Chinese maimed in industrial accidents

By Tim Johnson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

	DOUG KANTER / KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS Wang Xuebing, a 19-year-old from Hubei province in central China, says he was making casings for air conditioners on a metal-mold machine when his right hand was severed in Shenzhen, China.
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Yan feels lucky that he lost only part of his finger, down to the first knuckle. He's confident that he'll get back his job, which pays about $96 a month.

"Every day, we get five or six cases like this, and sometimes over a dozen," said a hand surgeon at another large Shenzhen hospital, who asked that neither he nor his hospital be identified for fear of reprisal from city officials. "Most of the machines are old and semiautomatic. The workers have to put their hands into the machines."

In a grim replay of the industrial revolution in the United States and other countries, industrial machinery will crush or sever the arms, hands and fingers of some 40,000 Chinese workers this year, according to government-controlled news media. Some experts privately say the true number is higher.

A majority of the accidents occur in metalworking and electronics plants with heavy stamping equipment, shoe and handbag factories with leather-cutting equipment, toy factories and industrial-plastics plants with blazing-hot machinery.

In Shenzhen's hospital wards, maimed factory workers nurse mangled hands and forearm stumps. They tell of factory managers who've removed machine safety guards that slowed output, and of working on decrepit, unsafe machinery. Workers toiling 100 hours a week grow dazed from fatigue, then lose their fingers to machines.

Local officials routinely overlook appalling safety conditions, worried that factory owners will relocate. They send mutilated migrant workers back to distant rural villages, shunting the burden of workplace injuries onto poorer inland provinces.

Zhou Litai, a lawyer who represents hundreds of workers maimed or killed on the job, said foreign consumers should be aware that some "Made in China" products "are tainted with blood from cut-off fingers or hands."

Smaller factory owners have no leverage with global buyers and are always worried they'll be replaced by other suppliers, so they try to make money rapidly, said Chen Ka-wai, the assistant director of the Hong Kong Christian Industrial Committee, a watchdog group that monitors working conditions on the mainland.

Chinese media call Yongkang in coastal Zhejiang province the "finger-cutting city." Yongkang's 7,000 small factories make tools, and some 1,000 workers in those factories lose fingers or hands each year, the Metropolis Express newspaper said Feb. 18.

"The majority of them will be immediately fired by the owners," said the Web site run by the Communist Party's national newspaper, People's Daily. "The compensation for each cut-off finger is 500 yuan," or about $60, roughly a month's salary.
 
In China, laws abound, but enforcement is often lacking.

"China has a series of laws protecting workers' rights and interests. They are probably better than in some Western countries. But they don't apply it, particularly at the local level," said Zhou, the labor lawyer.

For a young person, losing a hand spells doom. With as many as 20 million healthy people clamoring for jobs each year, factory owners never hire disabled people. Dismembered workers are condemned to destitution — and often loneliness.

"With no money, it's hard to find a girlfriend," said Sun Hongyuan, 28, a worker who lost his right hand several years ago.

Accidents also are disasters for rural parents, most of whom have only one or two children because of China's strict birth-restriction policy and rely on their children for support in old age.

Some workers would prefer to die because their parents would get a larger one-time compensation, said Luo Yun, professor of workplace safety at Beijing's University of Geology.

"There's a popular saying now: 'We can afford to die, but we can't afford to be injured,' " Luo said.

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