Chinese company ‘confines’ employee in dark room for 4 days to force him out

Gaming company ordered to pay aggrieved worker £40,500 in compensation

Representational. A man works on his laptop at a train station in China (Getty)

An online gaming company in China confined an employee inside a “small dark room” for four days in an attempt to make him resign, sparking a legal battle over labour rights.

Guangzhou Duoyi Network has challenged a court ruling telling the company to compensate the former employee, South China Morning Post reported.

Amid protracted negotiations over his resignation from a Guangzhou subsidiary in Sichuan province, Liu Linzhu arrived at work one day in late 2022 and found that he could no longer log into the system or use his entry pass.

The company told Mr Liu he was required to attend “training” and put him in a small room on a different floor, away from his workstation.

The room had no power supply and was completely dark. And it was sparse save for a table and a chair.

Although Mr Liu was allowed to leave the room “freely” over the next four days and go back home after “work”, he was not assigned any tasks and his mobile phone was confiscated, the Post reported citing court documents.

On the fifth day, Liu’s wife went to the police. That is when the company issued an official notice laying him off.

To avoid paying compensation Guangzhou claimed that Liu was let go because he violated company policies.

In May this year, a court in Sichuan asked the company to pay Liu 380,000 yuan (£40,500) as compensation for mistreating him. The firm openly disagreed with the ruling and published the full court document on its Weibo account.

“We believe that there are many problems with the labour laws which severely hinder economic development and are arbitrarily enforced by judges who distort the facts,” it said.

The records of the trial are yet to be made public on the court’s website.

The company accused Mr Liu of viewing nude pictures and browsing unrelated websites during working hours.

Mr Liu argued that, as a game art editor, he viewed the images for work purposes.

The court agreed with him.

It ruled that confining Mr Liu to the “dark room” was illegal under the labour contract law, which mandates employers provide proper working conditions for employees, the Post reported.

The company has made no further comment on the matter.