The Bottom Line
Getting in on the global free-for-all, improving the gross national product, ensuring that productivity and low price undercuts all competitors. That's the bottom line. And it's the major reason why a country like China has been able to challenge the supremacy of other countries, most notably the United States, in marketing production and export. China is a huge country with huge natural resources, a great geography, history, tradition and (past) culture. Its people are industrious, imaginative and highly intelligent.All that hugeness is finally resulting in greater numbers of Chinese reaching out for and grabbing the rainbow of success. Success as measured in disposable income. Equating with the enhancement of life and lifestyles, more approximating, in a gradual progression, that seen in developed, western economies. China has been slowly and inexorably, pulling itself up by its economic bootstraps. Those very same bootstraps that still mitigate against the freedoms that those other, developed western countries take for granted.
Still, China has come a long, long way. In her relative relaxation of Communist imperatives. The recognition and acknowledgement that her economy could only be sufficiently advanced with the acceptance of capitalism - resting uneasily with the state ideology, but making the leap into the future nonetheless. The state remains totalitarian in nature. Avowedly sprinkled here and there with an avuncular beneficence, a motherly benevolence. China strives for amicability among its various populations.
And the Chinese authorities do truly struggle to attain to a future where all of its peoples' needs may be met. That wonderful omelette-in-the-sky, however, does require the breaking of eggs now and again. And when those cracked eggs reveal themselves in all their inhumane glory, China's face is once again besmirched with egg. One unfortunate revelation after another. This is, after all, an immense country; the authorities cannot possibly contain each and every malfunction in society's proclivity to occasionally revert to corruption ... can it?
Setting aside those vexing internal problems which so fascinate the outside world, like China's ardent wooing of brutal dictatorships, her battles against Falun Gong, her requirement to remind Tibet where its allegiance lies, the unfortunate discovery of kidnapped and indentured factory workers. The discovery of children, as young as 7- but most a more mature 10, 12, 13 and 15 years of age, being sold by their families into work-slavery. Or, in many more instances, families clamouring for the authorities to investigate the sudden disappearance of their young children.
The children? Auctioned off to the highest bidders for work in factories producing toys, electronics and textiles for exporting abroad. Those nimble little fingers belonging to frightened, impoverished, threatened children can move like lightning. And, since they're on their own, with no one compassionately overseeing events in their interests, they have little option but to obey their employers. Working long hours, ill fed, receiving little in the way of monetary recompense. Far from home, they are China's answer to too-few workers to respond to increasing international orders.
Journalists, tipped off to the existence of these child slave-labourers, did their own investigations, and found, handily enough, that children were being lured away from their homes, sold into slavery by their impoverished families, and kidnapped off the streets of their villages. China's rapidly developing economy cannot keep pace with the demands for their products, and the demand for workers to produce those products. The by-product of which is neglect of their own child labour, and local labour laws. These workforce violations are an embarrassment to the country, and they should be.
Under developed or poverty-stricken areas of the country are ripe for the picking, as local governments, anxious to see their economies profit from the opportunities they see dangling before them, lose sight of their responsibilities to their populations. And become quietly complicit with manufacturers on the lookout for cheap labour. Recruiters flow into the countryside, find unsuspecting victims and the corner-cutting manufacturers are only too happy to take them on. Illegal employment agencies working hand-in-glove with unscrupulous manufacturers, with the silent consent of local governments.
Now those same officials vow to initiate investigations into the scandal. Where children employed to work in toy factories can be threatened with death if they attempt escape.
Labels: Political Realities, Societal Failures
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, May 01, 2008
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