Tan Guocheng is hardly a self-styled labor leader. Age 23 and introverted, he grew up among rice paddies and orange groves far from China's big factory towns. But last month, an hour into his shift at a Honda factory in the southern city of Foshan, Tan pressed an emergency button that shut down his production line. 'Let's go out on strike!' he shouted. Within minutes, hundreds of workers were abandoning their posts. Colleagues described Tan's leadership as an uncharacteristic act of courage; Tan said he simply wanted a pay raise. Regardless, he has helped touch off a wave of strikes at Honda plants and other workplaces in China that are still playing out in surprising and significant ways. Though Tan has since been fired by Honda for 'sabotage' and moved back to his village, striking workers at another Honda plant less than 100 miles away in Zhongshan marched in the streets on Friday and made a new demand: the right to form an independent labor union. That local union effort seems to have been broken, as Honda in Zhongshan on Sunday began replacing the strikers with newly hired workers -- although it has raised wages somewhat and invited the strikers to return to their jobs. The two-week strike at Tan's plant forced Honda to shut down its four assembly plants in China and eventually offer 1,900 workers in Foshan a 24 to 32 percent pay raise. That got to the heart of Tan's complaint. Leaving his home in central China four years ago at age 20, Tan had hoped that working on an assembly line for a global company like Honda would be his path to a middle-class future. But the pay was meager, he says, and inflation ate away at his earnings. And in January, when Honda offered to increase his $175 monthly salary by a mere $7. Tan, who planned to marry soon, was distraught. It was not enough money to buy a house or raise a child. 'I couldn't understand how they could give us so little,' he said. So he decided to fight back. 'I came up with the idea of going on strike,' he said. But it was not easy, he said, trying to recruit colleagues in secret talks on the factory floor during breaks. Before he was scheduled to formally resign at the end of May, Honda fired Tan on May 22. On June 4, after intense negotiations involving the local government in Foshan and Japanese executives, Honda agreed to a large pay raise, though short of the worker's demand for nearly doubling their salary. 'I think we can call it a success,' Tan said. 'I only led the strike to earn my fellow workers a decent reward.' 