Introduction
In 2019, Chinese tech workers launched an online campaign protesting the 996-schedule. The campaign generated a nation-wide conversation about the punishing working schedules of white-collar workers in China. In the last couple of years, China’s tech workers have adopted a new set of vocabulary that captures their frustrations, which may indicate a new rising class consciousness.
Programmers, regarded as a professional class, may see themselves as part of the working class. As the tech sector races ahead, producing more billionaires than ever before in Chinese history, how can we understand these signs of recent class consciousness among Chinese tech workers? What forces in the industry have produced these conditions, and what does this say about the tech industry at large?1
We are republishing with permission a conversation with JS Tan, a former tech worker, researcher and labor organizer. The conversation was originally published in China from Below: Critical Analysis & Grassroots Activism edited by Ralf Ruckus, Daniel Reineke, Jule Pfeffer, and Kevin Lin.
Kevin Lin (KL): Today we have JS Tan with us to talk about tech workers in China. JS is a former tech worker in the U.S. and has written widely about tech, labor, and China. With China’s tech sector growing exponentially in recent years, tech workers are under immense pressure to work excessive hours. The practice known as 996—that is, working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week—is ubiquitous in the tech sector in China.
JS Tan (JS): The main thing I want to talk about is the rising class consciousness of tech workers in China. In particular, I want to frame this discussion around the question of labor and what transnational solidarity with tech workers in China might look like.
First, I want to share a quick note about myself. I am a member of a group called “Collective Action in Tech,” a media and research group that supports the tech labor movement. Among other things, one of our main goals is to work towards a tech labor movement that is global. Before that I was a software engineer at Microsoft, and I spent a lot of time on labor organizing within the company, particularly around climate justice and anti-militarism work. Anti-militarism was a big topic when it came to organizing within Microsoft because of the contracts that Microsoft had with the U.S. government. Today, I am primarily speaking from the perspective of a tech worker, and as someone who has been involved with tech organizing in the U.S. for many years.
One of the things that got me thinking about Chinese tech work was the anti-996 campaign led by tech workers in 2019. 996 means to work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., 6 days a week. This schedule is standard practice in most large tech firms in China. When the anti-996 campaign launched, it quickly catalyzed tens if not hundreds and thousands of tech workers across China to mobilize against the long working hours.
The whole campaign was run on GitHub, which is a platform for programmers to share code, bookmark projects, work collaboratively, and network with each other. If you are a programmer you almost certainly have a GitHub profile and use GitHub somewhat regularly. To give you a sense of how viral this anti-996 campaign became: within a few weeks, the anti-996 GitHub project shot up to become the second-most bookmarked GitHub project ever. It was bookmarked more times than any mainstream open-source project or famous library.
That was when it really occurred to me that we cannot think of the tech work movement holistically without thinking about how Chinese tech workers fit into the picture. As I was watching the campaign unfold, I wanted to see if there was any opportunity for U.S. tech workers to show solidarity and support the movement happening in China. Working with other organizers at Microsoft, I organized a separate GitHub project for U.S. tech workers to voice solidarity with the anti-996 campaign. Being one of the first times where tech workers were united across the U.S. and China, the small campaign of solidarity created a buzz. The solidarity statement was signed by hundreds of tech workers in the U.S. and around the world. Since the statement was also posted on GitHub, it was easy for Chinese tech workers to find it. They shared their gratitude knowing that they were getting support from across the world.
Since then, I have been following the working conditions of tech workers in China. One of the things that I observed was that with the exception of a few smaller companies, the 996 campaign basically failed. No major tech firm ended up revoking the 996-work regime. In fact, in the case of a few companies, work conditions became even more grueling. As an example, Pinduoduo, which admittedly was not as big two years ago, now requires some of its employees to work 380 hours a month, which is roughly the equivalent of twelve hours every day of the week. On top of that, there have been complaints by employees that the company was serving spoiled food. In some cases, they have also required workers to come in during national holidays. Over the past few months, one of their employees tragically committed suicide. Another died suddenly on her 1:30 a.m. commute home from work. There was also a case of a worker suddenly passing out and getting hospitalized in the middle of the day. These incidents have been said to be connected to the tough working conditions within the company. The conditions at Pinduoduo were so bad that people have likened what has happened in this high-tech firm to the Foxconn suicides (in 2010).
