BEIJING (AFP) — 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 away in factories.
The children, aged from nine to 16, worked long hours in factories for about 35 cents an hour, the state-run China Daily and other media said Wednesday, in echoes of a brick kiln slavery ring that made world headlines last year.
The news came as workers in communist-ruled China prepared to celebrate May 1, Labour Day, as a national holiday.
But the latest incident showed that labour abuse remained a major problem in China, where many poor people remain vulnerable to exploitation despite the nation's phenomenal economic growth, according to one workers' rights group.
"They (labour scandals) get exposed from time to time. If they become a big story, then the government usually promises to crack down and investigate," Geoffrey Crothall of the Hong Kong-based China Labour Bulletin told AFP.
"But the underlying problems that give rise to these incidents just continue. The situation never seems to improve noticeably in terms of poverty relief and in terms of keeping kids in school."
Police have so far rescued 167 children in Dongguan, one of the cities at the centre of the latest scandal, the Hong Kong-based Wen Wei Po newspaper said.
The China Daily carried a photo of a young girl crying after emerging from her place of work in Dongguan, which has sought for many years to attract foreign investment and is an export hub.
The children were also found working in factories in nearby Shenzhen and Huizhou, which are also key to Chinese exports, according to the China Daily.
Authorities have set up a task force to rescue all the other children, local authorities in Dongguan were quoted as saying.
"Our labour enforcement and trade union will investigate all companies in the town, the labour market and agencies," said Wang Yongquan, a spokesman for Shipai town in Dongguan, according to the China Daily.
An underground organisation had lured the children from Liangshan, a poor farming area in Sichuan province thousands of kilometres away, the China Daily said.
The factories paid the children between 2.5 yuan and 3.8 yuan (35 and 55 cents) an hour.
The Southern Metropolis Newspaper, the first to report the scandal, quoted a factory foreman as saying that all the children were passed off as 18 to pass the labour department's inspections.
"We have absolute management control over them -- we can adopt any measure," another foreman named Pan Ajie told the newspaper's reporter before the crackdown began.
Last year, China approved a long-awaited labour law aimed at better protecting workers' rights, amid outrage over the brick kiln slavery scandal that highlighted endemic abuse behind the nation's economic boom.
Hundreds of workers, some of them children and others mentally disabled, were found to be working as slaves in the brick kilns in Shanxi and Henan provinces in June last year.
The law, which came into effect in January, stipulates that employees can now face criminal prosecution if their neglect results in serious harm to workers.
However, even before the new law went into effect, communist China in theory already had many legal protections for workers that were routinely ignored.
And even with the new law, workers can still be seen building new skyscrapers in Beijing and elsewhere without protective equipment and other safeguards that would normally be seen in developed countries.