作者：周敏  

2026年7月6日21时，横州市娘山水库水位已达88.15米且仍在上涨。当地水利部门直到深夜23时才发布通告，决定于次日凌晨2时30分开闸泄洪，要求横州镇、莲塘镇通知涉及的村庄群众远离河道。从发现险情到实际泄洪，留给下游群众的反应时间三个半小时，这短短200分钟是在深夜——手机信号本就容易在暴雨中中断，村民酣睡，村干部逐户敲门通知的效率可想而知。

而在几十公里外的六蓝水库，情况更为凶险。据下游村民梁微转述，8点通知泄洪，9点多堤坝就塌了——从通知到决堤，几十分钟而已。何等仓促。

六蓝水库坝体最终出现两处溃口，总长约50米，洪水直冲云表镇下辖的邓圩、振兴、黄榃、亚陂等多个村庄，部分区域水淹二楼。据南宁市应急管理局通报，此次洪涝灾害受灾人口约5.5万，转移疏散4.8万，另据多方消息，横州因灾死亡、失联人数持续攀升。

同时发生了两个灾难：泄洪与决堤。前者是有预案、有闸门控制的主动排水，后者是坝体本身失去控制的被动溃决。横州这次的实际情况，是官方通报的”漫顶、决堤”——也就是说，是一次没能及时调洪、最终酿成溃坝的险情。把泄洪当作事后解释的挡箭牌，掩盖不了大坝本身管理和预警的失败。

六蓝水库其实早已被官方点名列为问题水库，且有村民反映，险情发生前一天水库已经蓄满了。一座已知存在隐患的中型水库，承担着十几万亩农田灌溉任务、下游又是人口密集的乡镇村落，为什么没有在汛期来临前完成除险加固？为何直到坝体开裂、水位逼近极限，才仓促决定开闸？这些问题比半夜泄洪更值得深究——失责不单单发生在泄洪的那一瞬，而是隐藏在此前数月甚至数年的隐患排查与投入之中。

近些年，从郑州7·20地铁隧道进水，到涿州为保京畿而分洪淹没大片农村，几乎每一次极端降雨引发的重大伤亡，事后复盘都会指向同一组问题：预警发布滞后、基层通知不到位、工程设施带病运行、决策链条冗长。郑州事故后，国务院调查组认定其为重大生产安全责任事故，处理了数十名相关责任人。但公众普遍的感觉却是，处理停留在行政处分层面，没有对决策链条更高层级的追问，也未能转化为可验证、可监督的制度改进。涿州分洪的争议则更进一步：为保护上游城市而牺牲下游农村的决策逻辑本身有其防洪工程学上的合理性，但决策过程是否充分论证？受灾群众的知情权和补偿是否到位？至今缺乏透明的公开说明。

这次横州，同样的剧本，同样的家园尽失、生灵涂炭。

古代治水同样依赖人力和经验，技术条件远远逊于今日，但问责机制要直接得多。比如明代，对河防官员实行严格的岁修考核，堤防失事导致伤亡，主管官员依情节轻重要被杖责、革职乃至更重的惩处。且这种问责通常发生在事故之后不久，责任人是谁、受了什么处分，是可以公开追溯的。这套制度当然有其时代局限，但它至少建立了一条清晰的因果链：谁主管、谁负责、出了事谁承担。

今天的问责机制在技术能力上远胜古人——遥感监测、水位预警系统、应急指挥体系一应俱全。但在责任落地这一环，却比古代更加模糊。灾害发生后，通报中充斥着”迅速启动应急响应”、”全力搜救转移”这类程序性表述，偏偏很少看到对”为何险情发现到预警发布之间存在数小时空窗”、”为何已知隐患水库未能提前加固”等具体问题的正面回应。技术进步了，但透明度和问责的具体性没有同步提升，这才是问题。

这次横州灾情中，还有一个值得记录的现象是：大量最初的求救信息，来自身处异地、通过社交平台为家乡父母求助的普通网民，而不是官方来主动通报。云表镇一位居民的父母被困在了两层自建房顶楼，是女儿在社交平台发帖求助后，才联系上了应急部门，得到的回应却是：救援行动已经展开，但由于洪水涨势过猛，呼吁市民先自行前往高处——这是不是把最初的自救责任推回给了受灾群众本身？与此同时，本地民间自发组成的救援队伍，在断网断电、道路被淹的情况下持续搜救转移群众，成为实际救援力量的重要补充。

