996 working hour system

Based on Wikipedia: 996 working hour system

When Work Becomes a Death Sentence

In February 2022, a twenty-eight-year-old employee at ByteDance—the company behind TikTok—posted a message on a Chinese social networking platform. The next day, he was dead.

His case wasn't unique. It wasn't even unusual. It was simply the latest casualty of a work culture that has earned a darkly clinical name: 996.

The numbers tell you everything. Nine in the morning to nine at night. Six days a week. Seventy-two hours of work every week, stretching into months and years until bodies and minds break. In China's booming tech sector, this schedule became so normalized that workers stopped asking whether it was legal—because it wasn't, and nobody seemed to care.

The Arithmetic of Exhaustion

Let's do the math that millions of Chinese workers live with. A standard workweek in most developed countries runs about forty hours. The 996 system nearly doubles that. Where a conventional job might give you evenings for family, hobbies, or rest, 996 leaves you twelve hours each workday—and only Sunday to recover before it starts again.

This isn't entrepreneurial hustle or passionate dedication. It's industrial extraction of human capacity, dressed in the language of opportunity.

The health consequences are brutal and well-documented. A 2013 survey found that nearly ninety-nine percent of Chinese IT workers reported health problems. Not just vague complaints—we're talking about musculoskeletal pain from endless hours hunched over keyboards, sleep disorders from schedules that leave no time for rest, eating problems from meals grabbed between meetings, and the pervasive fog of chronic exhaustion that follows workers home to their cramped apartments.

More than three-quarters of urban workers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou suffer from what researchers clinically term "work-family imbalance." The phrase sanitizes something uglier: parents who don't see their children awake, marriages conducted in exhausted fragments, lives that exist almost entirely within office walls.

The Companies That Built an Industry on Burnout

The roll call reads like a who's who of Chinese tech giants. Alibaba. Huawei. ByteDance. JD.com. Pinduoduo. At least forty major companies have implemented 996 or something even more demanding.

Some tried to make it official. In September 2016, a classified advertising website called 58.com publicly announced it was adopting the 996 system. When employees and social critics pushed back, the company offered a revealing clarification: the schedule would be "encouraged, not compulsory." The distinction mattered legally. It changed nothing practically.

Other companies operated through less formal channels. When 58.com's announcement made news, an internal email from JD.com leaked online. A vice-president named Gang He had demanded that management implement 996 "on a flexible basis." Again, that word flexible—elastic enough to mean whatever the company needed it to mean while providing deniability.

Richard Liu, JD.com's founder, eventually addressed the issue with the kind of corporate candor that reveals more than intended. The company wasn't forcing anyone into brutal schedules, he insisted. But he was laying off workers he deemed "slackers"—people who weren't his "brothers." His advice to those who remained?

"Every person must have the desire to push oneself to the limit!"

The limit, in this context, meant accepting conditions that Chinese labor law explicitly prohibited.

When Bodies Become Evidence

The deaths kept coming.

In early January 2021, a twenty-two-year-old worker at Pinduoduo—a massive e-commerce platform—collapsed and died. The Japanese have a word for this: karoshi, death by overwork. China was generating its own examples at an accelerating pace.

Pinduoduo's response would be darkly comic if it weren't so horrifying. The company's official account posted a statement on Zhihu, a popular question-and-answer platform, explaining the situation with remarkable bluntness: "Those who are at the bottom of society earn their wages at the risk of losing their lives."

They deleted it almost immediately. But the internet remembers.

Days later, another Pinduoduo employee committed suicide by jumping. When a third worker posted photographs of a colleague being loaded into an ambulance, the company fired him.

The message to surviving employees was clear: keep working, stop documenting.

The Rebellion That Started on GitHub

GitHub is an unlikely platform for labor activism. It's where software developers store and share code, a sprawling digital library of programming projects. But in March 2019, someone created a repository with a grimly memorable name: 996.ICU.

The joke embedded in the name was bitter. Work 996, and you'll end up in the intensive care unit.

What happened next shocked everyone, including the activists who started it. Within two days, the repository had fifty thousand "stars"—GitHub's version of likes. By day four, it had doubled. Within two weeks, it had become the second most-starred repository in GitHub's entire history, surpassing projects that had been accumulating support for years.

The movement's slogan was simple: "Developers' lives matter."

What began as a list of companies practicing 996 evolved into something more ambitious. Activists created the Anti-996 License, a legal hack that prohibited companies using 996 schedules from incorporating code released under its terms. It was a clever piece of leverage: if you want our software, you can't work your employees to death.

Chinese tech companies responded with the tools at their disposal. Tencent's QQ browser, WeChat, Alibaba's UC Browser, and several others began blocking access to the 996.ICU repository, labeling it "an illegal and fraudulent site."

