In 1989 in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the prints distributed amongst the local population symbolises a significant occurrence of mass organising in the region’s history. Produced in the form of handbills, waybills, posters and public communiques, prints handed out in factories, universities and on the walls of the streets. While the varying bodies of protestors had different grievances, they collaborated to equip the movement with printing structures, disseminate information and bolster solidarity.

The publications, each form with their own material histories in China, highlights the unofficial formation of the Workers’ Autonomous Federation (WAF) in the wake of Tiananmen protests in the Spring of 1989. The protests, named after the massacre on Tiananmen Square on June 4th where many workers, students, protestors, civilians and soldiers lives were lost. WAF expressed solidarity with the struggle of the students and held a unified ground for the mobilisation of a labour movement, which included the different sects of labour and their specific outcries. The Chinese workers’ role during Tiananmen lies thus not only in their organizing contributions in the streets of Beijing in May but in their vigorous use of counter-institutional publications to carve out alternate discursive spaces to develop socialist ideas external to the state and yet make demands on it.

In other words, the circumstances and form of workers’ writing was inseparable to how the workers independently practiced new ideas of struggle in Tiananmen. These writings demand “completely independent” forms of autonomous governance that would “supervise” the Communist Party and develop a system of socialist pluralism to take control of and reorganize the Chinese society’s means of production. These perspectives informed the means and tactics of workers’ struggle, from how the workers negotiated their relationship to the students to why they decided to take over certain factory production lines as a means to assist the struggle. The diverse forms of writing were tactical and timed to respond to different moments of the struggle in May from day to day, varying from adjusting their demands with different manifesto flyers to verse poetry and more personalized open letters to specific student bodies.