China's Foreign Trade Dbq Essay

For thousands of years, people have been trading, buying, and selling things to each other with great distance between them, such as the Silk Road in the Middle Ages that connected China to Europe. Since then, people have invested their business in other countries in order to support their company or to support the country. Because of the technological advancements that have occurred recently, “cross-border” trade has increased so immensely, almost to the point where most people believe that the world has entered a new phase it its economic evolution. This expansion of the market has most likely been triggered by the new policies that have opened economies in countries and also worldwide. This had gone into full steam in the years after

According to Document F, “From October 2010 to June 2011, through an investigation of ten global brand supplier electronics factories, China Labor Watch discovered multiple violations of China’s Labor Law, which was recently instituted in 2008. The majority of these violations fall under five general categories: overtime, wages, labor intensity, contracts, and discrimination.” (China Labor Watch). This shows that the majority of companies that have opened “branches” in other countries, such as China, bypass the country’s work standards. For example, China’s labor law states that the overtime for workers should not exceed 36 hours per month but all of the globalized companies in China had its employees with 36-160 hours of overtime a month. The same instance occurs with wages and labor contracts, in which the minimum wage does not meet the living cost of the workers and workers are not fully informed about the specific details in a contract before signing it which also violates most principles of a country’s law. This is a product of globalization because these companies opened here so they would be able to make more money, quicker, by over-working their staff in inhumane conditions and paying them very little for it. This exemplifies how these major companies take advantage of their workers by subsiding the country’s regulations and dictations. The significance of this is that these employees are getting payed below the country’s minimum wage for very intense work and are expected to provide for themselves and their