Another company that has been the target of public anger is TikTok’s competitor Kuaishou. It was leaked that the company had installed timers in the office toilet stalls to monitor how long employees were spending in them. Pinduoduo was also caught up in this controversy. Some floors of the Pinduoduo office in Shanghai were crammed with over a thousand employees but only had as few as eight bathroom stalls. Employees had to either wait in lines for hours or run over to the closest mall to use the public bathroom. The company also installed devices to block off the WiFi and cell phone connection in the bathroom stalls to discourage phone usage.
In response to these working conditions, tech workers have come up with a whole swathe of new words to capture what it is like to work in the industry. Some of these new terms are worth discussing because they indicate a shift in class consciousness among these workers. Terms that have become popular among programmers to call each other are manong, coding peasant, or dagongren, a term typically reserved for describing rural migrants who work in factories or lower-paid blue-collar jobs. Calling each other dagongren, even if only jokingly, shows that programmers are starting to see their work not only as incredibly grueling but as repetitive and even unskilled.
Another term that gets thrown around a lot is moyu, touching fish. The term means to pretend to work while actually slacking off on the job. This can look like taking unnecessary trips to the water cooler, playing games on your phone, or scrolling through social media. You can imagine how a word like moyu can become so popular in a culture where you are expected to work 996 hours. On online forums you will also find tech workers referring to their offices as hulianwang dachang, “big internet factories.” Despite working in modern skyscrapers or office campuses, tech workers have started to liken their programming work to working on the factory floor.
The most popular term in the past year or so is involution or neijuan, which originated outside the tech industry, but has really resonated with tech workers. The term literally translates to “inward roll.” So just from the word itself you get this feeling of spiraling inwards, a feeling of not being able to go anywhere, this sense of diminishing returns. For tech workers this has become a particularly ac-curate word for describing the brutal working hours in tech, the limited opportunities for career growth, and the cut-throat competition amongst tech workers.
I find neijuan to be a really compelling word, because it is also spot-on in describing the broader trend in the Chinese tech industry. At the more macro scale, the term captures the stagnation happening in the consumer tech ecosystem. For the past decades, the Chinese tech industry has enjoyed incredible growth. It has benefitted from the popularity of the smartphone, alongside China’s massive population coming online. But obviously this growth cannot last forever.
We see this clearly in e-commerce. In the early days of the e-commerce boom in China, there were two substantial players: JD.com and Alibaba. Back then, these companies were not really competing against each other as much as they were racing to bring online shopping to as many people as they could in the country. However, these days e-commerce is no longer about getting new users on to the service, but rather it is about how to steal users from competing services. Pinduoduo is another good example of the competition in e-commerce. Instead of fighting against Alibaba and JD.com for consumers in large tier one or tier two cities, the company has figured out that the market in these cities is already saturated, and so they have focused on capturing new users in lower tier cities and rural towns.
Another example is this battle between the top two food delivery platforms in China: Ele.me and Meituan. Both are backed respectively by Alibaba and Tencent and locked in competition in this extremely low margin business for food delivery. These companies are similar to Uber and Lyft in that they have always struggled to make a profit. But with the big financial backers that they have, Ele.me and Meituan are basically able to sink large amounts of money into their operation making it ridiculously cheap to order food, barely enough to break even. All this is because they are essentially fighting with each other over a fixed mar-ket in food delivery. In other words, they are unable to charge customers more for their delivery because Ele.me and Meituan are trying to outdo each other on prices. As a result, these companies have to cut costs, or worse, pass the pressure on to their delivery drivers who unsurprisingly have been seeing their incomes drop year after year.
