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Sydney Morning Herald - Sydney,New South Wales,Australia




The kidnapped kiln workers may have been freed, but John Garnaut and Maya Li meet parents still searching.

Hu Jiyong should be celebrating his epic escape from China's "black" brick kilns, where he and hundreds of other kidnapped children were forced to work up to 20 hours a day in subhuman conditions. Instead, the 18-year-old is too frightened to talk to outsiders or leave his mother's home.

The timing of his escape was all wrong. Hu climbed up a human ladder and slipped past the thugs and guard dogs in September - a month after police declared the black kiln children had all been rescued and this sordid chapter in Chinese history was officially closed.

Hu had been kidnapped as a 15-year-old while walking on a street in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan province, and was bundled into a van and driven to a brick kiln in Linxian, across the border in Shanxi.

Then, in May this year, investigators were closing in. Chinese journalists and parents of missing children had ignited a media firestorm that was shaking all levels of Chinese society and government, particularly in Shanxi. So the boy's mouth was gagged and his filthy, emaciated body was stuffed into a sack and sold to another brick kiln - this time back in Henan.

The President, Hu Jintao, and the Premier, Wen Jiabao, mobilised 40,000 police to search 8760 brick kilns and other suspect enterprises and rescue 359 children. It was a shining example of how media exposure can lead to government accountability and better policy.

But those rescued did not include Hu Jiyong, who was still being forced to work from well before dawn to late at night, living on just two meals of watery rice gruel a day. His mother, Zhang Aihua, says six of Hu's teenage co-workers were caught trying to escape in June and he was forced to watch as each of them was beaten to death, one by one.

Distraught parents believe hundreds of other children are still working in kilns after being sold from Shanxi to neighbouring provinces including Henan, Shandong and Hebei.

"Almost 500 parents are still searching for their children," says Yuan Chen, who devotes his life to walking the country roads of Henan and Shanxi with a picture of his 18-year-old son, who disappeared last year from a Zhengzhou worksite. "Two-thirds of the children have not been found." Yuan knows his son was working at a black brick kiln because an escaped child worker recognised his photo.

The state security apparatus that swung to help parents and children in May and June has now reverted to ensuring that various layers of government are not embarrassed by more bad news. Efforts to stop parents searching and communicating seem to extend to the top of the Shanxi and Henan hierarchies.