Die Welt

The scandal of slave workers in China is spreading. According to official reports Chinese police have freed more than four hundred people, including children, who had been kidnapped and put to forced factory labour.

It started at a bus stop. Or at a railway station. They promised the earth, and the victims, mostly the dispossessed and children, some just eight years old, believed them. They were dragged off by the hundreds to work as slaves in brickworks.

According to reports from China , they had to work for more than ten hours a day and were often beaten. The children were forced to go hungry and to work for no pay. They were flogged if they fell ill or were too weak to carry the bricks. Some had to work for up to twenty hours a day, living on bread and water.

The most recent police estimates show that more than a thousand people, adults and children, in the provinces of Shanxi and Henan were working in miserable conditions. So far about four hundred and fifty slave workers have been freed. The authorities stated that about thirty-five thousand officers were deployed in the biggest police operation in the history of China to search thousands of brickworks and foundries in these northern provinces.

In Hongtong in Shanxi province the police freed thirty-two workers from twelve regions of China. They had been lured under false pretences to work in a brickworks. Some had been snatched from the streets and driven away. Nine of the thirty-two had learning difficulties and were less able than the others to stand up for themselves against ill-treatment.

This case is causing an exceptional stir among the Chinese public, as the brickworks is situated on land owned by the Party Secretary of the village and run by his son Wang Bingbing. He was arrested together with four accomplices. The thirty-two slaves had been intimidated by cruel supervisors, and the owner had them guarded by six German Shepherd dogs.

His prominent father "would have known everything that went on in his son’s infernal factory" said the newspaper "Shanxi Evening News, citing a trade union representative, who demanded his expulsion from the Party.

The weekly "Nanfang Zhoumo" reported on the case of forty-six-year-old Yang Aizhi from Henan, who has been looking for her sixteen-year-old son since March. When she found out that children had been systematically kidnapped and transported to Shanxi, she went to more than a hundred brickworks to look for him. She discovered that "most of the children had been put to the hardest labour."

She has been appealing ever since for public support in the press and on television. She saw schoolchildren at work, still wearing their school uniforms. They were flogged if they worked badly. She was threatened whenever she tried to rescue any of them.

Brickworks manager Zhao Yanbing admitted on Chinese state television to having beaten a man with a spade for not working hard enough. "His performance was so bad, and I wanted to scare him a bit" he said after his arrest. According to the "Beijing Youth Daily" many of the child slaves had been snatched from the streets and sold to firms for five hundred yuan (£33). The media reported that local police failed to act because many of them were in the pockets of the brickworks management.

President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have given "important directives" in connection with the affair, and the fact that they made it official is an indication of how far awareness has spread in China. So much so that a letter of protest was posted to the Internet. It stated that a group of four hundred fathers demanded that the authorities be more energetic in searching for their disappeared sons. In total a thousand children had been kidnapped.

The problem of child labour in Shanxi has been known about since 2004. In the past few months the state media have been carrying reports about other cases of slavery and mistreatment of workers. The police forces of Henan and Shanxi announced that they were joining forces against the rogue brickworks and people-traffickers.