Beneath a sweltering concrete bridge in Wuxi, a manufacturing hub in eastern China, dozens of college students stood shoulder to shoulder with their luggage, waiting for factory jobs that didn’t exist.

Two recruiters in plain clothes barked orders, sorting the students by age, gender, and shift preference. Among them was 21-year-old Wang Shumei, who had traveled from the northern Shandong province after answering an online ad for a factory job that promised high pay and free housing.

Instead, her first stop was this makeshift “orientation” under a bridge, where recruiters offered little more than confusion. “The factory office is under repair, so we’re holding the meeting here!” Wang remembered one of them shouting.

Over the next few days, the same recruiters shuttled Wang between dingy hotels and factories that bore little resemblance to the ads. Each stop brought new charges — deposits, “medical checks,” even bedding fees — while the promised wage shrank to barely half.

“I kept calling the ‘HR staffer’ who promised me a salary, but the number had gone silent,” Wang said. “That’s when I suspected it was all a scam.”

Every summer, thousands of college students pour into factory towns across eastern China, lured, like Wang, by the same lucrative online listings.

But this year, with factory orders slowing and recruiters still aggressively advertising, many arrivals found themselves stranded between dubious agents, underpaid shifts, and overcrowded dorms. Some, left on the streets, even gave up and returned home, their savings gone before they had earned a single wage.

Behind most of these ads is not the factory itself, but a chain of middlemen. Students rarely deal directly with employers; instead, they are funneled through layers of recruiters and sub-agents, each taking a cut. By the time they reach a factory gate, the job often bears little resemblance to the ad that lured them south.

On Douyin, China’s TikTok, videos of students stranded amid a heatwave have gone viral. One widely shared clip, describing a student’s harrowing experience, drew over 4,000 comments and 3,000 reposts. While some urged students to flee home before losing more money, others still asked desperately: “Which factories have openings?” and “Is anyone going together to apply?”

“Many were students who had just finished exams or were on summer break,” said Zhao Zhenghua, a recent graduate from a junior college in Shandong who spent July drifting between factories in Kunshan, in neighboring Jiangsu province, while waiting for his diploma. “They spent a fortune traveling down from the north, but after failing to find a job, they didn’t want to go home.”

When Wang and other students sought help from police, officers told them such cases were common but difficult to pursue. Because deposits and fees had been collected across multiple cities, they classified the matter as a “financial dispute” and offered only limited mediation.

Still, every summer the flow continues. For students from smaller towns, factories still promise wages far above what they could earn at home — enough to make the risks, and the stories of scams, seem worth taking.

The bait

Leaving the bridge, Wang clung to the promise that had drawn her south: a job at Japanese electronics giant Alps Alpine in Wuxi. It advertised 28 yuan ($3.80) an hour — higher than Apple supplier Foxconn’s wages in her hometown — and free travel and housing.

“I just wanted my last summer break to pay off,” said the junior software engineering student, who spotted the ad on 51job.com, one of China’s biggest job sites. She contacted the recruiter, packed a small bag, and set off with just 1,000 yuan in her pocket.

But instead of work, recruiters asked her to hand over 240 yuan for bedding and another 30 yuan for “ID card printing and photos.”

Wang hesitated, wondering why such fees couldn’t be handled at the factory. But as she watched other students pay — and the agents arrive in BMWs and Mercedes — she handed over the cash. “I realized later that recruiters likely collected more than 50,000 yuan from the gathered students,” she told Sixth Tone.

And the next morning, the car that came to collect her never slowed near the Alps Alpine factory she had mapped in Wuxi. Instead, it sped past the city limits and onto the highway, carrying her more than 260 kilometers away before stopping at another Alps Alpine plant in Ningbo, across the provincial border in Zhejiang.

By evening, Wang and three other girls she’d never met found themselves crammed into a shabby roadside hotel. Four shared a tiny room with just two narrow beds, each paying 25 yuan a night out of pocket.

“Before we could even settle in, they asked for another 260 yuan, this time for an ‘accommodation deposit and medical exam,’” Wang recalled. After arguing with the agent who had brought them, Wang and the others were dumped on the roadside with their luggage.

Not long after, another agent appeared, sending them north to Jiashan County in Zhejiang — nearly halfway back toward Wuxi. The promised dormitory was nothing more than a subdivided unit in a six-story walk-up. “Six students were crammed into each bunk-bed room, with barely enough space to stand,” Wang said.

The scale of the deception hit only when her first payslip arrived. “They promised 28 yuan,” she said. “The factory gave 16. And once the agent took his cut, it was only 14.”

By then, Wang had stopped asking questions. She reported the matter to the police, and within days boarded a train north back home.

Around her, though, other students still debated whether to stay on, hoping to salvage something from the trip: Some endured grueling night shifts, some found their student identities rewritten to fit factories’ demands, and others simply sank deeper into debt.

The switch

Wang Chen, a freshman in surveying and mapping engineering from the central Henan province, had also chased the promise of a summer job at a major electronics plant. Instead, he found himself on the night shift of a small electronics factory, operating a printing press that smeared solder paste onto motherboards.

