Safeguarding the Universiade Games should not be used as an excuse to stop workers from safeguarding their legitimate rights, Wang Fang, a lawyer with the Beijing Zhicheng Migrant Workers Legal Aid and Research Center, told China National Radio.

"If there is any illegal activity during the process of petitioning, related parties will definitely be held responsible according to the law," he said. "To prevent this from happening, the local government should expend more effort at stopping arrears."

This is not the first time Games-related actions have drawn criticism of the Shenzhen authorities.

More than 80,000 "high-risk" people had been evicted from the city, authorities announced on April 12.

The city police's 100-day crackdown was criticized for discriminating against former prison inmates, vagrants and the mentally ill.

Starting July 1, Shenzhen will implement a real-name registration policy for the purchase or selling of dangerous knives including kitchen and fruit knives with fines of up to 5,000 yuan (US$770).

The same policy was adopted for the Guangzhou Asian Games and the Shanghai World Expo.

It was the government's duty to make sure everything went smoothly for the games, said Wang Yukai, a professor of public management at the Chinese Academy of Governance in Beijing, "but it should be cautious in making those regulations," he warned.

"Learning lessons from the Beijing Olympic Games, Shenzhen has a benign intention of making the event successful by adopting administrative intervention but some of these new regulations overstep the legal limits and may harm the city's image."

The fundamental problem was to how to tackle wage arrears and make sure workers got paid on time, he said.

Earlier this month, the Chongqing government mobilized special police forces to help migrant workers obtain wage arrears, arresting a labor contractor at a construction site for not paying 200 migrant workers' salaries worth more than 2 million yuan.