A Brief History Of Chinese Slavery By The USA

http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/free_trade/2007/06/a_brief_hi...

by Elaine Meinel Supkis
The Chinese slavery story is making the rounds with little analysis or thinking about slavery in general. In the USA, people have been and are being enslaved. In China, the vast excess of labor encourages attempts at exploitation. In the rich oil kingdoms, there are many literal slaves, the push to free the child jockeys came only from Europe, it was barely mentioned in the USA. And then there is a typical story about Chinese slaves from our own dark past, one that few Americans know or want to remember.

From the BBC:

China has pledged to bring to justice traffickers who enslaved hundreds of children and adults to work in brick kilns in two provinces.

As it prepared to send investigators to Henan and Shanxi, the government said that all captives would be freed.

Some 550 people have been liberated in recent weeks and families believe up to 1,000 children were enslaved.

The story made national headlines after parents of some of them launched an internet campaign for their freedom.

The history of slavery is very interesting and focusing on the enslavement of Africans loses sight of the fact that slavery has along history going back to the beginnings of human society. Early human warfare was concerned with capture of women, eating other humans and pushing other families out of desired hunting and then farming areas. The desire to make people work for free and to be able to beat them so they work is very strong.

The colonization of the USA would have gone much slower if it wasn't for slavery. The wealth of Europe that could then suddenly spend much more on military technology so they could invade Asia, was based 100% on the enslavement and looting of both African and New World stone age peoples. The decimination of the New World as the slavers from Europe worked the natives to death, the endless demands for gold, silver and farm products coupled with diseases and starvation destroyed 90% of the population, an astonishing number.

The natives of nearly all the Caribbean islands were annihilated and African slaves were kidnapped and shipped by the millions to work the now deserted islands producing indigo and sugar. The deaths of these slaves during the first 100 years was so ferocious, the need to import more was an ongoing enterprise. Once that shameful business was terminated, the condition of the slaves improved slightly because there was some small incentive to keep them alive, barely.

The Irish and Scots made bad slaves for the British slavers but to control them politically and to cement the power of the British slave state, the Crown would deport, chase out or displace huge populations of peasants not only in Ireland and Scotland but inside the Kingdom itself. After the Great Plagues of the 14th to 16th centuries, there was a period when there weren't enough peasants but as that faded, the peasant population was too high to control politically, indeed, much of Australia and the USA were populated by slaves from Europe shipped over in chains or forced to go by other means. These people also suffered the whip and loss of liberty that the Africans endured only unlike them, there was a means towards ending enslavement.

From Train Web:

The American Railroad management fretted over all delays in forward progress, including building the spur. Complete the road and then build the spurs, they ordered Totten. To their way of thinking, early completion was merely a matter of persistent work and flooding the project with laborers.

The arrival of 360 more Irish in January 1854 was the beginning of that flood.

By the end of February over 9,000 workers were busy on the 18-mile stretch between the Obispo River and Panama City.

The dire warnings of the perils to be faced in Panama from climate and malignant disease issued by Vanderbilt and his colleagues dissuaded many Americans from coming, but other nationalities - Irish, Hindus, Chinese, English, French, Germans, Malays - responded to the call.

Workers died in large numbers, but the railroad company did its best to discredit the notion that this death rate was in any way out of the ordinary.

The company’s attitude inspired such statements in the Star & Herald as follows:

“As to all the nonsense about malaria, fever, pestilential swamps and the thousand other ills that are charged to the Isthmus, we report again, they exist no more than in any other tropical climate, and that prudence and ordinary precaution is all that is required on the part of "unacclimated newcomers" to our sunny shores.”

First of all, note how the American media was used to lie for the capitalists.

As usual, the complicit criminal actions of the media owners in collusion with the people seeking to profit off of some venture is classic. Far from investigating the conditions of the workers and exposing the lies used by labor recruiters and showing the world how despicable this all was, the media was recruited to help these monsters get more workers to replace the ones who were dying at such a ferocious rate.

Also note that the natives of the region ran off or refused to labor under these inhuman conditions.  The railroad owners should have been arrested and executed.

Instead, they were celebrated as heroes. When the rails were built from California to the Midwest midcentury, the vast bulk of the dangerous work in the Sierras was done by semi-slave Chinese labor and every mile of every road and canal in the New World was lined by anonymous graves, unmarked and unremarked.

To this day, "not one cent of reparations have been paid to the families who lost sons and fathers in this brutal slavery. On top of this, the survivors were deported and the workers were forbidden to bring over women of any kind for fear these semi-slaves might stay and have children.

From the railroad history:

Early on the morning of March 30, 1854, the sober, right- thinking Argonauts who chose to stroll on the sea wall at Panama City rather than spend their time in saloons and card rooms were rewarded for their virtue by the sight of the clipper Sea Witch entering the harbor. The Sea Witch, owned by Howland and Aspinwall, was 192 feet long with towering masts and a black dragon as figurehead. Launched in 1846 for the China slave trade, by 1854 she was a famous ship. The Sea Witch was the first vessel to sail from New York to San Francisco around Cape Horn in less than 100 days. Twice she had broken the speed record from Canton to the United States, and neither of these passages has ever been equalled by a sailing ship.

Many of the sea wall strollers, eager to relieve their boredom, rowed out for a closer look at the beautiful vessel and thereby suffered disillusionment.

The Sea Witch was filthy and stank like a slaver. She had made the run from Canton to Panama with her holds packed with Chinese coolies. Soon she was joined in the harbor by two other sailing ships, equally filthy and odorous, also loaded with the Oriental slaves.

The railroad company had purchased the services of the Chinese "coolies" from a Canton labor contractor under a system similar to that of the British indentured servants sent to Virginia and Georgia during the seventeenth century.

The company agreed to pay the contractor $25 a month for each man sent, and then the contractor made his own arrangements with the individual Chinese "coolie" - generally doling out four to eight dollars a month in wages and retaining the remainder as payment for ocean passage and food.

It was a slave system, but the Panama Railroad Company was not averse to using slaves if they would help complete the road.

The railroad barons knew of this exploitation. Just like we know of the exploitation of illegal aliens who are brought in to the US to break unions and drive down wages of native workers. This shameful business is part of the revolution in China: Mao and his sorts got legitimacy from their opposition to this business!

Of course, all revolutions end in new slavery which is interesting since humans have been enslaving each other since the dawn of humanity.

I will also note how the Holocaust industry makes lots of noise about that event but there are no memorials to the Chinese coolies who died building our empire. History books barely mention them. Our complicity in their exploitation is seldom broached. The Chinese are very proud people and they don't want to harp on this dreadful history but it must be faced.

"The history of slavery is very interesting and ONLY focusing on the enslavement of "Africans" loses sight of the fact that slavery has a long history going back to the beginnings of human society."