to go to learn about ongoing struggles. Most of the active threads there deal with workers’ grievances, and most of those involve bosses withholding wages. A few deal with workers fighting back.

Another interesting thing is that, while logging in, in order to authenticate that I was human instead of a bot, I was given a Chinese fill-in-the-blank to the effect of “The working ___ leads everything” (工人＊级领导一切). I guess, in addition to bots, they’re also trying to weed out class enemies.

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Notes