The International Labour Organization estimates that there are 215 million children around the world engaged in work. No one knows for sure how many children are working in China because the government does not publish such data, but the recent signs are worrying. Several participants at a seminar in Shenzhen last week indicated that the use of child labour was on the rise again, particularly since the implementation of the Labour Contract Law in 2008. Children were primarily employed by factories as a means of cutting costs.

Two weeks ago, a truck carrying 17 migrant workers skidded and crashed, killing three workers and badly injuring the other 14. Just two days earlier, in the same city, another worker being transported along with a pile of building materials on the back of an open truck was killed after being impaled by a metal bar. But this was not a small city in central or western China, this was Singapore, supposedly one of the most advanced and modern cities in the world.

Well into the second week of the spring semester, hundreds of migrant children in Beijing’s Chaoyang district still have no school to go to. This despite a pledge made last week by the Chaoyang education committee that; “no school-age child will be out of school.” It seems all the Chaoyang government has done to honour its promise so far is to put up a notice listing the township offices where parents who had yet to find a school for their children could register. However, when questioned by the media, neither parents nor the township offices concerned were even aware of this notice.

Two civil rights activists in Beijing have urged the municipal authorities to accept the children of migrant workers into city’s kindergartens so that they don’t have to pay high fees at private nurseries or risk sending their children to poorly supervised unlicensed kindergartens. At the same time, officials in Chaoyang district have already taken action to deliberately exclude rather than include migrant children.

One of Shenzhen’s largest manufacturers has threatened not to hire any new workers in the city after a court ordered it to pay 800,000 yuan in compensation for nonpayment of statutory overtime and social insurance contributions for more than one hundred workers.

Several little boys were lining up in front of a tap in the corner of a school playground in suburban Beijing waiting to clean their lunch boxes. In the nearby classroom, another boy, about six or seven years old, was putting away his clean lunch box carefully into a plastic bag and then into his school bag. I was touched by these scenes. Some people say China is like Hong Kong 30 years ago. I am not sure this is true but these scenes did remind me of growing up in Hong Kong in the 1970s when parents were working hard to make a living, and children had to take care of themselves, and help out in the family. It was common at that time for older sisters to drop out of school to work to support the family. The difference was that Hong Kong children did not face systematic discrimination because of their residence status.

Every year, thousands of people are lured or kidnapped into illegal work places. The victims are forced to work long hours in dangerous conditions, beaten up or even killed. However, the maximum punishment for forced labour is only three years imprisonment, and only gross violations are brought to court.

A 69-year old man robbed a young female university student at the Beijing Railway Station. During the robbery, he encouraged the victim to cry for help. This was the second attempt he made to get himself arrested within half an hour. He was arrested and sentenced to two years imprisonment, but he was not satisfied with his “light” punishment fearing that he cannot support himself outside.

My report on migrant children shows that children without a local hukou in the cities are barred from major social services. Many can only study in sub-standard migrant schools. An NGO in Shanghai conducted a survey of 78 migrant schools in 2007 and found that teachers in Shanghai’s migrant schools earn between 950 and 1,000 yuan a month, barely more than the minimum wage, compared with 5,000 yuan for teachers in state schools.