He Xiaobo: latest victim of China's crackdown on labour activists

Assault on workers’ rights leaves activists in custody facing charges including disturbing social order and embezzlement

 He Xiaobo nd his wife Yang Min. He was detained on 3 December as part of a government crackdown on Chinese labour activists in the southern province of Guangdong. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

 Yang Min holds up a photo album showing wedding photographs of her and her husband. Photograph: Tom Phillips for the Guardian

Tom Phillips in Foshan, Guangdong province-Tuesday 2 February 2016

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.” 

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 ChinaLabour 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”.

“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.”

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