A 16-year-old vocational student arrived at a factory in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province, for an internship. He worked 11-hour shifts – days and nights, weekdays and weekends – processing car parts. A 17-year-old began an internship at a technology company’s factory in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, logging more than 10 hours a day hauling heavy boxes. Another 17-year-old, assigned to an electronics manufacturing factory in Jiangxi Province, January 2022, worked 12-hour shifts.
Internships are mandatory for graduation from secondary vocational schools across China. But tragically these three young people did not finish their education. Despite expressing severe distress to factory managers and teachers, all three died during their internships, two by suicide, and one of serious illness that had progressed too far before receiving adequate medical care.
These were not workplace accidents in any ordinary sense. For vocational school students, internships are supposed to help build career skills for the roughly 4 million children who graduate each year. But new research by the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) shows that some internships involve hazardous conditions for student interns: long hours, vulnerability to work injuries, inappropriate work assignments, inadequate protection mechanisms, all in violation of domestic and international law.
That same research – drawing on news reports, court records, and government notices – also found companies in manufacturing, entertainment, and services are hiring children under 16 to work in spite of clear legal prohibitions. In one case, a 13-year-old child working at a garment factory in Hebei Province fell, suffering fractures, and skin damage requiring graft surgery. In July 2024 alone, authorities in Dongguan, Guangdong Province, issued 39 administrative penalty notices to companies for child labor violations.
But the true scale of these abuses almost certainly exceeds what is officially recorded or reported by state media or legal bodies, because that depends on victims and their families coming forward – a step many are unwilling to take given the risk of government retaliation.
That gap is precisely why international oversight matters. The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) and the International Labor Organization (ILO) have repeatedly called on Beijing to document violations and release disaggregated data on child labor, but the Chinese authorities have not complied. No publicly available disaggregated data exists to assess how many children have been subject to child labor abuse, or whether any remedies have been applied.
The responsibilities to protect children do not fall on the government alone. Chinese and foreign companies, including American and European firms, operating in and sourcing from China are obliged to act. While adopting Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) policies – which commit them to maintaining standards around working conditions, labor rights, and environmental sustainability – is becoming a common practice, this new research also shows that companies’ actual performance is alarmingly inconsistent.
Human rights due diligence should be conducted annually and published transparently. Firms should ensure their and their suppliers’ labor conditions meet international standards. Companies can go further – by seeking rights-respecting partnerships with vocational schools to provide substantive, career-relevant internship opportunities that genuinely benefit students and companies alike.
Foreign governments, too, have a role to play. The goods and services flowing from China, from clothing to electronics, touch the lives of consumers around the world – and so do the conditions under which they are produced. Ensuring that trade and bilateral agreements with China include meaningful child labor protections is not merely a formality; it is an acknowledgment that no child should be in these supply chains in the first place – and that when they are, governments and corporations will urgently remedy those abuses. This means requiring regular compliance reporting on child labor laws, CRC and ILO obligations, and establishing clear, enforceable consequences when those commitments are repeatedly violated.
On International Children’s Day in June 2025, President Xi Jinping exhorted: “We must not let the children suffer, and no matter how impoverished, we must not deprive them of education.” If Xi is serious, the path forward is clear: treat vocational school internships as educational tools, not sources of cheap and compliant labor. That means ending mandatory internships as graduation requirements until the government can guarantee that students in those programs are genuinely protected and eradicating the scourge of child labor.
The students who died – and those who remain at risk – are not just data points or numbers. They are children who went to school, followed the rules to try to build their future, and paid with their lives.
