07/12/26 - Student Internship Edition!
“A black market that is even worse than Myanmar has been exposed. You can profit 2000RMB off of a student, 630K RMB off of 300 students. If you have a whole school’s worth, that’s 60 million RMB in profits. There’s an unimaginable amount of grey income behind student internships.
Lately, a news story was exposed in the media. A 17-year-old student in Anhui, Wuhu suddenly went missing. After interviewing multiple parties, his body was eventually found in the river. The police investigation ruled out the possibility of murder. This was a very ordinary accidental death case, but when people dug deeper, they found a shocking black industry.
We learned that this 17-year-old student was named Gao. He got into a technical school in Shandong in 2024. He thought he would learn a trade that would support him in technical school. But at the end of March this year, the school sent him to a car parts factory in Anhui Wuhu as a part of “collective education”. There, he didn’t learn any practical skills. He just worked the production line every day, 12 hours a day, and only got one day off a month, a much stricter schedule than normal adults.
After working like this for over two months, in June, he started feeling unwell, like he couldn’t keep going. He asked the factory supervisor to a day off, but the supervisor said that he had to have a paper diagnosis from a hospital to get sick days.
As an underaged child, he needed permission to even leave the factory. How is he supposed to get himself to a hospital to get proof? So he had to grit his teeth and keep working until clock out, and then run to his teacher to complain. He said it’s too hard, he can’t keep working, and begged the teacher to allow him to go home and rest.
But not only did the teacher not comfort him, he didn’t allow him to go home either. He merely called Gao’s parents. And Gao’s parents didn’t realise how serious the situation had become. They thought their kid was simply spoiled, so they told him to keep at it, it’ll be over once he officially graduates.
The fact that even his parents didn’t understand him made Gao completely despair. 11PM that night, he left the factory with the excuse of buying dinner, and the tragedy we just talked about happened.
Gao isn’t a lone example. A lot of magical things have been happening in student internships.
Like in 2021, a 17-year-old nursing student in Yunnan was sent to an electronics factory in Jiangxi under the guise of “societal experience”, and made to work 12 hours a day. She got sick three times and was denied rest three times and eventually died from respiratory failure.
And in 2025, a student intern in Hubei was sent to a shipping company to load and unload boxes, working from 1AM to 1PM for 20 days without any rest, and died from sudden cardiac disease after work.
A lot of people think this is an accident, but actually, look closer and you’ll see that this isn’t a coincidence at all. It’s the inevitable end of illegal exploitation.
Why do I say this? Today, we’re going to be breaking this industry down, and make it clear to people just what kind of game the schools, middle men, and factories are playing at.
We all know that higher education institutions will often arrange internships. The goal is usually to match your major, train your skills, and help you find a job that suits you. This is the initial goal of school arranged internships. But a lot of schools arrange internships that are completely different now.
They’ll make nursing students load delivery trucks, make IT majors work production lines, make marketing majors sort delivery packages. The content of their internship has nothing to do with their major and they can’t learn anything.
So why does the school arrange these internships? Because the school—middleman—and factory have formed a stable triangle of profit, and every step brings a lot of money.
Let’s talk the factory first. A lot of electronics factories, food processing plants, shipping companies, etc lack labour during busy seasons, like 618, double 11, or right before Chinese New Year. Theoretically, if you lack workers, you should try to hire them normally, but all of this labour demand is short-term. It’s too costly to hire on an official employee and makes it harder for the factory to turn a profit. So a lot of factories will give their demands to an outsourcing company and ask them to find some cheap, competent temp workers and give them a kick for each employee.
These outsourcing companies will look for cheap labour once they get the demand. Which demographic doesn’t ask for much pay and is obedient? Obviously, university and technical college students who haven’t graduated yet.
Adults want 3000-4000RMB a month, but a university intern only wants 1900RMB a month, and they don’t need insurance or social security. And uni students don’t have any societal experience yet. They’ll work hard and they’re easy to manage. They perfectly fit the demands of the factory.
So a lot of outsourcing companies will negotiate with school management. Send your students to these factories to intern, and you can spend their wages however you want. That way, you can bolster your budget.
The outsourcing companies help the schools and factories build a connection, and all three parties know what they’re getting out of the deal.
