Poverty prompts Liangshan minors to seek work elsewhere

As a result of poverty, minors in the Liangshan Yi autonomous prefecture in Sichuan province would rather work as child laborers in Guangdong province than stay at home, Beijing Youth Daily reported.

On the afternoon of Jan 11, police in Butuo county, Liangshan, stopped 35 minors who were about to leave Sichuan to become child laborers. The minors were upset and their parents who were told to take them home were also unhappy and asked: "Why not allow the children to work outside? As child laborers, they can have enough to eat."

Nine days earlier, some of 41 child laborers from Liangshan found working illegally in an electronic equipment plant in Shenzhen, Guangdong, were sent home.

Most of the child laborers were girls aged between 13 and 14 who worked 12 hours a day for a fixed monthly salary of only 2,000 yuan ($330).

Before being sent home, one girl said: "I don't want to go home. I have rice and meat here and only potatoes and corn at home."

On a long-distance bus heading from Xichang, the capital of Liangshan, to Zhaojue county, a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily became acquainted with a 16-year-old girl who had been sent home from Guangdong on Jan 8.

The girl said she had bad luck to be discovered as a child laborer and sent home. "So many people younger than me haven't been found working as child laborers," she told the reporter.

She and other minors reached Dongguan, Guangdong, on Dec 8 to work in an electronic equipment plant for 12 hours a day, earning only 12 yuan per hour.

Before working in Dongguan, she had worked in Shenzhen for three years.

Liangshan is the country's largest habitat of the Yi ethnic group and it has more than 2 million Yi people.

In the aftermath of widespread drug-taking, drug trafficking and AIDS, many people have died, become handicapped or been jailed in Liangshan, which causes a deterioriation of children's living conditions, Beijing Youth Daily reported.

The latest statistics available show that in early 2009, more than 10,000 people were infected with HIV in Liangshan. More than half of the HIV carriers were intravenous drug users. A large number of women in their 30s had been infected with HIV by their drug-taking husbands, the newspaper said.

The poverty of mountainous Liangshan stems from both its inaccessibility and the rising number of HIV carriers and orphans as a result of widespread AIDS.

If no efforts are taken to solve such problems, children from Liangshan might still be willing to work in plants in coastal regions, Beijing Youth Daily said.