[The trafficked children] came from faraway Liangshan in Sichuan, and most of them are not yet 16. The overseers sought and recruited them from families mired in poverty, promising them high wages; some were even abducted and sent off in batches to Dongguan and from there distributed by the truckload to factories across the Pearl River Delta. On unfamiliar soil, these children are often scolded and beaten and only have one proper meal every few days. Some little girls are even raped. Day after day, they undertake arduous labour. Some children think about escape, but the road is blocked. The overseers threaten them and warn them that if they try to run away, there will be a price to pay.
In fact, the foremen in these factories were regularly recruiting children. Thousands of Yi kids from Liangshan were working in Guangdong. At Shen Wei’s factory, more than twenty kids were recruited every year. ‘But even before the report came out, I heard that the factory was thinking of cutting down its workforce,’ said Shen Wei. ‘I guess it was easy for them to sack us because they didn’t really need us anymore.’
Fei, a twenty-five-year-old Tibetan, spoke up. He had been deceived by a local job recruiter, who knew that he was desperate for work, into selling the drug ecstasy in Beijing. The recruiter had promised him a security job, but not one guarding a company. He took the offer without hesitation; the pay was 150 yuan (now £14.5) a day. ‘Good money, isn’t it?’ he said, and everyone around us perked up: Indeed, it was a large sum compared to usual urban wage levels. Every day, Fei was instructed to stand at a particular location, to wait for buyers. Sometimes it was outside a building, sometimes on a certain street corner. He had no idea who the buyers were, only that they were regular. ‘But I was so frightened of getting caught all the time. You wouldn’t want to spend a minute in prison – as a Tibetan, you would have a hellish time there. I was so scared of that,’ he said. ‘When I wanted to quit the job eventually, they wouldn’t let me.’
The crowd listened quietly. ‘I fled in the end,’ he said. One day, he simply didn’t show up. He went to buy a ticket home and stayed waiting in the train station for hours, always looking around him, scared that someone might be after him. ‘When I returned to Chengdu that summer, looking desperately for work again, a middle-aged Sichuanese recruiter approached me and told me he had a job transporting goods,’ Fei went on. The man had been there, recruiting young people, for weeks by then, Fei believed. He made a bad impression on Fei; he didn’t seem honest. He wouldn’t give specifics about the job, just said, ‘You’ll find out when you get started.’
‘What was the job?’ asked a voice in the crowd.
‘He sent me to Yunnan province. The job covered food and accommodation,’ Fei said. ‘But it wasn’t any ordinary transporting job.’
Fei took a bus to Kunming, Yunnan’s capital, and another bus to a border town, Yingjiang, where he was picked up by the recruiter’s contact. The contact drove him to a house miles away from the town centre. At the house, another two men came to meet him. They explained the job to him: transporting heroin. By then, Fei knew that he couldn’t get out. He was reluctant to give us details, and didn’t want to identify the people he met there. ‘I had to swallow the heroin and transport it across Yunnan, all the way to Chengdu. I swallowed eighteen condoms filled with heroin, five kilograms total, every time they sent me. I felt really sick, and I kept vomiting. I had to leave the job after just a few days.’
Two other men had worked with him, both Tibetans, recruited in a labour market in Yunnan itself. All the people transporting drugs were males. Fei hadn’t talked much to them, just knew that they were carrying the same amount of heroin. He’d felt too unwell to think about the others.
Fei ran away, taking the first train back to Chengdu one morning. Again, he believed that the recruiters would be after him, but nothing happened. Perhaps young Tibetan boys running away from this job was a usual occurrence. He didn’t know. But he’d been worried enough to start wearing dark glasses to disguise his appearance. He wore them for months.
Opium poppy cultivation is a huge enterprise in Burma, and Burmese smugglers account for 80 to 90 percent of the heroin that enters Yunnan. The authorities currently seize two to three tons of opiates per year, and the majority of heroin in China is trafficked through Yunnan or Guangxi to Guangdong or Fujian, and then on to the international market.
Now yet another worker in this crowd of more than 100 stepped in and told his story. He was tall, tanned, handsome and well-built, with hair to his shoulders, quite unusual for a Chinese man. He had been working as a security guard in a bar in Shanghai, he said, and was determined to stay in that job, until one day, he met a woman.
He hesitated. I urged him to continue.
‘She was in her mid forties. Wealthy. I mean, stinking rich,’ he said. ‘Her husband was never at home, doing business abroad, heaven knows what business. She met me outside the bar where I worked. She stared at me as she passed, then turned back and approached me. She liked my looks. She asked if I’d be interested in meeting. So we met the next day and she took me to an expensive café for coffee and lunch.’
‘There was Western food on the menu. I’d never tried American steak, I said to her. She encouraged me to order it. During lunch, she told me she was interested in me and set up the next meeting, in a posh hotel in central Shanghai, which she paid for. She needed a young man, and offered to pay me for sex.’
The crowd exploded in laughter. It wasn’t the most usual kind of work around.
‘I was only nineteen!’ he said. ‘I was confused. But it was a large amount of cash she was offering. So I said yes.’
‘The word “prostitution” didn’t come into my head, until later, when the offer was repeated, again and again,’ he said. He managed to earn 10,000 yuan (now £909) a month working as her lover.
Someone shouted at him from the back: ‘Worker, you’re the tool!’ The crowd laughed again.
But the story wasn’t so funny for the man recalling it.
‘We began to meet regularly, once a week, after that,’ he said. He knew for certain that the meeting was purely for sex – she didn’t seem interested in anything else. She never asked a question about his background and what he’d done in his life. ‘I thought that I could continue working like that and earning good money in Shanghai. I was young and in good condition. Having sex with a woman more than twice my age was no big deal for me. I could carry on like that for years, and bring in good income for my parents. I was really naïve then.’
‘Time went by, and soon she became tired of me. One day, three months later, at the end of our session, she told me that she wouldn’t be seeing me again. She said my job was over. And she never called again. From other security guards at the bar, I heard that she’s picked another boy, from the countryside, to replace me. She’s got a new lover.’
His story was unusual; the majority of China’s three million sex workers are still migrant women, most of them peasants between fifteen and forty years old. I had received those calls from female sex workers in the hotel saunas in Beijing, but in fact these women were in every city, selling their services in karaoke bars and shopping malls and on street corners as well. Shenzhen, with the highest number of migrant sex workers, has more than a thousand of these ‘karaoke bars,’ where more than 300,000 women are estimated to work. The majority of them are from Sichuan.
Then the subject of the earthquake came up again. Yuan Gang, a middle-aged man who’d been a railway worker in Shaanxi province when the earthquake hit – spoke about how his house had collapsed, how his wife and three children were put into temporary housing, and how the compensation he had been entitled to was withheld, for no reason. ‘Knowing the past record of our local authorities, we believe our compensation is being permanently withheld!’ he cried. He was shivering with anger, and people in the crowd began to nod.
Encouraged by Yuan Gang’s open denouncement of the local government, others began to speak up about their own experiences with it, and their frustration. A white-haired, frail-looking man in his sixties, named Xue, who