Dozens of workers gathered in clumps shortly before sunset on Thursday in front of the sprawling parts factory and outspokenly criticized local authorities for seeming to side with the company.

Image The workers, nearly 2,000 in all, have been holding meetings to discuss who would be able to best represent them. Credit... Ariana Lindquist for The New York Times

The workers said that large numbers of police officers had been positioned in the factory on Wednesday and Thursday in an attempt to intimidate them. The two other Honda parts factories shut down by walkouts in recent weeks have reopened after workers were promised large pay increases.

The Chinese government has not allowed unions with full legal independence from the national, state-controlled union. But the government has occasionally finessed the issue by letting workers choose their factories’ representatives of the national union, or by allowing the creation of “employee welfare committees” in parallel with the official local units, said Mary E. Gallagher, a China labor specialist at the University of Michigan.

But these exceptions have tended to be in less prominent industries like shoe and garment manufacturing, and not in bastions of heavy industry like automaking.

Workers here were not specific Thursday about what would qualify as having their own union. They are mostly in their early 20s, more than half are women. Their education levels are low. Although several said they had high school degrees, Honda requires only junior high school educations.

The workers say they want to be paid as much as workers at the first Honda factory recently to go on strike, a high-tech transmission factory in Foshan where the workers are almost entirely young men with a couple of years of vocational school training in addition to high school degrees.

Besides the Honda strike here, there were new reports Thursday of strikes at Japanese- and Taiwanese-owned factories in at least five other cities. Four of the cities are outside the heavily industrial Guangdong Province, where all three Honda auto parts strikes have taken place.