by: Stefanie Parsons

In part one of this article (published in issue IX of the Voice), I examined some reasons as to why my friend, who is new to Canada from China, would give up a successful career and be separated from her family to start all over again.  I assumed that China held many new opportunities since it has relaxed it laws against capitalism and opened its boarders to international investment.  China has positioned itself as the next major industrial power with a workforce of 1.3 billion people and was the second largest economy next to the United States in 2005.

But what I failed to realize is that even market freedoms don’t change a communist system overnight. 

In China, apparently you cannot have your wealth and your freedom of speech too.  As Canadians we enjoy having a laugh at the political humour that’s on T.V. or in the newspaper.  We take for granted that our government isn’t monitoring everything that we say on the internet and isn’t waiting to throw us in jail if we post something they don’t like.  Not so in China, as Human Rights Watch reports, many websites and online forums have been shut down and internet writers are jailed for posting their views.

“Although a Chinese government Information Office official said ‘no one in China had been arrested simply because he or she said something on the internet,’ subversion charges in 2006 led to 10, 12, four and two-year sentences respectively for internet writers Ren Ziyuan, Li Jianqiang, Guo Qizhen, and Li Yuanlong.”

International corporations such as Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google and Skype have all admitted to assisting the Chinese government in censorship efforts to be acceptable to Chinese regulators.  According to Human Rights Watch, “Yahoo! released the identity of private users to Chinese authorities, contributing to four critics’ lengthy prison sentences”.  

But for the most part, the Chinese government isn’t protecting these estimated 150-200 million people who have moved to the cities to find work.  Poverty and discrimination and the fact that many don’t have legal status without a temporary residence permit make them extremely vulnerable to exploitation by employers, according to Amnesty International.

“Employers take advantage of internal migrants’ vulnerable status by withholding the equivalent of billions of US dollars in unpaid wages.  Because the vast majority of internal migrant workers do not have a labour contract, they do not have recourse to legal action to claim their unpaid wages.”

In an article titled, ‘The Fake Trade: Wanted for Stealing Childhoods’ in the January 2007 edition of Harper’s Bazaar, author Dana Thomas uncovers many of the ‘knock-off’ luxury goods are made by girls working shifts of 10-plus hours in Chinese factories.

“Very often, the workers are children – some as young as eight – most of whom live on the premises with little or no adult supervision.”

In researching for her upcoming book on the luxury-fashion business, Thomas discovered that when the police do intervene and raid illegal factories, the children are left with no where to go and their families have lost a crucial source of income.

“The children are left there, effectively homeless, forced to move out of their rooms at the factory.  And though some of them – particularly those who work in counterfeit workshops – were sold into labour, like indentured servants, they still feel the police have robbed them of their livelihoods.”

This author recommends that we all should research clothing companies and ‘big box’ stores to actually find out what their labour practices are and where they get their goods from.  The Gap has made available their ‘Social Responsibility Report’ on their website which details their guidelines and approval standards for potential factories and also lists the countries where they do business.  But don’t stop there. Check out the list of websites posted now on the Social Concerns bulletin board downstairs in the Chapel and read online, or better yet buy second hand clothing at Goodwill or other locally run stores.

In many ways China is a good country to leave and it has made me thankful that I can live in such a free country.  I may complain about the cold and having to constantly shovel snow, but my Chinese friend never does.  She is a hard worker and fills the rest of her free time learning English on her own and seems to have a steady hope for her future now that she has settled into a ‘Canadian’ existence.