Child Labor in China

Government Policies Enhance Child Exploitation in Rural China

Dec 29, 2007

A lot is known about Child Labor in the Chinese Providences of Sichuan, Guangdong, Shanghai and Beijing; however, examinations to determine why it exists are missing.

The Problem

The last few decades China has set a series of events into motion that have created a problem no one likes.

One Child Policy: Originally designed to lower the exponential growth of the Chinese population, it also minimized the population needed for a future workforce. China understood its procedure for feeding its people, during the cold war, was unsustainable. It embarked upon this successful program to put more reliance on individual work than sustenance from a large family.
Relocation Policy: From 1960 to 2000 China forcibly relocated over 12 million people with the largest relocation of 383,000 in the Danjiangkou project on the Yangtze River having occurred only recently. This was for two main reasons: to "properly position" the intellectual and elite population and create a more vibrant infrastructure.
Economic Policy: The Chinese expansion has eased East-West tensions the way a military buildup could never have. Chinese Communism fundamentally disagrees with Western capitalism; however, China has become the world’s second largest economy using capitalist principles. This has created a symbiotic relation between China and the West that China has yet to grasp.

The Dilemma

One child, relocation and economic policies are not necessarily bad programs. Eminent Domain Laws have been used in the West for decades to advance the national infrastructure and, reproductive policies instituted after WW2 gave America the “Baby Boom.” China’s policy could have worked had the original programs not been abandoned by the “Great Leap Forward” and the “Cultural Revolution.”

Minimize project-related resettlement;

Pay adequate compensation to both the resettled population and the host-communities;

Undertake thorough preparatory work to ensure that resettlers were accepted in their new communities;

Assure that resettler standards of living did not fall below their original level; and

Protect host communities from losses.

The Paradigm

As “only Nixon could have gone to China,” the problems too could only have come from China. Chinese predicaments are compounded by the fact that China did not foresee her historical future.

New York based Human Rights in China estimates, “as many as 10 million school-age children [under the age of 15 by Chinese Law] are doing their part to turn China into a low-cost manufacturing powerhouse.”

The combination of advanced economic development and historical displacement has allowed this once homogeneous nation to become socially divided. The burgeoning middle and upper class have created a divide greater than Chinese leaders can control. "We know enough about the problem to know child labor is extremely widespread," said Robin Munro, research director at China Labor Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor rights organization. "The rural education system in many parts of the countryside is in a state of virtual collapse.”

Munro continued; “a growing number of rural schools have contracted out entire classes of students to work in urban factories, supposedly to help defray part of their school costs. They call it work study programs….Of course, it's child labor, because the school was earning money from it."

The Result

“It is estimated that of the 10 million children out of school, over 5 million are working in factories. In Sichuan, 85% of children who drop out of school are working elsewhere.”

China has, of its own making, created a class of people that has abandoned it historical social security net – multiple children to care for the elderly. She has become an economic powerhouse that all citizens know about but not able to partake in. Out of necessity rural families, who do not benefit from the Chinese miracle, use the only asset they have available – their child. And Chinese capitalism willingly exploits that need.