Slavery in China encompassed several changing forms of unfreedom rather than a single institution constant across all dynasties. Chinese legal and social systems distinguished free commoners from household slaves, bondservants, government slaves, penal laborers, and other dependent groups. War and conquest could produce captives, while powerful households and the state employed people in domestic service, agriculture, administration, corvée, and punishment labor. Because these statuses differed in transferability, inheritance, legal protection, and ability to leave, historians caution against treating all coerced labor as equivalent to Atlantic plantation slavery.[1][2]

Late Qing reforms formally attacked slave status and the sale of people in the early twentieth century, with 1910 often used as a principal legal-reform date. Household servitude, trafficking, and other coercive practices did not disappear at once, so legal reform should be distinguished from effective emancipation.

References

↑ Robin D. S. Yates, “Slavery in Early China: A Socio-Cultural Approach,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44, no. 3 (2001).

↑ E. G. Pulleyblank, “The Origins and Nature of Chattel Slavery in China,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 1, no. 2 (1958).