Twenty Chinese workers, previously reported
missing, have been staying in Mongolia illegally, and will be repatriated soon,
a Chinese diplomat has been quoted in the Global Times, the English-language
newspaper published in Beijing. “There are exactly 20 Chinese migrant
workers in this case. None of them has a work visa, thus their stay in Mongolia
is illegal,” said Liu Jimin, consul of the Chinese embassy in Ulaanbaatar.
“The embassy is working with Mongolian authorities on their
repatriation.”

According to a newspaper in Hubei
Province, a total of 84 migrant workers from Huarong town, Ezhou, went to
Mongolia through a Huangshi-based labor agency called the Haifa Labor Export
Co. The first group of them, holding tourist visas, departed August 17.
However, after they arrived in Mongolia, their passports were “all
collected and taken away.”

What happened next is similar to
slavery. “Mongolians could buy any one of us at the price of 4,000 Chinese
yuan ($597),” a worker who returned to Hubei earlier this month told the
newspaper. “We were treated like animals.”

“There are tens of thousands of
Chinese migrant workers being brought into Mongolia to work in construction and
mining sectors like this,” a Ulaanbaatar-based source who is quite
familiar with the issue told the Global Times. “Those Chinese job agencies
usually promise the workers a monthly salary of 5,000 to 8,000 yuan.”

Those agencies usually take the Chinese
to the Consulate- General of Mongolia in Erenhot, a major China-Mongolia border
city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and apply for tourism visas for
them, the source added.

In an earlier report the newspaper
said 20 workers from Ezhou city, Hubei Province, have gone missing while
working in Mongolia, and the city government held an urgent meeting Saturday to
discuss the matter.  Of the over 40
workers taken to Mongolia in August, 10 have returned to China, 15 are on their
way home – but the others are still in Mongolia and there has not been any
contact with them. One of the workers who returned home said that his family
had lost touch with his uncle and father-in-law who are in Mongolia.

Another worker who returned to China
said that they slept in a hut and did not have much to eat. They were all sent
to different working places and there was always someone there to watch over
them during the night. Their passports had been taken in order to prevent them
from escaping.