Ideals and reality conflict on Chinese child labour

Reports of slavery at a brick factory in Shanxi Province reveal a wider problem of child abuse in China, one the government often ignores.

By Howard W. French

SHANGHAI: When stories of hundreds of people being forced to work under slavelike conditions in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province burst forth in the Chinese news media last week, many readers were horrified by a picture of their country that they hardly recognized.

Most shocking of all was the fact that a great many of the workers were children, in a country where employment in factories under the age of 16 is illegal. According to the reports they made, many of the children had been kidnapped, held against their will and forced to work unusually long hours under brutal conditions.

After the torrid initial burst of news reports, the government, through the Central Office of External Communication of the Communist Party, instructed the news media to stop reporting "harmful information that uses this event to attack the party and the government," China Digital Times reported.

The arrest Saturday of Heng Tinghan, the manager of a factory where one enslaved worker had died and 31 others had been rescued - and the closest thing in this story to an official villain - seemed to assure an early end to coverage.

However reprehensible, in some ways, the words attributed to Heng by a newspaper in Hubei Province, where he was caught, are the most revealing comments yet about this scandal of worker abuse and the exploitation of minors.

"I felt it was a fairly small thing, just hitting and swearing at the workers and not giving them wages," Heng said, according to The Shiyan Evening News. "The dead man had nothing to do with me."

Under President Hu Jintao, the Communist Party has made the creation of what it calls a harmonious society one of the government's main tenets, and as part of that effort, in fact, a major revision of laws governing the rights of children took effect just this month. The reality on the ground here, however, is often far closer to Heng's world than it is to the government's vision of things, with working conditions in many areas approaching what might be called brutal capitalism.

From the densely packed factory zones of Guangdong Province to the street markets, kitchens and brothels of major cities, to the primitive factories of China's relatively poor western provinces, child labor is a daily fact of life and one to which the government typically turns a blind eye.

"In order to achieve modernization, people will go to any ends to earn money, to advance their interests, leaving behind morality, humanity and even a little bit of compassion, let alone the law or regulations, which are poorly implemented," said Hu Jindou, a professor of economics at Beijing University of Technology. "Everything is about the economy now, just like everything was about politics in the Mao era, and forced labor or child labor is far from an isolated phenomenon. It is rooted deeply in today's reality, a combination of capitalism, socialism, feudalism and slavery."

Indeed, even if conditions at Heng's brick kiln were considered unusually harsh, experts said that the withholding of pay or otherwise cheating minors, and holding them and forcing them to work against their will, were commonplace.

In the same week that the Shanxi Province kiln factory horrors were revealed, child labor abuse of an entirely different sort emerged, illustrating how widespread such practices are and how government attitudes make them all but impossible to suppress.

This story began with reports in a Guangdong newspaper, where junior high school students from faraway Sichuan Province complained that they were being abused through a work-study program that supplied young workers from western China to an electronics assembly plant in the southeastern industrial boomtown of Dongguan, where labor shortages are common, as a form of compensation for their school fees.

Students complained that they worked 14-hour days, including mandatory overtime, and that their money was withheld from them. In some instances, those who wished to quit the program had no way of telephoning their families or paying for transportation home.

Zhang Ronghua, the mother of one of the Sichuan students, described her 15-year-old daughter's situation in an interview by telephone. "My daughter promised to call every week, but she's been gone for three weeks and has only called once," Zhang said. "She said that she wants to come home, that she's worked from 8 a.m. to 11 p.m. and that she's constantly busy and tired."

A moment later, the mother added, "If it wasn't because we couldn't afford her tuition, I would never have allowed her to go."

Yuan Guangyao, the deputy manager of the factory, defended his company. "This internship is a form of cooperation between our company and the school, or rather with the county," he said. "I've been to that county myself and I found the local people were very poor, so this initiative of having students work here is a win-win strategy for both of us."

Labor officials from Yilong County in Sichuan Province, where the students came from, said they had no say over working conditions agreed to between their school and the Dongguan factory.

Officials at the provincial labor bureau in Guangdong Province, which has oversight over Dongguan, said pretty much the same thing, offering that labor arrangements made by a school should be regulated by the Education Ministry. The Education Ministry, meanwhile, did not answer telephone and faxed queries on the matter.

"Each department or ministry only cares about itself," said Jin Yingjie, a labor law expert at the China University of Political Science and Law. "If the law concerns its own interest, it will make an effort to apply it. But when an issue involves the intersection of more than one department, they tend to shirk responsibility."

Liu Kaiming, a longtime researcher into labor conditions in Guangdong, called the employment of students who were paid low wages and forced to work overtime a common phenomenon.

"In Dongguan, you can even see children of 12 and 15 working in toy factories," he said. "These kids are basically from adjacent, underdeveloped provinces and they are brought by their teachers. There are laws forbidding child labor, but for work-study programs, there are no specific rules, and no limitations on age, working hours or job description."