Thread by @lillianmli

1) Let's talk about Pinduoduo and the backlash of China's 996 work culture today.

An employee's death (apparently due to overwork) and PDD's apparent flippant response has riled up the Chinese internet. Who are all asking the question: Is money the be all and end all to life?

2) 996 culture is a sad fact of Chinese tech firms and means that a employee works from 9am to 9pm for 6 days a week. Some have even semi-joked their working hours are 007.

This is pretty true to life. On most weekends you can find engineers grinding away in the offices

3) Since Wechat rather than email is the default mode of communication, workers are always all. As Andrew Ng once said, if he sent his chinese colleagues a work text at 7pm and didn't get a response by 8pm, he's start thinking there was something wrong.

4) Backlashes against this has already been happening, with engineers using Github since 2019 to complain about the lack of choice in such a brutal working environment.

But the recent case has taken on new casualities

5) A 22 year old employee of PDD collapsed after leaving work at 1.30am in the morning on Dec 29. This has sparked outrage on Weibo (Chinese Twitter) esp after PDD's apparent flippant response scmp.com/tech/big-tech/…

6) PDD's official account posted this on Chinese Quora, then swiftly deleted. It translates roughly to "Everyone's working to the bone for money...This is an era where you have to push with your life. You can choose the easy path but there's consequences"

https://twitter.com/LichtSpektrum/status/1346047430727352320

7) As you can imagine, the phase 'This is an era where you have to push with your life' is pissing a lot of netizens off. PDD's swiftly announced the statement was made by a rogue PR manager rather than their official view.

https://twitter.com/File_helper/status/1346050402790252549?s=20

(h/t @LichtSpektrum )

8) Netizens are aghast at how young the employee was, they are aghast that Colin Huang was named the second richest person in China just days ago, they are aghast at the callousness of the response.

9) I think Western media paints Chinese tech workers as these relentless machines who will work hard to crush their competitors and western counterparts at all costs. This picture is quite flawed. There's increasing frustration at the lack of choices people have in jobs and life.

10) The key words involution and labourers both represent this growing realisation that the life the white collar workers live do not lead to greater freedom. Often the opposite.

https://twitter.com/lillianmli/status/1345028000669003777?s=20

11) Meantime the playbook for the tech giants haven't changed. Whenever there's a new opportunity (like that of community group buying) they through money and people at it and fight until there's a winner.

The public have cottoned on to this.
lillianli.substack.com/p/the-hottest-…

12) The rise of the backlash against tech is alive and well in the China internet discussions. People wonder about the true cost of their cheap deliveries and groceries on society.

They broadly support the incoming government regulations that curtails the giant's reach.

13) (IMO) Chinese society after 1997 largely used how much money someone earned as a measure of their success (and worth). This has fed into a mass scarcity mindset where if you're not making money, you're losing out.

14) But as society become richer and a middle class with only one child has emerged, there's an increasing level of soul searching happening. Is money all there is? Does earning that money justify the cost of losing loved ones?

15) For the chinese millennials who are working today, the payoff calculus are also dramatically different. It used to be that after working hard for one of these tech companies for 3-4 years they can get a house in a first tier city.

16) But housing prices have increased such this is now a pipe dream. They increasingly feel they can never earn enough money, no matter how hard they work.

So why try?

Many of them dream of leaving the big city and choosing a quieter life, and in fact, many do.

17) I think these calls against 996 work culture will be the beginning of something else for Chinese working population. Everyone knows this is unsustainable, something's got to give sooner or later. The image of dying at work like Japan or Korea looms over people's imagination

18) I want to predict that more regulation for worker's rights come in, but also know the government doesn't want to stifle a good thing when they see it. So I only put this at medium confidence level.

I'll be doing threads like this for the rest of Jan so follow if you like these to spam your TL.

Also curious about your take here as well- thoughts?