Slavery is known to have existed as early as the Shang dynasty (18th–12th
century BC) in China. It has been studied
thoroughly in ancient Han China (206 BC–AD 25), where perhaps 5
percent of the population was enslaved. Slavery continued to be a feature of
Chinese society down to the 20th century. For most of that period it appears
that slaves were generated in the same ways they were elsewhere, including
capture in war, slave raiding, and the sale of insolvent debtors. In addition,
the Chinese practiced self-sale into slavery, the sale of women and children (to
satisfy debts or because the seller could not feed them), and the sale of the
relatives of executed criminals. Finally, kidnapping seems to have produced a
regular flow of slaves at some times. The go-between or middleman was an
important figure in the sale of local people into slavery; he provided the
distance that made such slaves into outsiders, for the purchasers did not know
their origins. Chinese family boundaries were relatively permeable, and some
owners established kinlike relations with their slaves; male slaves were
appointed as heirs when no natural offspring existed. As was also the case in
other slave-owning societies, slaves in China were often luxury consumption
items who constituted a drain on the economy. Th
