World & Nation

China’s disabled exploited as slaves



His hands are as red as freshly boiled lobster from handling hot bricks from a kiln without proper protective gloves. On the backs of his legs, third-degree burns trace the rectangular shape of bricks, a factory foreman’s punishment for not working fast enough. Around his wrists, ligature marks tell of the chains used to keep him from running away at night.

Liu was found wandering in the small town of Gaoling, north of Xian, on Dec. 22, 10 months after his family reported him missing. He was wearing the same clothing as when he’d disappeared in February, but the trousers were glued to the festering wounds on his legs and the gangrene of his frostbitten feet stank through the gaping holes in his shoes.


Despite his injuries and an intellectual impairment, he was able to tell how he’d been tricked by a woman who bought him a bowl of soup and promised him the equivalent of $10 per day, good wages for manual work in rural China.

Instead, he became a slave.

“They took advantage of my brother because he has a mental disability,” said his 26-year-old brother, Liu Xiaowei. “They forced him to work, beat him, tortured him, and then when he was too weak to take it anymore, they threw him out on the street.”

In an adrenaline-paced economy with a chronic shortage of manual laborers, ruthless recruiters often prey on China’s mentally disabled. The worst offenders work with the brick kilns that are feeding a seemingly insatiable appetite for the new apartment complexes and malls cropping up around the countryside.


“The brick factories can never get as many workers as they need. The work is heavy and a lot of people don’t want to do it,” said Ren Haibin, the former manager of one of several brick factories where Liu said he had worked. “Possibly the mentally disabled can be intimidated and forced to work.... They are timid and easier to manage.”



Reports on conditions in the factory said the workers hadn’t been allowed to bathe in more than a year and were fed the same food as the boss’ dog.

“Every year there are cases like this,” Zhang said. “The worst are when they are violating the rights of the disabled in the name of charity.”

Police often won’t exert much effort when a mentally disabled person disappears, he said, and even if they’re rescued, their testimony is not taken seriously because of their impairment.

“This is not like when a child goes missing. Police will just assume they’ve run away,” Zhang said. Some families, he says, won’t even bother to report. “They might feel that they’ve been relieved of the burden.”



Liu doesn’t speak much. When he does, the words come slowly but clearly, as though they’ve required some concentration. He left school in the third grade, when it became clear that he’d never be able to read or write beyond an elementary level.


“He wanted to stand on his own feet,” said younger brother Xiaowei. “He was kindhearted and thinks that everybody else is too.”


Little did they know that he had been transported almost 100 miles away to Gaoling, a rural county where there are dozens of brick factories tucked deep in the countryside. They might never have found him if not for another family who’d also lost a son to the brick factories.


He Wen went missing June 2. The 35-year-old had been psychologically troubled since his late teens, when he’d suffered a breakdown after failing an exam. He was unable to hold a regular job but could unload trucks and was proud that he’d managed to buy his own television set.

The afternoon he disappeared, a nephew overheard him taking a telephone call from a woman who’d offered him a job that would provide more than $10 a day, meals and a free pack of cigarettes. He rode away on a bicycle.



“I was suspicious as soon as I heard about this supposed job offer. I started asking around and people told me stories about the brick factories,” He said.


“They kept kicking me from one place to another,” he said.

So he launched his own investigation. Every afternoon, he’d go out in a three-wheel motorized cart, handing out fliers and business cards with images of his son’s square-jawed face. Somebody printed out a map from Google and he marked the locations of all the brick factories he heard about: 58 in Gaoling alone.


“People kept saying they’d seen my son, but by the time I’d get there, he’d have disappeared.”


Disappointed, he returned home. His wife was furious.

“How could you leave that boy out on the street in winter? Maybe it was our son, after all. Even if he’s not, he’s somebody’s son,” she badgered her husband.


He was Liu Xiaoping.



He identified a photograph of He Zhimin’s missing son as one of 11 disabled workers imprisoned with him. He also picked out from police photographs the woman who tricked him and a man known as Lao Fang, a nickname meaning “Old Fang,” the foreman who beat him and the other workers.

He described in detail the location of the three brick factories where he’d worked, one of them where the workers had recognized the photo of He Zhimin’s son.


“Look around if you like. There’s no evidence against me. It’s all just rumor,” he told a visitor.

Wang acknowledged that it’s hard to find workers — “Business is great. We sold 27 million bricks last year and would have sold 30 million, if we had the labor” — but denied using the disabled. “If you say otherwise, show me the proof.”

But Ren Haibin, who was manager until June, when he says he retired because of ill health, confirmed most of what Liu Xiaoping claimed. He said the factory contracted with a man named Fang who would supply and supervise mentally disabled workers. Fang’s mistress recruited them with the promise of $10 a day in wages.


“They made promises they didn’t keep,” Ren said. “The money went into Fang’s pocket. The workers never saw it.”

Ren said he never saw Fang beating a worker, but added: “He was not a kind person.... Maybe if they didn’t work up to a certain level, there would be no food.”


In the two months since Liu was found wandering, local authorities have visited many brick factories in the area, requesting lists of workers’ names and where they’ve come from. But no one has been arrested and Liu’s family has yet to receive compensation for his medical bills.

“I thought this should be so simple, an open-and-shut case, but it has proved so complicated,” said his brother Liu Xiaowei. “I’m very disappointed that our society hasn’t done more to protect people like my brother.”

He Zhimin, meanwhile, is no closer to finding his son. He fears that whoever is holding him may have spirited him far away to avoid detection. It’s not an unreasonable fear; when the disabled workers were rescued in December in Xinjiang, one was found to have been transported 2,000 miles across China.


By now, most people recognize him, so they simply shake their heads: No, they haven’t seen his son.