This article is more than 4 years old

This article is more than 4 years old

Labour activist He Xiaobo had been expecting a knock at the door. At about 3pm on 3 December last year, it finally came.

As the 42-year-old father-of-two stepped out from the apartment block where he lives with his wife and baby daughter, he was surrounded by police officers.



“He called me and said: ‘I’m being taken away,’” his wife, Yang Min, recalled during an interview at their eighth-floor flat overlooking this southern industrial city. “I didn’t know what to do.”



The day Zhao Wei disappeared: how a young law graduate was caught in China's human rights dragnet Read more

Two months after his arrest – part of what campaigners describe as an unprecedented government assault on China’s labour movement – Yang has yet to set eyes on her husband.



At least two other leading workers’ rights activists, including one of the country’s best known, Zeng Feiyang, also remain in custody having been arrested during the same roundup in early December. They face charges including disturbing social order and embezzlement.



Campaigners fear the crackdown – which comes amid rising labour unrest and follows similar government attacks on civil society activists, human rights lawyers, academics and journalists – represents the latest phase in a widening Communist party attack on its perceived enemies.



Since Xi Jinping took power in late 2012, a severe political chill has descended on the country as Beijing turns back towards what one leading political scientist has dubbed “hard authoritarianism”.

Geoffry Crothall, a campaigner from the Hong Kong-based advocacy group China Labour Bulletin, said he believed the wave of arrests against key labour organisers was “definitely part of a wider central party agenda to reassert control over all sectors of society and the economy”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yang Min holds up a photo album showing wedding photographs of her and her husband. Photograph: Tom Phillips/The Guardian

“So you are seeing attacks on lawyers who are considered outside of what the party would like them to do, and the same with labour activists,” Crothall added. “I doubt very much that is going to work but I suspect that is the rationale at the heart of all this.”

Eli Friedman, a Cornell University labour expert, said the crackdown appeared designed to warn workers that unrest would not be tolerated at a time when many factories were either closing as a result of China’s slowing economy or relocating to parts of south and south-east Asia where costs were lower.



China Labour Bulletin detected a “massive upsurge” in worker unrest in 2015, recording 2,774 such incidents, twice the previous year’s figure.



“Part of what is going on here is they are trying to figure out a way to send this message to workers that strikes are going to be treated increasingly as criminal events, which has not really been the case that much over the past 15 years,” Friedman said.



“Going to arrest some anonymous worker who has been involved in a strike and putting them in jail doesn’t generate the same kind of media sensation [as arresting prominent labour activist leaders].”

He Xiaobo’s activism began in 2006, when then then migrant worker came to Foshan, a manufacturing hub in the southern province of Guangdong, from Henan province only to lose three fingers in an industrial accident.



Activists say millions of impoverished workers have been maimed since China’s low-cost manufacturing boom began in the 1980s in a region that became known as the “world’s factory”.

Incensed at the poor treatment of such migrants, He set up the Nanfeiyan Social Work Service Centre, a group that is credited with helping hundreds of wounded workers secure compensation from their employers after becoming injured or ill on the job.



Apo Leong, a retired campaigner who has known He for about a decade, said his “comrade” and friend believed it was his mission to help Guangdong’s out-of-luck workers.

“He always wants to see justice for the migrant workers – particularly the accident victims – because he himself was one of them,” the Hong Kong-based activist said.

As part of that mission, He’s group set up a hotline for injured workers seeking advice or assistance. He also made regular visits to hospitals in search of workers who had been cut loose by their employers having lost digits, limbs or been diagnosed with illnesses linked to their work in unsafe factories such as benzene poisoning or asbestos-related lung disease. “He was very dedicated. He really cared for the workers,” Leong added.

In a 2012 interview with Chinese state media, He complained of the government’s mistreatment of migrants. “Whenever the government launches a crackdown on disorder or littering, it mainly targets migrant workers,” he said.

The detentions of He and his fellow activists have sparked outrage among campaigners, who have condemned Beijing’s “coordinated attack” on the labour movement.

Writing in the Washington Post last month, three leading North American academics accused the Communist party of attempting to stamp out labour activism in Chinese civil society “once and for all”.

Gui Minhai: the strange disappearance of a publisher who riled China's elite Read more

This week, Zhu Xiaomei, an activist who was also among those seized in early December, was released on bail.

He, who had repeatedly confided in his wife that he was facing increasing pressure from authorities and feared arrest, has had no such luck. “I always told him: ‘Don’t let it happen,” Yang, 29, said. “I was scared inside. I was worried.”

Yang, who now cares for the couple’s 21-month-old daughter, Shuangshuang, alone, flinches when asked whether she believes her husband’s detention is part of a wider political campaign against those who speak out against the Communist party.



“That is something that is over my head,” she said cautiously, adding: “No matter what charges they lay against him, I trust him. He is innocent.”



As Yang remembers her absent husband and how she tried to convince him to step back from his frontline activism, her eyes become bleary. “He once told me: ‘If someone is going to have to make a sacrifice, I am willing to be the one.”