A Chinese City Apologized for Stopping a Blogger From Grinding Off Hazardous Ground Nails

Kang, a blogger in Xinxiang, Henan, goes by the handle "Tianhan the Nail Puller," and his content is exactly what it says: he waits for tips about leftover ground nails — the steel studs that roadworks leave flush in the pavement — and grinds them off the street with an angle grinder, because a stud hidden by rainwater or fallen leaves is a notorious tripping hazard, especially for the electric scooters that crowd Chinese cities. On the morning of August 26 a tip took him to Wenyuan South Street, and "about ten minutes in, two workers came over — one in uniform, one not," he told Jiupai News. "[They] said my cutting was raising dust, so no angle grinder." Without the grinder, he reasoned, the nails could not be removed at all — and he noted that wind raises more dust on an open road than his tool did. He packed up and went home, and the video of the exchange did the rest.

The story caught fire because it compressed a familiar frustration into one absurd frame: a volunteer doing hazardous-removal work a city plainly has not finished, stopped in the name of environmental rules — dust control being a genuine and heavily enforced priority in Chinese cities, which made the excuse credible enough to sting. The first official reactions did not help. City management and environmental bureau staff said they knew nothing of the incident; the environmental bureau's advice was that well-meaning citizens should "file in advance" before doing public-interest repairs, specifying their equipment and possible pollution. Another city management staffer, though, conceded the blogger had a point: "We ourselves have cleared several thousand ground nails... He genuinely gave our work a push."

Once the video had spread, the district with jurisdiction over the street issued a formal notice. The Hongqi District Urban Management Bureau wrote that its staff's "manner of communication was too blunt, causing a misunderstanding — for this we express our sincere apology," thanked the blogger for his "public-interest clearing of leftover ground nails to protect what is under residents' feet," and accepted oversight and criticism. It also announced a district-wide sweep for "small safety hazards," promising to clear road dangers and to welcome public participation in city governance — in effect adopting the blogger's hobby as municipal policy.

By then the story had climbed onto Baidu's hot search board as well, and commenters relished the asymmetry the case exposed: a work crew can blow dust across a street before repaving, they noted, while a private citizen cutting out a nail gets shut down. The apology resolves the personal dispute, but not the standing question it raised — whether China's cities want citizen fixers, and how to regulate them beyond asking them to file paperwork before fixing a hazard the city missed.