In the years following May 1968 more baby boomers than would care to admit it today hawked their Red Moles and Socialist Workers around the streets and factory gates trying to convince the working class socialist papers were a truthful alternative to the biased bourgeois press.
Their naivety and ineptitude were brilliantly satirized in the TV comedy Citizen Smith about Wolfie Smith, an unwashed but charming revolutionary in a Che Guevara beret, his long suffering sidekick and adoring girlfriend. The series set Robert Lindsay in the title role on the road to stardom.
Circulation figures show the socialist press failed to convince more than a few thousand. Maybe the sports coverage wasn’t good enough.
Now in the course of a few weeks coverage of the Tibet crisis, the western media has managed to convince an entire sub-continent that it is institutionally and irremediably slanted. It takes a lot to convince ordinary Chinese that their own wretched and censored media is preferable to the BBC, the New York Times and so on, but somehow the western press has managed it.
The Chinese people have famously long memories and this lesson will not be forgotten any time soon. I wonder if the scribblers realize quite what they’ve done.
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March 31. In an astonishingly bold move, striking aircrew turned 14 passenger jets round in mid-flight and flew back to their point of origin, Kunming in south-west Yunnan province. The pilots were protesting against restrictive labour contracts.
The action by pilots of China Eastern Airlines took place against a background of growing discontent among China’s aircrews. On March 14, forty Shanghai Airlines pilots “took sick leave”. Following their example, on March 28, eleven East Star Airline pilots threw sickies.
China’s booming airline business is facing a labour shortage but to prevent pilots moving to better -paid jobs, bosses have forced them to sign 99-year contracts with punitive penalty clauses if they resign. A labour arbitration committee ordered one pilot to pay his employer, Xiamen Airlines, 1.2 million yuan (86,000 pounds). In a case yet to be ruled on, China Eastern is demanding a staggering 12.57 million yuan (902,000 pounds)in compensation from a pilot who quit.
Pilots have tried filing lawsuits against the airlines to have the contracts declared invalid, but the courts have predictably sided with the employers.
“The only option left for us is to go on strike," said one of the China Eastern pilots.
The strike drew a predictable response from the so-called communist authorities. China’s civil aviation authority vowed to punish the China Eastern strikers severely and said strike leaders could face a lifetime employment ban.
Sources: Guangzhou Daily April 2, China.org.cn April 2, and previous China.org.cn stories.
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