Liang Min (not her real name) was 13 years old when she began working in a small restaurant in Chongqing last year. Usually she works for 13 to 15 hours a day. She receives people, serves tea, washes dishes and cleans the floor.
Liang Min can get about 350 yuan a month from her hard work. But she hardly gets a day off.
“At the end of the day I feel so tired,” said Liang. "My family is poor. There is no money for me to go to school."
Liang's story is not an unusual one. There are 250 million children in the world who are working in hard, sometimes dangerous. They do all kinds of work. Most of them are between the ages of 5 and 14. What has made children work?
Many children work to make money for their families.
Another reason is that schools are too far away or there are no schools in the area at all.
Some employers(雇主）are bad, too. They hire(雇用）children because they can pay them less money and give poor working places. They don't think that children will complain very much. In China, a law called Prohibition of Child Labour(《关于禁止使用童工的规定》）bans(禁止）any company hiring children under 16. The law says anyone who introduces a child to work will be fined(罚款）5,000 yuan.