"Don't, whatever you do, call him a dissident. Hero of Tiananmen Square he may be, but he won't be labelled that way – too intellectual, too highbrow. Han Dongfang always remembers that before the spring 1989 protests he was a railway worker. And who with a name like Dongfang – meaning "the East" in reference to The East is Red, China's anthem during the Cultural Revolution – could set themselves up as a counter-revolutionary?
No, Han Dongfang was never a self-appointed Lech Walesa of the Far East. "I never urged the workers on to political action," he writes in his autobiography published in early 2014 in France. A hard-headed country-boy, he just wants to do his little bit to improve workers' living and working conditions. An action man, then. Exiled to Hong Kong, he founded the China Labour Bulletin in 1994 with the aim of persuading the poorest workers of the benefits they could reap from organizing collectively. It was printed out and posted to a list of 5 000 firms, a bit like a message in a bottle cast into the sea. As you might guess, the results were disappointing.
Han Dongfang knew that he would get nowhere without practical involvement by the workers themselves. But what could he do, trapped in Hong Kong? It was then he remembered his unsuccessful application to Radio Beijing at his mother's prompting, who thought he had "a lovely voice". So he contacted the US Congress-backed Radio Free Asia which had recently set up in Hong Kong, which offered him several hours' weekly air time. He started out feeling his way along, commenting on working conditions in China from his cramped studio. But he got bored with it not being connected to workface realities. "I was just an editorializing journalist, never getting out of the office and doing nothing but commenting," he now says.
So he persuaded Radio Free Asia to set up a direct chat line with workers in all regions of China. "These weekly talks helped me understand how Chinese workers live and what they go through every day. They let the China Labour Bulletin build up a country- wide network of workers". Now, it draws a big audience over the Internet in China, but also elsewhere – the show is a big hit with Chinese communities throughout the world.
The Internet and social networks, especially Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, help reach a younger generation born in the 1990s. "They are a generation of migrant workers who won't let themselves be ground down (…) They have developed an Internet-based virtual solidarity which can be turned into a huge physical protest movement in a flash", he enthuses from his belief in their ability to make things happen.
Unlike their parents, they never lived through the "iron rice bowl" period where industry workers had job security, a pension guarantee, medical care, free schooling for their children, and company-provided housing. Privatization in the 1990s "turned local officials into the bosses of private companies". The bond of trust was broken; the Chinese regime's Marxist veneer was irreversibly shattered.
But there is still a long and challenging road ahead. Industrial development has put the environment and workers' health at risk. "Most of the cases we have taken up in the past two years concern work-related accidents and diseases," he says. Silicosis is wreaking havoc, affecting more than six million workers – miners, naturally, but also workers in the building trades, cement works, jewellery manufacture, etc. To help them claim compensation, the China Labour Bulletin sends lawyers out to even the remotest villages. And it is paying off: the law was overhauled in 2012 so that silicosis sufferers no longer have to prove the causal link between their illness and their job to get compensation.
After twenty years' activism, Han Dongfang finally seems reconciled to the idea that he may never go back home. China to him is what he now experiences through the personal stories of those who growth has sidelined, urging them to get organised and stand up for their right to dignity but without crossing the red line. Because he has not forgotten Tiananmen Square: "In China, you take political action at the risk of prison or even death." — Denis Grégoire"

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