A court in southern China has convicted 11 workers for “disrupting public order” in a closely watched test case of the government’s intolerance towards a recent surge in labour activism across the country.
The guilty verdicts in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong province, came on the same morning that eyewitnesses said more than 10,000 striking workers at a Taiwanese shoe factory took to the streets in the nearby industrial centre of Dongguan.
Last year, Chinese authorities used public disorder charges to round up legal activists and constitutional reformers in a crackdown that culminated in January with a four-year jail term for Xu Zhiyong, in China’s highest profile political show trial since Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo was jailed in 2009.