China's labor pains: young factory workers are demanding a share of China's new prosperity. Will their next demands be for political rights?

• Author: Barboza, David
• Position: INTERNATIONAL

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Tan Guocheng was just 19 when he left his home in central China four years ago in search of a factory job. Tan hoped that working on an assembly line for a company like Honda would be his path to a middle-class future.

For years, China's economic boom has been driven by young people like Tan from poor, interior provinces migrating to coastal factory towns. They work long hours for line pay, often six or seven days a week, in steamy, high-pressure factories. But now many of them want better jobs and a larger share of the fruits of China's economic miracle.

Last January, when Honda offered to increase Tan's $175 monthly salary by only $7, he was distraught. He planned to marry soon, and it was not enough money to buy a house or raise a child. So he decided to fight back.

The strike he led at the Honda factory in Foshan last spring eventually resulted in a 24-percent wage increase. But beyond that, news of the workers' resistance, which spread quickly via cellphone and the Web, inspired similar strikes at factories across the country that make everything from auto parts to flat-screen TVs for export to the U.S. and the rest of the world.

For the last three decades, China has been an odd hybrid of communism and capitalism. In 1978, China began opening up its state-run economy to free-market capitalism, but politically it remains an authoritarian state, run by the Communist Party.

Using Technology to Organize

Wielding cellphones and computers, members of China's emerging labor movement so far seem to be outwitting official Web censors in an effort to build broad support for what they say is a war against greedy corporations and their local government allies.

Ironically, the labor movement might not be possible if the Chinese government had not made a concerted effort in the last decade to shrink the country's digital divide by lowering the cost of mobile phone and Internet service. That's given China the world's biggest Internet population (400 million) and allowed even the poorest of the poor to log on to the Web and air their labor grievances.

"This is something people haven't paid attention to--migrant workers can organize using these technologies," says Guobin Yang, a professor at Barnard College and author of The Power of the Internet in China: Citizen Activism Online.

There may be other reasons the Chinese government is allowing the labor movement to press its demands for...