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The Jasic Workers' Movement, Shenzhen (2018)

Workers at Jasic Technology who sought to form a union under China's Trade Union Law were fired, beaten and criminally detained; left-wing students from Peking University, Renmin University and other campuses formed the Jasic Workers Solidarity Group, which riot police cleared in a dawn raid on August 24. It was the largest worker-student alliance since 1989, and the Xi era's harshest crackdown on a labour movement.

Time

May–November 2018 (peak: July 27–August 24)

Place

Jasic Technology factory, Pingshan, Shenzhen, Guangdong; the solidarity group's base near the Shenzhen–Huizhou border; repression spread to Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai and Wuhan

Decision-makers

Shenzhen and Pingshan public security; Guangdong provincial public security; the exact chain of command was never disclosed. The backdrop was the Xi administration's systematic tightening against labour NGOs and left-wing campus groups.

Background: discontent in the welding-equipment factory

Shenzhen Jasic Technology Co., Ltd., a private manufacturer of welding equipment in Pingshan District, employed roughly a thousand workers. In spring 2018, grievances centred on arbitrary wage deductions, inadequate overtime pay, withheld social-insurance and housing-fund contributions, and harsh working conditions. In May, several workers lodged complaints with the Pingshan branch of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU); the officials who received them instead suggested a solution: form a union in accordance with the law, and explained the legal procedure.

That suggestion became the spark. In June, a handful of worker organisers launched a unionisation petition that gathered roughly 80–89 signatures within two weeks (accounts differ; see methodology table). Management soon found out, and the leading activists were fired one by one on various pretexts. Among the first dismissed were "worker-poet" Mi Jiuping, Yu Juncong (who had written an open letter challenging the company) and Li Zhan. Yu had earlier been beaten by a workshop manager after filming the man's verbal abuse; after calling the police, he was fired for supposed "absenteeism."

Notably, in China only unions under the ACFTU are legal — and the ACFTU is widely seen as rarely representing workers against employers. The Jasic workers were following the "legal" procedure under the Trade Union Law. That is the incident's bitterest irony: those who followed the legal path were treated as illegal.

Who decided

The political backdrop is Xi Jinping — even as Xi reaffirmed Marxism's place in education and official ideology, the state crushed Marxists in Marxism's name. Cornell labor scholar Eli Friedman: "the state wants a firm grip on defining the discourse."

But no public evidence shows Xi or the Politburo directly ordered the Jasic crackdown — stated plainly. The verifiable decision chain sits at the local level:

• Company management: Jasic Technology's management refused the workers' union demand and fired the organizers.
• Pingshan (Shenzhen) government/police: the local government sided with the company; police repeatedly detained worker representatives and student supporters.
• Guangdong level: the August 24 raid and nationwide roundups of student leaders indicate decisions reached at least the provincial level — but no named decision-maker on the public record (unverified).
• Universities complied: Peking University and others disciplined Marxist-society students who joined the solidarity effort.

Detailed timeline

May 2018: Workers complained to the Pingshan ACFTU branch and were advised to form a union lawfully.

June 2018: Workers launched a unionisation petition, gathering roughly 80–89 signatures; the leading organisers were fired one by one.

July 20, 2018: Dismissed workers protested outside the factory demanding reinstatement and the right to unionise; police beat them. The workers then protested outside the Yanzi Hill police station, demanding the release of beaten co-workers and punishment of the officers; the incident spread widely on social media.

July 21, 2018: Some detained workers were released, but the protest did not subside — it drew national attention.

July 26, 2018: A Pingshan public-security discipline official had promised a decision by 10 a.m.; no announcement came. That afternoon workers went to the Yanzi Hill station to "collect the decision."

July 27, 2018: The Yanzi Hill station criminally detained 30 people — 23 men and 7 women, including Jasic workers and supporting workers from other factories — on suspicion of "picking quarrels and provoking trouble." Amnesty International immediately called for their unconditional release.

Late July–early August 2018: Under public pressure, Jasic hastily set up a "union preparatory committee" on August 1 and "elected" nine union committee members on August 20 — a management-led "union" created after firing and detaining the workers who had genuinely sought one.

August 22–23, 2018: Worker and student supporters in Beijing submitted petitions to the ACFTU complaints office and the All-China Women's Federation. A Hong Kong journalist was reportedly barred from entry; police tried to seize a Japanese journalist's equipment.

Around 5 a.m., August 24, 2018: Large numbers of shield-bearing riot police stormed a house near the Shenzhen–Huizhou (Huiyang) border, taking away about ten Jasic workers and some fifty students of the solidarity group, including Peking University graduate Yue Xin and students from Renmin University, Beijing Foreign Studies University, Hunan University and others. After two short videos from the scene, all contact was lost. Detained students still in school were reportedly held in a local primary school; graduates and workers elsewhere. The same day, Beijing-based graduates Gu Jiayue and Yang Shaoqiang, and petitioning workers Tang Xiangwei and Shang Yangxue in Shenzhen, were seized by Beijing and Guangdong police. Shen Mengyu — whom officials had claimed was "sent back to her hometown" — was confirmed to be under soft detention in a Shenzhen hotel, watched in shifts by state-security officers.

