A clash between protesting workers and police broke out at a coronavirus test kit factory in Chongqing, China, on Saturday.
Video clips smuggled past Chinese censors showed angry workers tossing improvised weapons at uniformed officers, who used loudspeakers to order the demonstrators to halt their “illegal activities.”
The plant is owned by a Chongqing-based company called Zybio (sometimes rendered as ZY Bio). The company did not respond to queries from Agence France-Presse (AFP) about the demonstration.
AFP noted local commentators insisted the protest was not political in nature but was simply a dispute over unpaid back wages, however China’s vast censorship apparatus worked hard to ensure the rest of the country did not hear about it:
The hashtag “Chongqing Dadukou Pharmaceutical Factory” appeared to be censored on the popular Weibo social media platform Sunday, with only one post from the previous day still visible describing the protest as an “interesting topic.”
One video posted on a TikTok account belonging to a state-owned news outlet showed what it claimed was a street littered with antigen tests in a Chongqing industrial park.
“Sources say a labor dispute triggered conflict,” the caption read. The video was taken down within hours.
AFP compared the Chongqing protest to the demonstrations and riots at Foxconn’s iPhone factory in Zhengzhou, which began with workers fleeing from a brutal coronavirus lockdown in the city’s industrial sector, and later became an angry protest by new workers who complained the company did not pay the bonuses offered for new hires and returning employees.
A video from Chongqing cited by the BBC on Monday featured a crowd of protesters chanting, “Give us our money back.” A caption included with one of the locally sourced videos claimed this was a reference to “unpaid salary.”
The political angle to the Chongqing protest appears to be that the Chinese government encouraged greater production from medical equipment providers to cope with the massive coronavirus wave that began rising late last year — but then canceled those orders when Beijing decided to instantly abandon most of its epidemic protocols and throw its borders open.
“After the sudden easing of anti-[coronavirus] restrictions a month ago, following grassroots protests in late November, demand for testing kits and other materials for tracking the SARS-CoV-2 virus collapsed, with production lines standing idle,” Asia News reported Monday.
This evidently prompted companies such as Zybio to renege on wage promises and lay off thousands of workers they hired before Beijing decided to abandon mass coronavirus testing:
Similar confrontations are reportedly occurring at other Chinese companies as the immense projected demand for government-ordered testing abruptly drops to zero:
These reported labor disputes dovetail with many other complaints that China changed its coronavirus policies too suddenly, with essentially zero time for anyone to prepare, creating both massive health problems and economic disruptions.
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