Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

CONCLUSION
foreign owned enterprises, these labour regulations do not apply (Du
Guang 2005). Though the freedom to strike has been abolished, the
‘capitalist roaders’ have yet to wipe out the labour legacy of the Mao
era in state-owned enterprises.
Mining accidents offer another example of how socialist values still
matter. According to one estimate, there were more than 4,000 deaths
from mining accidents in 2004 alone (He Qinglian 2005). Another estimate
puts this figure at 6,000 (Armitage 2005). According to one
estimate, the coal mining accident death toll is as high as 30,000 a year
in China (French 2007). Li Qiang (2005), the head of a labour-watch
organization based in New York, maintains that China only produces
35 per cent of the world’s coal but suffers 80 per cent of the world’s
mining accident deaths, with the death rate 30 times higher than that
of South Africa and 100 times higher than that of the United States.
But these accidents happen mostly in private mining firms. The
situation in private mining is that those with capital can force miners
to sign contracts that stipulate that compensation for death should not
exceed 20,000 RMB. A miners’ life has thus been made so cheap that
business contractors are not interested in investing in safety. While
media publicity eventually resulted in an increase in the price of a life
to 200,000 RMB in some mining areas, local government authorities
would prefer to cover up accidents and not to collect death figures. To
make life easier for private contractors some local governments simply
report a dead person as missing (Chen Bisheng 2005).
Again, thanks to the socialist legacy of the Mao era, this kind of
violation not just of human rights but of human life does not prevail in
a state-owned coal mine.
The socialist truth and belief values of healthcare and
education
State-owned enterprises are among the few institutions that uphold
socialist values through their labour regulations. Other important
socialist legacies from the era of Mao such as healthcare and education
in rural China have been cut back so much by Deng and neoliberal
policy makers that it will be difficult for them to recover. In 2003, the
new CCP central leadership in Beijing decided to allocate some state
expenditure to rural China, something that had not been done since the
late 1970s. A document to this effect was sent to various state departments,
but these departments refused to endorse it. Consequently,
when a meeting was convened to finalize the document, a meeting that
was to be attended by all the relevant ministries, no documentation
was tabled for the agenda. Hu Jintao, furious at this deliberate sabotage,
declared at a Politburo meeting that with or without
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