Student Alleges 13-Hour Days at Shandong Electronics Firm
A first-year vocational high school student has alleged that interns at Shandong Sanxian Electronic Technology Co. were made to work as long as 13 hours a day, prompting students to stop work and demand their wages before leaving.
The account was published on September 23 by Yesterday, a nonofficial Chinese website that records labor protests. It rests on statements from one unnamed student and a written description of video from the confrontation. The student, school, specific factory location and number of interns involved were not identified. The material available for this article contained no response from the company or school, and the central claims have not been independently corroborated.
What the student says happened
According to the report, the student was completing an internship at a company identified as Shandong Sanxian Electronic Technology. The student alleged that the company required students to work up to 13 hours each day. The report did not give shift start and end times, say how often such days occurred, or distinguish working time from meal and rest breaks. It also did not state how long the students had been assigned to the company.
The student said the interns stopped working and asked for their pay to be settled so they could leave. No participation figure was provided, and it is unclear whether the stoppage involved one class, one production line or a broader group. The report also did not identify the amount allegedly owed, the agreed wage, the date payment was due or whether the students were ultimately paid.
During the dispute, the report said, a company leader challenged a student who had taken a leading role, telling the student, in translation, “If you don’t accept it, let’s go outside and fight.” That wording was relayed through the published account rather than confirmed in a complete recording available with the material. The speaker’s name, position and full exchange remain unknown, so the remark can be reported only as an allegation attributed to the student and the website.
The report further alleged that a manager took a phone from a student who was recording and attempted to delete the video. The student reportedly refused. The available description does not establish whether any file was erased, how long the phone was held or what happened immediately afterward. There is also no account from the manager accused of taking it.
Allegations involving the school
The most serious claims extend beyond conditions inside the company. The student alleged that the school collected a per-student fee from the factory and that this financial relationship helped supply the company with labor. No school was named, and the material included no internship agreement, payment record or other document showing that such a fee existed. The allegation therefore remains unsupported by documentary evidence in the available account.
The student also claimed that school officials discouraged students from speaking publicly by threatening a serious disciplinary mark that could affect graduation. The report did not identify an official who made such a threat or provide the school’s written disciplinary rules. It is not known whether any student was formally disciplined, whether a warning was communicated verbally or whether graduation requirements were actually invoked.
Those gaps matter because a vocational internship involves overlapping authority. A workplace controls schedules and production, while a school may control placement, academic credit and progress toward graduation. When students depend on both institutions, a dispute over hours or pay can carry consequences beyond an ordinary workplace disagreement. In this case, however, the nature of the school-company arrangement is unknown, and the student’s description is the only account included in the report.
The available account also says nothing about the internship’s educational component. It does not describe the student’s course, assigned training goals, supervision, classroom connection or method of assessment. Without those details, it is impossible to judge from the report whether the placement was organized around instruction, ordinary production work or some combination of the two. That omission is especially relevant when a student alleges exceptionally long days: the schedule cannot be evaluated alongside any stated training plan because no such plan was included.
It is similarly unclear how much freedom students had to leave the placement before the stoppage. The report does not say whether participation was mandatory, whether students could request reassignment, or whether withdrawing would affect academic credit. These questions do not prove the student’s broader allegation about institutional pressure, but answers would show whether the students had a practical alternative to accepting the disputed schedule while remaining on track to graduate.
Basic facts are still missing
The company name alone does not establish where the incident occurred. Publicly associated entities bearing similar Sanxian names have been linked to more than one city, but the event report did not specify a factory address. Assigning the dispute to a particular plant, school or local government without that information would risk identifying the wrong institution.
The student’s age was also not provided. A first-year vocational high school student may be young, but the available material does not establish whether this student or the other interns were minors. That distinction could affect how readers understand the students’ vulnerability, yet it should not be inferred from their grade level alone.
Nor is the reposting of the account independent confirmation. The second item in the supplied material reproduces Yesterday’s report and identifies it as the source. It adds no separate witness, document or response. The evidentiary position is therefore narrow: one unnamed student’s account, conveyed through a labor-event website, with a description of media that was not available here in a form permitting its full context to be assessed.
What would clarify the internship dispute
Several records could establish the basic contours of what happened without exposing students’ identities. A schedule or time sheet could show the length and frequency of shifts. Pay records could clarify whether wages were overdue and whether they were settled after the stoppage. The internship agreement could identify the factory, school, expected duties, compensation and process for ending the placement.
The school could also explain whether it received any payment connected to the placement, what that payment covered and whether students were threatened with discipline. The company could address the work schedule, the wage demand, the reported confrontation and the allegation that a manager tried to delete a recording. None of those answers appeared in the material available for this article.
Until such information emerges, the episode should not be presented as a fully established account of forced overtime or a proven school-company fee arrangement. It is nonetheless a substantive complaint about vocational student overtime, wages and the power institutions may exercise over students whose work is tied to their education. The allegation warrants attention precisely because the students’ practical ability to leave, complain or protect a record of the dispute may depend on rules and relationships that remain hidden from view.
