北京工人自治联合会 (Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation, abbreviated 工自联, gongzilian) was an independent worker organization active in Beijing during the 1989 democracy movement. It organized workers under their own banner and through their own committees, with its own publications, loudspeaker broadcasts, and picket detachments. The Free China archive treats it as an autonomous worker organization — not as a subordinate student body — that participated in the same citywide political crisis as the student organizations while maintaining a separate worker identity and organizational basis.
The archive records May 19, 1989 as the conventional formation date, the date of the federation’s founding manifesto. A credible scholarly account places the public announcement of the federation’s inauguration one day earlier, on May 18, and worker organizing had begun in mid-April.
Names used by the federation
The federation’s own documents use several variant names for what the sources describe as the same network. The archive preserves each document’s issuer name rather than imposing a single label retroactively:
- 北京市工人联合会 (Beijing Workers’ Federation) — used on the April 20 handbills
- 北京工人自治会 (Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Association)
- 北京工人自治联合会 (Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation)
- 北京市工人自治会 (Beijing Municipal Workers’ Autonomous Association)
- 首都工人自治会 (Capital Workers’ Autonomous Association)
- 首都工人自治联合会 (Capital Workers’ Autonomous Federation)
- 工自联 (gongzilian) — the popular shorthand; the June 8 government notice uses it
Formation: April organizing to the May declarations
Worker organizing began in mid-April 1989. Workers gathered at the Monument to the People’s Heroes after work, and by April 18 they were discussing forming their own organization; wallposters asked citizens whether they would welcome an independent workers’ organization (Walder and Gong, 1993, drawing on participant interviews and documents).
On April 20, two handbills appeared in the name of 北京市工人联合会 — 告全市人民书 (“Letter to All the People of the City”) and 十问书 (“Ten Questions”). The organization’s first public documents thus predate its public inauguration by about a month. In late April and early May, between 70 and 80 worker activists met regularly at the western reviewing stand in front of Tiananmen, not yet openly under a federation banner.
After the student hunger strike began on May 13, the workers operated openly: they raised a banner, set up a loudspeaker system, posted pronouncements on the wall of the western reviewing stand, and occupied tents continuously near the Square. Walder and Gong report that on May 18, following a rebuffed attempt to register with the Public Security Bureau, one of the federation’s leaders announced its official inauguration by megaphone after the day’s mass demonstration. This account rests on retrospective interviews with two former participants; no contemporaneous press record of it has been located.
The federation’s dated manifesto, 首都工人宣言 (“Capital Workers’ Manifesto,” May 19), declared that “Beijing workers are now organized” (北京工人已经组织起来了) and threatened a one-day general strike. Registration began on May 20 with a Preparatory Office proclamation, and a provisional organizational program followed on May 25. A May 26 evening press conference at the west gate of the Museum of Chinese History announced the preparatory committee. The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, in its 1989 filing to the International Labour Organization, dated the federation’s formation to May 19 and stated that a provisional charter was adopted in Tiananmen Square on May 28 — a date that sits uneasily with Walder and Gong’s May 25 program dating; the sources do not reconcile the two.
Structure and operations
The federation grew out of a preparatory committee — accounts name the printer Liu Qiang, the railway worker Han Dongfang, and the Beijing Workers University lecturer He Lili as early organizers — and developed a standing committee with departments for organization, propaganda, logistics, and liaison; later references describe a general assembly, standing committee, and executive committee. According to Walder and Gong, the structure designated no formal personal titles: leadership was collective, with Han Dongfang an informally dominant figure.
The core of continuously active participants near the Square numbered about 150. Membership rules required Beijing residency and work-unit affiliation, with identity and work cards checked at registration. Surviving reports give no agreed total membership: a scholarly estimate of about 3,000; government statements of more than 10,000 participants; and two former participants’ estimate of nearly 20,000 registered members by June 3. Membership rolls were reportedly destroyed as troops entered the Square, and no verified total survives.
The federation ran a print shop in Chongwen district and maintained picket detachments — including units called “dare-to-die” brigades — that were organizationally separate from the federation itself. It never built formal factory or workplace branches, though it had informal contacts in work units.
Broadcasting
From mid-May the federation operated a loudspeaker system on the Square, built up from megaphones to microphones and large public-address speakers. By late May it broadcast from morning into evening. According to Walder and Gong, the propaganda department rebroadcast BBC, Voice of America, and Taiwan radio news live, read leaked internal materials aloud, and turned the evening hours into an open forum — political statements, satirical songs and poems submitted by the audience and read on air — which became, in their account, the organization’s most popular activity. Asia Watch reported in 1991 that the organization “nightly transmitted items of news, commentary and political analysis which attracted audiences of several thousands, sometimes until dawn.” No verified formal station name for this operation has been found, and no primary transcript of the broadcasts is known to survive.
