All the protests in the key manufacturing base in southern China are self-organized, "questioning the relevance" of the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU), said Han Dongfang, who monitors the Chinese labor movement from Hong Kong.

The Chinese government wants to consolidate control gradually over all signs of organized labor activity under the ACFTU umbrella, the only legally permitted workers' representative in the world's most populous nation, western rights groups say.

"My figure, unofficially, shows the strikes involving over 1,000 workers happens at least once a day," said Han, whose influential weekly program on US Congress-funded Radio Free Asia reportedly reaches tens of millions of Chinese.

"These strikes are self-organized (and protesting workers do) not belong to the official union," he said.

Han said there were also many smaller strikes daily in the Pearl Delta River area, where about one-third of Chinese exports were manufactured and where, according to a published study, workers lose or break about 40,000 fingers on the job every year.

Han was a railway electrician when he organized China's first independent labor union in 1989, during the brutally-suppressed Tiananmen democracy movement.

He was imprisoned for two years, during which time he contracted tuberculosis. In 1992, after intense lobbying by members of the US Congress and the AFL-CIO umbrella trade union group, Han was given medical parole and sent to the United States for treatment, where a lung was removed.

A year later, Han tried to return to China but was turned back at the border of Hong Kong, a specially administered Chinese territory.

Han hoped that strikes and the "massive" growth of non-governmental labor groups would "pressure" the official union to change.

"People are questioning the existence of the ACFTU. They have to do something otherwise they will be left behind," said Han, the founder and director of China Labour Bulletin, a non-governmental group based in Hong Kong seeking to promote workers rights.

Asked about China-based foreign companies that brought in independent monitors to check on their working conditions, Han said such visits while welcomed were inadequate.

"These visits occurred once in three or six months but the reality is that in the workplace, rights violations could occur any minute or any day," he said. "Monitors should be from among workers," he said.

In a push to keep big corporations honest, labor groups in China regularly smuggle photographs, videos, pay stubs, shipping records and other evidence out of factories that they say violate local law and international worker standards, the New York Times reported last week.

In 2007, factories that supplied more than a dozen corporations, including US giants Wal-Mart, Disney and Dell, were accused of unfair labor practices, including using child labor, forcing employees to work 16-hour days on fast-moving assembly lines, and paying workers less than minimum wage, the newspaper said.

Minimum wage in Guangzhou province, part of the Pearl River Delta area, is about 55 cents an hour.

Han urged multinational companies to give greater consideration to workers' welfare and rights, calling for "genuine collective bargaining" with elected workers representatives even at the expense of increased production costs.

"That is what I will suggest to the foreign companies if they are really sincere," he said.

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