AND THEY WONDER...:

China to probe brickyard slavery: The number of people rescued from forced labor in police raids surpasses 500 as scandals continue to plague the government. (Ching-Ching Ni, June 16, 2007, LA Times)

He was a culinary student looking for his first job, and when a stranger offered him restaurant work he eagerly accepted. But the 20-year-old was taken instead to a rural brick kiln where he toiled as a slave with little food, no pay and regular beatings that nearly killed him.

Yet Zhang Yinlei is among the lucky.

He was one of at least 548 workers rescued so far in a crackdown on brick factories in north-central China, where abducted men and children as young as 8 had been sold into slavery for $65 a head. Most of them were freed this week in raids at thousands of kilns in two provinces.

The case has so scandalized China that state media announced Friday that President Hu Jintao had personally ordered a prompt investigation.

Child labor and harsh working conditions used to be the stuff of propaganda movies used by the Chinese Communists to discredit capitalist societies. Today they are a fact of life in a country driven by its own pursuit of wealth, often at the expense of the poor.

Reports of Forced Labor Unsettle China (HOWARD W. FRENCH, 6/16/07, NY Times)

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.”

...why students who go overseas don't return?

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 16, 2007 7:12 PM