BEIJING — He was a cooking 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 those
were rescued last week in raids on 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.
China's leaders, worried about its reputation as the sweatshop of
the world, are trying to clean up its image, especially in the run-up
to the 2008 Olympics.
Embarrassing stories, however, continue to dog them.
Just last week China was accused of employing children as young as
12 to produce Olympic-related souvenirs. Authorities denied the report
by the Brussels, Belgium-based PlayFair, saying instead that six
middle-school and two primary-school students had been hired during
school holidays to "pack notebooks, not Olympic-licensed products,"
according to the New China News Agency.
The latest scandal — slavery at brick factories — might not have
come to light had a group of 400 fathers with missing sons not sent out
a collective cry for help on the Internet. They accused local
authorities of turning a blind eye to the abuses and suggested that as
many as 1,000 children had been kidnapped from Henan province and
shipped to nearby Shanxi province by human traffickers who abducted
their children near train and bus stations or lured them away with
prospects of high-paying jobs.
As a result, more than 35,000 police from Henan province and 14,000
from Shanxi province fanned out to about 10,000 kilns, detaining at
least 140 suspects, the official Xinhua news agency said Friday. More
raids and arrests were expected.
Before the crackdown, some of the fathers had been conducting their own rescue missions.
"We saved more than 100 boys during 15 different occasions," said
Chai Wei, whose 17-year old son disappeared in April on the streets
near their home. Chai and two other fathers with missing children
traveled together to hundreds of small kilns in search of their
children.
Some fathers went undercover to learn more about the kilns and couldn't believe what they saw.
"They start work at five in the morning and sometimes don't finish
until past midnight," said Chai. "They get no pay and are fed only
bread and water. If they try to run away, they would break their legs.
Some were buried alive. We saw police pull out two bodies. One was an
18-year-old. The other was 19."
Fathers said that most of the time when they showed up, the young
workers had been sent into hiding. If not, they said, there was usually
a confrontation and sometimes thugs hired by the owners would beat the
parents and chase them away.
"They had completely lost their freedom," said Zhang Shanlin, the
father of the rescued 20-year-old. "I saw six vicious guard dogs and
seven hit men. Anyone who didn't work hard enough was beaten. There was
no chance of running away." His son had refused to work and was burned
all over his back with hot bricks.
"Another young man tried to run away, they burnt him on the face,
leaving only the mouth," Chai said, "so he could still eat and continue
to work."
The injured were given no medical treatment and left in cramped and
dirty living quarters where men had not washed for so long that sores
caked their bodies, and their hair had grown down to their waists, Chai
said.
Zhang said his son was finally sent to the hospital after a raid
that followed local residents' reporting the brutal working conditions
to police. When freed, some of the laborers seemed so dazed and
frightened they could barely talk.
"My son told me that if he hadn't been rescued, he would not be alive today," said Zhang.
One of the reasons the inhumane treatment has gone on for as long as
it has, parents say, is that the owner is the son of a local Communist
Party official and the police were reluctant to touch him.
"Of course he knew what's going on at the brick factory," Zhang
said. "He visited there several times a week and he provided the coal
and electricity that ran the place."
Despite the crackdown, hundreds more parents, including Chai, have yet to reunite with their children.
"I don't know if we will ever find him," Chai said. "It cuts like a
knife. Each day we don't find him is another day for him of living in
danger."
