How Ming dynasty-era farming system allowed Portuguese merchants to buy China children as slaves
- Powerful landlords bought up swathes of land leaving farmers exposed
- Desperate peasants sold children to both Chinese, Portuguese buyers
New academic research has revealed that when Portuguese merchants arrived in southern China in the 16th and 17th centuries, they bought children as slaves, exploiting an already established domestic culture of bonded labour.
According to a paper published in Cambridge University Press in late December, farmers at the time often faced such wretched conditions that many felt compelled to sell their children.
The sales were often made to Chinese landlords, but Portuguese merchants also frequently participated in the slave trade, according to research by James Fujitani, an assistant professor at the University of Nottingham Ningbo campus in the Chinese province of Zhejiang, south of Shanghai.
Fujitani says the process was driven by the emergence of commercialised agriculture, which, at the time, saw plantation owners buy up swathes of arable land.
Eventually, a sharecropping system emerged, in which landlords would rent out plots of land to peasants.
“A comparison between Russian serfs and the Chinese peasantry is valid in many ways. There is a similar dependence on the landlord and a similar inability to leave the land. China was definitely not unique in the use of agricultural bonded labour,” said Fujitani.