但民间救援长期面临的困境是：缺乏统一协调、没有官方授权往往寸步难行，装备、信息、人力都要自行解决，一旦深入险情区域出现意外，责任归属也不明确，这使得很多本可以更快抵达现场的民间力量，不得不在”救不救、怎么救”之间反复权衡。一个健康的应急体系，理应是官方力量与民间力量的协同，而不是让民间在审批空白与责任真空中自行摸索。如果政府救援迟缓，又不能为民间救援提供便利通道和明确规则，受灾群众实际上是两头落空。

批评这类事件，不是简单地情绪宣泄，而是要把几个具体问题铺开在桌子上，倾听一个清晰的答案：

六蓝水库作为已知的”问题水库”，此前的除险加固计划执行到了什么程度？谁对此负责？

从险情预警到实际泄洪/决堤之间的时间窗口，是否符合应急预案的最低标准？如果不符合，是谁在哪个环节延误了？

民间救援力量在此次灾害中发挥了怎样的作用？官方是否应当、以及将如何为民间救援提供更明确的协作机制？

此次灾害的死亡、失联人数最终核实结果如何？相关责任人是否会被问责，问责结果是否会公开？

这些问题的答案，悬而未决。灾情在笔者打字的同时还在发展中。一些说法（包括社交平台上流传的、尚未获得官方或主流媒体证实的很多求救、遇难细节）仍需要时间和更多信源去核实。但可以确定的是，如果这次事件的问责最终仍旧止步于几份谨小慎微的通报，那么下一次暴雨时，会不会又一个深夜发出的泄洪通知，把同样的悲剧再来一遍。

编辑：李晶  校对：周敏 翻译：周敏

Guangxi Hengzhou Reservoir Dam Failure Flood — Repeated Dereliction of Duty on a Land of Suffering

Author: Zhou Min

Abstract: The Hengzhou reservoir dam failure incident in Guangxi once again exposes the low social governance and emergency response capabilities of the CCP authoritarian government. Power without accountability and supervision will inevitably disregard the life and death of the people.

At 21:00 on July 6, 2026, the water level of Niangshan Reservoir in Hengzhou City had reached 88.15 meters and was still rising. The local water conservancy department did not issue a notice until 23:00 late at night, deciding to open the gates to discharge floodwaters at 2:30 the next morning, requiring Hengzhou Town and Liantang Town to notify the residents of the involved villages to stay away from the river course. From the discovery of danger to the actual flood discharge, the reaction time left for the downstream masses was three and a half hours. This short 200 minutes was in the dead of night — mobile phone signals were already prone to interruption during heavy rain, villagers were fast asleep, and the efficiency of village cadres knocking on doors house by house to notify them can well be imagined.

In the Liulan Reservoir dozens of kilometers away, the situation was even more dangerous. According to the narration of downstream villager Liang Wei, the notice to discharge floodwaters came at 8 o’clock, and the dam collapsed at past 9 o’clock — from the notice to the breach, it was only a matter of tens of minutes. How hasty. The dam body of Liulan Reservoir eventually sustained two breaches, with a total length of about 50 meters. The flood rushed straight towards several villages under the jurisdiction of Yunbiao Town, including Dengxu, Zhenxing, Huangtan, and Yabei, with some areas flooded up to the second floor. According to a briefing by the Nanning Municipal Emergency Management Bureau, this flood disaster affected a population of about 55,000 and evacuated 48,000. In addition, according to multiple sources, the number of dead and missing people in Hengzhou due to the disaster continues to climb.

Two disasters occurred simultaneously: flood discharge and dam breach. The former is an active drainage with contingency plans and controlled by gates; the latter is a passive collapse where the dam body itself loses control. The actual situation in Hengzhou this time is the “overtopping and dam breach” as reported in the official briefing — that is to say, it was a danger that failed to regulate the flood in time and ultimately resulted in a dam failure. Using flood discharge as a shield for post-event explanations cannot cover up the failure of the management and early warning of the dam itself.

Liulan Reservoir had in fact long been explicitly named and listed by officials as a problem reservoir, and some villagers reported that the reservoir was already full the day before the danger occurred. For a medium-sized reservoir known to have hidden dangers, which bears the irrigation task of hundreds of thousands of mu of farmland and has densely populated towns and villages downstream, why was the elimination of dangers and reinforcement not completed before the arrival of the flood season? Why was the decision to open the gates made so hastily only when the dam body cracked and the water level approached the limit? These questions deserve deeper investigation than the midnight flood discharge — the dereliction of duty does not merely occur at the moment of flood discharge, but is hidden in the hidden danger inspection and investment during the preceding months or even years.

