20 'missing' Chinese migrant workers RoundUp found in Mongolia

By Hao Zhou

Twenty Chinese workers, previously reported missing, have been staying in Mongolia illegally, and will be repatriated soon, a Chinese diplomat told the Global Times Sunday.

"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 Ulan Bator. "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 anyone 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 Ulan Bator-based source who is quite familiar with the issue told the Global Times Sunday. "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.

Calls to the Consulate-General of Mongolia in Erenhot were not answered Sunday.