Police rescue 217 'slaves' in China
BEIJING (AFP) - Police said Thursday they had rescued more than 200 people, including 29 children, who were working as "slaves" in brick kilns, in a shocking revelation of labour practices in booming China.
"We have rescued 217 people, including 29 children, from brick kilns in Henan (province)," a police officer at the criminal investigation department of the Henan public security bureau told AFP by phone.
"During inspections of the kilns we arrested 120 criminal suspects."
The police officer refused to comment further, nor would he confirm widespread stories in the state press that human traffickers had been selling labourers to brick kilns in Henan and neighboring Shanxi province for months.
"The labourers were enticed or sent by human traffickers to the kilns, but upon arrival were beaten, starved and forced to work long hours without payment," the official Xinhua news agency said.
Press reports said that some of the children forced into slavery were as young as eight years old, while photos of those who were rescued or escaped showed groups of young children badly scarred from beatings and underfed.
Children claimed to have witnessed workers being beaten to death for refusing to work or working too slowly, the reports said.
According to the Southern Weekly, Henan police mounted an inspection campaign involving more than 35,000 police on June 9, inspecting 7,500 kilns in Henan in the ensuing three days.
The checks only came after widespread reports in the press about distraught parents trying to find their children in both Henan and Shanxi, the paper said.
"I ran to over 100 brick kilns, and every one of them were forcing children to work," the paper quoted Yang Aizhi, the mother of a 16-year old boy that had gone missing in March.
After failing to find her son, Yang returned to her home in Henan's provincial capital of Zhengzhou, where in April she soon came into contact with other families searching for missing children.
Children had disappeared at train stations, walking home from school or out shopping, sometimes they were told they could make money and were tricked into going along with kidnappers, other times they were drugged, the report said.
According to the Beijing News, a Henan journalist who travelled to brick kilns in Shanxi with the parents of missing children three times, estimated that more than 1,000 children were working there.
The report said that local police protected the kilns and only allowed the parents to take away their own children, resulting in the release of about 40 kids during the three trips.
The paper cited the rescue of one boy named Zhu, who was later taken away by a labour inspection department in Shanxi, only to be sold to another kiln, the paper said.
Police in Shanxi were not immediately available for comment.
"I was at the Zhengzhou train station in early March, when a group of traffickers drugged me and sold me into slavery," the Southern Weekly quoted 17-year old Zhang Wenlong as saying.
Zhang said he worked from five in the morning to midnight, eating only pickled vegetables and turnips three times a day and being deprived of meat for three months.
"All we could do was watch the guards enjoying dog meat and beer," the paper said cited him as saying.
"There was no way to escape, they had six dogs watching over us at night."