In recent years, from the Zhengzhou July 20 subway tunnel flooding to the Zhuozhou flood diversion to protect the capital region which inundated vast rural areas, almost every major casualty caused by extreme rainfall points to the same set of problems in post-event reviews: delayed issuance of early warnings, inadequate notification at the grassroots level, facilities running with defects, and lengthy decision-making chains. After the Zhengzhou accident, the State Council investigation team identified it as a major production safety responsibility accident and penalized dozens of relevant responsible persons. However, the general feeling among the public was that the handling remained at the level of administrative sanctions, lacking questioning of higher levels of the decision-making chain, and failing to transform into verifiable and supervisable institutional improvements. The controversy over flood diversion in Zhuozhou went a step further: the decision-making logic of sacrificing downstream rural areas to protect upstream cities has its own rationality in flood control engineering, but was the decision-making process fully demonstrated and debated? Were the affected masses’ right to know and compensation in place? To this day, a transparent public explanation is lacking.

This time in Hengzhou, it is the same script, the same loss of homes, and the same devastation of life.

Ancient flood control also relied on human labor and experience, with technical conditions far inferior to those of today, but the accountability mechanism was much more direct. For example, in the Ming Dynasty, strict annual maintenance assessments were implemented for river defense officials. If a dike failure resulted in casualties, the chief official would be flogged, dismissed, or even subjected to harsher punishments depending on the severity of the circumstances. Moreover, such accountability usually occurred shortly after the accident; who the responsible person was and what punishment they received could be publicly traced. This system certainly had its historical limitations, but it at least established a clear chain of causality: whoever is in charge is responsible, and whoever is responsible bears the consequences if something goes wrong.

Today’s accountability mechanism is far superior to that of the ancients in terms of technical capability — remote sensing monitoring, water level early warning systems, and emergency command systems are all available. However, in the link where responsibility lands, it is more ambiguous than in ancient times. After a disaster occurs, briefings are filled with procedural expressions such as “rapidly initiated emergency response” and “sparing no effort to search, rescue, and transfer,” yet they rarely see direct responses to specific questions such as “why there was a gap of several hours between the discovery of danger and the release of early warnings” and “why the known hidden-danger reservoir failed to be reinforced in advance.” Technology has progressed, but transparency and the specificity of accountability have not improved simultaneously, which is the problem.

In this Hengzhou disaster, another phenomenon worth recording is: a large amount of the initial information seeking help came from ordinary netizens who were located elsewhere and sought help for their parents in their hometown through social platforms, rather than being actively reported by officials. The parents of a resident in Yunbiao Town were trapped on the top floor of a two-story self-built house. It was only after the daughter posted a plea for help on a social platform that contact was made with the emergency department. The response received was: rescue operations had already commenced, but due to the rapid rise of the flood, citizens were urged to first head to high ground on their own — is this pushing the initial responsibility of self-rescue back to the affected masses themselves? At the same time, local civil rescue teams spontaneously formed, continuously searching, rescuing, and transferring the masses under conditions of cut-off network and power, and flooded roads, becoming an important supplement to the actual rescue forces.

However, the long-term dilemma faced by civil rescue is: lacking unified coordination and without official authorization, they often find it difficult to move a single step; equipment, information, and manpower must all be resolved by themselves. Once they go deep into dangerous areas and accidents occur, the attribution of responsibility is also unclear. This makes many civil forces, which could have arrived at the scene faster, repeatedly weigh between “whether to rescue and how to rescue.” A healthy emergency system should rationally be the synergy between official forces and civil forces, rather than letting the civil sector grope on their own in administrative blanks and responsibility vacuums. If government rescue is slow and cannot provide convenient channels and clear rules for civil rescue, the affected masses actually fall between two stools.

Criticizing this type of event is not simple emotional venting, but rather laying out several specific questions on the table to listen for a clear answer:

To what extent had the previous elimination of dangers and reinforcement plan for Liulan Reservoir, as a known “problem reservoir,” been executed? Who is responsible for this?

