Dejian (Ken) Zeng
China Labor Watch
Shenzhen, China
I am Dejian Zeng, a master’s student studying public administration at NYU Wagner.
I am also from mainland China.
This seems to be a very unusual identify for a young man trying to pursue a career in the human rights field in the United States. I didn’t witness the Cultural Revolution with my own eyes. I never stood alongside those enthusiastic students in Tienanmen Square in 1989. I was born during an era when China’s economy was rapidly developing and when millions of people were getting out of poverty. I belong to a generation that has an indifference to politics.
How did I get here, then?
Let me begin my story with the summer of 2014: sun shone through the beautiful glass roof and was reflected onto the expensive marble floor of the newly built Beijing South Railway Station, the most modernized train station in China. I stood in the middle of it, watching people coming and going through that grand building. And I felt sad. How can life here be so different? I asked myself. What I had seen just outside was a totally different world.
Located a five-minute’s walk from the South Station is the so-called “Happiness Village,” whose other name is the Beijing Petitioner Village. Because of its proximity to the State Bureau of Letters and Calls, the administrative office hearing grievances from petitioners, there are hundreds living there who suffer from injustice, with the faint hope of one day obtaining what people call justice and human rights. Since 2012, I had been doing research on social unrest and petitioners in China, and visiting the petitioner village was part of that research.
I witnessed fear in the eyes of newly arrived petitioners. I felt the gloom of an old man who had been petitioning for 30 years. These people came to the village and never left, no matter how horrible their living conditions were, and no matter how terribly their lives had been ruined. Some were there because of their destroyed houses and lost lands. Some because of corruption and unjust sentences. And many—hundreds or even thousands—because of unpaid wages and terrible working conditions. They were fighting for the dignity of being human.
From the thousands of cases I collected, I saw a different China—a China I wanted to fix, a China I wanted to make better.
Before I left the petitioner village, a female petitioner grabbed my hands and looked into my eyes. Then she asked the question I have been asking myself since: “You will help us, right?”
Would I? Human rights advocacy is so hard to do in a country like China, which has such extensive economic and political power.
But I was walking in the mist and couldn’t see what was in front of me. There are always possibilities. And, change would happen. In the labor rights arena, the number of strikes have skyrocketed in the past two years. There were over 2,700 strikes and protests in 2015—more than double of those in 2014. This trend has intensified in 2016, with more than 500 protests occurring in January alone. And laborers are taking bolder actions to defend their rights, which leads me to my summer project (which I will talk more about in my next post).
“Yes, I will!” I told that lady, faithfully looking into her eyes.
The sky is blue. The sun is shining.