BEIJING - Police caught a labor boss accused of starving and beating workers to keep them enslaved in brick kilns, state media reported Sunday.
Heng, 42, had become the chief target in the scandal, which has shocked China and exposed links between Communist Party officials and the kiln owners. Chinese President Hu Jintao and other national leaders have ordered an investigation.
More than 20,000 police were used in Shanxi province in northern China to raid suspected illegal workplaces, with 168 people detained for running illegal kilns and mines there and in Henan province, in central China.
Xinhua said Wang Dongji, a Communist Party branch secretary at a village in Shanxi, was being investigated after his son was found to be an owner of a kiln were 32 people were starved, beaten and forced to work 14 hours or more a day.
The raids were prompted in part by an open letter posted online signed by a group of 400 fathers appealing for help in tracking down missing sons they believe were sold to kiln bosses.
The fathers accused Henan and Shanxi provincial authorities of ignoring them or even protecting the kilns and human traffickers, saying about 1,000 children were being forced to work at kilns under conditions of extreme cruelty.
The letter sparked an outpouring of television and newspapers reports, along with widespread discussion on the Internet. On Friday, Shanghai's Oriental Morning Post ran a photograph on its front page of one of the slaves, showing his skin rubbed raw and bloody.
News reports have said that workers as young as 8-years-old were recruited from bus and train stations with false promises or abducted off the street, then sold to kilns for $65 each.
The current Chinese leadership has made improving the often miserable plight of China's hundreds of millions of migrant workers a priority, yet exploitation remains common.
People's Daily said authorities were prepared to apologize to the workers and pay back wages at twice the region's minimum rate along with one-time sympathy payments.
However, it said most workers had already faded away, back to their homes in other provinces or to unknown destinations.
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