Does the time window between the danger warning and the actual flood discharge/dam breach comply with the minimum standards of the emergency plan? If it does not comply, who delayed in which link?

What kind of role did civil rescue forces play in this disaster? Should the authorities, and how will they, provide a clearer collaboration mechanism for civil rescue?

What is the final verified result of the number of deaths and missing persons in this disaster? Will the relevant responsible persons be held accountable, and will the results of accountability be made public?

The answers to these questions hang in the balance. The disaster situation is still developing while the author is typing. Some statements (including many details of seeking help and casualties circulating on social platforms that have not been confirmed by official or mainstream media) still require time and more sources of information to verify. But what is certain is that if the accountability for this incident ultimately stops at a few cautious briefings, then during the next heavy rain, there might be another midnight flood discharge notice repeating the same tragedy all over again.

Editor: Li Jing Proofreader: Zhou Min Translator: Zhou Min

作者：胡平

在电影《昂山素姬》里，昂山素姬讲过一句话：“圣人，就是不断努力的罪人。”我认为这话讲得很好。在我认识的异议人士中，有不少人品行高洁、意志坚定。在其中，刘晓波本来未必是最优秀的。但一来是其他人先后都离开了中国流亡海外。在自由社会中，他们最美好的品质得不到充分的彰显。二来是刘晓波虽然有不少弱点，但他具有严格的反省精神。刘晓波的反省绝不是只停留在纸面上，而且还付诸实践。古今中外倡导精神修养的各种流派，大都强调践行，即按照你的理念去生活，把你的理念变成你的生活方式。只要你遵照理念的要求去坚持过一种不同的生活，那么，不管你开头有多少妄想杂念，只要你坚持下去，久而久之，那些东西自然就淡化了，心灵自然就纯净了。二十多年来，晓波坚守国内，通过更坚定的抗争，更从容的面对苦难，使得自己的精神境界日益进入到更高的层次。圣人，就是不断努力的罪人。刘晓波一直坚持，坚持到底，他就是圣人了，不是也是了——这样都不是，怎样才能是呢？圣人就是这样炼成的。没有人天生完美，完美就体现在对完美的不断追求。那些终生追求完美的人就是完美的。

刘晓波写道：历史没有必然，一个殉难者的出现会彻底改变一个民族的灵魂，提升人的精神品质。甘地是偶然，哈维尔是偶然，二千年前那个生於马槽的农家孩子更是偶然。人的提升就是靠这些偶然诞生的个人完成的。天安门大屠杀以后的沉寂与遗忘，很重要的原因是我们缺少挺身而出的道义巨人。 刘晓波就是一个挺身而出的道义巨人。刘晓波就是一个殉难者。我们的义务就是让刘晓波以及其他一些挺身而出的道义巨人，让这些殉难者，提升人的精神品质，改变一个民族的灵魂。也许，有人会争辩说，刘晓波还够不上道义巨人。但我们今天面临的问题并不是刘晓波是否够得上道义巨人－－我当然认为他够得上，而且我们还有不少这样的道义巨人。我们今天面临的问题是：在这样一个堕落的时代，有多少人还愿意追随道义巨人的脚步？殉难者还能不能起到凝聚人心的作用？在今天， 很多人已经失去了对道义良知的信心。他们认为，良知是无力的，理性是无力的；对付共产党这个流氓要靠流氓才行。我当然知道，在为正义而战的队伍里并非都是道德君子，而那些不是道德君子的人也会发挥积极作用。但是我坚信，正义的事业必须要有浩然正气，必须要有道义巨人的榜样，必须要有殉难者精神的激励。因此，正是在今天这样堕落的时代，我们纪念刘晓波格外必要，也格外有意义。

在法庭上的《最后陈述》中，刘晓波用散文诗的语言，讲述了他的梦想、他的期待：“我期待我的国家是一片可以自由表达的土地，在这里，每一位国民的发言都会得到同等的善待；在这里，不同的价值、思想、信仰、政见……既相互竞争又和平共处； 在这里，多数的意见和少数的意见都会得到平等的保障，特别是那些不同于当权者的政见将得到充分的尊重和保护；在这里，所有的政见都将摊在阳光下接受民众的选择，每个国民都能毫无恐惧地发表政见，绝不会因发表不同政见而遭受政治迫害；我期待，我将是中国绵绵不绝的文字狱的最后一个受害者，从此之后不再有人因言获罪。”刘晓波写道：“表达自由，人权之基，人性之本，真理之母。封杀言论自由，践踏人权，窒息人性，压抑真理。为践行宪法赋予的言论自由权利，当尽到一个中国公民的社会责任，我的所作所为无罪，即便为此被指控，也无怨言。”把争取言论自由当作战胜极权统治的第一步，继续为言论自由而抗争。这就是刘晓波留给我们的政治遗言。

