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 The passengers scurried over to a group of men standing by their
motorcycles, climbed aboard the bikes and disappeared into the
night. Two Chinese police officers in uniform, stationed at a small
post near the crossing point in the border town of Dongxing, watched
impassively as they rode past.
"We come every night," said one young biker with spiky hair before
he rode off. "Sometimes we carry (smuggled) goods into town.
Sometimes we carry Vietnamese workers."
The bikers’ illicit cargo on that late summer night last year was
illegal laborers. They were headed on a 700-kilometre (440 miles)
journey to the economic powerhouse of Guangdong. The province,
filled with factories making goods for export, has been dubbed “the
workshop of the world.”
The smuggling of illegal workers from Vietnam across the 1,400-km
(840-mile) border into China is growing. Labor brokers estimate that
tens of thousands work at factories in the Pearl River Delta, which
abuts Hong Kong. Workers from other Southeast Asian nations are
joining them.
 Visits by Reuters to a half-dozen factory towns in southern China
revealed the employment of illegal workers from Vietnam is
widespread, and authorities often turn a blind eye to their
presence. Workers from Myanmar and Laos were also discovered to be
working in these areas.
Reuters found that employers supply these illegal workers with fake
identity cards and sometimes confine them to factory compounds to
keep them out of sight of the authorities. Chinese human smuggling
syndicates, known as “snakeheads", work with Vietnamese gangs to
control the lucrative trade, workers and labor brokers in China
said. The syndicates take a cut of the workers' monthly wages - up
to 500 yuan ($80) a month in some cases, according to one broker -
and charge factory owners a fee.
(For graphic on China's illegal workers, see:
http://reut.rs/1M5YJjd)
INFLECTION POINT
Vietnamese officials express concern at the illegal flow of labor
into China. The number of Vietnamese crossing a long border with
“complex terrain" has increased in recent years, posing a challenge
for both governments, said Pham Thu Hang, deputy spokesperson at the
foreign ministry in Hanoi. She did not have figures on the illegal
flow. "Taking advantage of this situation, some bad elements have
brought Vietnamese to work illegally in China, making it hard for
the labor administration in both countries," she said.
A Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman declined to comment,
directing Reuters to other government departments she did not name.
The Ministry of Public Security in Beijing did not respond to a
faxed request for comment, nor did the Guangdong province Public
Security Department.
The growing influx of illegal labor into China is evidence of an
economy that has reached an inflection point. Chinese factories have
long depended on an abundant supply of cheap domestic labor to power
the country’s $2.3 trillion-a-year export sector. But the number of
people joining the workforce is declining as China's society ages
and wages are rising.
 Factory owners are struggling to retain their edge. They face a
choice. They can move production from the coast where wages are
higher, either to inland provinces or across the border to places
like Vietnam and Cambodia. Or they can pay the snakeheads and labor
brokers to smuggle in foreign workers who cost less, have no
protections and can be easily laid off.
The rest of the world will begin to feel the effects as China
transitions away from its cheap labor-intensive export model, says
Jianguang Shen, the chief Asia economist for Mizuho Securities Asia
Ltd. who wrote a research report in June on China’s slowing supply
of internal migrant workers. “China has been subsidizing other parts
of the global economy, not only by cheap labor but also (through)
very low welfare protection of the workers … In the global sense, if
everything else is equal, global manufactured costs may become a
little more expensive.”
Across Asia, the search for new sources of cheap workers to power
the continent’s low-margin, labor-intensive industries is boosting
migration - and along with it, the business of people smuggling and
human trafficking. Vietnam, a nation of 92.5 million people, sent
107,000 workers abroad legally last year – a 20 percent increase
from the year before.
China does not release any official data on illegal foreign workers.
One Chinese labor broker estimated "at least 30,000" illegal workers
were employed just in Dongguan, an industrial city of 8 million and
home to tens of thousands of export-oriented factories. An April
report in the official China Daily newspaper said authorities in
Guangdong province had investigated at least 5,000 cases last year
of illegal foreign workers.
Blue-collar wages in China have nearly doubled in the past five
years to roughly 2,800 yuan (about $450) a month for production-line
workers, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics. Some
Vietnamese are paid about half of that, labor brokers and workers
said. Others make as much as Chinese workers. But even then,
manufacturers are saving because they don’t pay medical insurance or
pension contributions for these workers.
For factory workers in Vietnam earning $250 a month, the opportunity
of better pay across the border is irresistible. One Vietnamese
factory worker, who came from a town near the border in Phu Tho
province, said by phone half the people between the ages of 30 and
45 in her town had left for China, where wages were "double, or even
triple" what they are at home.
JUNGLE PROCESSION
On the Vietnamese side of the border, the city of Lang Son is one of
the two main smuggling points into China. A Vietnamese worker in
China's Fujian province interviewed by phone said a guide led him
and about 1,000 workers in a snaking procession from Lang Son along
a barely discernible jungle path across the land border into China
last year. They kept out of sight of Vietnamese border officials, he
said. But on the other side of the border, Chinese customs officers
ignored them, the worker said.
