Slave Labour in China?

Well yes, the Chinese are shocked. As would we be, were we to discover that people have been abducted, taken from their families, sequestered in remote places and forced to labour under inhumane circumstances until they die from hunger, deprivation or become mentally unhinged. Revelations of thousands of slaves working in thousands of brick-making kilns in Henan and Shanxi provinces in central China have transfixed the Chinese with disbelief and horror.

Hundreds of desperate parents of missing children took the step of collectively posting information on the Internet pleading for official attention to their fears for their children's lives. This led to a number of investigations which had the result of unveiling the horrendous situation. Children as young as 8 years of age worked in brick kilns for as much as 16 hours a day. They were fed only enough to keep them alive. Guarded by dogs and by hired thugs.

These children lived alongside adults also taken into slavery, in squalid conditions, never allowed to wash, becoming encrusted with filth. The places where they were kept padlocked and windows barred to prevent escape. The children and the adults bore festering wounds from burns they suffered from the work they were forced to perform. Many were beaten to death by their guards. 7,500 kilns were raided.

Previously, worried parents had resorted to sit-down protests outside government and police offices, when their initial, and long-standing reports had been studiously ignored. Their repeated complaints about their missing children to government offices in the two provinces went unanswered.

Growing prosperity in the country and an accompanying building boom saw the brick kilns unable to keep up with demand, with a shortage of labourers in the last few years. Owners of the brickworks claim their workers were volunteers.

We have a tendency, we humans, to serve our communities very poorly. The widespread nature of this human calamity and the lack of political interest in the plight of the affected people speaks volumes about us as compassionate people. It's not just China, it's almost anywhere in the world, including the West, where people are abducted and forced into lives of slavery.

In the West it's more likely to be young people, forced into lives of sex slavery. It happens under the very watchful eyes of our authorities, our protective agencies, and we'd really rather not know about it, because it's just too painful to contemplate. What the solution to this tendency not to know, not to worry can be is a vexing one.

Children run away from abusive homes, they live on the streets, they become vulnerable to abuse. You've got to ask whether this is the best society can offer to its children.