Chinese workers beat manager to death; farmers block highway
Meanwhile the authorities announced today that, for now, there will be no lay-offs from Tonghua Iron and Steel Group, in Jilin, industry leaders, after infuriated workers killed manager Chen Guojun.
The company had intended to cut 30 thousand jobs. On July 24, furious workers stopped production. According to sources quoted by the state-run China Daily, "Chen provoked the workers, saying that most of them were to be thrown out within 3 days”.
The workers brutally attacked him and then clashed with the police to prevent them from bringing Chen to the hospital. He died in hospital, where he was finally brought, later in the evening.
In China there were over 87 thousand mass protests in 2008 for economic reasons. According to experts, workers and farmers are deprived of adequate legal and judicial protection against the expropriation of land and job cuts. As a result the outbreak of violent protest is increasingly frequent. The police often intervened on behalf of local officials who remove land from peasants in return for low compensation, or in support of companies against the protests of workers.
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