This is why individual workers are hustling so hard and are locked into this kind of cut-throat, zero-sum competition with each other. The metaphor that I like to use is that everyone is working super hard and fighting for just a marginally bigger slice of what is a shrinking pie. To me this is what is really at the core of neijuan. It is the idea that everyone is drowning in this culture of 996, but the minute you come up for a gasp of air you are suddenly outcompeted.
I want to return to the idea of tech workers organizing. As tech workers in China launched their anti-996 mobilization on GitHub, a similar pattern of rising class consciousness had also emerged in the U.S. tech sector. Over the past few years, software engineers, data scientists, AI researchers, and others working in tech have started to acknowledge their interests first and foremost as workers. We saw this when workers at Kickstarter unionized, then later when Google workers launched the Alphabet Workers Union.
With rising class consciousness in tech sectors in both the U.S. and China, I cannot help but wonder how tech workers in these two countries can come together, especially in this moment when we are hearing politicians use phrases like the “AI-arms race,” or the “tech cold war.” The question of how the U.S. and Chinese tech sector can co-exist, at least from my perspective, cannot be left to politicians and the tech elites. So far, their leadership has only increased the bifurcation of the internet and increased militarization on both sides. The term “tech cold war” should itself be indicative of how dangerous this direction we are moving towards is. Instead, can we look towards tech workers to rethink how the U.S. and Chinese tech sectors can co-exist? If so, how can we build these connections?
KL: Thanks a lot for the really succinct presentation. I want to start with what appears as a very basic question. Could you give us a sense of what a tech worker in China looks like? If there is a typical tech worker in China, how would you describe their profile?
JS: I have not worked in the tech industry in China before, so I may not have the most representative answer. But even if we limit the definition of tech worker to those in white-collar jobs (engineers, programmers, program managers, etc.), I think it is important to remember that tech work is extremely diverse. Obviously, this applies to China just as much as the U.S.
Just to give you an example, a childhood friend of mine is now a tech worker in Shanghai. Contrary to this whole story about the grueling hours of 996, he mostly works forty to fifty hours a week. However, the company he works for is relatively small. Another example is a tech worker I interviewed at Alibaba. He is a low-level manager, works 996, but for him there is not much time to moyu, to slack off, which he said he was able to do a lot in his previous job. So even within a single company there is a lot of diversity. At Huawei, there is this program where they employ superstar engineers who make salaries of something like 100,000 yuan a month, which is comparable to some of the top salaries you see here in the U.S. tech sector. These workers are probably working 996 if not more, but unlike a lot of tech workers, they are probably researching and experimenting with the stuff they are interested in. They probably relish in 996.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are tech workers who are barely making 7,000 or 8,000 yuan a month. These are people who might have attended a boot-camp-like program and have developed some skills in front-end engineering, or data-base management, or something specific like that. A few years ago, Echowall characterized this spread in tech as an “IT-pyramid.” I think the term is really useful to capture how within the industry, and even within a single company, there is a massive spread of incomes with some workers earning in the order of ten times that of their co-workers.
There is also a demographic dimension to this. In the tech sector, there has been a tendency to preference younger workers who do not have families. If you are young, fresh out of college, working 996 is much more doable. But as soon as you have a family, as soon as you have children, it becomes much harder. There is also a gender dimension to this. Women are expected to take on the bulk of domestic and childcare work. There is this joke you can find on many online forums about a 35-year age limit for tech workers. You start your career in your early twenties as a software engineer and then hopefully you get promoted over the years. By the time you are 34 you are a senior software engineer, or you have some title like that. But by the time you are 36 you are, all of a sudden, a delivery driver because you have been fired from the company.
