Enrique Dans
A long and very interesting article in the Financial Times, “‘Obedience and fear’: the brutal working conditions behind China’s tech boom”, provides some insight into China’s work culture, summed up as “996” — working from nine in the morning to nine at night, six days a week — as well as asking to what extent businesses rely on these long hours, which is beginning to create wider problems in society and has seen the deaths of numerous workers.
In China, a good worker is somebody who, like the famous Xi’an warrior statues pictured here, works their head off, even if the law limits overtime to three hours a day and a total of 36 hours per month. Needless to say, the sanctification of a culture of long hours means the law is flouted, particularly in industries such as technology. In response, younger Chinese tech workers have created a repository of grievances against some of China’s biggest companies on Github called 996.ICU, a reference to working long hours and then being sent to intensive care for exhaustion.
This brutal work culture has been defended in China by executives such as Jack Ma, while in Silicon Valley Mike Moritz, one of Sequoia Capital’s leading executives, recently wrote an article entitled “Silicon Valley would be wise to follow China’s lead”, which rails against the trend in the West toward shorter hours, working from home and finding a better work-life balance.
The article is particularly relevant in the light of the G7 meeting, where the United States has managed to secure support for action against autocracies like China and Russia. Speaking to the media after the meeting in the United Kingdom, Joe Biden said: “We’re in a contest, not with China per se, … with autocrats, autocratic governments around the world, as to whether or not democracies can compete with them in a rapidly changing 21st century.”
And while all G7 member states support pressing China on issues such as its treatment of minorities or forced labor, extracting generalized commitments is proving to be an extremely complex task. Can a group of countries, even the richest in the world, achieve an international agreement that aims to regulate the conditions of competition in the world, including environmental issues, and that aims to isolate countries that don’t comply with them? Much may depend on such an agreement and its enforceability.
Is China’s exploitative work culture sustainable in the medium and long term? Is the race to dominate global technology worth it, at the cost of generating a society with such standards? How can such an economic system be defined, if not as a kind of uncontrolled and involutionary hypercapitalism, in which everyone works themselves to death in the hope of becoming a billionaire? And if you manage to become a billionaire in China… be careful.
Is such a society sustainable? Desirable? And is the rest of the world headed in the same direction?
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