Documents
The federation issued a steady stream of dated handbills, preserved in the Hong Kong documentary collections 中国民运原资料精选 (1989) and cited in the scholarly record. The archive has compiled an inventory from Walder and Gong’s footnotes and Wu Renhua’s chronicle; direct examination of the originals remains future work. Dated items include:
- April 20 — 告全市人民书 and 十问书 (the first two handbills)
- May 17 — 告全国同胞书 (“Letter to All Compatriots”), demanding retraction of the April 26 editorial
- May 19 — 首都工人宣言 (founding manifesto)
- May 20 — Preparatory Office Proclamation No. 1
- May 21 — organizational proclamation; a workers’ declaration (“The working class must be the shock troops of the democratic movement”); a five-point program (“Ensure that the workers are really the masters of the firms”); a statement on workers’ inspection teams
- May 24 — 紧急呼吁 (Urgent Appeal) with instructions for the May 25 march around the Second Ring Road
- May 25 — 首都工人自治联合会筹建纲领 (Provisional Program); a second 紧急呼吁 on public order
- May 26 — 告海外同胞书 (“Letter to Overseas Compatriots”); 紧急动员起来，攻克八十年代的巴士底狱 (“Urgently Mobilize, Storm the Bastille of the 1980s”), issued jointly with the Young China Correspondence Society; 中国现状十大怪 (“Ten Strange Things about China These Days”)
- May 27 — 工人兄弟，动员起来 (“Fellow Workers, Mobilize”), which called on Wan Li to convene the National People’s Congress
- May 29 — 人民的号令 (“Command of the People”)
- May 30 — 紧急通告 and 急件 concerning the detention of federation member Shen Yinhan and the confrontation with public security
An undated Provisional Charter (临时章程) also survives in the documentary record. English translations of several May 21 documents circulate through a 1990 Hong Kong compilation and later republications; their completeness against the Chinese originals has not been verified.
Relationship with the student movement
The federation and the student bodies cooperated and clashed. Student organizations supplied material and legal help — students drafted documents and gave legal advice, and provided broadcast equipment and banners — and the federation supplied student protesters with medicine, food, and water. At the same time, Walder and Gong document significant friction: students at least twice in May blocked the workers from establishing a headquarters in the Square, and workers felt marginalized by the students’ insistence on the movement’s “purity.” Sociologist Zhao Dingxin has characterized the federation as “clearly merely an offshoot of the student movement”; Walder and Gong’s evidence of conflicted goals and contested space cuts against that reading. The archive records this as a genuine scholarly disagreement and treats the federation and the student organizations as autonomous actors in relationship, not as parts of a single command structure.
The official All-China Federation of Trade Unions donated 100,000 yuan in medical aid to the hunger strikers but refused to help the autonomous federation; on June 2 its Beijing Daily statement denounced the federation as “unlawful.”
June 8, 1989: declared illegal
On June 8, the Beijing Municipal Government and the Martial Law Command Headquarters issued Public Notice No. 10 (通告第10号), broadcast by Beijing Radio. Its full text names both the student and worker federations:
“The Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation (i.e. ‘Gao Zilian’) and the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation (i.e. ‘Gong Zilian’) are illegal organizations that have not been registered in accordance with the law and must be dissolved immediately and voluntarily.”
Members were ordered to “immediately stop all illegal activities.” The notice described the leaders of both federations as having “played an important part in inciting and organizing this counter-revolutionary riot in the capital,” and ordered them to “immediately surrender to the public security bureaus in their areas and strive for lenient punishment,” warning that those who refused would “be arrested according to law, brought to justice and dealt with severely.”
The federation’s two registration applications had earlier been turned down without reason, according to the ICFTU’s account. The International Labour Organization’s Committee on Freedom of Association later examined the case (Case No. 1500, reports of November 1989, early 1990, and November 1990) and found that suppressing the federation infringed workers’ right to set up and join organizations of their own choosing.
Detentions and trials
After the crackdown, federation figures were arrested across China:
- Han Dongfang 韩东方 — his name headed the government’s June 14 most-wanted list of pro-democracy workers. He turned himself in to Beijing police on June 19. He was held for 22 months without trial or sentence — in solitary confinement, then at Qincheng Prison — and released in April 1991 after contracting drug-resistant tuberculosis in detention; he later lost a lung. He traveled to the United States for treatment, returned in August 1993, was arrested in Guangzhou and expelled to Hong Kong, and founded the China Labour Bulletin in 1994.
- Liu Qiang — described by Human Rights Watch as a 27-year-old leader of the federation and formerly a worker at Beijing No. 3209 Printing Factory. Arrested in Inner Mongolia on June 14 (state television showed him being taken off a train) and held at the Taoran Ting No. 7 Detention Center in Beijing.
- Bai Dongping — a train attendant and member of the federation’s central committee; detained briefly on May 28 and released after several thousand people demonstrated outside public-security headquarters; rearrested in Sichuan on June 17.
- Liu Huanwen — a standing-committee member in charge of the pickets; arrested in Shijiazhuang on June 13.
- Yang Fuqian — leader of the third picket detachment; arrested June 10 and shown on state television the next day in an apparent coerced confession.