编辑：张致君 校对：程筱筱 翻译：戈冰

Wherever there is an ocean, there is Xiaobo

By Hu Ping

In the film The Lady, Aung San Suu Kyi once said: “A saint is a sinner who keeps on trying.” I think this was beautifully put. Among the dissidents I know, many possess noble character and steadfast resolve. Out of all of them, Liu Xiaobo might not have been the most outstanding at first. However, for one thing, others left China one after another to live in exile abroad, where, in a free society, their finest qualities could not be fully manifested. For another, although Liu Xiaobo had quite a few weaknesses, he possessed a rigorous spirit of self-reflection. Liu Xiaobo’s self-reflection never just remained on paper; it was put into practice. Most schools of thought throughout history, both in China and abroad, that advocate for spiritual cultivation emphasize praxis—that is, living according to your ideals and turning your ideals into your lifestyle. As long as you follow the demands of your ideals and persist in living a different kind of life, then no matter how many stray thoughts and distractions you had at the beginning, if you just persevere, over time those things will naturally fade, and your soul will naturally become pure. For over twenty years, Xiaobo held his ground inside China, and through even firmer resistance and a more composed endurance of suffering, he enabled his spiritual realm to ascend to ever-higher levels day by day. A saint is a sinner who keeps on trying. Liu Xiaobo persisted all the way, persisting to the very end; he is a saint now, and even if he originally wasn’t, he has become one—if this does not make someone a saint, what can? This is how a saint is tempered. No one is born perfect; perfection manifests in the continuous pursuit of perfection. Those who pursue perfection their entire lives are perfect.

Liu Xiaobo wrote: History has no inevitability; the appearance of a martyr will completely change the soul of a nation and elevate human spiritual quality. Gandhi was an accident, Havel was an accident, and that peasant child born in a manger two thousand years ago was even more of an accident. The elevation of humanity is accomplished precisely by these individuals born out of accident. A major reason for the silence and forgetting after the Tiananmen Massacre is that we lack moral giants who stand up. Liu Xiaobo is a moral giant who stood up. Liu Xiaobo is a martyr. Our duty is to let Liu Xiaobo and other moral giants who stood up—to let these martyrs—elevate human spiritual quality and change the soul of a nation. Perhaps some might argue that Liu Xiaobo does not quite measure up to being a moral giant. But the question we face today is not whether Liu Xiaobo measures up to a moral giant—I, of course, believe he does, and we have quite a few such moral giants. The question we face today is: in such a degenerate era, how many people are still willing to follow in the footsteps of moral giants? Can martyrs still play a role in rallying the hearts of the people? Today, many people have lost faith in moral conscience. They believe that conscience is powerless and reason is powerless; to deal with a rogue like the Communist Party, one must rely on rogue methods. Of course, I know that not everyone in the ranks fighting for justice is a man of moral virtue, and those who are not men of moral virtue will also play a positive role. But I firmly believe that a just cause must possess a noble and righteous spirit, must have the examples of moral giants, and must be inspired by the spirit of martyrdom. Therefore, it is precisely in today’s degenerate era that our commemoration of Liu Xiaobo is exceptionally necessary and exceptionally meaningful.

In his “Final Statement” at the court, Liu Xiaobo used the language of prose poetry to recount his dream and his expectation: “I expect my country to be a land of free expression, where the speech of every citizen will receive equal and kind treatment; where different values, ideas, beliefs, and political views… both compete with each other and peacefully coexist; where majority opinions and minority opinions will receive equal protection, and especially those political views different from those in power will be fully respected and protected; where all political views will be laid out under the sun to accept the choice of the people, and every citizen can express political views without any fear, absolutely never suffering political persecution for expressing differing political views; I expect that I will be the last victim of China’s endless literary inquisitions, and that from now on no one will ever be criminalized for their speech.” Liu Xiaobo wrote: “Freedom of expression is the foundation of human rights, the source of humanity, and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, suffocate humanity, and suppress truth. To practice the right to freedom of speech bestowed by the Constitution and fulfill the social responsibility of a Chinese citizen, what I have done is not a crime, and even if I am accused for it, I have no complaints.” Taking the fight for freedom of speech as the first step to conquering totalitarian rule, and continuing to struggle for freedom of speech—this is the political testament that Liu Xiaobo left us.

