Editorials

Op-Ed Contributors

Chinese Press

Columnists

LETTERS

Blot on society

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-07-24 07:47

It is an outrage that people can be enslaved in this day and age in our society and that mentally retarded people should be picked for such enslavement.

Thirty-two mentally retarded people, who were held captive as enslaved labor in a brick kiln in the city of Jieshou, east China's Anhui province, were rescued by the local police. The kiln's owner, along with nine others, was detained after police raided the kiln.

These people deserved to be treated as patients and provided extra care and attention because of their inability to look after themselves. Instead, they were forced to move bricks into and out of the kiln, one of the hardest jobs even for the able-bodied. They were kept locked in a shabby house and slept on the same floor where they relieved themselves.

Preliminary investigations show that most of these people had already worked in similar terrible conditions for three years in the neighboring Shandong province. They were transferred to kilns in Anhui simply because there was not enough earth for the kilns in Shandong to run any longer. The investigation also revealed a chain - that ran an operation from picking up people with mental deficiency to selling of them to brokers and kiln owners.

Behind this heinous crime is the loss of basic moral for some people when they are seeking the maximum profit.

This is not the first case of its kind the police has cracked. Another case - also involving a brick kiln in northern Shanxi province, where underage laborers were enslaved - shocked the country more than two years ago.

Two years after that crime surfaced, we are now witnessing something even more cruel and exploitative: of mentally deficient people being turned into slaves. They are incapable of defending themselves. They are unlikely to attempt an escape - as the laborers did in Shanxi and were abused cruelly for that. Many of them cannot even tell whether they were paid for their labor. They are unable to say how they came to work in the kilns and how long they have been held captive.

It is even more miserable for them that they cannot express their situation and sufferings because of their mental deficiency.

The fact that the culprits had enslaved the mentally retarded workers in kilns for three years without being discovered suggests that much remains to be done to effectively crack down on illegal and exploited labor, especially those who may be underage or mentally retarded. Local government leaders ought to be shocked for being so out of touch with their areas of governance: that they are in the dark about such a horrible crime taking place in the area of their authority.

After the exposure of the exploitation in the Shanxi brick kiln in 2007, a nationwide campaign was launched to crack down on illegal use of minors as laborers. The latest case is both a warning and a reminder: a warning that there are organized criminal rackets exploiting laborers of which the authorities may not even be aware; and, a reminder that the so-called campaign launched two years ago has not ended such practices but may have only driven them deeper underground.

This is a blot on our society and must be rooted out.

(China Daily 07/24/2009 page8)