An elderly Chinese resident has stirred controversy after cutting a high-rise worker's safety rope to use as a clothesline.
According to the South China Morning Post, the incident occurred Sept. 17 at a high-rise building in Foshan, Guangdong Province. The report was published Monday (local time).
A worker identified as Liu had been carrying out exterior repair work on the building when he descended from the 30th floor to the second floor and discovered that one of his safety ropes had been cut. Part of the severed rope was found on the second floor.
Fortunately, no one was using the rope for high-rise work at the time it was cut, so no injuries resulted.
The rope Liu had been using was about 120 meters long, and more than 10 meters of it had been cut. As a result, he was unable to descend to the ground floor. Liu called the act "thoughtless."
The person responsible was identified as a resident in his or her late 70s living on the second floor of the building. The resident said they had not known the rope was safety equipment used for high-rise work and had cut it to use as a clothesline.
Liu decided not to report the matter to police, taking the resident's age into consideration. Instead, he negotiated with the building management company and sought 400 yuan ($59) in compensation for the damaged rope.
Once the incident became public, criticism spread across Chinese social media platforms, with related posts drawing more than 61 million views.
One user described the act as "attempted murder," saying that age or ignorance of what the rope was could not justify damaging another person's property.
Another user said Liu should have filed a police report, arguing that "being overly lenient means the person who did wrong does not face the consequences they deserve."
Wang Haogong, a lawyer at Shanxi Haogong Law Firm, said the resident's act of cutting the rope violated Liu's property rights, and that if additional losses such as lost income had resulted, Liu could seek compensation through legal proceedings.
China has seen previous cases in which damage to high-rise workers' safety ropes led to accidents. In December 2017 in Zhengzhou, a man identified as Cao cut a high-rise worker's safety rope during a dispute over construction work, causing the worker to fall from the fourth floor and sustain fractures. Cao was sentenced to nine months in prison, suspended for one year, on charges of intentional injury.
bbo@heraldcorp.com
