China, please, reform!

Many of you may still remember the footage of animals being slaughtered in some of the most inhumane ways I can imagine and have seen (which I want show here, for very obvious reasons); and I believe most of you have at least some incling of the incidents that have been taking place in Tibet. All in all, nothing a rational human should ever approve of. And still China topped both off with the revelations of seemingly abundant cases of infanticide (mostly of girls).

While more and more conservatives argue politicians should be accepting of Chinese internal affairs, no matter what, all of these have again been shown to be nothing other than mere aspects of a much bigger problem: a society that is having trouble dealing with the moral Zeitgeist, as evidenced in this article.

Thousands of children in southwest China have been sold into slavery like "cabbages", to work as labourers in more prosperous areas such as the booming southern province of Guangdong, a newspaper said on Tuesday.

[...]

"The children generally fall between the ages of 13 and 15, but many look under 10," it added.

[...]

"The youngest kids found in the child labor market were only seven and nine years old," it said.

According to a contract exposed by an undercover reporter, a child laborer is paid 3.5 yuan ($0.50) an hour and must work at least 300 hours a month.

"These kids are robust and can do the toughest work," a foreman was quoted as saying, as he pulled a scrawny girl to stand beside him, the paper said.

Xinhua news agency said the county government had sent officials to rescue the children, but some were unwilling to leave, having been sold into slavery by their parents or volunteering to work themselves.

So, children as young as 7 years old and generally no more than 15 get to work at least 300 hours a month (that's 10 hours per day on average) for a mere grand total of 1.050 yuan - the equivalent of $150!

I don't know how the rest of the Chinese fare in this regard, but that is less than a sixth of the minimum €600 ($934) salary you get in Greece for a full-time job, or around a third of the minimum €300 ($467) salary you get for a part-time job, and then you only work 20 days per month, and only 8 and 4 hours respectively. The most disturbing part, though, is that parents give their children off to such slavery and that some of them have even volunteer for all this.

There is one thing we can be sure of: when a human sells his or her own freedom to make a living, something is going very, very wrong...