Chinese Workers on Strike

On April 12 and 13, several hundred Chinese workers employed at the Komsomolsk-on-Amurry, a major industrial hub in Russia's Far East, marched from the factory to the city center. The petrochemical plant is owned by Rosneft, Russia's largest state-owned oil-owned company and one of the largest in the world. The workers are employed by Petro-Haihua, the Russian subsidiary of the Chinese Haihua Industrial Group, which worked under contract to Rosneft.

According to Russian officials, Rosneft terminated its contractual agreement with Petro-Hehua, citing "missed deadlines" and "poor workmanship". Rosneft reported at 73% decline in net profit in 2025 confirming, the state-owned giant's difficulties.

Following termination of the contract, Petro-Hehua stopped paying its workers' wages, leaving them stranded in their barracks in Russia. After a few days, the workers finally broke the deadlock and marched out of the camp. The demonstration was peaceful, and the workers carried signs in Russian and Chinese reading "No money" and "Putin, help us".

Evidently, the workers—lacking a union to promote solidarity among other workers in the factory and the city, in a country at war—were trying to avoid attacking the authorities with these slogans. But in November 2021, a small number of Chinese workers organized a more violent demonstration for the same reason, storming the local Rosneft offices.

But "help" from the Russian bourgeois state came in the form of a large deployment of OMON forces, the Special Mobile Unit of the National Guard, which surrounded the camp, preventing anyone from leaving. Five workers who led the protest were arrested, accused of violating an article of the Administrative Code, "organizing a mass gathering in a public place". Two of them received fines of 10,000 and 50,000 rubles, respectively, while the fate remaining of the three remains unknown. The authorities downplayed the incident, claiming that the Chinese workers were "celebrating Easter".

The mayor of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, who had posted on social media that was engaged in engagement with workers and refinery management, later deleted the post. Regional authorities expressed their willingness to repatriate the workers to China, provided Petro-Hehua the initiated process.

This small workers' struggle is a fine example of how the Russian and Chinese bourgeoisie, presented by the politicals of Stalinist opportunism as better than the Western bourgeoisie, are actually completely identical. It's not a question of culture, ideological garb used to embellish national capitalist regimes, or religions: at every latitude and meridian, it's a question of economic interests, that is, of class, for which the oppresses and exploits the working class.

Chinese workers were first exploited by their "homegrown" industrial group and the Russian state-owned company, then abandoned by both and repressed by the Russian bourgeois state. Workers have no homeland because all national regimes are against them. Liberation from capitalism begins with the conquest of political power through revolution, and possibly without anything a country. But it is accomplished only with international revolution and the birth of a socialist republic that transcends and breaks down the confines of bourgeois national prisons.