Few would choose to break their backs picking shellfish by hand on a Lancashire beach in the depths of winter but the drowned labourers had been faced with little choice.

Underworld Chinese gangs from Merseyside and Manchester have seized control of harvesting a £5 million seam of cockles in a hitherto untouched stretch of coast.

The workers are among the thousands of Chinese who arrive illegally in Britain every year, part of a mass migration that has lifted millions out of poverty and plunged at least as many into a different kind of despair.

Some workers are there to repay debts, either to the so-called Snakehead gangs, the human traffickers who brought them into the country, or to honour gambling losses. Others are students, illegal immigrants, asylum-seekers and “tourists” who cannot get a work permit to find a proper job in the catering trade. They huddle together on street corners in Liverpool before dawn to be collected in time for the first tide.

Tony Johnson, a councillor for Bolton-le-Sands, used to marvel at the arrival of the Chinese as he took his daily walk with his dog along the bay. “They seemed to be spilling out of two decrepit Transit vans,” he said. “You’d think, ‘There’s a huge number coming out of there’. They are taken out to the cockle beds on a trailer pulled by a tractor. They appeared to be marshalled by other people.”

The workers are left with £8.40 a day after their Chinese gangmasters deduct money for petrol and transport. Many of the dead are expected to come from Fujian province, where a Scotland Yard fact-finding team learning about people-trafficking discovered locals earning just £40 a month.

The region has contributed five centuries of nomads to the Chinese diaspora. The Fujianese go to Chinatowns overseas to make money with the ambition of returning home and building “Spanish villas” for themselves.

Jiajin He, a Fujian community leader in Britain, whose father and grandfather were emigrants, said: “Obviously any job the British don’t want to do, the Chinese will do it. Chinese don’t look down on any job if they can get money and feed their family. This is their attitude.”

An estimated 30,000 Fujian-ese are living in Britain, most coming in the past seven years. The 58 Chinese people who died of suffocation in a tomato lorry in Dover in 2000 were Fujianese. Many now arrive on false papers instead of being physically smuggled into the country.

The cost of getting to Britain is about £15,000 to £20,000. The immigrants, mainly better-off, ambitious young people aged 25 to 35, tend to borrow the money from relatives. Along the route, emigrants might pay a couple of thousand pounds each to traffickers on various legs of a journey which may take them from China to Hong Kong, and via Russia, the Balkan states and Brussels to Britain.

The majority of the 9,000 Chinese takeaway restaurants in Britain are now ownedby the Fujianese, who have bought the businesses from their Hong Kong founders.

Thomas Chan, chairman of the Chinese Takeaways Association, has been doing research which shows that, even in the smallest British town, the average takeaway already has three Fujianese workers.

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