RUZHOU - Up from the countryside and desperate for work, 16-year-old 
Chen Chenggong jumped at the well-paying factory job offered by the unknown man 
who approached him at the train station. 
 
 
   Workers stand at a police station after they were rescued 
 from a brickworks in Hongdong County in Linfen, north China's Shanxi 
 province, May 27, 2007. [Shanxi Evening News]
   | 
Within hours, he was bundled into 
a minivan with 12 others and dumped at a brick yard where they were fed little, 
beaten often and forced to haul loads for 20 hours daily without pay. As for the 
recruiter, he never saw the man again. 
"I hope they are shot," Chen said of his former tormentors on Wednesday, his 
face, arms, legs and torso mottled with sores where the guards' blows became 
infected. Finally freed in a raid by provincial police, he returned home 
Saturday, but fear of his former tormentors remained palpable. 
While Chen's story was impossible to immediately confirm, it jibes with many 
other tales told by former slaves over recent weeks. Apparently prompted by 
online protests and media reports, tens of thousands of officers have raided 
more than 8,000 kilns and small coal mines in Shanxi and Henan provinces, 
freeing nearly 600 workers, including 51 children, and detaining about 160 
suspects. 
China's central authorities have ordered thorough investigations. 
Local governments, who benefited from bribes, taxes paid, and ownership 
shares, are widely believed to have protected the operations, although 
authorities have leveled direct accusations at only one village-level Communist 
Party secretary so far. 
Chen's tale points to government neglect from start to finish. Having failed 
to qualify for upper high school, he was easy pickings for recruiters at the 
sprawling, chaotic, train station in Zhengzhou, provincial capital of his native 
Henan. Streets surrounding the station are plastered with job offerings and 
unlicensed job agencies, some of them believed linked to human traffickers who 
sell workers onto brick yards. 
In response to allegations of such ties, at least one other major city in the 
area, Xi'an, said Wednesday it was banning all job agencies from around its 
railway station. 
Following his March abduction, Chen said he often saw local uniformed police 
officers visit the brickyard in Shanxi's Hongtong region. 
"They were paid off by the owner. The whole village was his," Chen said, 
surrounded by a small crowd of neighbors and relatives, who weighed in from 
time-to-time with comments and expressions of sympathy. 
The 34 workers in his group included at least one foreigner, Chen said, a 
20-year-old Iranian who had drifted across the border into China. He said 
children who looked as young as five made roofing tiles in a neighboring yard. 
Food consisted of normal farmer's fare, he said, though there was never 
enough. "Sometimes we'd steal someone else's," he said. All workers slept on the 
bricks they hauled, with no showers, medical care or even haircuts. 
Eight guards beat the slaves when they worked too slowly, while six guard 
dogs helped keep them in fear and prevent escapes, Chen said. Beatings were 
sometimes carried out with iron bars and wooden staves, although often guards 
would simply pick up a brick and smash it across a worker's head or body, he 
said. Workers who tried to escape were shackled, though still forced to work. 
"It was very 'black'," he said, using the Chinese term for evil or corrupt. 
Chen said at least one prisoner who managed to slip away reported the 
slavery, but no action was taken. 
Many freed slaves were reported in a daze-like state from their ordeal and 
Chen seemed unclear about the circumstances of his release. One day, he said, 
the "big police" appeared and the yardseeing those who ran the yard go to trial. 
Asked if he warned his son of such dangers, Chen Jinliang said: "You just 
never think of such things happening in a farming village." 
Worries of retaliation by those connected to the yard remained constantly on 
the family's mind, and they agreed to be interviewed only after receiving 
assurances that the exact location of their homes would not be identified. 
"I'm afraid of those people over there," Chen blurted out in a raspy voice, 
fumbling with a cigarette.