Editor: Zhang Zhijun Proofreader: Cheng Xiaoxiao Translator: Ge Bing

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》虽然对压实各方责任有明文规定，但各部门在执行中存在偏差，行业主管部门之间配合参差不齐，”中梗阻”现象普遍存在。换句话说，他们自己都承认，问题不是缺少法律条文，而根本是条文从没真正执行过。

耐人寻味的是建筑工人在网络上的自问自答：”如今2026年了，国家建立了监管账户，实行了代发制度……怎么还有农民工讨要工资呢？”答案是：班组每月上报的工资额度，往往远低于工人实际收入。剩下的部分，还得等老板自己收到工程款后补发。更恶劣的情况下，层层分包的小包头甚至会把已经代发到工人卡里的工资，重新收回去——制度的漏洞，反而成了新一轮克扣的工具。

这套治理体系最值得审视的地方，在于它的功能错位：当局投入大量精力，要求对欠薪引发的”负面舆情”联动处置，对”恶意炒作、挑动社会对立情绪的”内容及时管控，防止发酵蔓延。很明显,一部分本该用于解决欠薪的治理资源，实际上被用于了管控舆论。讨薪问题之所以年复一年地”治理”却始终未能消失,根源正在于此——它压根没被当作一个需要被解决的劳资纠纷,而是被当作一个需要被管控的舆情风险。

那么，有人替工人说话吗？为什么一个拥有如此完整治理体系的国家，会让讨薪沦为一场年复一年的血泪剧？大约有三重结构性的缺位。

第一重缺位，是没有真正属于工人的组织。

中国的工会体系，名义上覆盖了绝大多数企业，但是，它的任命决定了它的立场——基层工会主席往往由企业方指定或默许，而非工人自主选出、对工人负责的代表。当冲突发生时，工人举目无亲，不得不单枪匹马与资方周旋，没有一个独立的、依法享有罢工权与集体谈判权的组织可以为他们撑腰。这与许多市场经济体，比如美国，形成了鲜明对照：在美国等地，工会虽然力量有起伏，但其受劳动法保护的集体谈判权，本身就是一种真实的制衡力量。

第二重缺位，是地方政府的双重身份——既是裁判员，又是利益相关方。地方政府往往与本地企业捆绑着招商引资、税收、就业指标等共同利益，在处理劳资纠纷时，很难做到真正中立。经济下行压力之下，为了保住企业能提供的就业岗位，地方政府在处理纠纷时，时常倾向于优先保企业、而非保工人——这也是为什么，浙江桐乡某光电公司千余名员工因欠薪罢工时，员工反映”市政府、镇政府都不出面，还阻拦我们，抓了十几个人”，而不是出面协调企业偿付欠薪。

第三重缺位，是司法救济本身的失灵。就算工人愿意走法律途径，胜诉也未必意味着能拿到钱——一旦欠薪企业已经破产、无力支付，法院的判决便只是一纸空文，执行照样会卡死。诉讼成本高、周期长、执行难，许多工人根本不敢、也不愿走司法这条路，最终只能回到最原始危险的方式：用肉体去要挟——爬上塔吊，威胁跳楼。

三重缺位叠加之下，工人被推到了一个几乎没有合法、有效救济渠道的境地。极端事件，无论是以自己的生命相要挟的跳楼讨薪，还是转向施害者的灭门与纵火，是制度空转下，被反复证明正常渠道走不通之后，逻辑上几乎必然出现的产物。

而被牺牲的，往往是最沉默的那群。

经济下行的代价，最先扑向的，是产业链条最末端、议价能力最弱的那群人。当房地产企业债务违约、地方政府财政紧张、制造业订单萎缩,这些宏观层面的风险，层层传导，雪花飘落般盖在了具体的某个农民工、某个外卖骑手、某个包工头身上——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 Impasse of Wage-Claiming with Chinese Characteristics

By ：Zhou Min

At the beginning of 2026, as the Lunar New Year approached, a migrant worker in Shanxi, having repeatedly failed to claim his back pay, chose the most extreme method of retaliation—murdering the entire family of the employer who owed him money. Around the same time in Quanzhou, Fujian, a subcontractor, unable to obtain his project funds, drove his car to the construction site and immolated himself; in Huian, Quanzhou, another group of workers whose wages were withheld chose to burn down the warehouse of the defaulting enterprise.

