[Marxism] Forced labor in China

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, June 16, 2007
Reports of Forced Labor Unsettle China
By HOWARD W. FRENCH

SHANGHAI, June 15 — Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were 
traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the 
Chinese New Year when they disappeared.

Cheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the 
final leg of the journey home, their father, Su Jianjun, said in an 
interview, they were taken in by a woman who provided them with warm 
shelter and a meal on a cold winter night. She also offered them a 
chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.

The next thing they knew, however, they were being loaded onto a minibus 
with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, 
where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, 
the boy, 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home. A 
few days later, Mr. Su was able to rescue his daughter, 18.

This story and many others like it have swept China in recent days in an 
unfolding labor scandal in central China that involves the kidnapping of 
hundreds of children, most in their teens but some as young as 8.

The children, and many adults, reportedly, have been forced to work 
under brutal conditions — scantily clothed, unpaid and often fed little 
more than water and steamed buns — in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province.

As the stories spread across China this week, played prominently in 
newspaper headlines and on the Internet, a manhunt was announced midweek 
for Heng Tinghan, the foreman of one of the kilns, where 31 enslaved 
workers were recently rescued.

Mr. Su said his children were brought to the factory around midnight of 
the day they vanished. Once there, they were told they would have to 
make bricks. “You will start working in the morning, so get some sleep, 
and don’t lose your bowls, or you will have to pay for them,” he said 
the children were told. “They also charged them 50 renminbi for a 
blanket.” That is equivalent to about $6.50.

Mr. Su managed to recover his children after only a matter of days at 
the kiln, but many other parents have been less fortunate, losing 
contact with children for months or years. As stories of forced labor at 
the brick kilns have spread, hundreds of parents have petitioned local 
authorities to help them find their children and crack down on the kilns.

In some cases, according to Chinese news media reports, parents have 
also come together to try to rescue their children, placing little stock 
in the local authorities, who are sometimes in collusion with the 
operators of the kilns. Other reports have said that local authorities, 
including labor inspectors, have taken children from freshly closed 
kilns and resold them to other factories.

The director of the legal department of the Shanxi Province Worker’s 
Union said it was hard to monitor the kilns because of their location in 
isolated areas.

“Those factories are located in very remote places and most them are 
illegal entities, without any legal registration, so it is very hard for 
people outside to know what is going on there,” said the union official, 
Zhang Xiaosuo. “We are now doing a province-wide investigation into 
them, both the legal and illegal ones, to look into labor issues there.”

Liu Cheng, a professor of labor law at Shanghai Normal University, had a 
different explanation. “My first reaction is that this seems like a 
typical example of a government-business alliance,” Mr. Liu said. 
“Forced labor and child labor in China are illegal, but some local 
governments don’t care too much.”

Zhang Xiaoying, 37, whose 15-year-old son disappeared in January, said 
she had visited over 100 brick factories during a handful of visits to 
Shanxi Province in search of him.

“You just could not believe what you saw,” Ms. Zhang said in a telephone 
interview on Thursday. “Some of the kids working at these places were at 
most 14 or 15 years old.”

The local police, she said, were unwilling to help. Outside one factory, 
she said, they even demanded bribes.

“We finally got into that place, and I saw people hauling carts of 
bricks with great difficulty,” Ms. Zhang said. “Some of them were very 
small, and the ropes they pulled left tracks of blood on their shoulders 
and backs. Others were making bricks, standing by the machines.

“They had to move the bricks from the belt very quickly, because they 
were hot and heavy and they could easily get burned or hurt by the 
machines.”

By Friday, with the help of Mr. Su, Ms. Zhang finally located her son at 
a kiln near the one to which Mr. Su’s children had been taken.

Another father, Cai Tianliang, said he had set out to Shanxi Province in 
May from his native Henan Province in search of his missing 19-year-old 
son after a local television broadcast had shown a team of television 
reporters and Henan parents searching the Shanxi kilns for kidnapped 
children.

“I thought there was a great possibility that my son was also kidnapped, 
so I went there twice,” Mr. Cai said. “The usual thing is for an owner 
to have more than one factory, and to shift people without 
identification from one place to another.”

On his first trip, which he took with a group of parents, Mr. Cai said 
he found few clues. On a second visit to the area, he said, he was 
refused police permits to enter any of the brick factories but persisted 
anyway.

“We located a place called the Zhenjie Brick Factory in a town called 
Chengbei, and at first they would not allow us in,” he said, “but we 
kept negotiating. Finally, they let a few of us in, and they found my 
son inside.”

Like many other parents, Mr. Cai said he was dumbfounded by the boy’s 
condition when they were reunited.

“My son was totally dumb, not even knowing how to cry, or to scream or 
to call out ‘Father,’ ” he said. “I burst into tears and held him in my 
arms, but he had no reaction. He was in rags and had wounds all over his 
body. Within three months he had lost over 10 kilos,” about 22 pounds.

Mr. Cai said he tried to rescue a 16-year-old boy he found there, but 
was refused by the factory boss. “He said I could only take my own,” Mr. 
Cai said, “and must leave other people behind at the kiln.”

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