In the midst of the “trade war” between the world’s two dominant imperialisms, the US Treasury Secretary made a trip to Beijing in the spring of 2025. A so-called “truce” was then negotiated in early June, resulting in much higher US tariffs on China and lower Chinese tariffs than those in place before January, when the new American government took office. Framed as an effort to accomplish fair terms for the U.S., these trade negotiations were in reality an act of gunboat diplomacy by US finance capital to subordinate the Chinese capitalist class which is currently grappling with an increasingly serious crisis. In the foreground of the talks a bubbling workers movement has begun to organize itself outside the official Chinese regime union structure taking independent combative action, representing a potential prelude to the future resurgence of the mass class struggle.

The Tariff’s Economic Consequence in China

In mid-2025, U.S. tariffs, peaking at 145% before settling near 30%, triggered a sharp contraction in China’s export-driven manufacturing sector, with official data showing factory output growth slowing to 5.8% in May, the weakest in six months, and exports to the U.S. plunging by 34.5% year-on-year. According to Reuters, estimated industrial job losses remain between 4 to 6 million despite the tariff rollback, with economists warning that these trade measures could cut China’s annual GDP growth by up to 1.6 percentage points. At the same time, the country’s protracted real estate crisis continues to drag down broader economic recovery. Real estate investment declined 10.7% from January to May, new-home prices fell in 70 major cities, and unsold housing stock reached 391 million square meters. Together, with the tariffs, these shocks have led to widespread factory closures, including in electronics and textile sectors, mass layoffs, delayed wages, and rising protests, particularly in provinces already devastated by collapsed property markets like Henan and Hebei.

In this context under the pretext of “normalizing trade”, the U.S. Treasury Secretary presented the now usual list of US demands to China: increased purchases of US Treasury securities to finance the US budget deficit, dismantling of state subsidies protecting Chinese industrial capital, and forced opening of national financial markets to US companies. While officially settling for a reduction in the Chinese tariff on U.S. goods and tolerance for an increased U.S. tariff on Chinese goods, China has so far halted its sell off of U.S. debts that it started in March and April. The framework for these demands, the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, as we reported in TICP 63 is nothing more than a modernized system of tribute and a continuance by other means of the same old same old imperialist brigandry.

Rising Worker Combativity in China

While U.S. and Chinese officials spoke of finance and diplomacy, the reality behind their words was fear, of both economic collapse and the ever looming potential for such a crisis to result in a proletarian eruption from the industrial foundations of China. In recent years the Chinese labor movement has seen increasing activity. According to the China Labor Bulletin, there were 434 factory strikes in 2023, a dramatic increase compared to 2022 when only 37 occurred and only 66 in 2021. In 2024 the trend continued to grow with China Labor Bulletin (CLB) recording 1,509 labor protests/strikes, including 719 in just the first half of the year, indicating relatively sustained high levels of unrest. Between January and April of this year CLB reported that approximately 540 incidents were recorded, with 171 strikes in January alone.

The upward trend of strike activity has only continued. As a result of the tariffs and factory closures, from April until the writing of this article in June, China has been the scene of escalating proletarian dissent and independent collective action organized outside the states domineering regime union structure. On April 24, hundreds of workers of Guangxin Sports Goods in Dao county went on strike after the company’s factory was shut down without paying employees their compensation or their social security benefits. Workers struck in the Shangda Electronics’ factory that manufactures circuit boards, after not being paid wages since the start of the year and social security benefits for nearly two years. On April 28, a large-scale workers’ protest broke out in Wuzhen, eastern China, over wages that have been reportedly unpaid since January where over a thousand went to the town hall to protest and a dozen were arrested. Workers at Yunda Express in Chengdu, Dongguan and Dao County went on strike and took to the streets against factory closures. Workers’ protests also took place in the autonomous region of Inner Mongolia, against the non-payment of wages. In the southwestern province of Sichuan, a textile factory was set on fire over unpaid wages, preceding the fire, affected workers had staged vigils, filed wage claims and protest sit=ins, decrying the absence of legal recourse, but state enforcement remained absent until the extreme act of arson forced their plight into the public eye, generating a viral response across Chinese social media. Online platforms quickly dubbed the arsonist “Brother 800”, with thousands of posts expressing sympathy, calling his act a desperate "lesson for exploitative bosses", and condemning delayed wage enforcement, though authorities later labeled the “800 yuan” narrative a rumor.