- You Diangsi — described as a “core member”; captured in Xi’an on June 14.
- Tian Bomin — a 24-year-old studio worker and federation member; arrested in Yunnan on June 26; sentenced to five years.
- Chen Yinshan — described as a leading member; arrested on May 30 or June 1.
- Zhou Shaowu — a liaison between students and workers, active in the federation from May 18; arrested in Shanghai on June 10.
- Li Jiang — described as a “key” member of the federation’s Dare-to-Die team; turned himself in after state television broadcast footage of him.
- Liu Zihou — described as head of the Beijing Workers Special Pickets; tried on January 11, 1991.
- Guo Yaxiong — arrested on June 8 with four unidentified federation members and later sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. He is reported to have drafted and distributed a leaflet called “Declaration of the Dragon.” No source attributes him a federation office, and the Chinese characters of his name are not verified in the sources consulted.
Several transliterated names in the detention records — including Qian Yunin (a name Asia Watch regarded as certainly misspelled) — remain still being researched at the identity level.
Lü Jinghua 吕京花 served as the federation’s spokesperson from May 26 to June 3, according to an account citing Walder; she helped destroy the membership lists on June 3–4 and later fled to Hong Kong and the United States.
Li Jinjin 李进进 presents an open question at the identity level: Human Rights Watch’s 1991 trial reporting names him among “the main leaders of the Beijing Workers Federation,” while Zhao Dingxin’s account describes him as a Peking University law student who helped draft documents and give legal advice. The archive does not assign him a federation office.
The June 17 death sentences — and what they do not show
On June 17, 1989, the Beijing Intermediate People’s Court sentenced eight workers to death on charges arising from the June 3–4 violence; seven were executed on June 21 or 22, and the eighth, Wang Lianxi, was spared on a mental-retardation plea and later received life imprisonment. The individual case records are documented separately in the victims’ memorial records.
The archive has found no source naming any of the eight as federation members. A Chinese government reply to the ILO in 1990 grouped them under a “WAF members” category, and a 2010 activist-scholar account stated that 14 of at least 27 workers executed in June were federation members — without naming individuals or citing a source. The human-rights records that individually document the eight — Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — attribute federation membership to other named detainees but not to them. The archive does not state that the executed workers were federation members.
Separately, a June 15, 1989 Hong Kong labor report relayed survivor accounts that “most” of the federation’s representatives were killed in the June 3–4 assault — an unverified second-hand account. Named federation figures are documented alive and arrested in the days and weeks afterward.
Aftermath
The federation ceased to exist as an organization with the June 8 dissolution order. Wu Renhua’s chronicle cites a federation name-change statement dated June 7 and a dissolution notice dated June 8; their full texts have not been located. Subsequent individual activism and exile labor work are not treated by the archive as continuity of the May–June 1989 organization.
Evidence status
Well documented: the staged formation sequence (April organizing; April 20 handbills; May 18 announcement account; May 19 manifesto; May 20–26 institutionalization), the 23-item dated document inventory, the broadcasting operation, the June 8 Notice No. 10 (full text), the ILO proceedings, and the post-crackdown detention records.
Still open: direct examination of the Chinese document originals; the May 18 inauguration’s contemporaneous corroboration; the federation’s exact committee composition; the Chinese characters of several transliterated names; the membership total; and whether any of the executed workers belonged to the federation. These gaps are recorded explicitly and do not undermine the page’s core findings.
Sources
- Andrew G. Walder and Gong Xiaoxia, “Workers in the Tiananmen Protests: The Politics of the Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation,” Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 29 (January 1993) — the anchor scholarly study
- Asia Watch, “Chinese Workers Receive Harsh Sentences; ILO Reports on 91 Cases,” News from Asia Watch (March 13, 1991) — detainee records and the ILO proceedings
- ILO Committee on Freedom of Association, Case No. 1500 (268th Report, November 1989; 270th Report, February–March 1990; 275th Report, November 1990)
- Public Notice No. 10 (通告第10号), Beijing Municipal Government and Martial Law Command Headquarters, June 8, 1989 — full text via the International Institute of Social History poster collection (chineseposters.net)
- Amnesty International, ASA 17/60/89 (August 1989); ASA 17/09/90; ASA 17/07/99
- Hong Kong Trade Union Education Centre / Trini Leung, report of June 15, 1989 (eyewitness visits to the federation’s headquarters, June 1–3)
- Wu Renhua, 《六四事件全程实录》 — retrospective chronicle (cited at passage level)
- Au Loong-yu and Bai Ruixue, “Contemporary Labor Resistance in China 1989–2009” (2010)
- CHRD, “The Legacy of Tiananmen” (June 1, 2009), Appendix III — Chinese-character forms for the June 17 defendants
- UK Parliament, Hansard, July 6, 1989 — parliamentary question on detained federation figures
- U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee, Han Dongfang biography (June 17, 2015)
- Zhao Dingxin, The Power of Tiananmen (2001) — on the student–worker relationship