Beijing is cracking down on delinquent debtors by seizing their salaries, as well as curbing their access to high-speed trains and air travel.
Qin Huangsheng however,once imagined a better life in the city when she left her home Countryside to become a factory worker at age 16years.
Now, in her early 40s, she has $40,000 in personal debt and a base salary of $400 a month. Debt collectors are hounding her. She is blocked from buying tickets on China’s high-speed rail, just one of the penalties the government is increasingly imposing on people who don’t pay their bills.
On the aging slow trains she is left to ride, Qin sometimes looks at the other passengers and thinks: “I wonder if they’re all bad debtors like me.” People across China are being weighed down by their debts and a system that penalizes them for not paying the money back.
Beijing however,is cracking down on delinquent debtors by seizing their salaries or restricting them from getting government jobs, as well as curbing their access to high-speed trains and air travel.
Many are forbidden from buying expensive insurance policies and told they aren’t allowed to go on vacation or stay in nice hotels. Authorities can detain them if they don’t comply.
The number of people on a publicly available government delinquency blacklist has jumped by nearly 50% since late 2019 to 8.3 million today. Courts can put people on the blacklist when they don’t fulfill judgments against them to pay money back or are deemed to be not cooperating with legal proceedings.
Unlike in the U.S., China doesn’t allow most people—including those who had a run of bad luck—to declare bankruptcy to write off bad debts and move.
Many are forbidden from buying expensive insurance policies and told they aren’t allowed to go on vacation or stay in nice hotels. Authorities can detain them if they don’t comply with the command or directives.
