Response to the Letter

Letter to Mr. Jacques Rogge, President, International Olympic Committee (IOC)

Published: Thursday, 21 June, 2007, 01:45 AM Doha Time

BEIJING: China announced a nationwide crackdown on enslavement and child labour yesterday, in the highest admission yet of grim exploitation in rural brick kilns where official complicity has been charged.

Revelations of hundreds of poor farmers, teenagers and some children forced or lured to kilns, mines and foundries in Shanxi and Henan provinces have unfolded over past weeks, outraging citizens and local media. But until now, national leaders have avoided public comment.

Premier Wen Jiabao chaired a meeting of the State Council Standing Committee, or cabinet, which heard of a gruesome chain of abuses, state television news reported.
“In the Shanxi black kilns there were not only grave illegal employment problems, but also criminal forces abducting, restricting personal freedom, using coerced labour, employing children and maliciously wounding to the point of death,” said a summary of the meeting read out on television news.

“Strike hard against law-breaking and crime and criminal forces, rescue all the victims,” ordered the meeting. It announced a national inspection focusing on child labour and enslavement in small rural kilns, mines and workshops.

The scandal has been a slap in the face for Wen and President Hu Jintao’s vows to create a “harmonious society” that respects and enriches poor farmers.

Local officials and police have been accused of ignoring or even helping the trade in trapped workers, many taken from around railway or bus stations. One detained kiln owner, Wang Bingbing, was the son of the village party secretary.

A father who tried to find and rescue his missing son and other victims said he was brushed off by police.

“If you find your own kid, just take him away. Otherwise, keep your nose out of this,” an officer told him, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The governor of Shanxi, Yu Youjun, made a self-criticism at the meeting on behalf of his administration. By Tuesday, police there and in Henan had detained over 130 people suspected of involvement in the hidden human trade and freed over 500 workers.

The cabinet meeting vowed to “strictly investigate and punish involved officials for any corruption and dereliction of duty” and urged all officials to “absorb lessons” from the scandal. - Reuters

http://www.gulf-times.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=
156365&version=1&template_id=45&parent_id=25

17 June 2007

Regional party bosses and police under fire as hundreds of slaves – including children – are released from Shanxi and Henan ’hell holes’

Vincent Kolo, Beijing

We are used to hearing about slave labour in China’s sweatshop industries. But the major story in China in recent days is about actual slavery in dozens of small brick works and mines in the provinces of Shanxi and Henan. More than 1,000 people, many children, have been forced into slavery as a result of a brutal human trafficking ring that has shocked the whole country.

As of Sunday 17 June, 568 people including children and the mentally handicapped had been freed from slavery in brick kilns and illegal mines, according to the New China (Xinhua) news agency. Police had made 250 arrests in raids on thousands of illegal sites in the two province and said the number of children forced to work in this way could rise to more than 1,000.

Shocking TV footage

News reports described the freed workers, including one child of just eight years, as having been beaten, nearly starved and forced to work long hours, allegedly with the involvement of police and local officials. A Henan TV broadcast showed released workers, many too feeble or ill to walk. Most had been severely beaten and none had been paid.

”They had all been hit by bricks and sticks. Seven of them were badly injured, with broken legs and such,” the TV commentator said.

Other harrowing TV images showed rescued child slaves, some who still wearing the school uniforms they had on when they were kidnapped. Many of the children had festering wounds, apparently from burns. The children described how they were guarded by dogs and some of their number had been beaten to death by their guards.

As the scandal grew, China’s president Hu Jintao and premier, Wen Jiabao, intervened to call for urgent efforts to trace hundreds more boys and young men still missing.

Parent activism and police passivity

The story broke as a result of desperate and courageous parents, who came together to try to track down and free their children, when police and other authorities refused to act. A group of 400 parents posted a letter on the internet pleading for official attention to their plight. This led to the story being picked up by news agencies. In one case, parents accompanied by TV crews entered a brick kiln and succeeded in freeing their children, while police refused to intervene.

Even in a country like China where confidence in the police force is low – police brutality is a common cause of social unrest – police misconduct in this case has aroused massive indignation. Parents of missing children have reported that police refused to intervene even when given the whereabouts of child slaves. One mother told how, outside the very factory where her child was incarcerated, police demanded a bribe before proceeding. Reports have surfaced this week of official labour inspectors taking children from freshly closed brick works and selling them to other factories.

The media storm, however, led to a massive police operation, involving a reported 35,000 police officers carrying out raids in the two provinces.

Local officials and Communist Party members are of course implicated in the scandal. Commentators say the slave trade in the provinces has possibly been going on for years – an impossibility without a degree of official complicity.

Xinhua reported that the local Communist Party chief in one Shanxi town at the centre of the scandal was under investigation along with county-level officials and police suspected of collusion with kiln and mine owners. The party chief’s son owned the brick kiln where 32 slaves were freed last week.
”How could officials in the area have connived with such audacious and appalling behaviour to allow this situation to arise under the very eyes?” the party mouthpiece, People's Daily, asked.

One answer was provided, ironically, by the US-based Bloomberg news agency: ”The pursuit of profit in the world’s fastest-growing major economy has given rise to dangerous, and sometimes inhumane, working conditions in the less-developed hinterlands.”

According to Liu Cheng, a professor of labour law at Shanghai Normal University, the scandal ”seems like a typical example of a government-business alliance... Forced labour and child labour in China are illegal, but some local governments don’t care too much.”

http://chinaworker.info/en/content/news/209/

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15th June 2007

Severe penalties promised for any child-labor abuse

BEIJING -- The Olympic image could be damaged by allegations that children as young as 12 are being employed to make officially licensed products for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

That's the message Wednesday from Chen Feng, deputy director of marketing for the 2008 Beijing Olympics, who has summoned four manufacturers to Beijing to answer charges of labor-law violations in the making of Olympic goods.

A report released Sunday entitled "No Medal for the Olympics on Labor Rights" alleges four factories in southern China broke national labor laws on child labor, overtime pay and minimum wages to make souvenirs for the 2008 Olympics.

The four manufacturers acknowledge they have Olympic contracts, but deny charges in the report by Brussels-based PlayFair 2008. The report also says the Beijing organizers -- and the Lausanne-based International Olympic Committee -- are doing too little to guarantee ethical work conditions in the making of official products that carry the five-ring Olympic logo.

Chen said he planned to meet Wednesday with representatives of the four companies. Li Zhanjun, director of the Beijing Olympic media center, said it would be several days before any findings might be released.
"We don't want them (makers of Olympic products) to damage the Olympic image," Chen said. "We want them to realize that their performance in terms of corporate responsibility, environmental protection and quality control has a lot to do with the image of the Olympics, and the reputation of the Olympic Games."
Chen said there was a "huge gap between the report and what the businesses told us. They have told us they did not employ child labor at all."

Chen, repeating threats made earlier by Jiang Xiaoyu, executive vice president of the Beijing Olympic organizing committee, said contracts would be terminated if violations were found.

"We will continue our investigation until we find the truth," Chen said. "If we find any problems, we will severely punish those violators."

Chen also promised a crackdown on the sale of counterfeit Olympic merchandise, like fake DVDs and knockoffs of designer goods, being sold on many street corners in Beijing.

"We really have taken notice of the problem," Chen said. "Some cases constitute criminal offenses, and we will take legal action to tackle them.

"Those (counterfeit Olympic) products are all provided by unauthorized businesses because we have strict controls on the authorized businesses. If the authorized businesses sell to an unauthorized buyer, that would be a serious violation of the contract and we would severely penalize them."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/olympics/319760_oly14.html

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11th June 2007