The workers in Yunnan province had been lured into working for the kiln in Shilin county, where they were kept captive and beaten up if they refused to do manual labour, state media reported.

Police in Shilin raided the brick kiln on Friday after they were alerted to the disappearance of a villager who had been forced to go work for the factory and never returned home, said a Yunnan Daily website.

"Twenty-four people were rescued and at least three people at the brick kiln have been criminally detained," a police officer at the public security bureau in the provincial capital of Kunming, who refused to be named, told AFP.

The news follows a similar rescue operation in the northern province of Hebei on May 21, when police freed 34 people forced to work 14- to 18-hour days at a brick kiln and given electric shocks if they protested.

The workers were rescued only after one man managed to escape the factory and reported the abuses to the police, the local Yanzhao Metropolis Daily reported on Sunday.

Similar cases of slave labour have been reported sporadically around China for years, despite pledges to root them out following a huge scandal in 2007 in the northern and central provinces of Shanxi and Henan.

Thousands of people in the two provinces were found to have been forced to work in kilns and subjected to regular beatings and near-starvation diets, with the alleged collusion of some local officials and police.

Although no official numbers have been reported on how many were enslaved in that scandal, a parliamentary investigation said some 53,000 migrant workers had been employed in over 2,000 illegal brick kilns in Shanxi alone.

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