Slaves Spoil Idea of a "Harmonious Society"

Treated as slaves, well over a thousand children and adults were deprived of their basic human rights and forced to work in brickyards and coal-mines in Shanxi province. Often, they were forced to work for nineteen hours a day, sometimes for three months at a stretch.

The money they had been promised as wages -- eighty euros a month -- never materialised. If they complained or tried to escape, they were beaten. Sometimes to death, as Zhao Yanbing, the arrested owner of one such brickyard, admitted on state television:

"There was an old man -- 57 or 58 years old -- who couldn't do much anymore," he explained. "I wanted to scare him a bit and I picked up a shovel. It hit the old man on the head and he fell. He died the next day. I buried him away from the complex with the help of my colleagues."

Guarded by day and by night

At night, the slaves were reportedly piled into long, narrow rooms where they slept on the floor. The complexes in which they worked were surrounded by high impenetrable walls, and the entrances were guarded by watchmen and dogs.

The authorities made a series of raids and arrests over the weekend, freeing almost six hundred slaves. Many were children kidnapped from neighbouring provinces. The youngest was eight years old.

The men were mostly from the province of Henan, which has a population of one hundred million that depends mainly on agriculture. Uneducated workers often go to the cities to search for work and fall victim to human trafficking networks. Promised good wages, they go unassumingly to the mines and brickyards by bus, where they effectively become slaves.

Big business

The slave traffickers gets forty to fifty euros a head. Whereas the bosses can earn a thousand times more by using slave labour. The authorities have been criticised for their complicity in the human trafficking trade.

"What angers me," says Cai Chongguo, an independent trade unionist," is that the local governments, the police and the employment centres work with the brick-yard owners, these cruel capitalists. One employment office sent a rescued child-worker to another such factory and the official got the a month of the child's wages as a reward."

In an effort to stave off criticism, state television has been running reports on the rescued children and men to demonstrate the efficiency of the authorities. Many parents have thus been able to identify their children.

Corrupt moral social order?

But now the question being asked is why the authorities didn't act earlier. The local press has reported that local functionaries were aware of everything. One of the arrested brickyard owners was the son of a local official.

"These cases show that in China people are not treated as people," explains Cai Chongguo. "These cold-blooded people only think about money. They don't care about the life or death of a slave-worker. What about the morality, and civilian courage, in Chinese society? This moral crisis has arisen from our political and economic societal order."

Alarm bells are beginning to sound in Beijing. Over 35,000 police officers have been deployed to inspect thousands of brick-works and mines, according to the Xinhua news agency. The Communist Party is beginning to fear that its idea of a "harmonious society" might be damaged by the existence of slave-workers in modern China.