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  Slavery in China: Combing the Brickyards for the Disappeared

Slavery in China Combing the Brickyards for the Disappeared

By Andreas Lorenz

Part 3: In Search of a Lost Son

Fu Zhenzhong, a journalist from the local broadcaster Henan TV Metro, uncovered the story in early May while traveling with a few parents looking for their missing children in the neighboring province Shanxi. It was like looking for a needle in a haystack. The brownish-yellow soil there is ideal for making bricks and the craggy landscape hides thousands of kilns both big and small.

But Fu and the parents still managed to find children, youths and men held captive. Some were so broken by then that they couldn’t speak. Fu wanted to take one boy with him, but the remorseless brick factory boss remained stubborn: “I bought him for 400 yuan,” he said.

The troubling pictures of abused slave laborers are slowly fading in the minds of the Chinese public. Word has come down from the party’s propaganda department to “wind down” the uproar. The journalist Fu is not allowed to speak to Western correspondents, and families questioned by the foreign media are visited by the police, who strongly urge them to avoid contact with outsiders.

One of the key figures in the scandal, Xin Yanhua, is also keeping a low profile. She is the aunt of a 16-year-old victim and she helped write the letter posted in the Internet by the fathers. She has declared she only wanted to help promote “society’s harmony and stability,” but now she’s afraid. She fears the factory owners and even local officials could try to take revenge. Xin has since gone underground. “I shiver when I think about my future,” she wrote in a newspaper before disappearing.

Looking for Haipeng

The Hao family in the province of Henan, though, is talking. In recent weeks, they have gone from the party office to the petition office, from the police to the local government authority -- and as the farmer Hao Xing'an says, they have been "warded off, sent away, and pushed around."

His son Haipeng has been missing since 2004. In March of that year, a recruiter visited the village and took the boy, then 14 years old, with him. He promised him a job in a restaurant in the neighboring province and 500 yuan (€50) a month plus food and shelter. "We trusted the man," says the father. "He was an acquaintance of a neighbor."

The family is desperately poor: The grain and peanut harvest brings in 2,000 yuan (€200) a year before taxes. Fortunately, the 26-year-old daughter Nana has found a job with the Korean firm Samsung in southern China. Now she is pregnant and waiting at home to give birth.

During the first six months he was away, her brother called often from his mobile phone. Then he asked for €320, explaining to his parents that he wanted to open a restaurant with a few friends. They believed him and borrowed money from the neighbors. They had a number for the bank account -- 9559981680160115414 -- but no name.

That was on Aug. 8, 2004. Afterwards, every trace of the boy was lost. His uncle Xingwei finally set off to look for him in May of 2005. But when he arrived at the restaurant where Haipeng was supposed to be working, all he discovered was that the recruiter who took his son was in prison for robbery -- and that the name he had given was false.

When Chinese television this May first reported on slave workers in the country, Haipeng's uncle got back on the bus. He travelled from one brickyard to the next but found nothing. In June, he headed north. There, roof tiles are manufactured and according to some reports, children from the tropical province of Yunnan are being held there. Maybe Haipeng is among them?

When he got there, though, the local police told him: "There are no brickyards here." But a few hundred meters from the main road, he found one kiln after the other. They have been closed down since, with just a few workers remaining to pull the last remaining tiles from the ovens. Some of them even run away at the sight of the stranger. Some youths are from the province of Szechuan, with traffickers having paid their families prior to taking their sons away. Now, the bosses refuse to let the boys return home even though there is no work -- they have paid for them, after all.

One Last Hope

Hao visited as many kilns as he could find, passing out cigarettes and showing people his nephew's photograph. He found no one who recognized the picture, nor was his trip to the provincial capital successful. The police allowed him speak to a few freed workers, but no one knew his nephew.

The family has one last hope. The man who hired their son is being held in a prison in Taiyuan, the provincial capital. Perhaps, the family hopes, he might know something about the son's fate.

Getting to the desired information requires crossing provincial frontiers, in China often as tight as international borders. First the family wants to convince the police in their own village to take the case. Then the officers need to be prepared to drive to Shanxi with them in order to request assistance from the local police so that the prisoner can be interrogated -- an expensive proposition.

But the question remains how such blatant human trafficking could take place under the watchful eye of the Communist Party, which once proclaimed it wanted to free the people from their feudal bondage and slavery.

The Beijing-based journalist and historian Wu Si blames the “local tyrants” that have existed in China for centuries and continue to exist under the communists. The 50-year-old Wu is the deputy editor in chief of the magazine Yanhuang Chunqiu and his book "Hidden Rules," which details the history of power in China’s smaller municipalities, has been banned by the censors.

Just like in the old days, Wu says “the political functionaries surround themselves with the local businessmen, who pay for their food, trips and the education of their children. As compensation they allow the bosses to do as they please.” That’s at least how it was in Shanxi. Of the 3,347 brick factories in the province, 2,036 didn’t have a license to operate. The officials pocketed the regular fines for such offenses, but left it at that.

'They Promised Me That Much'

In order to avoid such injustices in the future, Wu urges “allowing real trade unions. We should ease the access to information and let the people elect their government. If there’s an opposition, no village mayor will tolerate forced laborers.”

In Yubao, the town where young Ma Yongqiang lives, the brick factory slavery isn’t discussed. Ma’s parents are ashamed to tell their neighbors about their son’s fate. They believe they’ve lost face because he came back -- regardless of what he experienced -- just as he left: poor and unsuccessful in life. They found in the newspaper the name of a lawyer who wants to fight pro bono for Ma and the other victims.

But first the brick boss Yao has to be found. Ma isn’t asking for much -- no compensation for the beatings or his imprisonment. “I want 4,500 yuan, 1,500 for each month,” he says. “They promised me that much.”

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan