10 taxi drivers arrested over antitax rally in China

Asian Economic News, March 6, 2000

BEIJING, March 3 Kyodo

More than 1,000 angry taxi drivers have paralyzed traffic in Dachuan, Sichuan Province, to protest the imposition of a tax, a Hong Kong human rights group reported Friday.

The tax of 8,000-yuan ($966) amounts to more than half the drivers' yearly incomes. It is levied annually by the municipal government.

The Information Center of Human Rights and Democratic Movement in China reported that at least 10 drivers were arrested when police broke up the demonstration on Thursday.

The Hong Kong-based group said that "a person of responsibility" in the municipal government's taxi administration office said the levy had been imposed several years earlier but had been waived for the taxi drivers as a "preferential treatment policy."

This year the waiver was rescinded to finance road construction.

Sichuan Province has a reputation for labor unrest. It is home to many insolvent state-owned enterprises which moved to the western province during the late 1960s as part of a government plan to protect key industries from attack by American and Soviet bombers.

State workers, faced with layoffs, have often staged wildcat strikes and other demonstrations.

U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson, speaking at a news conference in Beijing on Thursday, singled out labor rights as an area where China's human rights situation had "deteriorated."

The human rights group estimates that more than 100,000 demonstrations took place nationwide last year.