China orders probe into child slavery claims

Beijing: China is investigating whether hundreds of children, most aged between 9 and 16, were sold to factories in the southern province of Guangdong over the past five years to work as virtual slave labourers, state media said.

The probe was launched following the publication on Monday of an investigative report by Southern Metropolis, a state-run daily newspaper in Guangdong. The report said the children were "sold like cabbages" by their parents to gangs who then sold them off to employment agencies or directly to factories hundreds of kilometres from their homes.

Most of the children were from Liangshan, a poor farming town in southwestern Sichuan province, and ended up working in factories in Guangdong's Dongguan city as well as Shenzhen and Huizhou, the report said.

Several arrests

The official China Daily newspaper quoted Dongguan spokesman Wang Yongquan as saying that the city's "labour enforcement and trade union will investigate all companies in the town, the labour market and agencies". He told the newspaper on Wednesday that police had already rescued more than 100 youngsters from rented houses and arrested several people.

The official Xinhua News Agency said yesterday the Dongguan government had investigated more than 3,000 companies involving 450,000 individuals in the city, but found that only a handful of small companies and workshops had hired temporary workers who might have been children.

Stiff fines

"The government has a very clear-cut attitude towards the illegal use of child labourers, and we will resolutely crack down on it. When we find one child labourer, that business will be investigated," Li Xiaomei, deputy mayor of Donguan City, was quoted as saying. Erring companies would also be fined 50,000 yuan (Dh26,323), he said.

The Southern Metropolis said the children from Liangshan earned as little as 2.5 yuan per hour and were forced to work long hours.