作者：周敏
2026年初，年关将至。山西，一名农民工因讨薪多次无果，选择了最极端的报复方式——将拖欠他工资的雇主全家杀害。同一时期，福建泉州，一名包工头讨要工程款不得，将自己的汽车开到工地，引火自焚；泉州惠安，另一批被拖欠工资的工人，则选择烧掉了欠薪企业的仓库。
这不约而同的疯狂，渐渐成为可以被预测、被统计的社会现象。据民间记录项目”昨天”统计，2026年春节前那段时间，平均每天收集到的集体讨薪事件超过两百起；仅2026年4月，该项目记录的全国抗争事件就有七十四起，其中劳动者维权占比超过三分之一。这一年的讨薪潮，被多家观察者形容为”比往年更惨烈”——建筑、制造、医疗、公交，几乎所有行业都卷入其中，天津、广东、陕西等十余个省市无一幸免。
灭门与自焚，只是这条绝望光谱上最极端的两个刻度。在它们之间，是更大规模、却已经被这个社会”正常化”了的日常图景：工人爬上塔吊、爬上楼顶，以跳楼相威胁；包工头堵住工厂大门；讨薪者挤满劳动局、信访局的接待大厅，场面混乱而无人能够真正解决问题。
这一切，并非发生在某个法治真空、政府缺位的失序地带。而是一个拥有全套劳动法律、专项治理通知、年度考核机制、应急救助基金的国家，年复一年上演的固定剧目。
中国特色讨薪是被制度催熟的的绝望。把视野拉长到过去几年，会发现这套剧本的同一套台词。2024年，四川宜宾一名工人因讨要800元工资多次无果，纵火烧毁工厂，被网民称为”800哥”；当地官方的回应，是将其纵火行为定性为轻生厌世，而拖欠他的5370元工资，”正在走审批流程”。这句”正在走审批流程”俨然成了官方话术的标本。标本下的使用说明写着：在今日之中国，工人讨薪要作为紧急议题被一脸严肃地举起，然后再无限期地正常化、流程化、合法化。
更早之前，湖南耒阳一名农民工因雇主拖欠1560元工资，最终杀害对方一家三口；这桩2012年的旧案，在2024年又一次被网络重新传播——人们之所以反复提起它，并非出于猎奇，而是因为类似的故事，十几年来始终不曾真正停止。
这种以命相搏、以暴制暴的讨薪方式，已经成为一种可以被命名的现象：人们称之为中国特色讨薪——它有固定的季节性（年关爆发），固定的舞台（塔吊、楼顶、工厂大门），固定的诉求方式（喊口号、爬高处、堵大门），以及，几乎固定的结局：工资不一定能拿得到手，讨薪者却可能先一步被警方以扰乱公共秩序、寻衅滋事为名拘留。
国家在场，问题依旧。这是一场”治理”了二十年的顽疾。
2023年，国务院修订印发了《保障农民工工资支付工作考核办法》，将欠薪治理成效纳入对地方政府的政绩考核；几乎每到冬季，国务院就业促进和劳动保护工作领导小组办公室都会下发通知，开展治理欠薪冬季行动，要求摸排风险、公开举报渠道、应急处置。建筑行业还建立了农民工工资监管账户和”代发”制度，理论上由施工方直接发放工资，绕开层层转包中的克扣环节。
个案确实存在成功的例子——安徽滁州一名农民工和五十五名工友,在被拖欠四年、超过八十万元工资后，最终经协调拿到了钱。这些稀罕事会出现在官方媒体的年终总结里，作为治理成绩。
但制度的设计者自己也清楚，这些举措相当地隔靴搔痒。2026年的一篇官方背景调研报道直言不讳：基层人社干部反映，《保障农民工工资支付条例》虽然对压身上——他们没有能力对冲风险，没有制度为他们兜底，只好用身体去赌一个本不该由他们承担的代价。
2026年的这一连串灭门、自焚、跳塔事件，是一套长期存在的制度性逻辑，在经济下行周期里被进一步放大后的必然显影。当一个社会的治理资源更多地投向“如何让讨薪者闭嘴”，而非如何让欠薪者付钱；当讨薪比欠薪还承担更高的法律风险；当工人除了以命相搏之外，找不到任何一条真正畅通的维权渠道——我们应该再对下一起灭门案、下一次跳楼跳桥感到意外吗？
编辑：李晶
校对：王滨
翻译：戈冰
When Wage Seekers Become Criminals: The Institutional Dead End of Wage Demands with Chinese Characteristics
By Zhou Min
At the beginning of 2026, as the Lunar New Year approached, the end of the year was drawing near. In Shanxi, a migrant worker, having repeatedly failed to demand his unpaid wages, chose the most extreme method of retaliation—murdering the entire family of the employer who owed him money. During the same period, in Quanzhou, Fujian, a subcontractor who could not recover his project funds drove his car to the construction site and committed self-immolation by setting it on fire; in Huian, Quanzhou, another group of workers whose wages had been withheld chose to burn down the warehouse of the enterprise that owed them money.
