On June 17, Chinese police have detained 168 people in in a large-scale operation to rescue slave laborers in small brick kilns and mines in Shanxi and Henan provinces in central China.
Forty-eight people who were allegedly to have been involved in the illegal use of slave labors were detained in Shanxi, while the others were detained in Henan, according to local police sources.
By Saturday, 351 people, including 22 under the age of 18, were freed after police stormed more than 3,700 small brick kilns and coal mines, many of them are unlicensed, in Shanxi, the country's biggest coal producer.
Chinese police have caught the boss accused of starving and beating workers to keep them enslaved in brick kilns, Chinese press reported Sunday.
Heng Tinghan is accused of holding workers in a kiln in Hongtong county in the northern province of Shanxi. One worker died after being beaten by one of Heng's helpers, and police rescued 31, thin and scarred.
When caught in the central province of Hubei, Heng apologized for mistreating workers but denied blame for the death of the mentally impaired man, a Hubei newspaper reported.
"I felt it was a fairly small thing, just hitting and swearing at the workers and not giving them wages," Heng said, according to the Shiyan Evening News. "The dead man had nothing to do with me."
I cannot believe that this kind of slavery is still happening in modern China. The most important thing is that the slave-labor boss still thinks that what he is doing is not a big deal. This news shows that either the Chinese government or general people still overlook the issue of human rights.
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