‘The most prominent feature of the trial has been the court’s complete lack of interest either in the facts or in issues of law’, he said in his speech to the Dongguan court. The defendants, he admitted, had taken part in ‘inappropriate action’ but they had already paid dearly for it with the loss of their jobs and the stigma of having been arrested. The cause of the riot was ‘the fact that our society today permits and encourages the most naked forms of social injustice, together with an unrestrained level of gross and inhuman exploitation of the workers that has reached truly reactionary proportions.’ The factory workers worked a six-day week, four of those days eleven hours long, for a wage that, he said, ‘cannot even support normal life.’

Gao continued, ‘The inequity of workers within our current system of labour relations is absolute. The channels for resolution of labour conflicts of all kinds in our society are either totally blocked or non-existent; and judicial protections for the rights and interests of the labourer are functionally absent… This is just like the [pre-1949] situation of cold-blooded and ruthless exploitation of the workers by the capitalists…the very same situation that caused the workers then to rise up in revolutionary rebellion! What distinguishes the present situation, however, is that in those days the Communist Party stood alongside the workers in their fight against capitalist exploitation, whereas today the Communist Party is fighting shoulder-to-shoulder with the cold-blooded capitalists in their struggle against the workers!’