Labor activists allege sexual humiliation and sleep deprivation in police custody
Society & Culture
Yesterday, Radio Free Asia reported on a “Maoist labor campaigner ‘kidnapped,’ believed detained, in China’s Guangdong.” Reuters follows up today with a report by Sue-Lin Wong and Christian Shepherd.
- Shen Mengyu 沈梦雨, a former employee of Jasic Technology, a car parts factory in Shenzhen, is the “Maoist” detained by the authorities. She had tried to form a union to negotiate collectively on behalf of 1,000 Jasic workers.
- Shen has a master’s degree “from a top Chinese university,” according to Reuters. But instead of going into a corporate or government career, she got a job at Jasic. She was fired in May for activism.
- Conditions at Jasic are grim: “Sometimes we would work for one month straight without any time off… They wouldn’t let us freely quit and they even watched us go to the toilet,” said one former employee — who was also detained for activism — to Reuters.
- The police abused workers detained for organizing. Sue-Lin Wong tweeted some of her reporting that did not make it into the article, and video clips of plainclothes cops around the Jasic factory. She mentions worker accounts that allege police used sleep deprivation and sexual humiliation to get them to sign documents they had not read and make video recordings.
