From Mimeographs to Self-organization: Beijing Workers’ Writings in the 1989 Tiananmen Movement

This essay unpacks how Beijing-based workers’ handbills and posters during the 1989 democracy movement functioned as a counterinstitution that enabled everyday workers to translate economic demands into political self-organization through groups like the Workers’ Autonomous Federation. In contrast to liberal dissident writing at the time by the likes of Fang Lizhi and Liu Xiaobo, workers’ organizing strategies and political vision have seldom been analyzed. The author argues that these writings represent an important effort to create an inchoate civil society under authoritarian conditions, while going beyond these conditions by empowering workers to ground a broader struggle for democracy in reorganizing the control of society and productive industries through independent politics.