China is investigating whether hundreds of children, most between the ages of 9 and 16, were sold to factories in the southern province of Guangdong over the past five years to work as virtual slave laborers, state media said Wednesday. The probe was launched following the publication Monday of an investigative report by Southern Metropolis, a state-run daily in Guangdong. The report said the children were "sold like cabbages" by their parents to gangs who in turn sold them off to employment agencies or directly to factories hundreds of miles from their homes. Most of the kids were from Liangshan, a poor farming town in southwestern Sichuan province, and ended up working in electronics and other factories in Guangdong's Dongguan city as well as Shenzhen and Huizhou, the paper said.
See "China launches investigation into claims of child slavery, state media reports", Henry Sanderson, Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 29, 2008