BEIJING, Jul। 6
http://www.upiasiaonline.com
Recently exposed cases of enslaved child and adult laborers in China's inland provinces have drawn nationwide attention. There are different opinions as to the causes behind this phenomenon, but everyone seems to agree that the owners of the illegal kilns are "evil-hearted."
In history there have been plenty of evil people and evil deeds. The question is, how could such evil deeds persist over a long period of time? This cannot be explained by the evil hearts of the kiln owners.
Some have put forward "capitalism" as a scapegoat, concluding that collusion between capital and political power has penetrated all aspects of Chinese life. Such collusion indeed exits extensively, but this viewpoint accuses the capitalists without blaming those in power, which is inappropriate.
The evil of the illegal kilns is that they treat people as slaves. Slavery was widely practiced before the era of capitalism and the market economy. This is not denied even by Marx's theory of the stages of social development.
The fact is that every slavery system in history was supported by political power. The illegal kilns prospered because of support from local authorities. Thus the key to this issue is not capital, but authority. On the surface the illegal kilns appear to be enterprises, but when they depend on political authority to enslave workers, they cannot be considered enterprises.
The kilns do not operate by the logic of capitalism, which requires freely signed contracts with those who labor. Instead, they operate under the political authority of the government, which makes them appendages of those in power, not entrepreneurs or businessmen. Such illegal operations are the extension of power. Therefore what is needed is a change in the old system, not a withdrawal from the market economy.
Some think the illegal kilns are the result of an evil alliance of interests between the local government and business groups with capital. These allies bully others who are not strong enough to forge such alliances, the theory goes.
This explanation has points in common with the one that blames capitalists, but raises a new question: Why is it that under the present system some people can form alliances for mutual benefit, while others cannot? For example, why can't laborers form an alliance with a local government? What would happen if everyone had the same rights and opportunities to form alliances, if the law effectively restrained the power of each alliance, and if laborers could establish labor unions? Who allows the kiln owners to behave so unscrupulously?
While the public condemns the kiln operators as evil individuals, what is actually evil is the system, not the people. Such a system is certain to mold evil people. Under a problematic system, the behavior of officials will naturally be problematic.
Over the past several hundred years, innumerable things have changed in Chinese society. However, what never changes is that the people's rights are not protected, and people's dignity is still trampled upon. The market economy should not be blamed for the enslavement of laborers. Blame must be shared by the officials, the owners of the kilns and the system, which does not protect individual rights of life, freedom and property.
The breakthrough in this incident came only after direct orders to investigate came from central government and provincial authorities. The question is: Why wasn't the law implemented without such direct political intervention? Obviously, it is orders that govern the country, not a legal system.
In addition, when the parents of the child laborers went to the kilns to search for their missing children, they were provided no assistance from the local police. Instead, they were threatened by the police. The purpose of a government is to protect people's dignity and their rights to life, freedom and property. People support these functions with their taxes. But in the places where the illegal kilns were found, local authorities served none of these functions.
It appears that the central government could not assume full control over the local government. Also, local citizens could not direct the local authorities. In other words, the people were not the masters. The local government is responsible to the central government, not to a local constituency. If the local officials' authority were based on the people's votes, if laborers could form alliances freely, if the local authorities had been interrogated by the media and by parents of the missing children every day, if there were full freedom of speech and of the media, if there were opposition politicians to pressure the officials, then such phenomena as the illegal kilns would automatically become extinct.
If the judicial authority, the labor department, and the public security agencies were all subject to publicly elected officials, they could not abuse the rights of the people for their own benefit. As long as authority does not originate from the people and political power is unrestricted, such evils will continue.
Some people might say that this case of slavery in illegal kilns is an isolated incident, and we cannot use one case to represent the whole of society. However, media reports have confirmed that this type of slavery exists in many places and many occupations. This labor problem cannot be separated from the problematic system.
The response to this kind of incident is not to return to a planned economy. Rather, we need to rebuild the political system and establish a political order that truly protects the people's rights to life, freedom and property.
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(Liu Junning is a researcher on social issues at the Institute of Chinese Culture under China's Ministry of Culture. He was formerly a political researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and a visiting scholar at the Fairbanks Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University. This article is edited and translated from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online. The original may be found on South City Weekly and www.ncn.org . ©Copyright Liu Junning.)
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