Wal-Mart Uprising: The Battle for Labor Rights in China

When Zhang Jun, a 44-year old electrician at Wal-Mart (China) Investment Co., Ltd. in Shandong, east of Beijing, shared his association’s Weibo blog, featuring a Mao-era propaganda poster, he was trying to make a point.

In it, Mao beams over a group of mobilized workers. A caption reads: “The working class must lead everything.” Zhang is not a fan of Mao, or his trade unions, but he is trying to revive a Maoist dictum in a cat-and-mouse game with both China’s only legal trade union and his capitalist bosses in Bentonville, Arkansas.