Chinese Police have caught the boss accused of starving and
beating workers to keep them enslaved in brick kilns, state media
reported Sunday.
Heng Tinghan is accused of holding workers in a kiln in Hongtong
county in the northern province of Shanxi. One worker died after
being beaten by one of Heng's helpers, and police rescued 31, thin
and scarred.
Police caught Heng late on Saturday after a nationwide manhunt,
the official Xinhua news agency reported.
He has become a central villain in a national drama over
possibly hundreds or more teenage and adult "slaves" forced or
cheated into grueling labor in kilns, mines and foundries across
Shanxi and neighboring Henan province.
When caught in the central province of Hubei, Heng apologized
for mistreating workers but denied blame for the death of the
mentally impaired man, a Hubei newspaper reported.
"I felt it was a fairly small thing, just hitting and swearing
at the workers and not giving them wages," Heng said, according to
the Shiyan Evening News. "The dead man had nothing to do with
me."
The China Youth Daily called the coercion a "shocking disgrace"
exposing officials' failure to enforce labor laws.
Dogs and beatings
"When a law is massively undercut in its implementation so that
it becomes a worthless piece of paper, then it's necessary to
rethink the law itself," the paper said.
State television has reported that owners of the primitive
brick-making operations ran them like prisons with fierce dogs and
beatings to deter escapes.
A sweeping police crackdown in Shanxi and Henan had so far freed
568 people from kilns and other work sites, including 22 under the
age of 18 in Shanxi, Xinhua reported. Wang Bingbing, the owner of
the kiln that Heng leased, was detained in late May.
Local news reports said Heng had coerced or cheated the workers
to the site from March 2006, forcing them to work 16-hour days and
live off mostly steamed bread.
President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao have issued
"instructions" on the scandal, state media have reported.
But this is not the first time brutality in Shanxi's brick
industry has stirred their concern. In 2003, Wen called for tough
punishment after a teenage boy was trapped into working in a kiln
in Yongji, Shanxi, media reported at the time.
By Saturday, Shanxi police had detained 25 people suspected of
involvement in the virtual slave trade, Xinhua said.
But a Henan reporter who had helped expose the business accused
officials of hampering parents' efforts to find missing
children.
"In our reporting, the biggest obstacle has been lack of
cooperation from some authorities in Shanxi," told television
reporter Fu Zhenzhong.
"Some are still coming up with any number of ways to obstruct
parents rescuing their children."
(China Daily June 18, 2007)
