The strike was only ended after the company gave in to the strikers' demands. But with at least 5,000,000 layoffs of state workers on the horizon, more protests may be coming.
The protests were sparked in part by Lu Hao, 49, the governor of Heilongjiang and the youngest provincial governor in China. Or more specifically, by Lu's boasts at a high-level political meeting.
Lu was speaking at the "two sessions," the nation's top annual political meetings, when he said on March 6 that Longmay Group, the largest coal mining group in the province, had not withheld or lowered miners' salaries despite heavy financial losses.
The meetings were simultaneously broadcast back home, where 80,000 miners have been waiting for "at least some living expenses," a fact Lu neglected to mention. Only after the strike began, Lu admitted that he'd given a misleading account of the miners' plight.
"We must thoroughly absorb the lessons of collecting and reporting inaccurate information," Lu said.
China Stringer Network / Reuters
"It didn't get resolved. The police came in so the strike couldn't continue," Geoffrey Crothall, Communications Director of China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor rights NGO, told BuzzFeed News in a phone interview.
There might be more protests in the future, he added. The organization has mapped 769 workers strikes in China from the beginning of 2016. The map might only record 10% of the overall strikes, says Crothall, since occasionally-released official documents give a much bigger number.
It's up in the air whether any future protests would have better coverage than the strike in Heilongjiang, which has been virtually absent from Chinese reporting. (Chinese media have been ordered to strictly control negative reporting during the "two sessions" according to a leaked document circulating online.)
Stringer Shanghai / Reuters
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