THE mud and brick schoolhouses in the lush mountain villages of this remote part of south-western China are dark and spartan in the best of times. These days, they also lack students.
Residents say children as young as 12 have been recruited by child labour rings, equipped with fake ID, and transported hundreds of miles across the country to booming coastal cities, where they work 12-hour shifts to produce much of the world's toys
, clothes and electronics, earning 12p an hour, or less than £50 a month.
"Last year I had 30 students. This year there are only 14. All the others went outside to find work," said Ji Ke Xiaoming, 35, a primary school teacher.
China is now investigating whether hundreds, perhaps thousands, of poor children of the Yi ethnic minority group in Liangshan were lured, or even kidnapped, to work in factories that are increasingly desperate for the kind of cheap labour that powered China to prosperity over the past two decades.
Labour recruiters have connected two radically different parts of Chinese society, bringing together ethnic minorities untouched by economic development in their mountainous isolation, and factory owners in the prime export manufacturing zones near Hong Kong.
Exporters have struggled to adjust to soaring inflation, a fast-rising currency and, with some irony, stricter enforcement of labour laws that make it harder to hire regular workers on a seasonal basis. Using child workers from a remote region, many of whom cannot even speak Mandarin, the country's main dialect, has provided a temporary, albeit illegal, solution.
A scandal involving Liangshan's children first came to light late last month when it emerged that more than 1,000 school-age workers from the area were employed in manufacturing zones near Hong Kong. The report was deeply embarrassing for Beijing.
Last week, the authorities in Liangshan said they had detained several people for recruiting children and illegally ferrying them off to factories. And officials in Dongguan, one of the manufacturing zones where the children worked, said that they had "rescued" more than 160 young people from factories.
Now, officials have begun to play down the scandal, saying there is little evidence of widespread violations of child labour laws. A two-day government sweep involving more than 3,000 factories around Dongguan, which was conducted after the initial raids, turned up only 10 children, officials said.
But residents of Liangshan say abject poverty, drug abuse and a lack of jobs have forced many children to head for factories. Sometimes it is with their parents' permission. Other times, children disappear, on their own or with job recruiters.
"When our daughter left, we were quite worried," said 42-year-old Qi Ji Gu Xi, whose 14-year-old daughter left last February. "We didn't know where to find her. Then she called us and told us she's a migrant worker in Guangdong."
The full article contains 486 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
