Date of publication: May 1, 2008
Source: New York Times
By David Barboza
China said Wednesday that it had broken up a child labor ring that forced children from poor, inland areas to work in booming coastal cities, acknowledging that severe labor abuses extended into the heart of its export economy.
Authorities in southern China’s Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong, said they had made several arrests and had already “rescued” more than 100 children from factories in the city of Dongguan, one of the country’s largest manufacturing centers for electronics and consumer goods sold around the world. The officials said they were investigating reports that hundreds of other rural children had been lured or forced into captive, almost slavelike conditions for minimal pay.
The children, mostly between the ages of 13 and 15, were often tricked or kidnapped by employment agencies in an impoverished part of western Sichuan Province called Liangshan and then sent to factory towns in Guangdong, where they were sometimes forced to work 300 hours a month, according to government officials and accounts from the state-owned media. The legal working age in China is 16.
The labor scandal is the latest embarrassment for China as it prepares to host the Olympic Games this summer. For much of the past year, the country has been plagued by damaging reports about severe pollution, dangerous exports, riots in Tibet and the ensuing disruptions to its Olympic torch relay by Tibet’s sympathizers, among other groups.
The abuses may also reflect the combined pressures of worker shortages, high inflation and a rising currency that have reduced profit margins of some Chinese factories and forced them to scramble for an edge — even an illegal one — to stay competitive.
The child labor ring, which was first uncovered by Southern Metropolis, a crusading newspaper based in Guangzhou, came less than a year after China was rocked by exposure of a similar problem in a less developed part of central China. Last June, labor officials in Shanxi and Henan Provinces said they had rescued hundreds of people, including children, from slave labor conditions in rural brick kilns. Many of those workers said they had been kidnapped.
The earlier case, which local officials initially sought to keep quiet, set off a national uproar in China and prompted a sharp response from President Hu Jintao, who vowed a broad crackdown on labor abuses. Local officials in Guangdong may have moved quickly to acknowledge the latest incident to keep it from becoming a running scandal as the Olympics approach.
The police in Guangdong said Wednesday that they had formed teams to search for child laborers in several coastal cities, including Dongguan and Shenzhen, another big manufacturing center, but disclosed nothing about the companies involved in employing the children, or the extent of the problem.
Officials did not identify the specific factories or products involved, and it is unclear whether any of them were suppliers to global corporations. But many companies in Dongguan and Shenzhen, where land and labor costs are typically higher than elsewhere in the country, are part of the supply chain for the country’s export manufacturers. The authorities have also said little so far about the identities of the children they claim to have rescued.
“These youngsters have no ID cards, so it makes it difficult to identify them,” said Zhang Xiang, a spokesman for the Guangdong Labor Bureau.
In recent years, Beijing has stepped up its efforts to crack down on child labor and labor law violations. Last August, Beijing revoked the license of a factory accused of using child labor to produce Olympic merchandise. Several other suppliers were also punished for labor law violations.
But experts say rising costs of labor, energy and raw material, and labor shortages in some parts of southern China have forced some factory owners to cut costs or find new sources of cheap labor, including child labor.
Even factories that supply global companies, including Wal-Mart Stores, have been accused in recent years of using child labor and violating local labor laws. Big corporations have stepped up inspections of factories that produce goods for them. But suppliers have become adept at evading such scrutiny by providing fake wage and work schedule data that suggest they abide by labor laws. Experts say the labor problems discovered in Dongguan are not uncommon.
“The Liangshan child labor case is quite typical,” said Hu Xingdou, a professor of economics and social policy at the Beijing Institute of Technology. “China’s economy is developing at a fascinating speed, but often at the expense of laws, human rights and environmental protection.”
Professor Hu said that while Beijing had pushed to improve labor conditions throughout the nation, local governments were still driven by incentives to grow their economy, and so they tried to lure cheap labor.
“Most of the work force comes from underdeveloped or poverty-stricken areas,” he said. “Some children are even sold by their parents, who often don’t have any idea of the working conditions.”
In a series of articles this week, journalists working for Southern Metropolis wrote that they had traveled to Liangshan Prefecture in Sichuan Province, an area of western China populated by ethnic minority groups and plagued by drugs and a lack of good jobs, to pose as recruiters and interview parents and residents.
The newspaper said recruiters and labor agencies working in Liangshan often selected and transported children south, where they were then “sold” to factories at virtual auctions in Guangdong Province.
At some coastal factories, children were even lined up and selected based on their body type, wrote the journalists, who also investigated factory areas in Guangdong.
The newspaper also said that children were paid about 42 cents an hour, far below the local minimum wage of about 64 cents an hour. By law, overtime pay is much higher.
Chen Fulin, a government spokesman in Liangshan Prefecture, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that the articles about child labor in Southern Metropolis were accurate.
“So far, we have detected and found four people in Zhaojue County suspected of luring the youngsters from Liangshan to Dongguan and forcing them to work in factories,” he said. “We are dealing with the illegal employment agencies and the labor dealers, according to the law.”
Officials in the city of Dongguan say they are now investigating all factories in the area to determine whether any are employing children.
In its report, Southern Metropolis said some children were threatened with death if they tried to escape.
The newspaper did not identify the coastal factories where the children worked, but the report said that one was a toy factory in Dongguan and that it had not been difficult for the journalists to uncover the labor scandal.
“Since journalists could discover the facts by secret interviews in a few days,” Southern Metropolis wrote in a separate editorial on Tuesday, “how could the labor departments show no interest in it and ignore it for such a long time?”
Chen Yang contributed research.