At the end of a year of rising wages and spiralling raw material costs, it was not the kind of festive surprise Hong Kong businessmen with factories in southern China would have wanted.
But just two days before Christmas, a senior government official in Shenzhen, the populous city across the border from Hong Kong, said new guidelines that could allow employees to appoint their own union representatives were “almost approved” and would be launched “as soon as possible”.
The statement was another sign that the balance of power has started to shift away from factory owners in favour of their employees following a spate of suicides at Foxconn, the Taiwanese-owned electronics company that supplies products to Apple and other multinationals, and wild-cat strikes at Japanese car parts companies in Guangdong last year.