Also August 24: Guangdong police went to Beijing to detain members of the Red Reference editorial team; seven editors of the pro-labour website "Pioneer of the Times" were placed under soft detention.

November 9 and 11, 2018: Authorities seized 18 supporters in five cities — Beijing, Guangzhou, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuhan — including Peking University graduate Zhang Shengye, physically abducted from the PKU campus while the university administration did nothing.

The Jasic Workers Solidarity Group: the last worker-student alliance

After the July 27 mass detentions, left-wing college students and Maoist activists from across the country rushed to Pingshan and formed the Jasic Workers Solidarity Group (also called the Guangdong–Shenzhen pro-union workers' solidarity group). By the August 24 raid it numbered about fifty, based in a house near the Shenzhen–Huizhou border, holding daily solidarity actions demanding the workers' release.

Its core figures came largely from elite-campus leftist societies: Peking University 2018 graduate Yue Xin (already known for the PKU #MeToo campaign demanding the university disclose the Shen Yang sexual-assault case), PKU graduates Zhang Shengye and Zhang Yunfan (a Marxist-Maoist activist), Renmin University student Chen Kexin, and worker-organisers Liu Penghua, Mi Jiuping, Yu Juncong and Li Zhan. Members described themselves as Marxists and Maoists, marching with portraits of Mao and singing The Internationale — a deeply provocative image in Xi-era China: using the official ideology's own symbols against the official order.

The group's demands stayed within the lawful frame of "forming a union according to law," but its tactics — sit-ins, marches, online mobilisation, nationwide networking — exceeded the authorities' tolerance. In early August it even tried petitioning the ACFTU and the Women's Federation, seeking an exit within the system; the answer was tighter surveillance.

Analysts distinguish two phases: before July 27, workers pursued rights-defence through established labour-organising practice ("worker work"); after the mass detentions, the campaign became a nationwide solidarity drive aimed at shaping public opinion. The state's subsequent legal assault focused precisely on the links between the support network and Maoist organisations.

Repression: the August 24 raid and nationwide roundups

The August 24 dawn raid was the turning point. Shield-bearing riot police broke in and took away roughly fifty students and ten workers. Two short videos from the scene were their last communication. In-school students were mostly released within two days and sent back to their home regions under local police surveillance; graduates and workers were held elsewhere, their whereabouts unknown.

Repression did not end on August 24. On November 9 and 11, authorities seized 18 supporters in five cities, including Zhang Shengye, dragged off the Peking University campus. According to Human Rights in China (HRIC), as of November 2018, 32 people remained in detention, disappeared, or under "residential surveillance at a designated location," with four former Jasic workers criminally charged with "gathering a crowd to disrupt social order." No public reporting on subsequent verdicts exists; this page makes no claim about sentences — marked unverified.

The crackdown extended to campuses: Marxist and Maoist study societies at universities nationwide were disbanded or reorganised; Cornell University ended its partnership with Renmin University over the punishment of involved students. "Confession" videos by Yue Xin and others were never broadcast publicly — instead they were shown privately at gatherings of left-wing students, intimidation in place of propaganda, which itself reveals the authorities' fear that the Jasic story could generate public sympathy.

Amnesty International issued a statement in August 2018 condemning the detentions and demanding immediate unconditional release. International labour groups such as Labor Notes rallied in solidarity. Domestically, all reporting was blocked and "Jasic" became a censored term.

Who executed

Execution chain: company management (firings) → Pingshan police (worker arrests) → Guangdong police (the August 24 raid, nationwide roundups) → universities (student discipline).

• July 2018: Jasic workers fired for demanding a union; protests; police detained worker representatives.
• The solidarity group: Marxist-society students from Peking University, Renmin University and others formed the "Jasic Workers Solidarity Group" — a rare worker-student alliance.
• August 24 raid: police stormed the solidarity group's quarters, mass detentions of workers and students.
• Nationwide roundups: in the following months, police across China detained solidarity-group leaders and participants; several students "disappeared."
• University crackdowns: Marxist societies shut down, students disciplined.
• Arrest counts: sources differ — presented side by side, unverified.

Scale & Methodology

Who opposed

1. The Jasic workers: May–July 2018, Shenzhen Jasic Technology workers demanded a union and better conditions; organizers were fired; protests continued. Their demands were entirely within the Trade Union Law — yet they faced both management and police repression.

2. The student solidarity group: Marxist-society students from Peking University, Renmin University and others traveled to Shenzhen at their own expense. Yue Xin (Peking University, class of 2014) published an open letter supporting the workers, becoming the movement's emblematic figure. The solidarity group marched with portraits of Marx and Mao, chanting "working class" slogans — resisting the authorities with the authorities' own ideology, an irony lost on no one.

3. International attention: NPR and others covered it; scholars including Cornell's voiced support. The episode exposed the paradox of a "Marxist ruling party crushing Marxists."

