Everyone is talking about the horrible revelations of slave labor in the brick kilns of Shanxi province.   Truly depressing.  Hundreds of people, many children, held against their will, in squalid conditions, and forced to work forging bricks.  Dickensian, we might say (perhaps growth-crazy, capitalist China needs its own Dickens…)

     Here is something from Roland, at ESWN (look for "Comments on the Shanxi Brick Kiln Case"), that stood out in all of the commentary, his translation of a statement he found in the Xinhua news service:

… Behind the phenomenon of illegal brick kilns, there is the problem of certain government departments being derelict in their duties.  The illegal brick kilns are illegal and have not passed any procedures.  So how could they exist for years?  Could the large-scale kidnapping of outsiders to work as slaves, the restriction of freedom of movement, the reckless beatings of the workers and other serious criminal acts be totally unnoticed by the relevant local departments?

 Which he pairs with an editorial from Southern Metropolis Daily:

The dereliction of duty of the base-level government, their slowness in reacting to the criminal activities, their shirking of public responsibilities and even indirect encroachment on public interests have reached a point of being intolerable.  Previously, there have been many analyses about these types of mistakes.  Usually, the reasons include confusion from the overlapping functions of various government departments or local protectionism.  But the assumptions of those analyses are usually that the local governments were trying to serve the people but their methods were wrong or ineffective.  But now it seems to be a huge question whether the base-level governments were genuinely interested in working for the rights of the citizens.  When the base-level governments are severed from the public, then all the laws, rules, regulations and policies are void.  The truth is that no one has been held accountable so far …

     The notion of "dereliction of duty" has a Confucian ring to it.  We expect virtuous leaders to do the right thing.  Indeed, Confucian principles would hold that only the virtuous should lead, and if they are not doing the right thing, they are, by definition, not virtuous and, therefore, should not lead.  But the problem for a Confucian-inflected political order (and I am not sure I would go so far as to say that is what the PRC in now) is a very general political problem: how can we ensure that those in positions of power do the right thing?

    Mencius famously held that "duty is internal;" that is, we all have an innate drive, something like an appetite, to fulfill our duties.  In a way, the CCP holds to the same ideal.  They believe that the Party can police itself, internally.  They still, on occasion, trot out the old moral exhortations (has anyone seen the eight virtues and eight disgraces recently?), to encourage people to get in touch with their internal duties.  The party certainly does not tolerate "external" oversight of party leaders, something like democratic accountability.  Of course, their aversion to democracy has everything to do with sheer power politics, but it dove tails nicely, even if unintentionally, with Confucian idealism about good leaders doing good things.

     Notice, however, where the Southern Metropolis Daily piece is going.  If the power-holders are "severed from the people" and are not being "held accountable," what, then, is the answer?  The editors there cannot directly call for competitive elections as a mechanism of popular sovereignty, but they are certainly leading us right up to that point.   

     It would seem then that the strange Confucian-Communist reliance on "closed rectification" (i.e. trying to police Party perfidy and corruption from within) has failed again in a deeply inhumane manner.  Slave labor.  What does the Chinese national anthem say: "Arise, Ye who refuse to be slaves!…"  And here we have slaves in the middle of "revolutionary" China. 

       Roland is right when he points out that the public airing of this terrible crime was inconceivable twenty five years ago, or maybe even only ten years ago.  But I wonder if the political fall out of the continuing stream of these sorts of stories will also be unprecedented: a move toward electoral democracy as a means of political accountability.