China officials order cleaners to sift through tonnes of rubbish for lost watch, spark outrage
Officials hail cleaners’ dirty work an example of ‘hospitality’; netizens condemn order to rummage through trash with bare hands as ‘exploitation’
A local government in China has been panned by internet users for making two cleaners spend four hours in the scorching heat searching for a small watch lost by a tourist.
In early July, a woman from Shenzhen, southern China, took her child to Datong in the northern province of Shanxi by train.
She accidentally put her child’s smartwatch in a rubbish bag near their seat, then left the train, Red Star News reported.
The gadget has a positioning function which showed it was still in the railway station.
The next day, the mother, surnamed Lu, followed the advice of a friend to call the hotline of the Datong municipal government, asking if they could retrieve the watch from the station.