4. Outcome: the August 24 raid destroyed the solidarity group; detained student leaders vanished; campus Marxist societies were shuttered. The Jasic movement — a rare "leftist" labor movement in reform-era China — showed the regime's zero tolerance for any spontaneous organizing, left or right.

Impact

The largest worker-student alliance since 1989. Jasic was the first social movement since 1989 in which Chinese workers and university students formed a substantive alliance. Students were no longer "enlighteners" but side-by-side supporters; workers were not passive objects of sympathy but the movement's initiators. The combination deeply alarmed the authorities.

The end of left-wing campus societies. Afterwards, Marxist societies and Mao Zedong Thought study groups at Peking University, Renmin University and other campuses were rectified, disbanded or reorganised. The paradox: the young people who took the official ideology (Marxism, Mao Zedong Thought) most seriously became the first the authorities purged.

Narrowing of labour-rights avenues. The Jasic workers followed the lawful procedure under the Trade Union Law — and even that path was sealed. The message to all workers: forming an independent union lawfully is impossible under the current system. Labour resistance in China grew further atomised and de-organised.

International academic and opinion fallout. Cornell's termination of its Renmin partnership became a landmark in Western universities' reassessment of academic cooperation with China. Sustained attention from Amnesty International and global unions made Jasic an international symbol of Xi-era labour repression.

After 2019: confession videos and the trial that was never reported

The judicial handling of the Jasic case stops, in the public record, at the arrests. The four workers at its centre — Mi Jiuping, Yu Juncong, Li Zhan and Liu Penghua — were formally arrested on August 28, 2018, charged with “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order” under Article 290 of the Criminal Law, and held at Shenzhen’s No. 2 Detention Center. According to a submission filed by Chinese Human Rights Defenders with the United Nations in March 2019, the four men’s lawyers were repeatedly refused meetings; lawyers for three of them were pressured into withdrawing, and a replacement lawyer for one was told he could not see his client because the case involved state secrets. Only one of the four was permitted a family visit in the months after arrest. After that, silence: no public trial was announced, no verdict or sentence was ever reported, and no release notice has appeared. That evidentiary gap is precisely why this page records the workers’ sentences as unverified. The absence is itself a finding — in a case the state had publicised through Xinhua as a foreign-instigated plot, the judicial outcome was never publicised at all.

The disappeared students resurfaced in a different format. In late January 2019, four graduates seized in the August crackdown — Yue Xin of Peking University, Gu Jiayue, Shen Mengyu of Sun Yat-sen University and Zheng Yongming of Nanjing Agricultural University — appeared in police-produced videos that officers played privately to left-wing students at Peking University and other elite campuses. Reuters, which interviewed students shown the tapes, reported that the four said on camera that they had spread false information, founded organisations aimed at subversion and acted on the instructions of an unnamed radical organisation; Yue also renounced her earlier #MeToo campaign. Friends of the four told Reuters the statements inverted everything the activists had stood for, and appeared to have been extracted after nearly five months held incommunicado, with no access to family or lawyers. The screenings were never broadcast publicly. Their purpose, students understood, was deterrence inside the campus: this is what supporting workers costs. After the screenings the four remained out of contact, and reports about their whereabouts stayed fragmentary for years. In August 2023, the overseas Chinese-language outlet Photon Media reported that Yue Xin had been released, was working, and was volunteering in her spare time with a library-related NGO. That is a single-source report which this page cannot independently verify; no authoritative public record establishes the current status of the other core supporters.

The repression also outgrew the case that triggered it. In December 2018, members of the Peking University Marxist Society, including its president Qiu Zhanxuan, were detained in connection with a commemoration of Mao Zedong’s birthday — an activity that, in another era, the state itself would have organised. On January 20, 2019, five labour NGO activists, among them the veteran organisers Wu Guijun and Zhang Zhiru, were arrested in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Changsha on the same “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order” charge, although none had played a direct role in the Jasic campaign. The Made in China Journal described the arrests as part of a wider clearing of the independent labour-NGO ecosystem that followed Jasic: first the solidarity network, then the infrastructure of worker support itself. Weeks later, editors of a labour news outlet covering dust-disease workers were detained in a separate case. Inside China, meanwhile, the word “Jasic” remained censored, the solidarity group’s accounts and articles were wiped, and the management-installed union at the factory — created in August 2018 after the genuine organisers had been fired and detained — never again featured in public reporting. No public record shows Jasic Technology itself being punished for the firings or the beatings that started the dispute. What the record does preserve, largely through overseas labour media such as Labor Notes, which published the detained workers’ own testimonies in translation, is the workers’ side of a case that was never allowed a public hearing.

Videos

"Shenzhen Jasic Technology: towards a worker-student coalition in China" — documenting the workers' unionisation drive and the student solidarity campaign (English narration).

More videos: Labor Notes panel: Chinese students and labour activists on the Jasic crackdown · Solidarity with the Jasic Technology workers' struggle (Aug 2018)

Related images (external links)

• Jasic incident image category — Wikimedia Commons (if the category exists; on-the-scene photos are mostly news-agency copyrighted, not embedded)
• English Wikipedia "Jasic incident" illustrations — check image licensing