In her 1966 autobiographical novel A Mortal Flower the Chinese writer Han Suyin tells the story of a visit to a Shanghai silkworks in 1934 together with her Belgian benefactor Jacques Hers. Here we bring her description of the visit and her thoughts on the child labor of the day:

‘Go and see a bit of life,’ said Hers. ‘Stuck in your university, you think everything can be done by slogans. You will see that the Chinese are worse to their own people than Europeans.’

A small rat-like man with glasses took me to a silk filature, in Chapei or Yangtsepoo, quite a way from the International Settlement. It was an area impossibly squalid, a slum of sagging huts, stinking unpaved alleyways. A barn-like structure, with a small courtyard in front, was the filature. Inside, great vats of boiling water, furnaces, and children looking about six but who the rat-faced man told me were all of fourteen, standing round the vats. It was hardly possible to see what they were doing with the steam rising form the vats, and it was suffocatingly hot; but they were plunging silk cocoons in bundles wrapped in fine webs of gauze in the vats. The children’s eyes were peculiar, bright red with trachoma, their arms were covered with scalds, and they worked almost naked; the temperature outside was ninety-eght degrees, inside it was one hundred and three or perhaps more. The smell was bad, and I could not stand it and no one wanted me to stay very long. ‘These are refugees... we give them work, otherwise they would die of hunger...’ The rat-like man told me how kind his manager was to give employment to those children, one hundred and twenty of them. Quickly we went out again. The car of the manager who had arranged this instructive trip for me beacause Hers had asked him to do so, was waiting beyond the mud lanes, as these were impassable; it whisked me away, back to civilization, in the French Concession... ‘Now you have seen the problem,’ said Hers. ‘Too many poor people in China.’ Later I found out the silk filature belonged to a Japanese concern.

Years later only did I meet Rewi Alley who had been an inspector of factories in Shanghai. A New Zealander who had come to China for three months in 1927, someone had spat at him as he landed. ‘Funny way of greeting people they have here,’ thought Rewi, and stayed in China forty years. From 1927 to 1938 Rewi worked in Shanghai, fighting against the factory owners, against the callous indifference of the foreign administration, against the appalling conditions, which reproduced those of nineteenth-century England. He toured the flood and famine areas in north and south and middle China; and knew the hideous use made of the refugees. For ten years he urged and pushed and got nowhere.

From the famines, the floods, the civil wars, wave after wave of children would arrive at the city with their parents. And they were sold by their parents, or hired out to work, as was done in England. The factories refused to employ men, they would only take women and children. From the refugee camps and the orphanages children would be bought. In crowded lofts, in rickety barns such as this, they were put to work; twelve, fourteen hours a day, no Sundays off; they made flashlight bulbs for the five and ten cent stores; they slept underneath the punch press machines; twice a day they ata gruel, and they died of beri beri, swollen with festering sores, within four months.

‘I shall never forget the irrepressible gaiety of dying children, in the lead battery factories... as I went to take their urine... the word child applied to the under twelve. Over twelve they became apprentices till they were eighteen. Apprentices were paid like children.’

‘The foreigners always said: It’s up to the Chinese administration.’ And the Chinese could not do anything even if they wanted to (which they did not) because over seventy per cent of the factories were owned by Japan and Britain.

The foremen in the textile mills were armed with guns and whips. The girls, mostly from the countryside, were brought into the city in batches of thirty, worked forteen hours a day and slept in lofts on floorboards. The prettiest were sold to the brothels. Rewi saw many a girl working with a child strapped to her back, another child tied to her leg, for there was no place where the children could be left while the mother worked.

The silk filatures of Shanghai had long lines of children, many not more than eight years old, standing twelve hours a day over boiling vats of cocoons with swollen red fingers, many crying from the beating of the foreman who passed up and down behind them with a number eight gauge wire as a whip; their arms were scalded in punishment if they passed a thread incorrectly.

‘But we’ve also been through this, you know, we had it in England during the nineteenth century,’ an Englishman loftily said to me when I told him of my gruesome visit. ‘And look at the British worker now! Always on strike, the Bolshies, if it hadn’t been for Ramsay MacDonald they’d have cut our throats!’ 'These people would starve if we didn’t give them employment.’ This was philanthropy.

(...)

Of the textile mills of Shanghai, 77,2 per cent were foreign-owned, 22,8 per cent Chinese. Woman and child labour was near 85 per cent of the total; the monthly earnings were fifteen (silver) dollars for a male, thirteen for a female, eight for a child (under twelve) working twelve to fourteen hours a day for seven days a week. Though the government had passed labour laws in 1931 they were never put into effect. And all this went on till 1949.

In these conditions invested capital was regained in profits within two years, and after that all was pure profit. The average life-expectancy in China in 1935 was twenty-eight years; in the mills in Shanghai it was far less. No New Life here, and no chastity possible. The mill girls had to please the foremen, and the pimps were always there.

From Han Suyin: A Mortal Flower, London: Jonathan Cape 1966, pp. 299-302