The same journey would have taken just three hours by air, or about 12 hours by high speed train, but Kong could not take either as he was a "deadbeat".

As one of 13 million officially designated "discredited individuals", or laolai in Chinese, on a public database maintained by China's Supreme Court, 47-year-old Kong is banned from spending on "luxuries", whose definition includes air travel and fast trains.

For this class of people, who earned the label mostly for shirking their debts, daily life is a series of inflicted indignities – some big, some small – from not being able to rent a place to stay in their own name to being shunned by relatives and business associates. In some places, the telecommunication companies apply a special ringtone to the phone numbers of laolai as a warning.

"It's even worse than doing time because at least there's a limit to a prison sentence," Kong said in a phone interview. "Being on the list means that as long as you can't clear your debts in full, your name will always be there."