KL: I want to pick up on this stratification, or the demographic diversity of workers. How does that intersect with 996 organizing and this sense of neijuan? Do you see the impact of this is uniformly felt, or do you think there is one segment that feels more intensely than others and is probably more likely to participate in the 996-campaign?
JS: I think that there are several factors here. Where you are on this IT-pyramid is one factor. If you are making in the order of 100,000 yuan a month, you might have the feeling that working 996 is fair, that you are simply reaping the benefits of your hard work. Whereas if you are on the lower end of that spectrum you might be working just as hard if not harder, and you might only be making just enough to get by. The latter group is more likely to be discontent with the long working hours. Another dimension is where in the industry a worker is located. For example, Baidu does not require workers to work 996, so relative to companies like Alibaba and Tencent, it is a much more relaxed workplace. There are also a lot of western firms with offices in China, like VMware or Microsoft. These companies also do not expect their engineers to work overtime. So, I think there are multiple ways to look at this question.
KL: I want to ask one more question about 996 before we move on to talk about class consciousness. In a way the campaign generated national conversation. People read about it and know about it, but the kind of organizing seemed very opaque. Almost all of the organizers remained anonymous. To the extent that you can share and to the extent that you know the behind-the-scenes organizing, how was that started, and how was it able to keep mobilizing even though the organ-izers are anonymous?
JS: I do not really know how it was organized. The first time I saw the campaign was when it was already live. Almost all the organizers behind this campaign were anonymous, because the 996-campaign was extremely critical of so many tech companies and their founders as well. Everyone was scared of retaliation. One of the communities that came out of this campaign was from Slack. And that really quickly became a vibrant community of tech workers in the campaign where a lot of new mobilization efforts came from.
KL: There are quite a few questions about the vocabularies and how they relate to class consciousness. One question is: “Does the way the workers call themselves dagongren necessarily contribute to their working-class identity? Are you suggesting that they would like to share a similar habitus and class identity with the working class in factories?
JS: At this stage, I am hesitant to say that a tech worker in any significant way identifies with factory workers. But the way I see the word used is more in a joking or self-deprecating way. There is this shift in how tech workers are thinking about themselves. Even if only jokingly, calling themselves dagongren is indicative of this. However, I would be hesitant to say that we are going to see solidarity between tech workers and other blue-collar workers anytime soon.
KL: All through the last twenty years or so, users on the Chinese internet have been using self-deprecating terms to describe themselves or what they are doing as a way to complain or protest. Can you share a bit about the genealogy of the tech workers using those terms? Is that very recent, in the last two or three years, or did you see that before? And, why do you think they emerged at that particular moment?
JS: I have primarily observed what has happened since the anti-996 campaign. I cannot say with any real confidence what class consciousness in the tech sector was like before then. However, it is only after the anti-996 mobilization that tech workers started to develop these terms.
What were the conditions that led up to this moment? One of the things that created that moment of stagnating growth in the tech sector was a turn in the economy at the end of 2018 or early 2019. That was when you had companies like JD.com starting to fire employees en masse in order to cut costs. There was this economic moment where the tech industry was taking a turn and suddenly this promise that, if you work hard, you will make it, was broken. That is part of the reason behind the anti-996 campaign. Since then, we have seen a deterioration of the conditions of tech workers in China. My hypothesis is that the trade war between the U.S. and China also worsened the economic conditions and led to this crisis.
KL: We will talk more about the U.S.-China tech war and what it means in terms of solidarity. There is a good question from the audience about class consciousness. This vocabulary of dagongren and neijuan, to what extent does it signify neoliberal individualism, and to what degree does it signify working-class collective experience? Do you see tension between this more individualized language and the more collective thinking? Which narrative is more dominant among tech workers in China?
JS: What illustrates that is the difference between the term “tech worker” used in the American sense and neijuan. The latter is hyper-individualistic. It is about turning inwards, competing with everyone else. “Tech worker” as popularized in the early years of the tech workers movement in the U.S. was envisioned as a broad category to include contract workers, content moderators, software engineers, and even the cafeteria workers serving food on tech campuses. So, it had this fundamentally collective aspect to it.
