Exploitation of Human Beings Throughout History In China

To give you a little background and a historical perspective of the problem I have done a study of how widespread exploitation of people have been in China throughout the years of civilization.

In the history of China there is not much records of outright slavery. I believe that this is because the Chinese are the ones that has written down their own history. Ancient China was very isolated from the rest of the world and few, if any outsiders observed and wrote down what they saw of the great empire in the east. Since the Chinese wrote their own history it is not surprising that they left out the unflattering parts of the society, like exploitation of humans and slavery. So how am I to investigate exploitation of people when the records of history has been polished and beautified? I chose to study major events in ancient China, such as the building of the Great Wall of China and the Grand Canal, where there probably were forced labor used. Because of the size of the projects there might be more information surrounding the conditions for the people giving me the chance to draw my own conclusion.

China started to grow into a major civilization about 4000 years ago. The civilization was divided up into states who were constantly fighting each other. One of the states grew stronger than the others. Favorable conditions allowed the Qins to focus on developing new strategies of war. They learned horsemanship from the neighboring horse tribes and became skilled riding warriors, which was something none of the other Chinese states had. Beside the new strategies and the usage of horsemen in war, the Qins also developed a technique which allowed them to mass produce weapons. Since the amounts of weapons often were the factor that decided the size of the army, this new way of production gave the Qins the means to equipping vast numbers of soldiers and thereby get the numerical advantage in war. The Qins conquered state after state, but to continue to be successful in their quest to put all of China under them they needed new ways of quickly producing food to sustain their growing army. In 300 B.C. the Qins created a dam to keep the land from flooding during raining season and to prevent drought in dry season. This made it possible to grow more crops, since the conditions for agriculture were good all year around. The large quantities of food led to a rapid population increase.

In 259 B.C. the Qins got a new leader by the name Ying Zheng. He had united China and became the first emperor. Ying Zheng even changed his name to Shi Huangdi, which means “first emperor”. To protect his new won empire from enemies, Shi Hungdi started to build the Great Wall of China. This project required enormous amounts of labor and with an already stretched economy, forced labor was the easiest solution. At this time there were no machines and therefore everything had to be done by hand. The labor force was built up by three groups which were soldiers, common people, and criminals. Those enrolled in the army could be called to build the wall. When enemies were scarce leaving the army idle, and wall workers were few, it was decided that the army would help with the construction of the wall. Criminals were also sent to the wall and forced to work. The third group consisted of common people, mostly men, but in the end also some boys. They were taken to the wall and ordered to work. Those who tried to run away were killed, sometimes in brutal ways to deter others from following their example. I heard somewhere that they used to burying the offenders alive, but maybe that is just a rumor. Many of the common men and boys never returned home, but worked their entire lives on the wall. Some died of old age, some were killed because of their disobedience, and some died due to the horrible working conditions. It was not only the men and boys who suffered from the forced labor. Indirect the entire society was effected. When the men (and sometimes the boys) were taken away from their families, the situation at home became very difficult. The men were the ones to do most of the physical work and business for the family, and when they were no longer there, the economy of many households failed. After some time, Shi Huangdi started to use forced labor in other projects as well, like for example to the construction of his own grave chambers.

I cannot help but noticing that up until the population boom in China there is not much records of slavery in the empire. I am sure that there were some slaves, but it was not a widespread thing, not something that was integrated into society. After the rapid increase of citizens however you can start to see glimpses of slavery nestling it’s way into acceptance. After the population boom in China there were probably more people in the empire than manageable. I believe that there were too many in each occupational group, meaning that the competition for customers were hard meanwhile the salaries sank. When the profits of honest labor grew smaller and smaller, many must have resorted to other ways of making money, like stealing. Criminal rates therefore went up. In order to solve all of this and at the same time get cheep labor for his huge defensive project, the emperor of China chose to use the surplus of people in both prison and outside of them as forced labor.

Medieval China was a vast empire that stretched over a large area. The trouble with this was the huge distances within the boarders. One big problem was that the Yellow River divided the empire into two and communication between the two sides were difficult. The emperor Yang Di decided to do something about this. He wanted to build a canal across China to connect the empire through water transportation. This canal, the Grand Canal, was a very ambitious project. It took over 5 million workers 6 years to finish this water road that stretched from one end of China to the other. The working conditions for these laborers were horrendous and tens of thousands died of either starvation and fatigue or they were beaten to death by their overseers. Though they were paid, it was not much and hardly seemed worth all their toil. The emperor decided to celebrate the Grand Canal by sailing it in his luxurious boat and as he went along the artificial river, he demanded gifts from all the counties he passed. This, in addition to the emperors throwing away of the excess food while the people was struggling to make a living, angered the working class. The emperor repeated his celebration sailings every year and the rage of the peasants grew stronger. This led to a peasantry rebellion which escalated and after some time, all of the social classes joined in. The emperor was in the end killed by his own generals.

In the 17^th century the concept of Booi Ahas developed. The Manchu leader Nurhaci invaded the Chinese peninsula Liaodong in the beginning of the century. He brought the customs of his people with him to China. Those with a certain amount of grain, Nurhaci gave additional land and houses, while the ones with less were made into slaves or Booi Ahas. Note that this is the first exploited group of people that I have written about that are officially called slaves. Even though they were slaves, Nurhaci encouraged the owners to be caring and loving in their relation to their servants. This was unfortunately ignored in many cases and the slaves did often receive a very harsh treatment and were traded with as if they were stock animals. In the beginning slaves, or Booi Ahas, were mainly something owned by private persons, but when Nurhachi conquered more and more land the number of war prisoners, who were enslaved and made into Booi Ahas, grew. There became a large surplus of slaves. This problem was solved by letting the slaves be owned by the state. The Booi Ahas then went from being almost exclusively households servants to being used as agricultural workers for the state. An interesting thing about the Booi Aha system is that the slaves had their own internal hierarchy among themselves. With the owners permission, a Booi could enslave another Booi and thereby become master himself. The first Booi is still a slave to the owner but he/she also has a slave of his/her own.