Jiangsu Chemical Plant Shutdown Draws Workers Demanding Pay

Hundreds of workers gathered outside a chemical plant in Fengxian County, in the city of Xuzhou, Jiangsu province, on October 8, according to overseas Chinese-language media and social media accounts, days after the company told staff it was suspending production. Police officers and armed-response units arrived at the scene and nearby roads were closed, the reports said.

The Fengcheng chemical plant, formally Fengcheng Salt Chemical Co., Ltd., had issued a notice on September 28 saying that because of industry conditions and its own operating situation it would stop production and send employees on holiday from October 1. Workers who arrived at the plant in work uniforms pressed the company over wages, social insurance and compensation, according to an event record compiled by the Chinese-language site fanzei.net, which draws on social media posts and marks each entry with a single source rather than independent verification.

What workers were demanding

New Tang Dynasty Television’s daily rights-incident roundup reported that workers feared an open-ended shutdown could be used as a way to avoid paying compensation, and were demanding that the company produce a clear settlement plan. A summary of a report by The Epoch Times, as indexed by the labor-research site Labor Information, gave a fuller account of the terms: the company’s notice was said to state that operations would not resume, that severance would follow the N standard of one month’s pay per year of service, that smaller amounts would be paid in a single lump sum while longer-tenured staff would be paid in two installments, and that the payout figures would be checked under the supervision of the county development-zone authorities.

Workers who arrived on October 8 found their plant access cards had been deactivated, leaving them unable to enter the site, according to that Epoch Times summary as republished by the search index. The Epoch Times headline described nearly 1,000 employees facing the loss of their jobs, a figure attributed to the outlet’s reporting; no official headcount has been published. The same summary said workers were broadly unwilling to accept reassignment to other posts.

An unverified picture

No statement from the company or from local authorities has been reported, and the details circulating so far — the number of workers, the exact terms of any settlement and the fate of the workforce — all trace back to on-the-ground video and social media posts rather than to company documents or government notices. The earliest identifiable account behind the event record is a post on the X platform dated October 9, roughly a day after the gathering, which is how the account of the October 8 scene entered circulation. How the standoff developed afterward, and whether any compensation plan has since been formally delivered to employees, remains unaddressed in the material available.

One entry in a crowded early October

The incident sits among several wage-related complaints recorded in the same window. fanzei.net’s unpaid-wages timeline for early October lists staff of a government hotline in Bazhong saying July and August wages had gone unpaid, construction workers on a project in Langfang sleeping on the ground while seeking pay, and workers at a Zhejiang factory chasing wages after the owner allegedly disappeared. The site cautions that these entries are aggregations of social media posts of varying reliability and reflect what was reported, not any official tally. New Tang Dynasty’s same-day roundup carried other grievance cases from the period as well, from a petitioner in Nantong who said she was confined while trying to travel to Beijing, to depositors of a rural bank in Henan writing to newly appointed provincial leaders — reminders that the same weeks saw complaints over wages and compensation unfold alongside a wider range of disputes.

What is documented, for now, is narrow: a production halt announced to take effect October 1, a crowd at the gate on October 8, and workers asking, in the words of the reports, for a plan they could hold the company to. The rest — company finances, the compensation negotiation and whether the plant ever reopens — is not settled on the public record.