110 years ago, China tried to enact abolition of slavery and till date it continues to fail in front of the world like all its substandard products.
AGE-OLD INHUMAN PUNISHMENTS IN CHINA
Lingchi (death by slicing), Xiaoshou (decapitation, separation of head), Lushi (decapitating the corpse), Cizi (tattooing the face) may sound like a cruel, yesteryear king’s ruthless punishments but they continue to exist in China even today. It won’t be an exaggeration to say that the most inhuman terrorist organization ISIS has inherited their style of capital punishment of severing the head from Chinese Xiaoshou.
This is what happens when a 21st-century leader injects autocracy in democracy through draconian laws.
HISTORY OF ATROCITIES BY CHINESE KINGS:
Chinese kings have a horrendous history of unleashing atrocities by enslaving their own citizens as well as slaves from other countries. And Xi Jinping, like an obedient student, has continued to follow their footsteps.
In the second millennium BC, the Chinese Shang dynasty enslaved five percent of the country’s population and used them for ritualistic sacrifices.
In 221–206 BC, the Qin government confiscated property and enslaved families as punishment.
In 206 BC – 220 AD, the Han dynasty sentenced men to castration by having their families seized and kept as property by the government.
But the advent of enslaving foreigners began in 618–907 AD by the Tang dynasty. Slaves sold to the Chinese included Turks, Persians, and Korean women, who were sought after by the wealthy.
Similarly in the Yuan reign, the stronger of the Mongols and Hans enslaved each other. The Mings received 300 black slaves from Indonesia. The Qing dynasty enslaved as many as two million people.
In the 20th century, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, the Yi people (also known as Nuosu) of China terrorized Sichuan to rob and enslave non-Nuosu including Han people. The descendants of the Han slaves, known as the White Yi, outnumbered the Black Yi aristocracy by ten to one. There was a saying goes like: “the worst insult to a Nuosu is to call him a “Han” (with the implication being that “your ancestors were slaves”)
RECENT CAPITAL PUNISHMENTS BY THE CHINESE:
Amidst the pandemic of the Chinese virus, where the whole world has come to the verge of just keeping them alive just due to misadventures of China, the stories of forced and wage less laborers still stand strong.
June 2020 saw a Chinese mine owner Zhang Xuen in Gweru province of central Zimbabwe shooting five times at both the thighs of a miner Kenneth Tachiona who had just asked for his salary in US dollars per the affidavit signed by Zhang. Police said Zhang fired another shot at workers, and one of the bullets grazed the chin of a member of staff.
The shooting of two Zimbabwean workers by their Chinese boss shows the “systematic and widespread” abuse that locals face in Chinese mining operations, says the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Society (ZELA).
This brings us to the death of four Indonesian crew in two-Chinese flagged ships
Indonesia has summoned China’s ambassador to clarify the deaths of four Indonesian crew from two Chinese-flagged vessels, Indonesia’s foreign ministry said in May 2020. The ministry issued a statement after a video was circulated on social media appearing to show a burial at sea aboard a Chinese-flagged ship. The footage showed a group of men praying around an orange body bag before it was tossed into the ocean.
“One crew member died and was buried at sea on March 31. In December 2019, two other crew members… died and were also buried at sea,” Ms Retno, Indonesian Foreign Minister, said.
With China trying to enslave minorities within and her helpless neighbors, she has also proved to be most ‘deceitful-friend’. On ‘Philippine-China Friendship Day’, the Chinese entered a war at sea and sank Philippine’s boat in Reed Bank on June 9th, 2020. “We are like slaves of China. It’s like we don’t have rights in our own territory”, lamented Felix dela Torre, the owner of the fishing boat sunk by a Chinese vessel in Reed Bank.
MORE RECENT EXAMPLES
‘The dubious Xinjiang Aid’: A new bombshell report from Australia indicates that the Uighurs and other minorities aren’t just being subjected to forced re-education — they’re being used as slave labor after completing their terms of “study.” The ASPI estimates that up to 80,000 Uighurs have been forced into labor camps this way, some of them directly after finishing their indoctrination at Chinese re-education centers. The report details how this massive system of relocation and forced labor has been built up under the guise of an aid program known as “Xinjiang Aid.” What appears superficially as a targeted aid program for the poor and undereducated people in the province is a relocation and reeducation program meant to destroy their culture and religious practices.
‘Brick Kiln Slavery’: Over a decade ago, during the summer of 2007, it became publicly known that people – many people – from rural areas were being kidnapped and forced to work in kilns in Shanxi province. The affair was, uniquely, kicked off by parents mobilizing together in search for their missing children. These parents scoured the countryside and, sometimes, found their children working in the kilns.
‘No wages under Hukou’: For construction in China, wages are withheld for up to a year and together with widespread lack of employment contracts, excessive and illegal overtime, and the dependency on employers for housing and food for many of the unpaid workers could amount to forced labor. Most construction workers caught up in this practice are rural migrants systematically discriminated against because of China’s household registration system.
JINPING’S CASTING COUCH
The neighbors like Pakistan looking for China’s help too have been reduced to sex slaves. China continues to act an evil-boss making Pakistan feel like a helpless secretary. The former’s financial dependence on China resulted in selling 629 Pakistani women as bride-slaves.
A report by the Korea Future Initiative (KFI), which was presented in the House of Commons in 2019, forensically details how vulnerable women and girls as young as 12 are being tricked into escaping North Korea only to be sold as sex slaves in China.
In Vietnam, one of the modern forms of slavery involves the trafficking of young women, forced into prostitution in brothels along the border with China or sold for money as brides to men across the border. In recent years, trafficking in the Asian country has particularly involved young women and girls, some just out of puberty, increasingly treated as “new sex slaves”.
The Myanmar Human Rights Commission said data provided to them by immigration authorities showed that 226 women were trafficked to China in 2017.
China’s hunger for sex slaves from neighboring countries clearly depicts it will barter a protective hand and go to any extent to gratify her men.
Maybe Xi, as a child, read poems of the Tang dynasty, who eroticized the slave girls of Viet or the poems by Yuan scholar Hao Jingceng who described the “white and delicate” skin of Korean women slaves.
Is it just an ongoing failure of human rights or the Chinese have failed yet again to enact a single law?
After unleashing the Chinese virus, the punctured dragon has opened a can of worms unearthing too many ghastly practices it has been silently following.