Just at the moment when the European ruling classes are hell bent on a strategy of driving down wages and reducing pensions to a level that will oblige workers to die on the job good news comes from China.

The Economist reported a few weeks ago on strikes and carried predictions that “declared the “end of surplus labour”  and that China, a country of 1.3 billion people, would soon run short of workers”. Demographics are at work.  The number of 15-24-year-olds entering the labour force will fall by almost 30% over the next ten years.In contrast to Europe  Beijing and other cities have announced increases in their minimum wages of up to 20%, albeit from a pitiful baseline.

Seumas Milne tells of strikes pushing up wages in iPhone maker Foxconn as well as Honda, Hyundai and Toyota plants and suppliers. Not even the bureaucracy’s China Daily has been able to ignore the outbreak of industrial action reporting that “several strikes have been reported after the wildcat work stoppage at Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing Co Ltd in Guangdong’s Foshan, which finally ended on June 1 with the employers bowing to a 30-percent salary increase. The strike started on May 17 and lasted two weeks.”

Milne hits the nail on the head when he explains both the sympathetic press coverage and the reasons for the strikes: “China’s leaders are determined to increase consumption at home in the face of continuing crisis in the western economies, shift resources from cheap labour to a more hi-tech output and transfer production to the poorer interior. They are also under intense pressure to respond to revulsion at the gross inequality that has disfigured China in the years of its explosive economic breakthrough.”

The bureaucracy might have its own agenda but the fact remains that a newly emerging working class, which will soon be the most powerful on the planet,  is learning how to fight and how to organise. Better than that, it’s learning what a victory feels like.