Chinese Employers Accused of Goon Hiring

[Omaha Steve]

http://money.excite.com/jsp/nw/nwdt_rt_top.jsp?news_id=ap-d8u0ic1o0&

Sunday January 6, 2:01 PM EST

SHENZHEN, China (AP) — Huang Qingnan lifts his hospital sheets and shows a long scar below his left hip. His right thigh needed stitches and surgeons fought to mend muscle and tendon gashed in his calf.

The 34-year-old labor activist was stabbed repeatedly by knife-wielding thugs, one in a series of attacks that experts and workers' rights advocates fear may signal a worrying new trend — privatized intimidation.

Once it would have been the communist government going after activists such as Huang. Today, he's less worried about the government and more about gangsters he believes are being hired by China's rough new capitalists to cow troublesome workers.

"The attack happened so fast," Huang said, lying in bed on the 19th floor of the Shenzhen Second People's Hospital. "It lasted just a minute or so, but I lost so much blood that I blacked out. Everything went blank."

A week before the November assault, another Shenzhen labor activist, Li Jinxin, was badly beaten, according to the Southern Metropolis Daily, a state-run newspaper. The paper said at least two others had been attacked around the same time. Shenzhen is a southern boomtown in Guangdong, one of China's most prosperous and industrialized provinces.

Chinese companies have used thugs to attack enemies in business disputes, but rarely against labor groups in big cities, said Anita Chan, a research fellow at Australian National University.

FULL story at link.