Occupy Underground

"Generally, a lot of worker protests are similar to this because of unpaid wages," he told NPR through a translator. "Bosses move factories without a heads-up to workers, and so workers are left unpaid."

Indeed, as the Journal says: "Numbers for such disputes are hard to come by, though an investigation by the Economic Information Daily, a newspaper published by the official Xinhua news agency, found that more than 400 bosses ran away from bankrupt factories in eastern China's Zhejiang province in 2008.

Most of those executives worked for foreign companies, meaning workers had virtually no hope of claiming months or even years of backpay owed to them."