Guilt, Shame, and Compensatory Claims: An Exploratory Case Study of Petitioning by a Victim of Employment Fraud

In the xinfang—or letters-and-visits—complaint reception work of public-sector companies in China, some petitioning matters involve harms that were not directly caused by the company itself. Nevertheless, because the company either controls, or is imagined by the petitioner to control, certain scarce institutional resources, such harms may be transformed into compensatory claims directed at the company. Based on an exploratory, interpretive single-case study of an anonymized petitioning episode—drawing on reception records, petitioning statements, and observed behavior—this article analyzes how an employment-fraud victim, who suffered both financial loss and the loss of his child's established employment opportunity, redirected his demand toward a railway company that had neither deceived him nor received his money. The analysis suggests that the petitioner's repeated visits, emotional distress, and insistence that the company solve his child's employment problem were not merely groundless demands, but are interpretable as the product of multiple post-fraud losses, paternal guilt, indications consistent with shame-related self-evaluation, externalization of remedial (rather than causal) responsibility, and compensatory expectations directed at the perceived holder of the lost resource. For company xinfang reception work, the key task is not only to clarify institutional and compliance boundaries, but also to identify the psychological crisis behind the petition, stabilize emotions, redirect the petitioner toward lawful remedies, and prevent escalation. The case suggests that effective reception should combine emotional containment, boundary clarification, legal-pathway guidance, and risk prevention.