Children & the Law Blog

The New York Times reports on a growing problem of child labor in China’s rapidly industrializing economy - Child Labor Rings Reach China’s Distant Villages:

The mud and brick schoolhouses in the lush mountain villages of this remote part of southwestern China are dark and barebones in the best of times. These days, they also lack students.

Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labor rings, equipped with fake identification cards, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world’s toys, clothes and electronics.

The article points to to a combination of the desperate poverty in the Liangshan province where many of the children are from and manufacturers in the coastal areas squeezed by increasing costs, a shortage of adult labor and stricter enforcement of labor laws. Once out of the province, the Li children are particularly susceptible to mistreatment and deception because they often don’t speak Mandarin.

…residents of Liangshan say abject poverty, drug abuse and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents’ permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters, and then call home from a factory dormitory, hundreds of miles away.

“When our daughter left, we were quite worried,” said 42-year-old Qi Ji Gu Xi, whose 14-year-old daughter left last February. “We didn’t know where to find her. Then she called us and told us she’s a migrant worker in Guangdong.”

This focus on China’s internal child labor problems highlights and old and relentless blight on many of the world’s economies - the use of child labor perpetuating a vicious cycle that cripples the coming generations through a lack of education and opportunity and prevents the local economy from developing sustainable local industries in any other capacity. China is far from alone, UNICEF estimates “158 million children aged 5-14 are engaged in child labour - one in six children in the world.”