Thousands of workers at the BYD electric automobile factory went on strike following one of the largest union actions in China’s recent history. In early April, around 1,000–2,000 workers at BYD’s Wuxi and Chengdu electronics plants went on strike to oppose a series of economic attacks by the company: performance-based pay was slashed, & overtime was forbidden, reducing total earnings by roughly 40–50%. The strike represented a development in Chinese workers militancy, in that it was coordinated between two factories over 1000 kilometers apart. Numerically it was much larger than the typical strikes which tend to involve only a few hundred workers focused on local issues pertaining to a single workplace accepting quiet back room deals. Instead, this strike openly refused management’s offer of closed-door delegate negotiations, and instead pressured BYD for mass, open talks. Thus workers signaled a strategic shift toward unified action and class combativity operating outside of the company and state controlled regime union structure of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU). The character of the strike underscores growing militancy and networks of solidarity across factory sites which have raised alarms for the company and government. CCP authorities responded with SWAT raids, mass arrests, and intimidation to prevent broader labor mobilization. In the face of state repression, these strikes may mark the emergence of a qualitatively new phase in the Chinese labor movement, more confrontational, collective, and politically aware than previous industrial disputes.

The all pervasive ACFTU union remains China’s only legally sanctioned union. It is the largest trade union in the world with 302 million members in 1,713,000 primary trade union organizations. The CCP exerts significant control over the ACFTU, particularly through the appointment of officials at regional and national levels. As with all regime unions it prioritizes containment of worker unrest, snuffing out strike action while subordinating the workers to the interest of the national capital. Thus the current wave of Chinese worker strikes that operate completely outside the established regime union, demonstrates a notable development for the independent class struggle of the Chinese workers.

At the same time, demonstrating the depth of the social crisis, other sections of the petty bourgeoisie, homeowners and shopkeepers, have protested in front of local offices, blocking highways and occupying construction sites, as the financial and real estate crisis worsens.

The Regime Union & CPoC Response

The Chinese capitalist class, unable to resolve the crisis, has so far responded with state violence. Protesters are beaten, arrested, and disappeared. Amid the mounting repression, Hong Kong based Chinese Labor Bulletin which has for years reported on the developing Chinese labor movement mysteriously shut down operations starting on June 12 that it “can no longer maintain operations”, closing its website and social media.

The All-China Federation of Trade Unions has echoed Chinese Communist Party leadership by emphasizing the need for “harmonious labor relations”, wage negotiation mechanisms, and workplace stability, particularly as it marked its 100th anniversary in April. While it has formally ignored directly commenting on the strikes in official comments, along with top CCP officials it has warned of “mounting employment pressures” and stressed that “jobs are the foundation of social stability”in recent public statements. Recently, ACFTU has also promoted state-guided collective bargaining reforms in provinces like Guangdong, feigned as democratization measures, while simultaneously working to defuse strikes or mass worker mobilizations.

The rising proletarian activity is not a collection of isolated incidents, but the initial pangs of the working masses spontaneous return to class struggle, albeit not yet led by its party with its program of action, not yet organized within class unions, but already appearing again onto the historical scene with barricades, fists, and fire spreading throughout the world at the onset of the looming economic cataclysm of capital and it’s future inter-imperialist war. The American bourgeoisie watches with concern and calculation. Trump claimed to have struck a “quick deal” with China to “save them from what I thought was going to be a very bad situation”. The harsh tariffs were not partially revoked out of generosity, but because adequate concessions were made to shore up U.S. financial dominance while simultaneously balancing the reality that behind all of the U.S. maneuvers to destabilize the CCP it is tempered by the risk of inadvertently breathing life into a renewed class militancy within the Chinese working class who toil within the world’s preeminent industrial power house.

The ruling classes in the East and West understand each other perfectly. What terrifies them most is not war between nations, which they actually desire as the only way to save their rule and privileges, but war between classes, as the only sure way to their defeat and end. The fear of rebellious workers unites them across borders, and for the bourgeoisie, this international unity finds no better expression than in sending the proletarians of their respective countries to slaughter each other in war. The bourgeoisie will vacillate between tariffs and treaties, between concessions and repression, but it will not be able to resolve the contradiction it carries within itself.

The proletarian masses in China and throughout the world are not yet organized, they are not yet armed with their program or their party, and they remain dominated, as everywhere else in the world, by the bourgeois state apparatus that fits them like a glove, acting in China as the last garment of the Stalinist betrayal of the global proletariat. But the working class movement is still on a historical course for the horizon traced by Marx, for the goal that the communist left has never abandoned: the dictatorship of the proletariat, the abolition of wage labor and the obliteration of class society. Until then, every embassy meeting, every Treasury mission, every bill or trade agreement is nothing but a delaying tactic, a scaffold erected on top of a volcano.