BEIJING - A CITY in southern China renowned as a major export hub is at the centre of a child labour scandal after more than 1,000 children were found toiling in its factories, state media reported. The children, aged between nine and 16, had been sold to the factories in Dongguan city and forced to work long hours for about 4 yuan (80 Singapore cents) an hour, the China Daily said.
Just last year, China was rocked by the exposure of a massive slavery and child labour scandal in which hundreds of farmers, teenagers and children were forced to work in scorching brick kilns, enduring beatings and prison-like confinement.
Similarly, the child labour scandal in Dongguan has triggered outrage across the country and highlighted endemic abuse behind the country's economic boom.
Police have so far rescued 167 children from houses and factories in Dongguan, an industrial city in southern Guangdong province.
Many Hong Kong and Taiwan businesses invest in Dongguan, but in recent years, it has been losing investors to inland provinces, where labour and overhead costs are lower.
The town of Shipai in Dongguan has been identified as a major centre for cheap labour.
From Dongguan, these workers will be sent to factories across the Pearl River Delta region.
The authorities in the city have set up a task force to rescue the children and prosecute those behind the illegal labour ring.
'Our labour enforcement and trade unions will investigate all companies in the town, the labour market and agencies,' Mr Wang Yongquan, a spokesman for Shipai town in Dongguan, was quoted as saying.
Mr He Zhujian, chief of the labour enforcement team in Dongguan, said: 'Most of the employers are medium to small companies. Most small firms are not registered with the labour department and try to cut operational costs.'
The China Daily said several people had been arrested, but did not give details.
The children, all from the ethnic Yi minority, were from poor families in the Liangshan region of the south- western province of Sichuan more than 1,000km away.
An underground organisation had lured the children from Liangshan, where most of the families in the area had more than a child each.
China's minority groups are exempted from the official one-child policy.
The middlemen in the child labour ring were reportedly paid 200 to 300 yuan for each child they supplied to the factories.
The ringleaders, according to the China Daily, could earn about 100,000 yuan each within three months.
According to the Southern Metropolis Daily, the underage workers were housed in rented rooms or motels.
A girl whose age was unknown told the Chinese-language newspaper that she had been raped twice.
The China Daily quoted an academic as saying that poverty in Sichuan had forced farmers to send their children off to work.
'In Liangshan, where farming alone cannot support a family...many parents are happy their children are earning several hundred yuan a month,' Professor Hou Yuanguo of the Central University of Nationalities was quoted as saying.
REUTERS, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
