Workers rescued in May from a brick kiln in Linfen, in Shanxi Province, in northern China, in what has become an unfolding labor abuse scandal.
\nSHANGHAI, June 15 \u2014 Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year when they disappeared.
\nCheated out of their money when they sought to buy a ticket for the final leg of the journey home, their father, Su Jianjun, said in an interview, they were taken in by a woman who provided them with warm shelter and a meal on a cold winter night. She also offered them a chance to earn enough money to pay their fare by helping her sell fruit.
\nThe next thing they knew, however, they were being loaded onto a minibus with several other children and taken to a factory in the next province, where they were pressed into service making bricks. Several days later, the boy, 16, escaped along with another boy and managed to reach home. A few days later, Mr. Su was able to rescue his daughter, 18.
\nThis story and many others like it have swept China in recent days in an unfolding labor scandal in central China that involves the kidnapping of hundreds of children, most in their teens but some as young as 8.
\nThe children, and many adults, reportedly, have been forced to work under brutal conditions \u2014 scantily clothed, unpaid and often fed little more than water and steamed buns \u2014 in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province.
\nAs the stories spread across China this week, played prominently in newspaper headlines and on the Internet, a manhunt was announced midweek for Heng Tinghan, the foreman of one of the kilns, where 31 enslaved workers were recently rescued.
\nMr. Su said his children were brought to the factory around midnight of the day they vanished. Once there, they were told they would have to make bricks. \u201cYou will start working in the morning, so get some sleep, and don\u2019t lose your bowls, or you will have to pay for them,\u201d he said the children were told. \u201cThey also charged them 50 renminbi for a blanket.\u201d That is equivalent to about $6.50.
\nMr. Su managed to recover his children after only a matter of days at the kiln, but many other parents have been less fortunate, losing contact with children for months or years. As stories of forced labor at the brick kilns have spread, hundreds of parents have petitioned local authorities to help them find their children and crack down on the kilns.
\nIn some cases, according to Chinese news media reports, parents have also come together to try to rescue their children, placing little stock in the local authorities, who are sometimes in collusion with the operators of the kilns. Other reports have said that local authorities, including labor inspectors, have taken children from freshly closed kilns and resold them to other factories.
\nThe director of the legal department of the Shanxi Province Worker\u2019s Union said it was hard to monitor the kilns because of their location in isolated areas.
\n\u201cThose factories are located in very remote places and most them are illegal entities, without any legal registration, so it is very hard for people outside to know what is going on there,\u201d said the union official, Zhang Xiaosuo. \u201cWe are now doing a province-wide investigation into them, both the legal and illegal ones, to look into labor issues there.\u201d
\nLiu Cheng, a professor of labor law at Shanghai Normal University, had a different explanation. \u201cMy first reaction is that this seems like a typical example of a government-business alliance,\u201d Mr. Liu said. \u201cForced labor and child labor in China are illegal, but some local governments don\u2019t care too much.\u201d
\nZhang Xiaoying, 37, whose 15-year-old son disappeared in January, said she had visited over 100 brick factories during a handful of visits to Shanxi Province in search of him.
\n\u201cYou just could not believe what you saw,\u201d Ms. Zhang said in a telephone interview on Thursday. \u201cSome of the kids working at these places were at most 14 or 15 years old.\u201d
\nThe local police, she said, were unwilling to help. Outside one factory, she said, they even demanded bribes.
\n\u201cWe finally got into that place, and I saw people hauling carts of bricks with great difficulty,\u201d Ms. Zhang said. \u201cSome of them were very small, and the ropes they pulled left tracks of blood on their shoulders and backs. Others were making bricks, standing by the machines.
\n\u201cThey had to move the bricks from the belt very quickly, because they were hot and heavy and they could easily get burned or hurt by the machines.\u201d
\nBy Friday, with the help of Mr. Su, Ms. Zhang finally located her son at a kiln near the one to which Mr. Su\u2019s children had been taken.
\nAnother father, Cai Tianliang, said he had set out to Shanxi Province in May from his native Henan Province in search of his missing 19-year-old son after a local television broadcast had shown a team of television reporters and Henan parents searching the Shanxi kilns for kidnapped children.
\n\u201cI thought there was a great possibility that my son was also kidnapped, so I went there twice,\u201d Mr. Cai said. \u201cThe usual thing is for an owner to have more than one factory, and to shift people without identification from one place to another.\u201d
\nOn his first trip, which he took with a group of parents, Mr. Cai said he found few clues. On a second visit to the area, he said, he was refused police permits to enter any of the brick factories but persisted anyway.
\n\u201cWe located a place called the Zhenjie Brick Factory in a town called Chengbei, and at first they would not allow us in,\u201d he said, \u201cbut we kept negotiating. Finally, they let a few of us in, and they found my son inside.\u201d
\nLike many other parents, Mr. Cai said he was dumbfounded by the boy\u2019s condition when they were reunited.
\n\u201cMy son was totally dumb, not even knowing how to cry, or to scream or to call out \u2018Father,\u2019 \u201d he said. \u201cI burst into tears and held him in my arms, but he had no reaction. He was in rags and had wounds all over his body. Within three months he had lost over 10 kilos,\u201d about 22 pounds.
\nMr. Cai said he tried to rescue a 16-year-old boy he found there, but was refused by the factory boss. \u201cHe said I could only take my own,\u201d Mr. Cai said, \u201cand must leave other people behind at the kiln.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Workers rescued in May from a brick kiln in Linfen, in Shanxi Province, in northern China, in what has become an unfolding labor abuse scandal. SHANGHAI, June 15 \u2014 Su Jinduo and Su Jinpeng, brother and sister, were traveling home by bus from a vacation visit to Qingdao during the Chinese New Year when they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1881","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-no-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1881"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1881\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1881"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.hi-alex.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}