For the factory, an adult worker needs a minimum of 3K a month, but a uni student ish appy with 1900. They’re saving at least 1000RMB per person. That’s money in the bank.
For the outsourcing company, they can eat from both ends. The factory will pay them a 200RMB fee for each student they obtain, and the school will give them a 200RMB kickback for each student they get into an internship. This way, they make a steady 400RMB off of each student. That’s huge profit.
For schools, there’s something in it for them too. There’s generally two ways they make money. One is they lie about the wages. For example, the factory will promise a pay of 25RMB/hour, and the school will tell the students it’s 15RMB an hour, and the 10RMB in the middle goes into the school administrators’ pockets. Someone’s calculated if 300 students work 10 hours a day, 26 days a month, they can make 630,000RMB a month like this.
The other is a set fee per student every month, 300RMB to 1K. The longer you work, the more money the school makes. If the school has thousand or even tens of thousands of students, it can reach an astronomical number.
Previously, citizen investigator Wang Hai exposed a school in Jiangxi who made over 60 million RMB with these methods. With this kind of numbers, what other business do you need to do? It’s hard to find anything with this much profit around the world.
And because it’s profitable, the schools, factories, and middle men have all agreed to keep this grey industry going. According to insiders, this grey industry has existed for well over a decade in China. It used to be concentrated around technical schools, but in the last couple of years, it’s been shifting to community college and some less prestigious universities. It’s a grey industry that’s reaching tens of billions in scale.
As parents, we spend tens of thousand or hundreds of thousands sending our kids to school, and they get shuffled off to productions lines to do a bunch of work that has nothing to do with their major, and become a set of numbers in someone else’s books.
I know someone is going to ask, “If this industry has been running for over a decade, why has no one exposed it? These students are getting exploited at work and by their school, why don’t they fight back or refuse?”
The answer is very simple. These students have no leverage to fight back with.
Why do schools openly make students work production lines? Because if you don’t complete the school assigned internship, you can’t graduate. If you can’t graduate, then your parents last 16 years of investment will go down the toilet. It’s very simple for a school to control its students—diploma, GPA, volunteer hours. Anything can make the students obey.
Forget working production lines. The news has exposed a story before where some schools will let students earn points for donating blood, where 400ml of blood is equal to two credits. So for just those two credits, some students will be forced to give up their blood. Of course they’re okay with working production lines.
Why do the factories openly exploit the students? Look at these cases, no sick days, 12 hours a day, over 20 days of work. How dare the factories? Because internships aren’t protected by labour laws. If you work a normal worker too hard, they can defend their rights, but students can’t. If they get their pay docked or were forced to work overtime or got injured at work, they can only sue in civil court. It’s a complicated process that takes a lot of time and energy, and even if they succeeded, it means they’ve made an enemy of their school and it’ll affect their future.
It’s because the cost of defending your fights is too high and the process is too complicated, almost no students choose to fight back. Most students just put up with it when they encounter similar problems, just push through until they get their diploma and can leave. This is why the tragedies I’ve talked about aren’t a coincidence but an inevitability. Because students have no right to fight back at all with so many parties with such power over them. Whether it’s hours that are too long or not getting rest when they’re sick, their only option is to put up with it. And as they put up with it, tragedies happen.
Education should be a noble thing, but now it’s become a tool of profit for some people. This is such a shame. If we can to completely solve this problem, we can’t wait for public opinion to fester after these tragedies every time. We have to close these loopholes systematically. For example:
Ban outsourcing companies from helping schools arrange internships.
Make sure internships have to match the major and control work hours.
Build a transparent internship wage system, where the wages are directly paid to the students and not to a third party.
Give interns labour law protection. We can’t leave their rights unprotected.
Punish schools that force internships and take students’ pay, and severely fine the companies that violate rules for using workers.
This is the only way we can cut off this black industry and protect students and parents!”
Comments say, “This isn’t a grey area. It’s systematic exploitation of underage minors. It should be a criminal offense.”
“It’s already 2026 and this still exists?”
“Students need to be less obedient.”
“If this is true, then why has the government just been looking the other way and letting them get away with it for over ten years without doing anything about it?”