An area in southern China renowned as a major export hub is at the center of a child labor scandal after more than 1,000 children were found toiling away in factories.
The children, aged from nine to 16, worked long hours in factories for about US$0.35 an hour, the state-run China Daily and other media said yesterday, in echoes of a brick kiln slavery ring that made world headlines last year.
The news came as workers in communist-ruled China prepared to celebrate May 1, Labor Day, as a national holiday.
But the latest incident showed that labor abuse remained a major problem in China, where many poor people remain vulnerable to exploitation despite the country’s phenomenal economic growth, a workers’ rights group said.
“They [labor scandals] get exposed from time to time. If they become a big story, then the government usually promises to crack down and investigate,” said Geoffrey Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labor Bulletin.
“But the underlying problems that give rise to these incidents just continue. The situation never seems to improve noticeably in terms of poverty relief and in terms of keeping kids in school,” he said.
Police have so far rescued 167 children in Dongguan, one of the cities at the center of the latest scandal, the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po newspaper said.
The China Daily carried a photo of a young girl crying after emerging from her place of work in Dongguan, which has sought for many years to attract foreign investment and is an export hub.
The children were also found working in factories in nearby Shenzhen and Huizhou, which are also key to Chinese exports, the China Daily said.
Authorities have set up a task force to rescue all the other children, local authorities in Dongguan were quoted as saying.
“Our labor enforcement and trade union will investigate all companies in the town, the labor market and agencies,” the China Daily quoted Wang Yongquan, a spokesman for Shipai town in Dongguan, as saying.
An underground organization had lured the children from Liangshan, a poor farming area in Sichuan province thousands of kilometers away, the China Daily said.
The factories paid the children between 2.5 yuan and 3.8 yuan (US$0.35 and US$0.55) an hour.
The Southern Metropolis Newspaper, the first to report the scandal, quoted a factory foreman as saying that all the children were passed off as 18 to pass the labor department’s inspections.
“We have absolute management control over them — we can adopt any measure,” another foreman named Pan Ajie told the newspaper’s reporter before the crackdown began.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver
RSS