In the Chinese tech sector, the individualistic aspect is possibly more dominant. Compared to the U.S., there is an even stronger belief in meritocracy. There are also immense societal pressures. As a result, there is not much opportunity for broader solidarity among different types of tech workers.
KL: Do you see tech workers using or leveraging any state socialist language that they learned in school? Do you see that as playing a role or having any influence in shaping the discourse of tech workers?
JS: On social-media platforms like Zhihu where it is common for tech workers to post about 996 or their own conditions, I have seen the kind of examples you are talking about. Several years ago, people thought of Jack Ma as a superstar businessman. Now when people post or comment on articles about him, you will see comments like “proletariat unite.”
My sense is that it is a relatively small but vocal group. A lot of these comments are more an expression of discontent than a call for unity. As someone who has been organizing in the tech industry in the U.S., I really believe in having one-on-one conversations and meeting your co-workers face-to-face. So, this nod to socialist politics on online platforms is not a bad sign, but it is certainly not a clear indicator that the broader discourse of tech workers is undergoing meaning-ful change, nor is it indicative of the potential for more tech worker unity.
KL: There is a follow up question on the individual versus collective narrative. The question is about workers in Shenzhen, Beijing, and elsewhere who are hustling for apartments, competing for jobs, for places to live. There are also different types of workers or layers of workers at JD.com and Tencent. Do you think this boundary contributes to the relative predominance of the individualistic narrative? And if so, do you think it is possible to build solidarity along different hierarchies of tech workers given all this fragmentation?
JS: I will answer this question by looking at what has been happening in the U.S. because it is a good case to compare with. Culturally, scholars have characterized the tech sector in the U.S., particularly during and before the dot-com era of the internet, with the term, the “Californian ideology.” The term points to a culture of individualism and the belief in free market capitalism. Many tech companies believed they could profit off free market capitalism while still maintaining progressive values. Yet over the past four or five years we have seen a remarkable shift in the culture of the tech industry. Tech workers who are making six-figure salaries are suddenly seeing themselves as workers. One really important aspect of this, especially early on when the tech worker movement began in the U.S., was the question of how we define a “tech worker.” Where do we draw the boundary?
In 2017, Facebook workers, office workers and software engineers, went out to support the union drive of the cafeteria workers on campus. Seeing solidarity between the well-paid office workers and cafeteria workers was inspiring to me because the former group were making the case that the latter group were in fact their co-workers. Since then, the Tech Workers Coalition has done a really good job at broadening the definition of a tech worker to be this much more inclusive category. As part of the Tech Workers Coalition, primarily an organization for office tech workers, we understood the struggles of Uber drivers and Amazon warehouse workers as part of our broader struggle. For me this was a remarkable moment in the U.S. tech sector where the word “tech worker” was used to unite all these fragmented pockets of the tech industry.
We have to remember that management benefits from a fragmented workplace. The platformization of work is one way this fragmentation happens. If you are a software engineer at a food delivery company like Meituan, it is extremely hard to think of delivery workers as your co-workers because you literally do not interact with them at all. That is why I think the key is to have this mechanism to organize in an inclusive way.
KL: This broad-based identity that you are describing has been emerging in the U.S. In comparison, how do you see this playing out in the Chinese context? We definitely see white-collar tech workers and delivery workers organizing. I am wondering how you see those dynamics playing out. Do you see the potential for broad-based mobilization or campaigning that cuts across not only tech workers from different companies, but also delivery workers and other workers who fall under the platform or tech economy in China? Do you see that emerging at all? And does this discourse contribute to the mentioned vocabulary? Or does it militate against forming that broad-based identity?
