China's recipe for economic success includes slave labor

Peter Kwong

is a professor of Asian American studies

at Hunter College

There's no secret to China's ability to chalk up an enormous trade surplus with the rest of the world: cheap labor.

It's maintained by an endless flow of migrant workers from the rural interior to the industrial centers, where they are treated like second-class citizens, given neither the right to formal residency nor to labor protection.

China's communist bureaucrats favor employers at the expense of workers in the belief that this is the only way to achieve economic growth. How else to explain their unwillingness to impose safety standards on mine operators, resulting in spectacular gas explosions and cave-ins? China accounts for 80 percent of the world's mining-related deaths, while producing only 35 percent of the world's coal.

Also, while the U.S. Federal Consumer Product Safety Commission recently recalled 1.5 million toy trains produced in China because of high lead contents, no authority in China bothered to investigate the potential harm to the workers who had produced the toys.

Earlier this month a British-based labor consortium charged that children as young as 12 had been found in Chinese factories that produce Olympic-related souvenirs.

Child labor was, until recently, the stuff of communist propaganda, used to illustrate the evils of capitalism. Alas, it is now widespread in China. Four hundred fathers posted a letter on Dahe, a Henan provincial Web site, on June 6, appealing to the public for help in saving their children who had been abducted by human traffickers to work in brick kilns as slave laborers in Shanxi Province. Impoverished migrant youth, some as young as 8, were forced to work from 5 in the morning to midnight without pay, watched over by enforcers with German shepherds. If caught escaping, they were beaten, some had their ears cut off, legs broken, or backs "ironed" by the foremen using heated bricks. Early this spring, two were beaten to near death and buried while still breathing.

I remember being horrified by stories like these when I was a small child in pre-communist China. No wonder that the fathers' appeal aroused immediate public reaction. People could not believe that - as seven Chinese won the distinction of appearing on the Forbes magazine's annual billionaire list - these rural youth were sold to the kiln operators as slaves for less than $50 per person.

The public was particularly outraged by the fact that local officials stood by, unwilling to help the parents locate their missing children, even obstructed the process by protecting the kiln operators. Local news reporters actually risked their lives to accompany the parents and force their way into the kilns to rescue victims. They found that in Hongdong County alone there were dozens of kilns enslaving at least 1,000 youngsters, some for as long as eight years.

As ever more gruesome information and photos of the victims appeared on the Web, the public's angry voices in the blogosphere cut right through the bureaucratic channels to reach the nation's top leadership. President Hu Jintao was forced to issue "instructions" to clean up the mess.

The government's subsequent attempt to manipulate virtual reality cannot obliterate the fact that a similar forced child-labor scandal shook Shanxi's brick industry in 2003. Then, too, Premier Wen Jiabao promised immediate action to eradicate the problem but did nothing once the public attention shifted elsewhere. This time the government has more at stake. It is afraid that this scandal might damage China's image just before next year's Olympic Games and tarnish the Communist Party's recent promise to build a "harmonious society."

Unfortunately, the kiln outrage is only the latest example of China's mistreatment of its workers. In committing itself to building a "state-guided" capitalist economy, the Communist Party has allied itself with the interests of the capitalists, which are, as the party leaders should know if they would consult their own Marxist literature, at odds with those of the working class. It is the classic class struggle: high profits vs. workers' benefits. China's current communist leaders might need a refresher course, because far from creating a "harmonious society," their tactics promise to deliver ever more of its most vulnerable members right into the clutches of slavery.