A former prisoner at a labor camp in China claims he and other prisoners were routinely forced to play online games like World of Warcraft until their eyes crossed, to make money for gold farmers. The Guardian quotes figures from the China Internet Centre estimating that 80% of the world’s gold farmers are in China — 100,000 of them doing it full-time. These figures place the amount of make-believe currencies traded in China alone at well over ￡1 billion.
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You don’t need to look very far to find the weirdness here. But in case your brain is not completely tweaked by hearing that prisoners in a real prison were really beaten for not generating enough fake online money, consider this: China has one of the most tightly controlled currencies in the world. The Chinese yuan is very different than the US dollar and the British pound. Those two currencies are traded freely internationally, and fluctuate based on world events ranging from wars to trade agreements to unemployment numbers to commodities futures to…whatever. In very basic terms, the dollar and the pound are regulated by the market.
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Way back in 2006, NPR explained it as follows in an article about pressure on then-President Bush to insist that China stop undervaluing its currency.If you’ve watched the international economic news even a tiny bit, you’ve probably heard about this issue. American manufacturing jobs have migrated overseas for a number of reasons, but one of the most important reasons manufacturing has gone to China is the currency undervaluation. It’s utterly disingenuous to suggest that the differential is “horrible for many U.S. manufacturers.†Who it’s horrible for are U.S. workers, who are expected to adapt to a virtual world where computer jobs, healthcare and service jobs are the core of the economy. It’s also horrible for U.S. manufacturers that actually make things in the U.S..But many companies that we think of as “U.S. manufacturers†long ago found it most expedient to move their manufacturing endeavors to other countries. China is far from the only country they moved to. When one says “U.S. manufacturers,†one needs to be clear what one is talking about — and the migration of U.S. manufacturing jobs to other countries can’t be blamed on China. That can only be blamed on U.S. companies, and the U.S. government that started favoring offshoring over keeping jobs at home, because it looked (and looks) better for corporate bottom lines.But as for gold farming, if it’s true, as it’s said, that 80% of gold farmers are in China, it’s not just because of prisoner abuse. Such practices may cast an ever more disturbing pall over the already creepy practice, but back in May, 2010, Rowenna Davis wrote about organized gold farming in China in her Guardian article Welcome to the New Gold Mines.
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