JS: I personally have not seen an instance of solidarity between platform workers and your more conventional definition of a tech worker in the Chinese context. That said, the struggle of platform workers has increasingly received more attention in China which is promising. There is also the fact that some employees at Meituan or Ele.me have a clear material basis for solidarity with their delivery driver counterparts, especially among folks who are lower on the “IT-pyramid” and make salaries comparable to those of delivery workers. I am speaking speculatively, because I have not seen these moments of cross-employment type solidarity in the Chinese context yet. But we can look to the U.S. as an example to see how tech workers in the U.S. conceptualize Uber drivers or the Amazon warehouse workers as part of their common identity.
KL: What alternative organizing concepts and methods for collective action have been discussed among the Chinese tech workers after the 996-campaign? For example, are walkouts, works councils, and unions being discussed? And that connects to another point I had in mind: we saw a great deal of online mobilization, but we did not really see much work-place based, offline action.
JS: The question of why we have not seen offline mobilization is an important one. The fact that the whole 996 movement was essentially run by tech workers who operated anonymously points to the fact that a lot of tech workers are worried about retaliation. In January this year, Wang Taixu, a programmer at Pinduoduo, was fired after anonymously sharing a video of a co-worker getting hospitalized, presumably from overwork. He shared the video anonymously on a LinkedIn-like service called MaiMai. Management at Pinduoduo was able to identify him and fire him. That is something we have to factor in when we ask why we have not seen more offline action.
After the anti-996 mobilization, some of the organizers made a mobile game about the working conditions of 996. It was a very simple game where you could play the role of a worker at one of these tech companies. You have to deal with management, you have to deal with working overtime. They released it a year and a half after the actual anti-996 campaign. Another thing that happened was an action where they sent a bunch of letters to Alibaba founder Jack Ma. For both these examples, pretty much everyone was working anonymously which makes it really hard to forge meaningful connections. I think we have to be critical of the efficacy of these types of actions.
KL: How does the state intersect the relations between tech workers and tech capital? In certain ways the state does discipline financial and tech capital, and when 996 happened the state media came out quite strongly condemning the work culture. At the same time, you also see them harassing and warning organ-izers of this mobilization. How do you see the role of the state in this? Do you think this is a different dynamic compared to the manufacturing sector or other sectors? Do you think there is something unique about the state role and how the state sees tech capital?
JS: These anti-monopoly policies or financial regulations are good examples for understanding the logic of the state. I do not think the government is fundamentally opposed to companies like Alibaba or Meituan. They will intervene though when they start to see these businesses operate in a way that is unsustainable or in a way that could cause instability to the system which could ultimately undermine their own legitimacy.
In the case of delivery drivers, they have on the one hand praised the companies for poverty alleviation efforts, and on the other hand criticized these companies for their lack of safety measures. It is all about stability. The e-wallet payment platform, AliPay, is another good example. Because this platform has so much control over payments in the country, the government sees it as causing a lot of risks. That is why they blocked it from going public and pushed through a variety of financial regulations. Once again, their motivation is to stabilize and concretize the dynamic that tech companies have created.
KL: Let us dive into some of the U.S.-China questions. Can you give us a brief summary: what is the contour of the U.S.-China tech war, and what are the points of contention?
JS: The tech war, particularly when referred to by politicians or the tech elites, has these five fronts: semiconductors is a huge one, network infrastructure such as 5G, operating systems, platforms, and content. You will hear accusations like Chinese tech companies are stealing intellectual property or that Chinese firms are puppets of the state, or that China has implemented so and so protectionist policies. In the eyes of many U.S. politicians, the rise of the Chinese tech sector is a result of Chinese firms not playing by the rules of the international free market.
But I think the war as it is waged on the U.S. side is a much more strategic one. For the last three decades, U.S. firms have dominated internet services all over the world. If you look at what online services are used in most countries, you find that Facebook, Google, Uber, and other American consumer internet services are the norm. On the backend, large businesses run on services provided by IBM or Microsoft. So now, as the Chinese tech sector has come up, they are really challenging the hegemony that Silicon Valley has enjoyed over the past decades. The tech war is being supported both by the U.S. government and by the tech elite to keep the U.S. ahead.