A dozen workers manned each line, all on their feet without chairs. “It’s the kind of job you just can’t stand for long.” One student, built bigger than him, quit after only a few days.

To get through night shifts, Wang kept a strip of paroxetine — often prescribed for anxiety disorders — in his pocket. “My symptoms aren’t severe, but sometimes I take one or two to calm myself down,” he said. He took the pills before work and before bed. “At night, standing at work, my mind wanders. Without the medicine, I can’t get through it.”

The side effects — nausea, no appetite, dependence — didn’t matter. “Some people rely on alcohol, some on cigarettes. I rely on this. Sometimes I even wish I were busier, just so my mind would stop.”

All he had wanted was a summer job that promised free housing and 5,000 yuan a month. Instead, his first weeks left him borrowing money from a cousin just to cover food and a bed, since salaries wouldn’t be paid until the following month. “If I had another 500 yuan in my pocket, I would have left long ago,” he told Sixth Tone.

Even his identity was reshaped to fit the system. Agents told him students weren’t wanted; he must pose as a “social worker.”

At a so-called “human resources center,” they fabricated bank statements, tax records, and even work histories in distant factories. Four fake apps were installed on his phone to make the story hold. Once logged in, the apps displayed records of jobs he’d never had: showing him as a factory hand in Guangdong province, southern China, complete with tax filings and bank activity.

“They warned us to answer interview questions exactly as they said,” Wang recalled. “I even tried to look up the factory to prepare, but there was nothing real to find.”

Though the center looked legitimate, to Wang it was theater. “It was just a front for selling labor,” he said. “The most absurd part was how real it seemed.”

Across Jiangsu and Zhejiang, students spoke of the same bait and switch.

In a dormitory, 23-year-old Dong from the northern Hebei province realized the wage cut was a trap baked into the system. He had signed up for a job promising 28 yuan an hour, but was dropped at another factory that paid just 16.

Another 6 yuan was withheld as a “bonus,” released only if he stayed one or two months — long after most students had already returned to school. Leaving early meant losing it altogether.

And in Kunshan, Jiang Feng from the central province of Hunan described a different kind of erosion. Her 10-hour shifts stretched to 12 with no overtime pay, and wages depended on meeting production targets that felt impossible.

Ten workers were packed into a room under four surveillance cameras, their movements monitored even as they slept. “We didn’t even have names,” she said. “They just called us ‘you,’ or ‘hey, come here.’ It was so demeaning.”

The cost

Legitimate recruiters who work directly with factories say the market is simple: factories ask for a set number of hands, recruiters supply them. But they acknowledge an informal layer of middlemen, now spread across the region, whose business depends less on job placements than on the fees they can extract from students along the way.

“Students are easy to scam out of their money,” said Wang Zhongzheng, 27, who works at a Henan labor firm that has specialized in placing seasonal workers for over a decade. “They’re new to the workforce, have no experience, and are easily tempted by high salaries.”

That promise of higher pay keeps drawing students south each summer.

In rural Hunan, Jiang Feng says, part-time jobs were “virtually nonexistent.” Others Sixth Tone interviewed compared the 100-yuan-a-day shifts back home with the 5,000- to 6,000-yuan monthly salaries advertised in Jiangsu’s electronics belt.

“I didn’t want to keep relying on my parents,” said Wang Chen. “Summer work felt like a way to test myself.”

According to Wang Zhongzheng, his recruitment firm used to place up to 20,000 students in factories each summer. Yet this year, amid shrinking orders, the number was cut in half. “We only hire as many people as the factories need,” he said. “That way we avoid wasting students’ time.”

And with middlemen still recruiting aggressively, he even took to Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, the lifestyle platform popular with students, to post a blunt warning. Orders were falling, factories were already turning away summer hires, yet agents kept collecting deposits. “In the end, students are just stranded on the streets, having made a wasted trip,” he said.

Recruiters like him typically earn about 500 yuan for every student successfully placed in a factory. But this summer, his phone filled with messages from students who said their pay had fallen short of what agents had promised — sometimes by 2,000 or 3,000 yuan.

He advised them to save chat logs, voice notes — anything that can serve as evidence in a complaint to the labor bureau. Some cases are settled, others drag into arbitration or lawsuits. But, he said: “Reliable platforms and strong supervision are still scarce.”

Wang Shumei witnessed that futility firsthand. When she finally approached the police about her predicament, officers told her such cases were routine across Jiangsu and Zhejiang. With deposits collected in Wuxi, lodging fees in Ningbo, and the supposed job in Jiashan County, no single station would take responsibility.

In the end, they logged her complaint as a “financial dispute” and offered only mediation.

“Under pressure, the agent returned 100 yuan,” said Wang. “A token refund for a dormitory I had never used.”

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: A screenshot shows students looking for factory jobs arrive in Kunshan, Jiangsu province, July 2025. From @何晴晴晴 on Douyin）