What is China’s 996 work culture that has claimed another techie’s life: All you need to know about it

Earlier this week, the sudden death of a young employee at a Chinese short-video streaming company has reignited the debate about China’s gruelling ‘996 work culture’ in the tech industry.

According to Agence France-Presse (AFP), a 25-year-old content moderator for short-video streaming site Bilibili died of brain haemorrhage after working throughout a week-long public holiday.

Bilibili confirmed the employee’s death in a statement late Tuesday and said they had apologised to his family while terming the incident a “wake-up call”.

“We should make active improvements in checking up on the physical health of employees to prevent similar tragedies from happening again,” the statement added.

The hashtag “Bilibili worker suddenly died after working overtime during Lunar New Year” went viral on the Twitter-like Weibo platform on Monday when a workplace blogger reported the man’s death, citing anonymous colleagues claiming that he was forced to work overtime.

The sudden death has added to a long list of similar deaths of young tech employees in recent years, sparking a debate over the industry’s notorious “996” culture.

Let’s take a look at the 996 work culture and what critics say:

What is China’s 996 work culture?

Once endorsed by tech billionaires like Alibaba founder Jack Ma and Richard Liu, 996 responds to working 12 hours per day, from 9 am to 9 pm, for six days a week: 72 hours per week.

Companies sometimes pay huge bonuses to some employees, enticing them to work more overtime, or reimbursing taxi fares for employees who work late into the night.

The intense work culture has met with online and offline criticism. In March 2019, an anti-996 protest was launched via GitHub.

The repository was made with the aim to list the companies that use the 996 working hour system, but it soon developed into a movement, the Anti 996 Licence, that prohibited companies which use the 996 system from using open source code on GitHub.

According to China’s Labour Law, employees are allowed to extend work hours by up to three hours for special reasons, but staff should not work more than 36 extra hours in a month.

The debate over the gruelling work culture is reignited every few months after the death of an overworked employee.

Deaths due to the 996 work culture

– Last year in January, in a video widely circulated on Chinese social media, 45-year-old delivery driver Liu Jin poured gasoline and set himself on fire outside a distribution station for Eleme in the eastern city of Taizhou, shouting that he wanted his money.

– In a similar incident, a 43-year-old delivery driver collapsed on the job and died while delivering food for Eleme.

– In December 2020, a 22-year-old employee surnamed Zhang of Chinese e-commerce giant Pinduoduo collapsed while walking home with colleagues around 1.30am. She died six hours later.

– The company was again in news in January last year after another employee, surnamed Tan, died by suicide after taking leave from the firm and returning to his hometown. He had been working with the company for about six months.

With inputs from agencies

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