Nineteen central government departments yesterday launched a
national campaign to provide better protection for minors, a major
part of which is to crack down on the use of child labor.
At its opening session, Gu Xiulian, vice-chairwoman of the NPC Standing Committee, said the protection of
minors was "a requirement necessitated by the construction of a
harmonious socialist society".
China has more than 340 million minors who account for 26.1
percent of the population.
The fight against the use of child labor is an integral part of
the revised Law on the Protection of Minors, which will go into
effect on International Children's Day next Friday.
"Enforcement mechanisms and legal responsibilities were not
clearly defined in the past," said Zhang Xiaoliang, head of the
Communist Youth League Central Committee's rights protection
division. "This undermined the operability of the law, and caused a
series of other issues."
The current law on the protection of minors has been effective
since 1992. Its amendment began in 2003, and was passed by the
nation's top legislators in the National People's Congress (NPC)
Standing Committee last year.
In conjunction with criminal laws, legislators clarified for the
first time the respective responsibilities of law enforcement
agencies, and strengthened punishment for employers of child labor,
Zhang said.
"Child labor is a serious problem and an acute issue," he said,
without providing official figures on the current number of child
workers in the country.
An earlier research report by Lu Shizhen, vice-president of the
China Youth University of Political Sciences, suggested that the
country had about 2-3 million child laborers (aged under 16) at the
end of the 1990s.
Although the number of child laborers declined over the past
decade, there is still widespread employment of children in some
manufacturing companies, especially in south China.
The television program News Probe on China Central Television,
revealed in a May 2000 program that 84 minors under the age of 14,
from Rongshui County in the southwestern autonomous region of Guangxi, were detected as being illegally
employed at a lamp mill in Dongteng, Zhejiang Province. During a clampdown
operation, inspectors stopped a man who was allegedly about to take
31 children he had kidnapped from Rongshui to the Zhejiang
mill.
"These things still happen but people are working very hard to
stop them from happening," Zhang said.
(China Daily May 25, 2007)