China investigates latest child labour scandal

Hundreds of children have been sold to Chinese factories as slave labour, reports said today.

Officials have begun an investigation into claims that the youngsters, most aged between 9 and 16, were put to work in the southern province of Guangdong over the past five years.

A state-run daily newspaper in Guangdong said the children were "sold like cabbages" by their parents to gangs who then resold them to employment agencies or directly to factories hundreds of miles from their homes.

Most of the children were from Liangshan, a poor farming town in south-western Sichuan province, and ended up working in factories in Guangdong's Dongguan city as well as Shenzhen and Huizhou, the report said.

They earned as little as 15p an hour and were forced to work long hours.

A spokesman for the city said police had already rescued more than 100 youngsters from rented houses and arrested several people.

The state mouthpiece Xinhua News Agency said today that the Dongguan government had investigated more than 3,000 companies involving 450,000 individuals in the city, but found that only a handful of small companies and workshops had hired temporary workers who might have been children.

The investigation comes less than a year after Chinese media uncovered that children as young as eight were abducted or recruited from bus and train stations with false promises of well-paying jobs and sold to brick kilns in central Shanxi province for about 400 Yuan (€40).

The victims were forced to work almost around the clock, beaten, and deprived of pay, nourishment and basic medical care.