A motor bike rider in Dongxing drove a Reuters reporter along a
route used by smugglers to show how minivans and large tourist
coaches filled with Vietnamese evaded police and military
checkpoints on main roads. At times, the vehicles wind through small
villages to their final destination in Dongguan and other Pearl
River Delta factory towns. Scouts are stationed along the way to
raise the alarm if police are spotted. Local residents provide rest
stops where smuggled workers can stay until the coast is clear,
labor brokers and workers told Reuters.
If factories place an order for foreign workers, “we can bring in
hundreds at a time," said a broker surnamed Zhang. He said he deals
directly with the smuggling gangs. Sitting in his office in
Dongguan, furnished with a coffee table and black leather sofa,
Zhang said “the snakeheads can bring the workers across within a
week.”
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Many illegal foreign workers are housed on factory premises to avoid
detection by local authorities. But in some places that Reuters
visited in southern China, the workers seemed to move around
unimpeded.
In the Pearl River Delta factory town of Dalingshan, a company
called Jia Hao produces wooden picture frames for export to the
United States and Europe. There, hundreds of workers, some wearing
Jia Hao’s gray polo shirt uniforms, strolled in the streets after
work hours. They played pool and ate at noodle stalls along the
road. They did not seem to understand Chinese when spoken to. A
manager at the plant told Reuters the workers were illegally brought
into China from Myanmar.
Local law enforcement officials called "Chengguan” patrolled the
area on foot and on mopeds. They showed no interest in the workers.
Jia Hao's factory manager denied the workers were illegal, saying
they were ethnic Wa people, originally from Myanmar's northern Shan
state but now living in the Ximeng region of China’s southwestern
Yunnan province.
“The Public Security Bureau gave us access to a website to check.
For every worker, we need to check if their ID is real, and only
then can we hire them,” said Zheng Lunshun, the factory manager at
Jia Hao. “If their identity cards were fake, we wouldn't be able to
find them on the online system.”
A duty officer at the local police branch in Dalingshan said police
had inspected the factory and found no illegal workers. Days after
contacting the police and the factory, Reuters observed far fewer
workers leaving the factory gates after work or milling around the
streets than before.
DETAINED AND DEPORTED
Some factory owners take extra precautions. To avoid detection by
the authorities, the manager of a furniture factory in Dalingshan
said new Vietnamese workers were driven straight into the factory
complex to a separate building with its own production line and
dormitory. The Vietnamese were allowed outside the factory once a
week, accompanied by factory guards, he said.
Employers face fines of 10,000 yuan ($1,600) or more for recruiting
illegal workers, according to Chinese media reports.
A manager in a factory making acrylic and gift products, who would
only identify himself as "Mr. Li," said his plant employed around 80
Vietnamese and Burmese workers in his workforce of around 600. He
said the factory owner saved money, but was constantly anxious about
a possible crackdown by the authorities. "All the Vietnamese workers
hold false identity cards," Li said, speaking on the condition that
his factory not be identified. "So (the boss) has an excuse. But he
lives in fear every day.”
Chinese police do occasionally launch crackdowns, workers and
factory owners say. At least 20 towns and cities in southern China
have seen raids on factories employing illegal workers, according to
state media reports reviewed by Reuters.
Hang from Vietnam's foreign ministry said her government has
coordinated with the Chinese in "busting many human trafficking
rings." Hang did not provide details of these busts.
Those who do get caught are taken to police detention centers,
sometimes for weeks, before they are deported back to Vietnam,
workers interviewed for this article said. A policeman in the
Dalingshan police station who gave his surname as Zhou said illegal
workers were held for up to 30 days before being repatriated.
“Most of the illegal workers are from Vietnam, and we will look for
these people,” said Zhou, who handles transient population issues at
the Dalingshan police station.
In China, few foreign work permits are granted for blue-collar jobs,
according to factory managers and labor brokers. Two factory
managers in Dongguan said workers were given fake ID cards with fake
Chinese names and coached by management at the factories on how to
respond if questioned by police. The managers said local authorities
were paid to ignore the workers. Chinese police and the Human
Resources and Social Security Bureaus in Dalingshan city and
Guangdong province declined to respond to faxed questions.
A man who makes fake identity cards told Reuters by telephone from
Dongguan that he had processed "large numbers" of fake documents for
illegal foreign workers from Myanmar and Vietnam. All he needed was
a false name and a photograph of the worker to produce an ID card.
The cards typically cost around 100 yuan, or $16, he said.
BUSINESS AS USUAL
Tensions between Vietnam and China over competing territorial claims
in the South China Sea have not deterred Vietnamese workers from
heading across the border. Foreign-owned factories in Vietnam,
thought to be run by Chinese, were attacked last year when tensions
flared after China parked a $1-billion deepwater rig off the coast
of Vietnam. Four people were killed and hundreds detained for the
attacks.
During a visit last year to the Chinese border town of Dongxing,
small groups of Vietnamese workers could be seen building a 10-foot
(3 meters) high border fence on the Chinese side. Ngoc Duc, 30, said
he had come across the border illegally. He said he earned 100 yuan
a day in China doing welding work on the fence, compared with about
200,000 dong ($9) a day in Vietnam.
“China is the best place to make money,” he said when asked if he
feared being caught by Chinese authorities. “More and more of us
will come.”
(Additional reporting by Nguyen Mai in Hanoi, Viola Zhou in Hong
Kong and Ben Blanchard in Beijing. Editing by Bill Tarrant and Peter
Hirschberg)
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