China's Child Laborers

The rescue of hundreds of children, most aged between 9 and 16, who worked as slave laborers in the city of Dongguan (one of the country’s largest manufacturing centers of electronics and "fashion" goods sold all over the world) in the Guandong province, has served as a brutal reminder to the international community of the Chinese plague of child labor. Child slave labor still exists in China, despite the government vow to effectuate "a broad crackdown on labor abuses," affecting at least 10 million children in China.

According to CNN the children, all from Liangshan, a poor region in Sichuan, "were 'sold like cabbages' by their parents to gangs who then sold them to employment agencies or directly to factories hundreds of miles from their homes." In other cases the children were tricked with false promises of well-paying jobs or were kidnapped by "employment agencies" which sent them to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were forced to work 75 hours a week for circa 30-50 U.S. cents per hour.

The New York Times reports that "hundreds of rural children have been lured or forced into captive, almost slave-like conditions for minimal pay." According to the Chinese daily “Southern Metropolis,” some children were physically and sexually abused. In its report, Southern Metropolis reported that some children were told they would be killed if they attempted to escape.

This scandal comes less than a year after the shame of the child-slave laborers in the brick kilns. In June 2007 the Southern Metropolis discovered that children as young as 8 were abducted or "recruited" from bus and train stations and then sold for about $65 U.S. dollars to factory owners in the Shanxi and Henan provinces. The children were forced to work in inhuman conditions, their hands burnt by hot bricks. Some were beaten to death, others deprived of pay, food and basic medical care, some buried alive to hide the "evidence."

Identification of the youngsters is always very difficult, because they have no ID cards. Often the children lie to the police, as they fear the authorities just as much as their captors, as methods used by the police to "persuade" them to go home are often just as brutal as those of the factory owners. To most of the children, to return home means to return to desperation and poverty. "My father and mother sold me; I don't want to go back" Luo Siqi, a young girl rescued in Dongguan, was quoted as saying while she broke down in tears. None of the the children freed in Guandong admitted that they had been forced or "sold."

Experts say the labor problems discovered in Dongguan are not uncommon. They also involve the manufacturers of Olympic gadgets. Factories that supply international companies, including Wal-Mart, have been accused of using child labor. Some major corporations have ordered inspections of factories that produce goods for them, but suppliers have become expert at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data which are in accordance with local labor laws. Factory managers also force their employees to learn scripted questions and answers to be followed in cases of inspection (for example "have you ever seen any child working in this factory?" "No, never").

Officials in the city of Dongguan say they are now investigating all factories in the area in order to determine whether any children are employed. According to Southern Metropolis, one of the factories which had been investigated was a toy factory in Dongguan and it was not difficult for the journalists to uncover the child laborers there.

The New York Times quoted the Southern Metropolis as writing in a separate editorial "Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days, how could the labor departments show no interest in it and ignore it for such a long time?"

Sources:

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/05/01/china.slavery.ap/index.html
http://www.newsgd.com/news/guangdong1/content/2008-05/04/content_4392728.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/01/world/asia/01china.html?pagewanted=print
http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menuitem.2c913216495213d5df646910cba0a0a0/?vgnextoid=a7cde75ea2fb9110VgnVCM100000360a0a0aRCRD&vgnextfmt=teaser&ss=China&s=News

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