Corporate behavior, consumption, and market dynamics.
On September 21, homeowners of Shengshijindu Estate in Chengdu's Tianfu New Area gathered to protest, accusing the developer of using banned techniques during tap water pipe construction, which polluted the water supply and threatened residents' health. After previous multi-party coordination failed, homeowners demanded a property refund on-site.
Starbucks China stores require employees to hand-draw smiles on every cup of coffee. Those who miss drawing them will receive a secondary warning, and accumulating two warnings will result in the loss of their 13th and 14th-month bonuses or even termination.
On August 29, a dispatch worker posted online that their employer reduced their salary by 1000 yuan without prior notice, and, citing a demand from the discipline inspection commission, ordered them to return nine years' worth of physical examination fees and holiday benefits. The employer claimed that dispatch workers should not enjoy such benefits, leaving the individual feeling helpless due to age and employment pressure.
On September 21, it was circulated online that the Mid-Autumn Festival mooncakes distributed by Huawei's Intelligent Vehicle Solution BU had expired, causing multiple employees to experience symptoms such as diarrhea and allergies after consumption. Huawei created an internal shared Excel sheet specifically to track the physical reactions of employees who ate the mooncakes.
To pass Walmart's social responsibility audit, Guangxi Wuzhou Tianmijia Bee Industry required employees to memorize false statements to cover up long-term mandatory overtime without days off, wage withholding, illegal employment practices, and lack of fire safety facilities, while also carrying out hasty temporary renovations to cope with the inspection.
An employee submission from Shanghai Gree Auto exposes that the company has a severe excessive overtime issue, and project site managers subject employees to verbal insults and sexual harassment.
On September 21, at the breakfast canteen of the passenger car plant of CRRC Changchun Railway Vehicles Co., Ltd. in Changchun, Jilin Province, an incident of refusing cash occurred. Netizens reported that using cash to pay at the canteen was refused. After the on-site manager called the store manager for instructions, they still explicitly refused to accept cash.
On September 18, the Cyberspace Administration of China issued a notice requiring platforms to clean up negative information inconsistent with official corporate statements, and categorized behaviors such as parodying corporate logos, products, and entrepreneurs' portraits as false and misleading handling scopes, demanding platforms to implement whole-process audits and strict handling of enterprise-related information.
On September 16, a netizen published a long post using speech-to-text and similarity calculation, accusing Zhong Shu, the host of the podcast 'Du Shu Bu Cheng Lin', of plagiarizing content across at least 14 episodes. Among them, about half of the content in episode 310 was highly similar to the English podcast 'Breaking History'.
On Sep 18, developers revealed that Zhipu's AI programming tool, ZCode, uploaded users' entire workspace code to servers without clear notice. Zhipu subsequently apologized and admitted the feature was enabled by default. On the same day, related skeptical posts were complained and deleted by Meizhou Direction Public Relations Consulting Co., Ltd., triggering public opinion suppression over the controversy.
On September 18, media reports indicated that the crowdfunding platform Shuizhichou increased its platform service fee from 6% to 8% starting August 15. Patient families reported that hefty service fees and channel fees were deducted upon withdrawal. Shuizhichou customer service responded that the price hike was intended to provide higher quality services, which triggered public skepticism regarding its commercial nature versus its charitable positioning.
On September 18, a large number of depositors in Zhumadian, Henan Province, gathered in the rain outside the municipal petition office to defend their rights, after the company chairman Wang Haizhou failed to fulfill his promise to distribute living expenses before the Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day holidays. They chanted slogans demanding to "see the mayor" and called for government intervention to resolve the issue.
Yunnan Jiuji Technology Co., Ltd. (Jiuji Network) internally implements a "Striving Value" system, quantifying employees' overtime hours and daily behavior as core indicators for performance appraisal and daily management.
On September 18, the Apple iPhone 18 Pro officially went on sale. Previously, Apple's official Chinese website had marked the release date as 'next Friday the 18th' instead of 'September 18,' which was accused of being an attempt to avoid the anniversary of the September 18 Incident. On the day of release, the comment sections of relevant media reports saw a large number of boycotting remarks such as 'never forget national humiliation' and 'firmly refuse to buy.'
On September 17, Evergrande Auto released its 2026 interim results, showing that the company has only 7 employees left, with total assets of approximately 182 million yuan and liabilities as high as 32.722 billion yuan. The company explicitly stated that it has exited the vehicle manufacturing business and has no intention to resume it, with the net profit for the first half of the year mainly derived from exchange gains on borrowings.