{"id":44273,"date":"2014-12-18T19:13:00","date_gmt":"2014-12-18T19:13:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=44273 "},"modified":"2014-12-18T19:13:00","modified_gmt":"2014-12-18T19:13:00","slug":"44273-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=44273","title":{"rendered":"A Thousand Retired Chinese Teachers Protest Over Lack of Pensions"},"content":{"rendered":"
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2014-12-18<\/div>
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A teacher gives a lesson at a primary school in Henan province, Nov. 14, 2013.<\/div>
 IMAGINECHINA<\/div>
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Hundreds of laid-off teachers converged on government buildings in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu on Thursday in protest at the government’s refusal to honor promises to give them civil servant status.<\/div>
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Carrying red banners bearing a single character, “Injustice,” and a banner which read simply “We need to eat,” the teachers marched to the headquarters of the Jiangsu provincial government to demand better pensions and health insurance.<\/div>
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An unknown number were detained amid scuffles with police and the more than 1,000 laid-off and retired teachers from several counties and cities in the province.<\/div>
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A protester from Jiangsu’s Xuzhou city surnamed Li said: “We have come here to the provincial government, but none of the leaders will come out to meet us.”<\/div>
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He said officials from the provincial education bureau and complaints office had said it would be “difficult” to meet protesters’ demands.<\/div>
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Teachers in China can be hired on civil service or non-civil service contracts, and those employed on the latter frequently complain of wages that are below a minimum living standard and that often go unpaid for months.<\/div>
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They also frequently complain of a lack of pensions and other benefits after retirement, or when they are laid off.<\/div>
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‘Unreasonable’<\/div>
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Directive No. 32, issued by the central authorities in 1997, called on local governments to put all teachers on civil service contracts, which carry higher wages and more benefits, including a retirement pension. <\/div>
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But cash-strapped local authorities have dragged their feet over the new rules.<\/div>
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“Some of the teachers who came from Xuzhou today were taken away by police. They were held in the provincial government offices by a group of police officers,” Li said.<\/div>
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“There was also a 76-year-old protester from Yangzhou who was shoved to the ground and had to be taken to Nanjing Emergency Medical Center,” he added.<\/div>
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According to Li, many of Jiangsu’s teachers only got into teaching because of a recruitment drive by Beijing, and have now been left with no income years later.<\/div>
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Continue reading the original article<\/a>.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>Carrying red banners bearing a single character, "Injustice," and a banner which read simply "We need to eat," the teachers marched to the headquarters of the Jiangsu provincial government to demand better pensions and health insurance.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-44273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44273\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}