SMEs, migrant slavery, and the urgency of a Chinese economy based on human dignity
Milan (AsiaNews) - What makes contemporary China different from that of the Maoist era are the small- and medium-sized enterprises, SMEs. However, their newness is largely relative and marginal because they do not constitute a truly independent and autonomous system of businesses, regulated by a framework of clearly defined rights and responsibilities, guaranteed by a judicial system above political influence.
The heart of China's bureaucratic and judicial apparatus remains the same as always, regulated and controlled by a regime under the thumb of the Communist Party. Without legal certainties, a true market is struggling to develop in today's China, and this applies to small- and medium-sized businesses. It follows that the latter are largely structural vassals in a neo-feudal system controlled by big business, the ones who pay the price for the drive for greater resource efficiencies.
To be fair, this is partly true. Greater efficiency has been achieved through a system of subcontracting that provide companies with economies of scale to produce the same components for different companies and different industries. However, the greater economic efficiency has largely come by "optimising" the main resource of any manufacturing enterprise, which is not machines or the corporate structure, but labour and its cost. Small- and medium-sized enterprises can by definition better control labour as a factor of production and benefit from the abundance of labour - migrant workers from China's countryside.
As suggested, China's agriculture has always been the most neglected sector in the country's development, and has been tied to a subsistence economy that meets basic needs. The countryside has been a human reservoir of hundreds of millions of people feeding the development of large state industrial firms. Today it continues to provide cheap labour to components manufactures and small enterprises, in coal mines for example, which supply China's main source of energy. This is one of the great little secrets that everyone knows, which has allowed China to contain the costs of its industrial exports.
We can and must speak about civil rights and greater prosperity for Chinese workers. Unfortunately - and tragically - all that makes little sense and more often than not slides into pure rhetoric as waves of indignation move across the West producing results that mostly touch the surface.
With great effort, China's great industry has even managed on the occasion to disguise itself and show a face that is a little more respectful of people. Behind it however, subcontractors making components continue like before and - unknown to the rest of the world - China's rural population, who are at the bottom of the heap, continue to live as they always have, in de facto slavery and serfdom.
In Italy, it was hard to understand how Chinese workers in Chinese-owned plants in Prato (Tuscany) could accept working and living conditions deemed subhuman by ordinary Italians. In answering such questions Chinese workers say the same thing, namely that it is better to work and live in such conditions in Italy than in China. If this is true for the Chinese garment plants in Prato, Italy, it applies a fortiori even more to companies in China, where labour pressure from the countryside is greater.
What the West especially does not often understand is that the very concept of civil rights does not make much sense in a Chinese context. China introduced this idea twice in its history: the first time when the Celestial Empire was overthrown and the Kuomintang's nationalist republic came into being under Sun Yat-sen; the second time, in 1949, when Mao's People's Republic of China was installed.
In both cases however, the concept was interpreted through Confucian ideas whose central focus is the common good and the Middle Kingdom. Civil rights in this context are seen as a kind of system of checks and balances that regulate the proper functioning of society.
In Western societies, on both sides of the Atlantic, such rights have been seen instead as absolute values derived from the centrality and dignity of the human person, a concept that Christianity developed on the basis of Roman law, but also and especially from the Gospel values.
The difference may seem subtle perhaps, but it is anything but that. If values civil rights are subordinated to the needs of society, the welfare of the Empire, shortcuts can be taken depending on actual needs and contingent opportunities. This is very different when civil rights are values, in some cases unavailable, related to the human person, such as the right to life, liberty and property. Thus, when speaking about workers' civil rights in different contexts we may use the same terms but mean different things.
The difference between the two becomes relevant in times of crisis like the one world economies are going through right now. A society that does not know the concept of the individual is more likely to subordinate rights to short-term imperatives.
From an institutional point of view, China today is at a turning point, perhaps on the eve of social strife. Uneasiness over how some people are getting rich quick and, especially, the daily experiences of arbitrariness and the lack of legal certainty are widely felt. For this reason, the authorities are very vigilant and quick to suppress any hint of dissent.
The opposition in civil society and in the Party have good reason to question the country's basic constitutional principles. Hopefully though, the dualism between Sun-Yat-Sen and Mao Tse Tung, and the KMT and Chinese Communist Party, might be avoided; it has already led to one terrible civil war.
At AsiaNews, we suggest to those in power and those in the opposition to study how Western Christianity developed from Charlemagne onward the concept of morally justified supreme political authority, distinguishing it from that which is usurped, as when Napoleon crowned himself emperor.
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