Twenty-Four Years at the Same Factory, and Not a Month of Social Insurance
A factory worker in Xi'an worked the same packing job for 24 years, then died by suicide in the workshop after bladder cancer treatment became unaffordable because no one paid his social insurance. A court ruled the suicide wasn't legally caused by the unpaid premiums — and ordered the company to pay only 20%.
In a workshop in Xi'an, a 54-year-old man named Wang spent twenty-four years moving packing materials. In November 2024, diagnosed with bladder cancer and unable to get his treatment reimbursed, he died by suicide at that same workshop. Last week, an appeals court settled the question of what the company owed his family: 20%, plus an explanation that the missing social insurance had no legal connection to his death.
The arithmetic of the case is stark. Wang's family says he worked at the same plant since April 2000, a familiar figure to everyone on the floor. The company says he was technically an employee only between 2007 and February 2024, and was later employed by a separate labor-outsourcing firm. The family agrees the contracts are real in name, and points out that the work itself never changed.
What matters is what never happened: across two decades of either direct employment or a thin-staffing arrangement, no one paid into the social insurance that would have kept Wang's cancer bills off his own shoulders. A recording submitted to the court catches the circular logic in action. In it, Wang tells someone from the company what a local official told him: you can still make up the missed contributions if you're under 60, so sort it out with the factory. The company's answer is simply that there is nothing to sort out.
"When I asked, they said I could still pay in the missed contributions before I turned 60," the recording has Wang saying, describing his conversation with an official. "Talk it over with the factory." The reply comes back flat: "I'm telling you, there's nothing." He was 53 at the time, by his own account, and the window was closing.
The trial court found that Wang's suicide at the workplace and the unpaid premiums had no legal cause-and-effect relationship, and assigned Wang the primary share of responsibility for his own death. Because the company failed to notice and properly supervise him, it would bear twenty percent, paying the family just over 200,000 yuan — from which a previous 30,000-yuan loan was deducted. The Hubei outlet Sohu news put the family's original claim at 660,000 yuan.
It is a case that has stung Chinese social media less for its verdict than for its candor. Twenty-four years at the same bench can earn a man a stack of labor contracts bearing three different company names, but not a single month of coverage; and when the coverage is missed, the law's answer is that you should have fought harder for it while there was still time. China has been pushing hard to fold gig and dispatch workers into the social safety net. A case like Wang's is what that campaign is up against.