The Fight of Chinese Workers Is the Fight of All Workers

May 26, 2025

A wave of protests by unpaid Chinese workers is sweeping across China, fueled by factory closures resulting from steep U.S. tariffs and a significant economic slowdown. Workers are taking to the streets in multiple regions, demanding back wages and challenging what they claim are unfair dismissals.

The unrest is not limited to factory workers. Protests by Chinese construction workers, health-care workers, teachers and sanitation workers demanding unpaid wages have erupted across China in recent weeks. In one instance of desperation, construction workers in Tongliao City, Inner Mongolia, gathered on the rooftops of the Jincan Royal Garden Community, threatening to jump if their back wages were not paid.

Tens of millions of Chinese workers are already bearing the brunt of the U.S.’s latest chapter in its trade war against China. Steep U.S. tariffs have pummeled Chinese export orders and production at the country’s factories. New export orders fell in April to their lowest level since Covid-19 was ravaging the country in 2022, while overall manufacturing activity in China was the weakest in more than a year, according to surveys published Wednesday by China’s National Bureau of Statistics.

China is usually portrayed in the U.S. news media as a rising economic superpower, the biggest exporter in the world and the second biggest economy, after the U.S. But much of this development was fueled by foreign investment and trade by big U.S. and other Western companies, in which the lion’s share of the profits and wealth were drained out of China.

Certainly, the Chinese capitalist class, protected by the big and powerful Chinese state, was also greatly enriched. But this was done on the back of the vast Chinese working class and peasantry. According to the World Bank, 19% of China’s population still lives below the poverty line, with 273 million people earning less than $6.85 a day. The most modern and affluent urban areas, around Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and the provincial capitals, still rub shoulders with the backward countryside. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers, like second-class citizens, come from the hinterland to earn the equivalent of a few hundred dollars under the harshest conditions, only to be sent back when the interests of Chinese and foreign capitalists turn around.

The Chinese economy has also been shaken by one crisis after another over the last two decades. In 2008, Chinese exports plunged following the global financial and economic crisis. In 2017, Chinese exports were hit again, after Trump imposed the first of many trade barriers and tariffs. Then, in 2022, an enormous real estate bubble in China popped, worsening the underlying economic crisis. At the same time, public and private debt hit record levels.

These multiple crises have led to worsening unemployment and underemployment, that has thus reduced consumer demand, especially for the working class and poor. This has led to a classic crisis of overproduction for Chinese industry. So, the Chinese and foreign-owned manufacturers in China have increasingly relied on exports, which have now been hit hard by Trump’s latest rounds of tariffs, especially since the U.S. still remains the largest market for Chinese exports.

Obviously, this worsening trade war cannot just be blamed on Trump. Even though China has been able to offer big U.S. companies new sources of profit, by placing at their disposal its large and educated proletariat, the growth of the Chinese economy has also strengthened the Chinese government and state, a state that brings together close to a billion and a half people on one-sixth of the globe. This gives the Chinese state a certain independence from the U.S.—an independence that it had already gained with the Chinese revolution of 1949.

To U.S. imperialism, this independence is a threat. That is why the U.S. is trying to bring China to heel through trade wars, as well as increasing military pressure.

No, the U.S. trade war is not being carried out to bring jobs back to the U.S., as Trump and the news media claim. On the contrary, U.S. workers will pay for this trade war, with much higher prices, as well as shortages of consumer goods, not just because of the tariffs, but because big companies will take advantage of the tariffs in order to impose generalized price increases.

Moreover, in the future, U.S. workers will be ordered to make much greater sacrifices in a real shooting war against the Chinese, a war that could usher in another World War, that is, a huge catastrophe for all of humanity.

The Chinese workers, who today are striking and fighting for their pay and jobs, are not the ones taking U.S. workers’ jobs, as Trump, the Democrats, and the U.S. media claim. The Chinese workers’ fight against their bosses and capitalists is our fight. We all face the same capitalist monster, just in different countries.