China slave scandal brings resignation calls

oops1

By Chris Buckley
Reuters
Monday, June 18, 2007; 7:23 AM

BEIJING (Reuters) - Chinese media demanded official resignations and repentance on Monday amid popular outrage over the virtual enslavement of workers in scorching brick kilns that reports said had operated with government complicity.

Hundreds of farmers, teenagers and even some children were trapped or cheated into grueling work in kilns, mines and foundries across Shanxi province in north China and neighboring Henan province. Nearly 600 have been freed so far, reports said.

The workers endured prison-like confinement, with fierce dogs and beatings, local media reported. Released workers were shown on television with festering wounds and emaciated bodies.

One supervisor at a Shanxi kiln accidentally killed a child with a shovel and hid the body at night in November.

Heng Tinghan, who trafficked the 31 slave laborers to the kiln in Hongtong county, was formally arrested along with four accomplices on Monday on charges of illegal detention and mayhem, Xinhua news agency said.

Police have detained the supervisor, but Xinhua did not say if he was one of the five receiving the arrest warrants on Monday as well. Another three are wanted, Xinhua said.

The scandal has emboldened local media to bluntly demand answers from the usually unassailable ruling Communist Party and to demand official heads roll.

\"Who'll assume responsibility for this crime that has lasted for over a decade?\" asked the Southern Metropolis Daily, a popular tabloid.

Local officials now parading as liberators of trapped workers had long turned a blind eye to the human trade, it said.

\"In many countries, a scandal like this would be enough to spark a major political crisis and crisis of confidence. But here in China to date there's not even a hint of resignations,\" the daily said.

On the Internet and via mobile text messages, some angry citizens urged people to wear blue ribbons on their wrists, bags and vehicles to show their outrage and support for the children and demand harsh punishment of owners and officials involved.

\"It's a way of mobilizing people to show they're unhappy with the weakness of the government response so far,\" Chang Kun, a Beijing-based activist who has promoted the campaign, told Reuters.

\"We want to show how shocked we are, and also that we want real change.\"

\"OWER VACUUM\"

The scandal has stained the Communist Party's promises to build a \"harmonious\" society with better rights and income for hundreds of millions of poor farmers.

A senior official in the Party-run All China Federation of Trade Unions told a news conference on Monday he was \"outraged and shocked.\"

\"It's absolutely impermissible for this sort of thing to happen in our socialist country,\" union official Zhang Mingqi said, according to a transcript of the news conference on the government Web site (www.gov.cn).

Police have detained 168 people accused of involvement in the exploitation, the China Daily reported. The government has sent a team to investigate the abuses and given freed workers 1,000 yuan ($130) each as \"sympathy\" money, the Beijing News said.

But many reports have dwelt on local government complicity in the abuses. One of the kiln owners detained, Wang Bingbing, was the son of the village Party secretary. And critics say the trade could not have survived without official collusion.

\"The dereliction of local government departments and even collusion between officials and criminals is plain to see,\" said one local newspaper commentary reproduced on the Web site of the People's Daily (www.people.com.cn).

The People's Daily itself said the scandal called for \"thorough reflection.\"

\"Otherwise, we will have no way of facing up to the word 'harmony',\" it said in a commentary.

The exploitation highlighted the disintegration of local government in the countryside, said some.

\"The state's control over the countryside and farmers has weakened,\" said the Guangzhou Daily. \"In some towns and villages a power vacuum has emerged and criminal forces have seized the opportunity to flourish and dominate.\"

($1=7.624 yuan)

(Additional reporting by Ben Blanchard and Guo Shipeng)