It really is amazing the stuff that people in third world countries or poor countries go through compared to what our average lives are in US. The sad thing is, there are certain parts in this country that's just as bad as a third country world where they have major issues with human trafficking or sex slavery, child labor and so on. We really need to progress as a global society to a better future where everybody is equal but that's just a dream of mine.
China is experiencing what the United States did in the very early 1900's. People were making nearly nothing and, of course, they way we handled some things caused an environmental catastrophe in the Dustbowl and massive intentional pollution. Don't forget we had child labor too at that time.
In China, it's common for families, including very small children, to pick through industrial trash dumps to locate circuit boards to attempt to recover silver, gold and platinum plating from defective waste. The industrial dumps are polluting their water tables and they're severely affecting their health trying to recover the metals. More recently it surfaced that the "brand name" USB flash drives we see coming into the US from China from places like ebay and cheap importers are actually pieced together devices made by peasants in China rummaging through defective discards that ended up in the dumps.
China's Three Gorges Dam Project displaced 13,000 people and has its own environmentally catastrophic effects for the sake of hydroelectric power. I am in no way an environmentalist but, at some point, their government needs to wake up and realize what's coming.
The US had violent worker uprisings which eventually led to the work conditions we have today. China is going to eventually end up with a massive amount of very angry people clashing with an uncaring government. Look at the Beijing Olympics. The Chinese government spent months doing sweeps forcing the homeless out of the city and then built a wall near Beijing's Olympic venues to prevent the international visitors from seeing or entering the slums.
There is an excellent documentary called China Blue about China's residential factories. One factory they observed had the workers (mostly very young girls) working 18 hours a day for 13 days in a two week period. This is from a review of the documentary:
Naïve and mentally unprepared, Jasmine falls headlong into the realities of factory hell. Sharing a room among 12 girls in an upper floor of the factory building, she and the girls make less than a dollar a day each, work overtime without compensation, and repeatedly suffer pay delays at the hands of their employer, who opts to cut costs to meet demands. Misdemeanors such as leaving the factory without permission or sleeping during work hours result in pay cuts and meal costs are automatically deducted from their pay.
One factory shown was making Mardi Gras beads. The person filming asked them what they thought they were and they thought they were some high-class jewelry. He explained that they were made to wear for a party, cost more than they made in a day and were thrown away after the party was over. They looked really confused.
They also showed a girl in Beijing who obsessed about buying expensive make-up with the little money she would make. Apparently, from the information provided, it's very common for the teenage girls to forego eating to buy make-up they've seen advertised.
If you want to put things into perspective I highly recommend you watch it.
The US exploited the Chinese immigrants to build our railroad infrastructure and now we do the same for our toys. Eventually China will have its uprising and the US will start buying from some other country.