This synchronized madness is gradually becoming a predictable, statistical social phenomenon. According to statistics from the civil documentation project “Yesterday,” during the period leading up to the 2026 Spring Festival, more than two hundred collective wage-claim incidents were collected on an average day; in April 2026 alone, the project recorded seventy-four protest incidents nationwide, with labor rights defense accounting for more than one-third. The wage-claiming wave of this year was described by multiple observers as “more tragic 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 spared without exception.

Annihilation of entire families and self-immolation are merely the two most extreme markers on this spectrum of despair. Between them lies a larger-scale, yet already “normalized” everyday picture within this society: workers climbing cranes and rooftops, threatening to jump to their deaths; subcontractors blocking factory gates; wage-seekers packing the reception halls of labor bureaus and letters-and-visits bureaus, creating chaotic scenes where no one can truly resolve the problems.

All of this does not take place in some lawless vacuum or an unregulated zone devoid of governance. Instead, it is a fixed drama staged year after year within a state that possesses a complete set of labor laws, special rectification notices, annual assessment mechanisms, and emergency relief funds.

Wage-claiming with Chinese characteristics is a despair ripened by the institutional system. Extending the scope of vision to the past few years reveals the exact same lines from this identical script. In 2024, a worker in Yibin, Sichuan, after repeatedly failing to claim 800 yuan in wages, set fire to a factory and was dubbed “Brother 800” by netizens; the local official response was to characterize his arson as a suicidal aversion to the world, while the 5,370 yuan in wages owed to him was “currently undergoing the approval process.” This phrase, “currently undergoing the approval process,” has virtually become a specimen of official discourse. The instructions for use beneath the specimen read: In today’s China, worker wage-claiming must be held up with a solemn face as an urgent issue, only to be indefinitely normalized, proceduralized, and legalized.

Even earlier, a migrant worker in Leiyang, Hunan, because an employer withheld 1,560 yuan in wages, ultimately murdered three members of the counterparty’s family; this old case from 2012 was recirculated online once again in 2024—people bring it up repeatedly not out of curiosity for the bizarre, but because similar stories have never truly ceased over more than a decade.

This style of wage-claiming, where lives are wagered and violence is countered with violence, has already become a named phenomenon: people call it wage-claiming with Chinese characteristics. It possesses a fixed seasonality (erupting at the turn of the year), a fixed stage (cranes, rooftops, factory gates), fixed methods of appeal (shouting slogans, climbing to high places, blocking gates), and an almost fixed ending: wages are not necessarily obtained, yet the wage-seekers may find themselves detained beforehand 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, incorporating the effectiveness of wage-arrears governance into the political performance evaluations of local governments. Almost every winter, the Office of the State Council Leading Group for Employment Promotion and Labor Protection issues notices to launch a winter campaign for governing wage arrears, requiring risk screening, the disclosure of reporting channels, and emergency response disposal. The construction industry has even established supervision accounts and “agency payment” systems for migrant worker wages, theoretically allowing the construction party to distribute wages directly, bypassing the deduction links within tiered subcontracting.

Individual successful cases do exist—a migrant worker and fifty-five fellow workers in Chuzhou, Anhui, after being owed more than 800,000 yuan in wages for four years, ultimately received their money through coordination. These rare occurrences appear in the year-end summaries of official media as governance achievements.

But the designers of the system themselves are well aware that these measures scratch the surface from outside the boot. An official-backed investigative report in 2026 stated bluntly: primary-level human resources and social security cadres reflected that although the Regulations on Guaranteeing Wage Payments to Migrant Workers contain explicit provisions on consolidating the responsibilities of all parties, deviations exist among various departments during implementation, coordination between competent industry authorities is uneven, and the “middle obstruction” phenomenon is prevalent. In other words, they themselves admit that the problem is not a lack of legal clauses, but fundamentally that the clauses have never been truly executed.

