RUZHOU - Up from the countryside and desperate for work, 16-year-old
Chen Chenggong jumped at the well-paying factory job offered by the unknown man
who approached him at the train station.
Workers stand at a police station after they were rescued
from a brickworks in Hongdong County in Linfen, north China's Shanxi
province, May 27, 2007. [Shanxi Evening News]
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Within hours, he was bundled into
a minivan with 12 others and dumped at a brick yard where they were fed little,
beaten often and forced to haul loads for 20 hours daily without pay. As for the
recruiter, he never saw the man again.
"I hope they are shot," Chen said of his former tormentors on Wednesday, his
face, arms, legs and torso mottled with sores where the guards' blows became
infected. Finally freed in a raid by provincial police, he returned home
Saturday, but fear of his former tormentors remained palpable.
While Chen's story was impossible to immediately confirm, it jibes with many
other tales told by former slaves over recent weeks. Apparently prompted by
online protests and media reports, tens of thousands of officers have raided
more than 8,000 kilns and small coal mines in Shanxi and Henan provinces,
freeing nearly 600 workers, including 51 children, and detaining about 160
suspects.
China's central authorities have ordered thorough investigations.
Local governments, who benefited from bribes, taxes paid, and ownership
shares, are widely believed to have protected the operations, although
authorities have leveled direct accusations at only one village-level Communist
Party secretary so far.
Chen's tale points to government neglect from start to finish. Having failed
to qualify for upper high school, he was easy pickings for recruiters at the
sprawling, chaotic, train station in Zhengzhou, provincial capital of his native
Henan. Streets surrounding the station are plastered with job offerings and
unlicensed job agencies, some of them believed linked to human traffickers who
sell workers onto brick yards.
In response to allegations of such ties, at least one other major city in the
area, Xi'an, said Wednesday it was banning all job agencies from around its
railway station.
Following his March abduction, Chen said he often saw local uniformed police
officers visit the brickyard in Shanxi's Hongtong region.
"They were paid off by the owner. The whole village was his," Chen said,
surrounded by a small crowd of neighbors and relatives, who weighed in from
time-to-time with comments and expressions of sympathy.
The 34 workers in his group included at least one foreigner, Chen said, a
20-year-old Iranian who had drifted across the border into China. He said
children who looked as young as five made roofing tiles in a neighboring yard.
Food consisted of normal farmer's fare, he said, though there was never
enough. "Sometimes we'd steal someone else's," he said. All workers slept on the
bricks they hauled, with no showers, medical care or even haircuts.
Eight guards beat the slaves when they worked too slowly, while six guard
dogs helped keep them in fear and prevent escapes, Chen said. Beatings were
sometimes carried out with iron bars and wooden staves, although often guards
would simply pick up a brick and smash it across a worker's head or body, he
said. Workers who tried to escape were shackled, though still forced to work.
"It was very 'black'," he said, using the Chinese term for evil or corrupt.
Chen said at least one prisoner who managed to slip away reported the
slavery, but no action was taken.
Many freed slaves were reported in a daze-like state from their ordeal and
Chen seemed unclear about the circumstances of his release. One day, he said,
the "big police" appeared and the yardseeing those who ran the yard go to trial.
Asked if he warned his son of such dangers, Chen Jinliang said: "You just
never think of such things happening in a farming village."
Worries of retaliation by those connected to the yard remained constantly on
the family's mind, and they agreed to be interviewed only after receiving
assurances that the exact location of their homes would not be identified.
"I'm afraid of those people over there," Chen blurted out in a raspy voice,
fumbling with a cigarette.