Revelation
The existence of illegal brickyards was first reported to authorities in 1998. On 1 May, Chen Jianjiao, a representative of the Shanxi People's Congress, received a telephone call from a laborer who had escaped from an illegal brickyard. The escaped man also wrote to the chairman of the Shanxi People's Congress. As a result, slave rescue operations were carried out by provincial government authorities without notifying local officials. Over 150 slaves, three of them child laborers, were freed from these illegal brickyards.
There have been continuing reports of cruelty committed at these illegal brickyards since 2004. On 7 May 2007, Henan TV Metro Channel reported the case of five minors around sixteen years old who had disappeared from the environs of Zhengzhou Railway Station. Having heard of earlier instances of child laborers being kidnapped for brickyards in Shanxi, their parents suspected their children might be found there. Two months later these five were among fifty minors from Henan who were found at an illegal brickyard. Human traffickers had sold them to brickyards for 500 Yuan each.
On 10 May, reporters from Henan Television, accompanied by two parents, visited the sites of some illegal brickyards in Shanxi undercover. Reporters later visited many illegal brickyards in Yuncheng and Jincheng. The conditions they found were clearly those of slavery.
Read more about this topic: 2007 Chinese Slave Scandal
Famous quotes containing the word revelation:
“Only a very bad theologian would confuse the certainty that follows revelation with the truths that are revealed. They are entirely different things.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)
“In a symbol there is concealment and yet revelation: here therefore, by silence and by speech acting together, comes a double significance.... In the symbol proper, what we can call a symbol, there is ever, more or less distinctly and directly, some embodiment and revelation of the Infinite; the Infinite is made to blend itself with the Finite, to stand visible, and as it were, attainable there. By symbols, accordingly, is man guided and commanded, made happy, made wretched.”
—Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881)