New Delhi, Sep 14 (IANS): More than 1,000 Chinese construction workers surrounded armed police vehicles and forced officers to release a detained colleague recently, in a rare public show of defiance by citizens of an authoritarian state working abroad, a new report has said.
The report from Sri Lanka-based Daily Mirror said the incident occurred after a Chinese worker, reportedly unpaid for months, was hauled off by the police following an altercation with managers.
The protest is the latest in a string of labour disputes involving Chinese contractors in Russia.
The publication cited Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service data showing Russia’s total unpaid wage arrears reached 2.879 billion rubles in April 2026, up 35 per cent month‑on‑month and 94 per cent year‑on‑year.
The company at the centre of the August incident, is a wholly owned arm of China National Chemical Engineering Group, the state enterprise. The company has a $20 billion-plus footprint along the Baltic, the world’s largest integrated ethane cracker and methanol projects.
“Workers who cannot get help from their own state-owned employer are left appealing to a foreign president for mercy,” the report said.
Chinese migrant workers have repeatedly raised complaints against the company of withheld pay, confiscated passports, wages routed through opaque third-party subcontractors, fixed salaries quietly swapped for piece-rate contracts.
The report said that excuses for payment defaults raised by the company were so absurd that “one manager blamed an entire workforce’s unpaid wages” on a single colleague’s bank account-related issue.
Nearly 10 Chinese workers died at work sites in 2025, from scaffold collapses, machinery accidents, and drone-strike shrapnel, but the company offered no responses.
“The picture that emerges is not one of two adversarial systems but of two states one authoritarian and cash-strapped, one authoritarian and image-obsessed that have found a mutually convenient way to externalize the cost of failure onto migrant labourers who have the least power to resist,” the report noted.
Similar protests have occurred also in another Chinese company Petro‑Hehua in April, where hundreds of workers marched in Komsomolsk‑on‑Amur after Rosneft terminated a contract and left roughly 1,500 workers unpaid.
