Four years after China's last major slave labor scandal, a group of disabled men has been freed from a brick kiln in the central province of Henan after an investigation by an undercover television reporter. Some of the men had been forced to work for years without pay, enduring beatings and poor food and living conditions, the state-run China Daily reported.

Japan and China should improve conditions for migrant Chinese workers whose rights are frequently abused in low-paid factory jobs in Japan, a report said Tuesday.

Fourteen workers, including some with mental disabilities, were rescued by local government officials from a brick factory in southern Guangdong on 12 May after their plight was reported in the Guangzhou Daily. The workers, some as young as 15-years-old, had been tricked or even kidnapped by labour traffickers and sold to the brick factory operator for just 400 yuan. They were forced to work 15 hours a day and beaten by thugs if they tried to escape. One worker told the newspaper that they were paid just five yuan for three months work.

A Xinjiang factory owner and his wife who used a group of mentally disabled people as slave labour for more than four years were, on 30 April, sentenced to four and half years and two years in prison respectively for a range of criminal offences, the Legal Daily reported.

An alleged trafficker sold workers with learning disabilities as slave labour to a factory grinding rocks into powder for building materials, Chinese media claimed today.The case in north-west Xinjiang province is the latest in a series of scandals over the exploitation of vulnerable workers.

Around a dozen workers have been held in a state of indentured servitude in a building materials factory in Xinjiang for around three years, working long hours in appalling conditions for no pay, according to an investigative report in the mainland media. The workers were trapped thousands of miles from home in Toksun county south of the provincial capital, Urumqi. They were beaten if they tried to escape and fed the same food as the boss’ dogs.

Mentally handicapped people are being forced to work at brick factories in the central province of Hubei every day, morning to night, for just 208 yuan a year (less than the weekly minimum wage in Shenzhen), according to a news report broadcast this week on Shanghai-based Dragon TV. The local authorities in Hubei countered in a Wuhan Evening News report the same day (25 January) that they had already launched a campaign to “rectify illegal employment and crackdown on criminal behaviour."

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Two brothers who admitted imprisoning and beating workers at their illegal brickyard in Sha’anxi have each been sentenced to just 18 months and 12 months (suspended for two years) in jail - even after an elderly brickyard worker died of exhaustion and heat stroke, the Legal Daily (法制日报) reported on 20 February.

There are 110 million migrant workers in China aged between 16 and 40 years old.  They left home in the hope of building a better life for themselves and their family, yet when they start a family of their own, they are faced with a stark choice; either take their children to the cities and subject them to institutionalized discrimination, or leave them behind in the countryside in the uncertain care of relatives.