Pressure From Chinese Toy Boycott Felt : Exports: Charges that the playthings are made by exploited labor have sparked a U.S. ‘toycott.’

Despite the coming festive season, there are dark murmurings in China’s toyland.

China’s toy industry--one of the country’s biggest export earners--feels trapped by a U.S. campaign for a Christmas boycott of Chinese-made toys over allegations that the playthings are produced by exploited labor.

“We’re under a lot of pressure, and it’s not going to get any easier,” said Edmund Young, vice president of Perfekta Enterprises, a Hong Kong toy company.

China’s toyland is centered in the Shenzhen region bordering Hong Kong.

Like most other major Hong Kong manufacturers, Perfekta moved across the border to southern China in the early 1980s when Beijing relaxed Marxist orthodoxy and began its first experiments with capitalism.

Its plant is just outside the Shenzhen special economic zone in Guangdong province, the heart of the export machine that now drives the Chinese economy.

“We are trying to help China, particularly southern China, into an era of free enterprise,” said Dennis Ting, chairman of Hong Kong’s giant Kader industrial concern. “In the past 10 years, there has been a huge improvement in China, but Americans just don’t see that.”

Thanks mostly to the workers of southern China, and the opportunities created by Hong Kong companies, Beijing enjoys a trade surplus with the United States that reached $12 billion in 1990 and could soar to $15 billion this year.

China’s total toy exports to the United States last year were worth about $2.2 billion, according to industry analysts. Between January and September, Hong Kong re-exported about $1.7 billion worth of Chinese-made toys to the United States.

The “toycott” is spearheaded by a U.S. consumer group that says China’s success has been won with the sweat of exploited workers, including children.

“We know there will be an effect,” said Yang Changda, Perfekta’s factory manager. “But we don’t know yet how big the effect will be.”

Manufacturers fear that it could distort perceptions, reinforce prejudices and tarnish the image of China-made toys in the all-important U.S. Christmas market.

At stake in the broader debate over trade and human rights are billions of dollars worth of Chinese exports to the United States and the future of places such as Shenzhen, the vanguard of capitalism in the country.

At Kader’s plant outside Shenzhen, which employs 2,000 people, women work on a well-lit assembly line.

They can earn up to 1,000 yuan ($185) each month in pay and bonuses--about seven times the national average--and they work eight hours a day, six days a week.

“Of course it’s not too bad, or we wouldn’t have stayed for eight years,” said Tang Yu, a worker in her mid-20s.

Many workers at Perfekta’s factory have escaped grinding poverty in rural areas. They look young, but workers and managers alike scoff at suggestions that Perfekta, or any other company, employs anyone below the legal age of 16.

They say child labor may exist in small, locally run factories in China’s interior, but that major producers in Guangdong stay well clear of such practices.

The proposed U.S. boycott highlights an increasingly angry confrontation between China and the United States over trade that has emerged since Chinese soldiers crushed a pro-democracy movement in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square in 1989.

Last month, the United States said it would slap punitive tariffs on Chinese goods if there was no immediate progress on U.S. complaints concerning violations of copyrights and other intellectual property.

At the same time, Congress passed a bill setting human rights conditions on the extension of China’s Most Favored Nation trade status, which covers billions of dollars of exports.

Worries over Most Favored Nation status have prompted Kader and a number of other Hong Kong firms reluctantly to draw up emergency plans to shift production to Thailand and Indonesia.

“China will remain; we just can’t move everything out,” Ting said. “We are hoping that, with Hong Kong’s help, somehow China and the United States will be able to move closer together on this issue.”