China: Scrap Yard Worker Decapitates Himself With a Hydraulic Press [NSFL]

A scrap yard worker in China walks up to a hydraulic crusher and puts his head where the scrap usually goes.

No argument on camera, no one else even in the yard. Just a guy, a machine, and a security camera that happened to be rolling at 7:31 on a Friday morning.

Video

It’s a straight yard surveillance feed, timestamp running in the corner. The setting is a scrap metal recycling lot, piles of twisted rebar and sheet metal stacked everywhere, with a squat hydraulic press box sitting in the open. A worker in dark clothes walks up to it and crouches down low against its side, like he’s checking something on the machine. A few timestamps later he’s just not there anymore, no dramatic moment caught on the fixed camera angle, just an empty spot where he was. Jump ahead a bit more and the whole box is tipped over on its side. A second worker in a red helmet wanders in, then a guy in a blue jacket joins him, and the two of them crouch around the toppled machine clearly trying to figure out what they’re looking at.

The report that comes with the clip spells out what the camera doesn’t: he stuck his head into the press himself. Whatever they found when they tipped that box back over isn’t something the footage actually shows you, and honestly that’s for the best.

What the Thread Said

The comment section wanders off into unrelated meme references more than it reacts to the actual clip, which happens. Buried in there, one guy makes the obvious dark joke about how a chicken keeps running around fine after losing its head, and one comment floats the theory that this was less about despair and more a calculated move for a life insurance payout to leave something for the family.

The Grim Backdrop Behind China’s Factory-Floor Clips

Nobody’s confirmed where or when this clip was shot, but footage like this keeps circulating out of China’s migrant labor system, so here’s the context.

• 7.5% of Shenzhen migrant workers surveyed (1,805 people) reported suicidal thoughts, nearly double the 3.9% national rate.
• 27.0% showed high levels of depressive symptoms, 9.5% high anxiety, in the same survey.
• At least 13 suicides hit Foxconn’s Guangdong factories in 2010, most victims young migrants from poor regions.
• Chinese reporting points to a ‘Werther effect’, one suicide seeming to trigger others, in these tightly packed, rigidly managed workforces.

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