On June 21, The New York Times reported on the Chinese media dropping its coverage of child slavery in the brick kilns of Shanxi Province. As often is the case in China, once the culprit is captured, the story disappears from view.
The villain in the case was Heng Tinghan, the manager of the brick works, who was arrested Saturday and promptly cemented his bad-guy image by protesting that it was a “fairly small thing” to beat and abuse underage workers, and to deprive them of pay. With his arrest, and the urging of the Central Office of External Communication of the Communist Party, the story then died away.
The article also reports:
Just within a week or so of the brick kiln story, there were several reports of labor abuses against children. A 14-year-old boy was killed in an explosion while filling a tank with napthalene at a chemical factory near Nanjing. A 15-year-old boy was dragged into a cotton gin and crushed to death in Nanchang after working a succession of 20-hour days. And 70 girls from rural Henan Province were brought by their teacher to work at a grape processing plant in Ningbo, where their hands bled from working 16-hour shifts.
The complete Times story is Fast-Growing China Says Little of Child Slavery’s Role.
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[...] In a country still in shock from this summer’s unprecedented public soul-searching over the slave labour used in brick factories, the sale of children, often disabled, to work as beggars is yet another scandal the authorities [...]