I'm currently reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History and the origins are the following:
* Initially they had a huge amount of prisoners and shortage of workers in key regions. Naturally they had them work in remote areas.
* The real motivation is economic - the central planners simply loved the flexibility of slave labor - they could start pet projects quickly. They wanted to complete vanity projects that made no economic sense like the Belomorcanal. Their need for hard currency also meant that they needed raw resources for export, most of which were in faraway, underdeveloped regions.
* Repressive organs found that they were strongly incentivised to send even more people to the camps.
* There was obviously no free media - which meant that any excess was covered up or spun as success - for example Gorky acknowledged that prisoners don't have the proper skills or tools, but somehow claimed that ideology and superb management created wonders. This eventually emboldened the government to enslave even more people.
In short they created a slave economy. It wasn't by design, in so far that the leaders of the country didn't explicitly wish the return of slavery and serfdom, but there was a spiral of reinforcing incentives in the system.
Just like the USSR of the 20s and 30s China is desperate to create economic growth at all costs, will eventually run out of cheap rural labor[0], on which it used to rely for the last few decades and is not beholden to either national or international opinion. Who can stop the CPC from reintroducing slavery or serfdom? The Gulag system developed over 10 years to reach it its classical form, we may well see the first steps.
Economist Evsey Domar famously created a model where high labour demand and lots of available land creates incentives for landowners to reintroduce serfdom [1] as they didn't want to compete with each other. Is China's capital being accustomed to cheap labourers migrating from poor rural areas the reason why rural minorities are now forced into labour by the government?
[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/rural-population-percent-... - this is the total rural population, but I assume eventually many of the remaining people will be old or average-off Han that like it in the villages.
[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63299/causeso...
* Initially they had a huge amount of prisoners and shortage of workers in key regions. Naturally they had them work in remote areas.
* The real motivation is economic - the central planners simply loved the flexibility of slave labor - they could start pet projects quickly. They wanted to complete vanity projects that made no economic sense like the Belomorcanal. Their need for hard currency also meant that they needed raw resources for export, most of which were in faraway, underdeveloped regions.
* Repressive organs found that they were strongly incentivised to send even more people to the camps.
* There was obviously no free media - which meant that any excess was covered up or spun as success - for example Gorky acknowledged that prisoners don't have the proper skills or tools, but somehow claimed that ideology and superb management created wonders. This eventually emboldened the government to enslave even more people.
In short they created a slave economy. It wasn't by design, in so far that the leaders of the country didn't explicitly wish the return of slavery and serfdom, but there was a spiral of reinforcing incentives in the system.
Just like the USSR of the 20s and 30s China is desperate to create economic growth at all costs, will eventually run out of cheap rural labor[0], on which it used to rely for the last few decades and is not beholden to either national or international opinion. Who can stop the CPC from reintroducing slavery or serfdom? The Gulag system developed over 10 years to reach it its classical form, we may well see the first steps.
Economist Evsey Domar famously created a model where high labour demand and lots of available land creates incentives for landowners to reintroduce serfdom [1] as they didn't want to compete with each other. Is China's capital being accustomed to cheap labourers migrating from poor rural areas the reason why rural minorities are now forced into labour by the government?
[0]: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/rural-population-percent-... - this is the total rural population, but I assume eventually many of the remaining people will be old or average-off Han that like it in the villages.
[1]: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/63299/causeso...