Slavery as the commodification of people: Wa "slaves" and their Chinese "sisters"

E-ISSN： 1558-5263|2011|59|3-18

ISSN： 0920-1297

Source： Focaal, Vol.2011, Iss.59, 2011-03, pp. : 3-18

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Abstract

In the 1950s, teams of Chinese government ethnologists helped liberate“slaves” whom they identified among the Wa people in the course of China’s militaryannexation and pacification of the formerly autonomous Wa lands, betweenChina and Burma. For the Chinese, the “discovery” of these “slaves” proved theEngels-Morganian evolutionist theory that the supposedly primitive and thereforepredominantly egalitarian Wa society was teetering on the threshold between Ur-Communism and ancient slavery. A closer examination of the historical and culturalcontext of slavery in China and in the Wa lands reveals a different dynamicsof commodification, which also sheds light on slavery more generally. In this articleI discuss the rejection of slavery under Wa kinship ideology, the adoption ofchild war captives, and the anomalous Chinese mine slaves in the Wa lands. I alsodiscuss the trade in people emerging with the opium export economy of the latenineteenth and early twentieth century which helped sustain, yet also threatened,autonomous Wa society. I suggest that past Wa “slave” trade was spurred by thesame processes of commodification that historically drove the Chinese trade inpeople, and in recent decades have produced the large-scale human traffickingacross Asia, which UN officials have labeled “the largest slave trade in history” andwhich often hides slavery under the cover of kinship.