This concurrent madness is gradually becoming a social phenomenon that can be predicted and statistically tracked. According to statistics from “Yesterday,” a civil recording project, during the period leading up to the Spring Festival of 2026, the average number of collective wage demand incidents collected exceeded two hundred per day; in April 2026 alone, the project recorded seventy-four protest incidents across the country, with worker rights defense accounting for more than one-third. The wage demand wave of this year was described by multiple observers as “more tragic and violent than in previous years”—construction, manufacturing, healthcare, and public transit, almost all industries were engulfed, and more than ten provinces and municipalities, including Tianjin, Guangdong, and Shaanxi, were not spared.
Mass murder and self-immolation are merely the two most extreme markers on this spectrum of despair. Between them lies a larger-scale, yet already “normalized” daily landscape within this society: workers climbing cranes and rooftops, threatening to jump; subcontractors blocking factory gates; wage seekers crowding the reception halls of labor bureaus and letters and visits bureaus, scenes chaotic and yet no one capable of truly resolving the issues.
All of this does not occur in some lawless vacuum or a chaotic zone devoid of government. Rather, it is a recurring drama staged year after year in a country that possesses a complete set of labor laws, special governance notices, annual assessment mechanisms, and emergency relief funds.
Wage demands with Chinese characteristics are a despair accelerated to maturity by the institution. Stretching the perspective back over the past few years, one finds the exact same lines from this script. In 2024, a worker in Yibin, Sichuan, having repeatedly failed to demand 800 yuan in wages, set fire to a factory and was dubbed “800 Brother” by netizens; the local official response was to characterize his arson as world-weary suicidal ideation, while the 5,370 yuan in wages owed to him was “currently undergoing the approval process.” This phrase, “currently undergoing the approval process,” has deservingly become a specimen of official rhetoric. The instruction manual beneath the specimen reads: in today’s China, workers demanding wages must first be held up with a solemn face as an urgent issue, and then indefinitely normalized, proceduralized, and legalized.
Even earlier, a migrant worker in Leiyang, Hunan, because his employer withheld 1,560 yuan in wages, ultimately murdered three members of the employer’s family; this old case from 2012 was recirculated on the internet once again in 2024—the reason people repeatedly bring it up is not out of curiosity for the bizarre, but because similar stories, for over a decade, have never truly ceased.
This method of demanding wages by risking lives and countering violence with violence has already become a phenomenon that can be named: people call it wage demands with Chinese characteristics—it possesses a fixed seasonality (erupting at the end of the year as the New Year approaches), fixed stages (cranes, rooftops, factory gates), fixed methods of appeal (shouting slogans, climbing to heights, blocking gates), and an almost fixed outcome: the wages might not necessarily be successfully obtained, yet the wage seekers may instead be detained first by the police under the names of disrupting public order or picking quarrels and provoking trouble.
The state is present, yet the problem remains. This is a chronic illness that has undergone “governance” for twenty years.
In 2023, the State Council revised and issued the Measures for the Evaluation of the Work of Guaranteeing Wage Payments to Migrant Workers, integrating the efficacy of managing withheld wages into the political performance evaluation of local governments; nearly every winter, the Office of the State Council Leading Group for Employment Promotion and Labor Protection issues a notice to launch winter campaigns to govern wage withholding, requiring the screening of risks, publicizing of reporting channels, and emergency handling. The construction industry has even established migrant worker wage supervision accounts and a “direct payout” system, which in theory allows the construction party to issue wages directly, bypassing the deduction loops in multi-level subcontracting.
Successful cases do indeed exist in individual instances—a migrant worker and fifty-five fellow workers in Chuzhou, Anhui, after having their wages withheld for four years amounting to over 800,000 yuan, ultimately received their money through mediation. These rare occurrences appear in the year-end summaries of official media as governance achievements.
But the designers of the institution are themselves well aware that these measures are quite akin to scratching an itch through one’s boot. An official-backed research report in 2026 stated bluntly: grassroots human resources and social security cadres reflected that although the Regulations on Guaranteeing Wage Payments to Migrant Workers crush down heavily upon their bodies—they have no capacity to hedge against risks, no institution to provide a safety net for them, and so they have no choice but to use their physical bodies to gamble on a price that should never have been borne by them.
This continuous string of mass murders, self-immolations, and tower-jumping incidents in 2026 is the inevitable manifestation of a long-existing institutional logic further amplified during an economic downward cycle. When a society’s governance resources are directed more toward “how to make wage seekers shut up” rather than how to make wage defaulters pay; when demanding wages carries higher legal risks than withholding wages; when workers cannot find a single truly unblocked channel for rights defense except for risking their lives—should we still feel surprised by the next mass murder case, or the next instance of jumping from a building or a bridge?
Editor: Li Jing
Proofreader: Wang Bin
Translator: Ge Bing
