China’s Slavery Problem

This is an ugly story: Children are being enslaved as brick makers in China. From the London Times report:

More than 1,000 children may have been kidnapped and sold into slave labour in a brutal human trafficking ring that has shocked and outraged China. The children, some as young as 8, worked in brick kilns for 16 hours a day with meagre food rations. They were guarded by fierce dogs and thugs who beat their prisoners at will.

Many were abducted right off the streets of cities in the region and sold to factories and mines for as little as 400 yuan (£27). The unfolding scandal, involving negligent law enforcement and even collusion between government officials and slave masters, burst into the open this week.

And here’s more from the Telegraph’s reporting:

The reports of children being abducted, locked in factories for years, beaten, left untreated for severe burns and, in some cases, killed spread this week from a single case in Shanxi province to implicate hundreds of kilns.It took a campaign by parents, who in some cases led raids to rescue their children themselves, before official action was taken. They say at least 1,000 children, as well as adults, have been abducted.

Reporters have alleged that collusion between the kiln owners and local officials blocked intervention. In the first case discovered, the owner was the son of the local Communist Party boss.

Let us hope the Chinese Government makes short work of these criminals. But I worry that China has an inadequate appreciation of the intrinsic value of human life, given its past and present policies involving the Falun Gong, organ harvesting and sales, and eugenics. Slavery and human trafficking are a major issue inextricably connected to human exceptionalism, which seems to be worsening (or perhaps, we are just learning more about it). I hope to focus more on this issue in the future.