Two months after a dozen police broke into her apartment and dragged her away in front of her one-year-old daughter and teenage son, labour activist Zhu Xiaomei returned home on the evening of 1 February…

Zhu had been working at the Panyu Centre since 2014, after she was fired by her former employer Hitachi Metals in Guangzhou for organizing workers and lobbying for the establishment of a trade union at the factory. Since joining the Panyu Centre, Zhu has been involved in several collective bargaining cases such as the Guangzhou University Town sanitation workers dispute and Lide shoe factory dispute. In both these cases, the workers successfully negotiated with management and obtained nearly everything they were asking for…