Archive notice — read this first. The CLB Strike Map is no longer a live or updating source. China Labour Bulletin dissolved on June 12, 2025, and its website became inaccessible the next day. The event series is frozen at June 2025. This page documents a terminated archive: use it as the historical record of what was documented between 2011 and mid-2025, never as a current feed. Every count on this page is a count of events documented by CLB, not of strikes in China.
What the map was
From 2011 to June 2025, China Labour Bulletin ran an interactive online map recording collective labor protests across mainland China. Each event was logged by CLB researchers and classified by industry, cause, demands, size, and location. It became the outside world’s most-used systematic record of worker collective action in China — used by journalists, scholars, and the U.S. Congressional-Executive Commission on China, which relied on Strike Map data for its worker-rights reporting (the Commission cites CLB’s annual documented counts: 1,509 incidents in 2024, 1,794 in 2023).
How events got in
CLB researchers continuously monitored Chinese media reports and social-media posts about worker collective action, then screened, verified, and classified what they found. That method defines the dataset’s shape: the map measures only events that were reported or surfaced online, survived censorship long enough to be captured, and passed CLB’s own verification. The Commission’s reporting notes CLB’s own estimate that its database captures roughly 5 to 10 percent of actual incidents.
Industry skew runs through the catalog. Construction and manufacturing dominate recorded events, and wage arrears are the leading recorded cause — CLB’s own analyses documented this, including its finding that wage arrears drove 80 percent of recorded incidents in one half-year period and 99 percent of construction-sector incidents. The map does not track union activity by the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions.
The limits, stated plainly
- The Strike Map does not measure the true number of strikes in China. Apparent trends confound real-world change with changes in media coverage, social-media penetration, censorship intensity, and CLB’s own staffing capacity.
- Event counts cannot become strike rates or prevalence estimates — there are no denominators.
- It does not measure strike propensity, strike success rates as population parameters, or total labor unrest.
- CLB’s coding taxonomy and inclusion/exclusion rules were not available for review; subjectivity in classification is an unmeasured margin of error.
- 2020–2025 capture operated under Hong Kong’s post–National Security Law environment; any staffing or capacity effects on event capture in this period are not established.
Why it ended
China Labour Bulletin announced its dissolution on June 12, 2025, citing “financial difficulties and debt issues.” Founder Han Dongfang told Taiwan’s Central News Agency the decision was his own and that he would remain in Hong Kong. The next day, clb.org.hk became inaccessible (AFP reported an archived webpage of the site; an AFP reporter found CLB’s known office closed with its sign removed, the landlord having taken the space back weeks earlier). A minority interpretation attributes the closure to Hong Kong’s tightening political environment under the National Security Law — that view is recorded as attributed interpretation, not as the founder’s stated reason.
How to cite it now
Cite archived CLB pages with the archive date and the 2025-06 freeze date. Always frame figures as “events documented by CLB, 2011–2025-06.” No DOI was assigned.
Related research uses
Canonical event-catalog source for documented collective labor protests in labor-rights and worker-unrest coverage; historical input to 2011–2025 labor-unrest annual briefs (series marked terminated); companion source to the Work Accident Map (same archive status) where workplace-safety context is relevant.
Related records
- Data Resources
- China Labour Bulletin — terminated archive (dissolved June 2025)