Abstract

China: The World's Proletariat

This article presents the author's views on the economic and nationalist struggles of China. In China both are inextricably intertwined. For China has the greatest cheap labor supply on earth. It is good labor, too and European capital, which at first merely bought native products cheap, has for two or three decades been attempting to install Western factories with. The mills have sprouted like mushrooms along the coast and rivers of China. The first cotton mill came to China in 1890; there were 14 in 1906, with 400,000 spindles; 42, with 1,154,000 spindles, in 1916; 83, with 2,666,000 spindles, in 1923; and there is no reason to suppose that the number will not continue to double every six or seven years. China still imports the blue cotton cloth which has become the national uniform of her masses, a fantastic statistician once figured that China's annual consumption of cotton cloth would pave a roadway sixty feet wide to the moon.