CATL Denies Viral Video Claiming Workers Were Denied Toilet Breaks, Reports It to Police
A viral video claimed a team leader at CATL's Yibin battery complex barred workers from toilet breaks. The company calls it a fabricated rumor about a site that is not its own and has reported it to police — but much of the internet is asking which factory the footage actually shows.
A video claiming that workers at a CATL battery plant in southwest China were denied toilet breaks spread across Weibo on September 9, putting the country's dominant electric-vehicle battery maker on the trending list — not for its products, but for an accusation about life on its factory floor. By evening, the company had called the video a deliberate fabrication, said the footage does not show one of its facilities, and reported the post to the police.
The claim that raced through the platform was specific. A team leader at the Yibin base in Sichuan province, it said, would not let production workers leave the line for the toilet, until one worker "had an extreme reaction." The details that circulated alongside the clip were degrading enough — commenters repeated them in full — that the story outran any correction.
CATL's official response came the same day. A company representative told the news account 白鹿视频 that the video was maliciously fabricated and that the site in the footage is not a CATL facility; the matter has been handed to the police. The representative added a detail clearly meant to settle the question: CATL's bases even set aside smoking areas for workers, and would not forbid something as basic as a toilet break.
What made the story travel was not novelty but plausibility. On Chinese assembly lines the 班长 — the squad leader who runs a section of a line and answers for its output — is the lowest rung of management and the one workers meet daily, and toilet discipline on production lines is a long-standing grievance in manufacturing towns. So the reaction online was telling: many users' first question was not whether the video was staged, but which factory it actually showed. "So which company is it, then? So hard to guess," one Weibo user wrote under screenshots of the clip (所以，到底是哪个公司，好难猜哦), in a post liked more than 800 times.
The story also broke out of Weibo. A question on Zhihu asking how to read the episode — the claim, the worker's reported breakdown, and the company's insistence that the site is not its own — drew a busy thread, and the company's response was a top item on Baidu's hot board through the evening.
The stakes are higher than for most viral rumors. CATL supplies batteries to automakers worldwide, and Yibin is one of its largest production complexes; labor conditions at its plants are already watched closely abroad. A crude video about toilet breaks would not normally register in that scrutiny, but a denial that many readers greet with a knowing shrug does.
The police investigation may eventually establish where the footage was filmed and who posted it. Until then, the company's flat denial has to compete with something older than this particular video: the assumption, across a good part of the Chinese internet, that the factory floor is exactly as disciplined as the video alleged.