What invites reflection is the self-questioning and answering by construction workers on the internet: “Now that it’s 2026, the state has established supervision accounts and implemented the agency payment system… how are there still migrant workers claiming wages?” The answer is: the wage quotas reported monthly by work shifts are often far lower than the actual income of the workers. The remaining portion still must wait to be backpaid after the boss himself receives the project funds. Under even worse circumstances, small subcontractors within the tiered subcontracting system will even recollect the wages that have already been paid via agency into the workers’ cards—the loopholes in the system, conversely, become a tool for a new round of deductions.

The aspect of this governance system most worthy of scrutiny lies in its functional dislocation: the authorities invest a vast amount of energy requiring the joint disposal of “negative public opinion” triggered by wage arrears, and the timely management and control of content that “maliciously hypes or instigates social antagonistic sentiments” to prevent it from fermenting and spreading. Clearly, a portion of the governance resources that should have been used to resolve wage arrears is, in reality, utilized to manage and control public opinion. The root cause of why the wage-claiming problem is “governed” year after year yet never disappears lies precisely here—it is not treated at all as a labor dispute that needs to be resolved, but rather as a public opinion risk that needs to be managed and controlled.

So, is there anyone speaking up for the workers? Why does a country with such a complete governance system allow wage-claiming to degenerate into a year-after-year drama of blood and tears? There are roughly three layers of structural absence.

The first layer of absence is the lack of organizations that truly belong to the workers.

China’s trade union system nominally covers the vast majority of enterprises; however, its appointments dictate its stance—primary-level trade union chairs are often designated or tacitly approved by the enterprise management, rather than independently elected by the workers as representatives accountable to them. When conflicts occur, workers find themselves utterly helpless and are forced to deal with capital single-handedly, with no independent organization that legally enjoys the right to strike and collective bargaining to back them up. This stands in sharp contrast to many market economies, such as the United States: in places like the US, although the strength of trade unions fluctuates, their collective bargaining rights protected by labor law are inherently a real countervailing power.

The second layer of absence is the dual identity of local governments—acting as both the referee and a stakeholder. Local governments are often bound together with local enterprises by shared interests such as investment promotion, tax revenue, and employment targets, making it very difficult to remain truly neutral when handling labor disputes. Under downward economic pressure, in order to preserve the jobs that enterprises can provide, local governments, when handling disputes, frequently tend to prioritize protecting the enterprise over protecting the workers—this is also why, when more than a thousand employees of a certain optoelectronics company in Tongxiang, Zhejiang, went on strike over withheld wages, the employees reflected that “the municipal government and the township government did not show up at all, and even obstructed us and arrested over a dozen people,” instead of stepping forward to coordinate the enterprise’s repayment of the back pay.

The third layer of absence is the failure of judicial relief itself. Even if workers are willing to take the legal route, winning a lawsuit does not necessarily mean they will get the money—once a defaulting enterprise has gone bankrupt and is unable to pay, the court’s judgment is merely a scrap of paper, and enforcement will still be stuck completely dead. With high litigation costs, long cycles, and enforcement difficulties, many workers simply dare not and do not want to take the judicial path, ultimately leaving them no choice but to return to the most primitive and dangerous method: using their physical bodies as leverage—climbing up cranes and threatening to jump to their deaths.

Under the compounding effect of these three layers of absence, workers are pushed into a predicament where almost no legal or effective channels of relief exist. Extreme incidents, whether it is jumping from buildings to claim wages by wagering one’s own life, or turning upon the perpetrators through annihilation of families and arson, are the products that emerge with almost logical certainty under the idle spinning of the institutional system, after normal channels have been repeatedly proven to lead nowhere.

And those who are sacrificed are often the most silent cohort.

The price of the economic downturn is the first to pounce upon those at the absolute end of the industrial chain with the weakest bargaining power. When real estate enterprises default on debts, local government finances become tight, and manufacturing orders shrink, these macro-level risks transmit downward layer by layer, falling like snowflakes upon a specific migrant worker, a specific food delivery rider, or a specific subcontractor—they have no ability to hedge against the risks, and no institutional system to provide them with a safety net, so they have no choice but to use their bodies to gamble against a price that should not have been borne by them in the first place.

This succession of family annihilations, 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 cast more toward “how to make the wage-seekers shut up” rather than how to make the wage-defaulters pay; when wage-claiming carries higher legal risks than withholding wages; when workers can find no truly unblocked channel to defend their rights other than wagering their lives—should we still feel surprised by the next family annihilation case, or the next jump from a building or a bridge?

Editor: Li Jing

Proofreader: Wang Bin

Translator: Ge Bing