It was a completely avoidable tragedy. On the afternoon of June 25, a 17-year-old student “intern” at a Shenzhen factory, identified under the surname Yu, jumped to his death from his dormitory balcony.
A final-year computer student at Hanjiang Technology School in Shiyan, Hubei province, Yu had been sent to the factory on an “internship” arranged by his school—but far from doing any work related to their major, he and his classmates were assigned repetitive manual labor: packing and moving boxes, and working on assembly lines, for 11 hours a day at 14 RMB (2.17 USD) an hour. Yu was unable to handle the workload and had missed work four times mostly due to health reasons, and with permission from his supervisor.
Yet on the morning of his death, Yu found out he’d been marked “truant” yet again. In a WeChat group shared with Yu’s whole class, his teacher threatened to expel him from school if he took any more time off, alleging that he showed a “lack of remorse” and a “bad attitude.”
Throughout the tragedy, both Yu’s school and the factory flouted a string of provisions from the national “Management Regulations on Internships of Vocational School Students” enacted by the central government in 2016 to protect vocational school students and clarify their rights. According to the regulations, internships must match the student’s major; students are allowed to select their own place of internship; students under 18 cannot be assigned overtime work and night shifts; and interns cannot be paid less than 80 percent of what regular workers earn during the workers’ probation period.
But Yuan Yayang, a lawyer specializing in labor cases, wrote on social media platform Zhihu that it’s “common for vocational schools to violate the regulations,” though he refused to comment further when TWOC contacted him.
Tales about students being placed in exploitative internships by vocational schools have long been reported by Chinese media: “Almost every summer, one can read reports about interns being exploited,” fumed Vista magazine in an article about Yu’s death. In March, a vocational school in Zhengzhou made it compulsory for a group of students, majoring as flight attendants, to intern at a water-heater factory if they wanted their diploma. Their teacher confiscated the students’ ID cards on arrival, and they worked on the assembly lines for 12 hours a day, with two days off each month.
Students typically attend vocational secondary schools, known as “secondary professional schools” (中等专业学校) or zhongzhuan (中专) for short, after finishing their nine years of compulsory education. Each year, around half of the students who take the National High School Entrance Exam (zhongkao) fail to qualify for high school, and can drop out of education or enroll in vocational schools where they train for blue collar jobs.
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