Qin Huangsheng once imagined a better life in the city when she left her home village to become a factory worker at age 16.
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 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…
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How might being unable to access certain services or goods because of debt impact an individual’s mental health and social status?
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Financial insecurity is a root amplifier of many mental health and social issues. While having money may not always fix the problems someone is having, it has been proven in multiple instances to help.
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They might have made a bad decision in the past and now they regret it
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Debt is often unavoidable and more help should be given to help people
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Would denying people with bad debts the chance to start over through something like bankruptcy be more harmful than helpful to society?
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It would hurt those in the lower strata and remove the ability for social mobility