Chinese schools losing kids recruited for child labor

LIANGSHAN, CHINA

The mud-and-brick schoolhouses in the lush mountain villages of this remote part of southwestern China are dark and bare-bones in the best of times. These days, they also lack students.

Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labor rings, equipped with fake identification cards, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world's toys, clothes and electronics.

"Last year I had 30 students. This year there are only 14. All the others went outside to find work," said Ji Ke Xiaoming, 35, a teacher whose students in Erwu Village are mostly ages 12 to 14. "You know, we are very poor. Some families can't even afford a bag of salt."

China is now investigating whether hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor children of the Yi ethnic minority group in Liangshan were lured or even kidnapped to work in factories that are increasingly desperate for the cheap labor that powered China to prosperity over the past two decades.

Labor recruiters -- government investigators and some local residents portray them as con men -- have connected two radically different parts of China's turbulent society. They have brought together ethnic minorities untouched by economic development in their mountainous isolation, and factory owners in the prime export manufacturing zones of southern Guangdong Province, near Hong Kong.

Exporters have struggled to adjust to soaring inflation, a fast-rising currency and, with some irony, stricter enforcement of labor laws that make it harder to hire regular workers on a seasonal basis. Child workers from a remote region, many of whom cannot even speak Mandarin, the country's main national dialect, have provided a temporary, albeit illegal, solution.

A scandal involving Liangshan's children first came to light last month, when Southern Metropolis, a state-run newspaper, reported that as many as 1,000 school-age workers from the area were employed in manufacturing zones near Hong Kong.

The report was deeply embarrassing for Beijing, which is preparing to serve as host for the Olympics and coping with international criticism of its handling of riots in Tibet. Recently authorities in Liangshan said they had detained several people for recruiting children and illegally ferrying them off to factories.

And officials in Dongguan, one of the manufacturing zones where the children worked, said that they had rescued more than 160 young people from factories. The legal minimum working age in China is 16.

Now, officials have begun to play down the scandal, saying there is little evidence of widespread violations of child labor laws. A two-day government sweep involving more than 3,000 factories around Dongguan, which was conducted after the initial raids, turned up only six to 10 children, officials said.

But residents of Liangshan say abject poverty and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents' permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters, and then call home from a factory dormitory hundreds of miles away.

Liangshan, formally known as the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture, may have become a target of child labor rings precisely because it is a place of desperation. The villages, populated almost exclusively by Yi, are reached by traveling for hours along winding roads through the thickly forested part of Sichuan Province. Most people survive on subsistence rice farming. Others fall prey to the drug trade. One of the main heroin trafficking routes passes through these parts on the way from northern Myanmar to Chengdu, the largest city in the region.

The area is plagued by drug abuse and AIDS. Many people have no formal education and cannot converse in Mandarin, making it difficult to seek employment in cities on their own.

Luo Gu A He, 69, said his 14-year-old granddaughter left Keqie Village for Beijing in March, after the death of her father, who had been addicted to drugs. She now earns about $4 a day working seven days a week at a construction site, he said.

"She is too young. I worry about her being alone in Beijing," the grandfather said. "But if she stays with me she couldn't live, either; she'd starve to death."

A woman spoke of a daughter who left home at 15 to work in a brick factory in Shandong Province but returned recently. "My daughter was taken by a foreman," said the woman, Pa Cha Ri Gu, 62. "I was concerned, but we are poor. You see the small house we live in."

Residents say they have heard of children being kidnapped and forced to work in factories. Other villagers say that desperate parents, some addicted to drugs, have resorted to selling their children to traffickers.

Over the past few years, coastal factories have been caught in a squeeze between foreign buyers, who are addicted to lower prices for manufactured goods from China, and surging food and energy costs. Profit margins, never very fat, have shrunk, and Beijing has passed new labor laws that restrict the use of temporary workers.

Employment agents have come to the rescue, providing the factories with pliable children who carry falsified documents attesting that they have reached the legal working age.