If you’re interested in labor in China (and if you’re not, you should be), then hurry over to the South Atlantic Quarterly where you’ll find four great articles on the topic that have been temporarily emancipated from their paywall:
Ralph Litzinger: The Labor Question in China: Apple and Beyond
Ngai Pun and Jenny Chan: The Spatial Politics of Labor in China: Life, Labor, and a New Generation of Migrant Workers
Tim Pringle: Reflections on Labor in China: From a Moment to a Movement
Ho-fung Hung: Labor Politics under Three Stages of Chinese Capitalism

Utopia has up an very interesting, lengthy and wide-ranging interview with Han Deqiang on the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ protests. It tries to put the protests in a larger context of ‘globalization’, which Han explains as mainly the result of the strategy of companies in developed countries to boost their profits by moving production to developing countries, such as China. Along the way there’s an interesting discussion of poverty in the US, and a simple primer about ‘Who Rules America?”

Unfortunately, despite Han’s own explanation, and the interviewer’s faithful adherence to Han’s logic, in the end Chinese workers are told to enter into a united front with Chinese capital. Sigh.

Against the backdrop of Liu Xiaobo being awarded the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, this issue of CLNT highlights the case of Zhao Dongmin – a labor lawyer and Maoist who on 25 October 2010 was sentenced to three years in prison for applying to set up a workers’ organisation to monitor the privatization of state enterprises and alert the authorities about cases of corruption.

China Strikes is a great new site that maps labor unrest across China. It is easy to add strike reports to the map, and anyone can do that.
http://chinastrikes.crowdmap.com/
About This Site:

The purpose of this site is to track strikes, protests and other collective actions by Chinese workers to defend their rights and interests. We hope that over time the site will serve as a resource to those wishing to better understand and support the labor movement in China.
The categories we use for strikes are based on the type of …

Zhao Dongmin was sentenced to three years for disrupting public order last week, nearly a week before the scheduled sentencing date (the 25th).

Zhao has been in prison for more than a year after being arrested last August for organizing a drive to establish the Shaanxi Union Rights Defence Representative Congress, a body tasked with overseeing and monitoring SOE restructuring, and reporting corruption and abuses of power.

There are two possible explanations for the early sentencing….