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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The judicial record of the Jasic case stops, in public, at the arrests. The four workers — Mi Jiuping, Yu Juncong, Li Zhan and Liu Penghua — were formally arrested on August 28, 2018, on charges of “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order,” and held at Shenzhen No. 2 Detention Center. According to a March 2019 submission by Chinese Human Rights Defenders to the United Nations, their lawyers were repeatedly denied meetings, several were pressured to withdraw, and one replacement lawyer was told the case involved state secrets. No public trial, verdict, sentence or release notice for the four has ever been reported — which is why this page marks subsequent sentences unverified rather than filling the gap with rumour. In January 2019, four disappeared solidarity-group graduates — Yue Xin, Gu Jiayue, Shen Mengyu and Zheng Yongming — surfaced in police-produced “confession” videos screened privately for left-wing students at Peking University and other campuses; Reuters reported that the four renounced their activism on camera, while friends told Reuters the statements flatly contradicted the four’s known convictions and appeared coerced after nearly five months incommunicado. Repression then spread beyond the case itself: Peking University Marxist Society member Qiu Zhanxuan and others were detained in December 2018 over a Mao birthday commemoration, and on January 20, 2019, five labour NGO activists — including Wu Guijun and Zhang Zhiru — were arrested in Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Changsha on the same “gathering a crowd” charge despite no direct role in Jasic, a follow-on sweep against the independent labour-NGO ecosystem described by the Made in China Journal. In August 2023, the overseas outlet Photon Media reported that Yue Xin had been released and was working, volunteering in her spare time with a library-related NGO — a single-source report this page cannot independently verify. No authoritative public record exists for the current status of the other core supporters or the four workers, and the management-installed Jasic “union” never again appeared in public reporting.

The official framing ran in parallel with the judicial silence. On the day of the August 24 raid, Xinhua published a long investigative report portraying the Jasic affair as the product of foreign instigation: it claimed that Fu Changguo, an employee of a Shenzhen migrant-workers’ centre, had organised workers to “make trouble” at the direction of overseas NGOs, and that the centre received funding from a Hong Kong-registered labour organisation. Fu was himself arrested and charged with “gathering a crowd to disrupt social order” alongside the four workers — the five names in Chinese Human Rights Defenders’ 2019 submission to the United Nations are exactly these. The “foreign forces” narrative dovetailed with the scripts of the later confession videos: first rewrite a lawful union drive as foreign manipulation in public, then let the case itself vanish in silence. The dispute’s actual starting point — workers complaining to the district union federation and being advised to form a union according to law — went unmentioned in Xinhua’s account.

The campus purge also left a public record. In September 2018, Peking University forcibly restructured its Marxist Society, discarding the society’s elected leadership and installing university-approved students in its place, over open protests from members — a step reported by Reuters and other international media. Marxist and Maoist reading societies at Renmin University, Beijing Foreign Studies University and other campuses were then deregistered, reorganised or shut down in succession, their faculty advisers replaced. A party that rules in the name of Marxism dismantled, by its own hand, the campus societies that studied Marxism most seriously — among the most damning footnotes the Jasic affair left behind.

• 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