Young Chinese men are increasingly becoming victims of forced labour as economic necessity forces them to migrate to other provinces in China where they have been promised well paid jobs in brick factories or stone quarries.

An article by Bruce Gilley published in this week's Far Eastern Economic Review (16 August 2001) recounts how 27 men were forced to work as slaves, for 12 hours a day and no pay, in a brick factory in Dingzhou, China. One of the men who tried to escape was caught, dragged back to the camp and beaten to death in front of the other men. It was only on 22 May 2001, after one worker managed to evade the guards, that local labour officials were informed and arrived to arrest the manager and free the men. The workers had been enslaved there for more than one year.

This is not an isolated case. In February 2001, the local newspaper, Dahe Daily, reported that officials in Zhengzhou, Henan province, tried to free 30 slaves from an illegal coal pit, but were turned away by 20 armed guards and had to return the next day with armed police. The same paper later reported that another coal pit was closed in the area and 16 slave labourers, whose ages ranged between 14 and 73 were released.

In May 2001, five women, who were being forced to work without pay at an industrial materials polishing factory, escaped during an electricity blackout, according to a report in the Yanshan Metropolis News. The five migrant women had been working alongside 30 local women who were paid normally and free to leave.

China's household registration system or hokou gives workers few rights or protection when they leave their designated place of residence, encouraging a tendency to view migrants as second class citizens. Sophia Woodman, research director of the Hong Kong based Human Rights in China, explains that "the hokou system institutionalises an attitude that it's not our people so we're not responsible for them." In one reported case from May 2001, 100 people from Henan were only rescued from a kelp factory in Shandong's Rongcheng city after one of them managed to contact family in Henan and they contacted the local newspaper, the Henan Daily.

Gilley draws attention to the fact that while economic necessity makes the migrants vulnerable to being trapped as forced or bonded labourers, it is corruption and indifference to the fate of migrants that allows slavery to flourish. One manager of a brick factory in Dingzhou admitted to keeping "several" workers against their will. While laws exist to prohibit forced labour government officials and labour officials often do not enforce them.

China still has not ratified the International Labour Organization's Convention on Forced Labour 1930 (No.29) or the Convention on the Abolition of Forced Labour 1957 (No.105)