KL: There are two related questions. How can workers in both the U.S. and China resist the use of AI for military applications? And on what material basis could tech workers in the U.S. and China come together to fight?
JS: First we have to remember that this rhetoric of a tech cold war is relatively new. It can seem like the U.S. and China have opposite interests, but we must not forget how integrated the global tech infrastructure really is. Connectedness forms the basis for one kind of solidarity, or a global wall-to-wall solidarity.
Ride hail is a good example. The venture capital firm SoftBank dominates the entire ride hail industry. They have a stake in Uber as well as Uber’s Chinese counterpart Didi. Uber itself owns 19 percent of Didi. This means that the exploitation of ride hail drivers in China directly contributes to Uber’s bottomline.
We can also look at how integrated the tech supply chains are. Apple is the canonical example here. Apple relies deeply on factories in China as a central piece to their supply chains. This means that Apple engineers in California and factory workers in Shenzhen who are assembling iPhones are being exploited ultimately by the same boss. The one example that really punctures this myth is that the Chinese tech sector and the U.S. tech sector are completely at odds: semiconductors. Chinese firms spend a ton of money on U.S.-designed chips. From 2018 to 2020, China has consistently imported over 300 billion U.S.-dollars’ worth of chips each year.
But not all tech capital is interconnected. Over the past decade, the Chinese consumer internet has emerged as a completely distinct concentration of tech capital, separate from the interest of the U.S. tech elite. After all, Huawei did get sanctioned, TikTok was nearly booted from the U.S., and China has essentially made it its national priority to rely less on the U.S. So, in light of this new cold war dynamic where tech companies in the U.S. and China are turning inwards and leveraging more nationalistic rhetoric, what can solidarity between tech workers in the U.S. and China look like? In this environment, what is the basis for solidarity?
To answer this question, we have to understand the way nationalism operates and how it is deployed in both contexts. Throughout history, nationalism has been used as a way to obscure the inherent class contradiction between workers and management. This means that workers are willing to put aside their class interests for national interests, making it easier for elites to get away with all sorts of things. The tech industry is no exception. In China we have already seen the tech elite use nationalist rhetoric to justify the 996 hours as a matter of national pride. For example, Ren Zhengfei, who runs Huawei, responded to U.S. sanctions by saying that the company must take this opportunity to prevent employees from slacking off.
In the U.S., tech companies use nationalism to justify all kinds of horrible behavior. Executives like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg or Google’s Eric Schmidt, and of course Peter Thiel, have all done things like opposing anti-trust regulation or legitimizing violent military contracts in the name of staying ahead of China. Incidentally, these military contracts as well as the 996-working hours are the very things that U.S. and Chinese tech workers have organized against. It is really important to recognize that in both these cases nationalism has been used to undermine existing labor organizing efforts in the industry.
All that is to say that if tech workers are able to develop stronger relationships with their counterparts in China, they can possible counter the nationalistic, jingoistic narrative that has been used to pit us against each other.
- For more analysis, see: 996.ICU: https://996.icu/#/zh_CN (Chinese); https://996.icu/#/zh_US (English); https://996.icu/#/zh_DE (German). Lin, Kevin, “Tech Worker Organizing in China. A New Model for Workers Battling a Repressive State.” New Labor Forum, vol. 29, no. 2 (2020), 52–59. Tan, JS, “Tech Workers Lie Flat. Why is China’s Internet Industry Putting an End to the Grueling Schedules that Have Fueled so much of its Growth?” Dissent Magazine, Spring 2022, https://tinyurl.com/3j3cwjdz. Zhou, Viola, “The Dream is Over for China’s Tech Workers.” Rest of World, July 12, 2022, https://restofworld.org/2022/china-tech-layoffs.