Employees at Microsoft and GitHub, watching from across the Pacific, created their own repository in support. They understood that censorship might be coming, and they wanted to make clear where Western tech workers stood.

The Billionaires' Blessing

Jack Ma built Alibaba into one of the world's largest e-commerce empires. His personal wealth at various points exceeded fifty billion dollars. His opinion on 996 was unambiguous.

"Workers should consider 996 'a huge blessing' as there is no way to 'achieve the success one wants without paying extra effort and time.'"

From a man whose success would allow him to never work another day, this advice landed differently than he may have intended.

Richard Liu echoed the sentiment from his position atop JD.com. Jason Calacanis, an American entrepreneur and angel investor, offered his own endorsement from Silicon Valley, describing 996 as "the same exact work ethic that built America."

This was historically illiterate. America's labor movement had fought, bled, and died to establish the forty-hour workweek. The eight-hour day wasn't a gift from industrialists—it was extracted through strikes, legislation, and decades of organizing. Workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory burned to death in 1911 in part because of the conditions that unrestrained capitalism produced. The Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 established overtime protections precisely because the market, left alone, would exploit workers beyond human limits.

996 wasn't the ethic that built America. It was what America's labor movement had spent a century dismantling.

The State Media Surprise

In China's tightly controlled media environment, state outlets often align with corporate interests and government priorities. When they turned against 996, it signaled something significant.

Xinhua, China's official news agency, published commentary stating flatly that 996 "violates labor law and overtakes health and the future." The People's Daily—the Communist Party's flagship newspaper—added that "advocating 'hard work' does not mean resorting to and enforcing the 996 system."

Beijing Daily went further, criticizing Jack Ma and Richard Liu directly for "boasting" about schedules that were "aimed at disguising reduction of salary or layoffs." A writer for Banyuetan, a state publication, called the entrepreneurs' rhetoric "poisonous chicken soup"—a Chinese phrase for advice that sounds inspiring but is actually harmful.

This wasn't the state defending workers out of humanitarian concern. Chinese authorities had their own reasons for worrying about a tech sector that was becoming too powerful, too independent, and too cavalier about rules. But the effect was to legitimize criticism that workers had been voicing for years.

A Study in Modern Slavery

In 2020, researchers publishing in IEEE Software—one of the most respected journals in computing—compared work cultures across Chinese and American tech companies. Their findings were stark: Chinese businesses were significantly more likely to demand long hours than their American counterparts.

Another academic study reached for a more loaded comparison. It likened 996 culture to "modern slavery," formed through what the researchers called "unrestricted global capitalism and a Confucian culture of hierarchy and obedience."

The phrase provoked debate. Was it fair to invoke slavery when workers technically had choices? Could people simply quit?

The reality was more complicated. In a labor market where major employers had tacitly coordinated around similar expectations, where housing costs in tech hubs consumed vast portions of salaries, where the entire structure of career advancement assumed acceptance of these conditions—how free was the choice to refuse?

Beyond 996: The Joke That Isn't Funny

Among Chinese workers, darker humor emerged. Some began talking about "007"—not the suave British spy, but a grimmer schedule: midnight to midnight, seven days a week.

The term carries multiple meanings depending on who's using it. Sometimes it describes workers expected to essentially live in the office. Sometimes it refers to remote positions requiring round-the-clock availability, a phenomenon that accelerated during COVID-19. Sometimes it's sarcasm—workers suggesting that 996 is actually the sanitized version of what employers really want.

There's also "tang ping," which translates roughly to "lying flat." It describes a kind of passive resistance: if the system demands everything and offers nothing sustainable in return, some workers simply stop striving. They do the minimum required, refuse promotions that would mean more hours, and redirect their energy elsewhere.

It's not a solution. But it's a survival strategy in an environment where the official channels for change have proven unreliable.

The Law Finally Speaks

On August 27, 2021, China's Supreme People's Court issued a ruling. The 996 working hour system was illegal.

This wasn't a surprise—it had technically violated labor law all along. But the ruling carried weight, or at least it was supposed to. Legal scholars immediately began asking whether it would actually be enforced.

ByteDance, responding to years of pressure and the death of that twenty-eight-year-old employee, moved away from 996 in late 2021, mandating shorter hours. Other companies made similar adjustments, at least on paper.

The deeper question remained unanswered: could a legal ruling change a culture?

America's Inconvenient Import

In 2025, something troubling began appearing in reports from Silicon Valley. The artificial intelligence boom had attracted staggering investment, and with it came familiar pressures. Wired magazine and the Marketplace podcast documented a growing number of American AI startups implementing 996 schedules.

The justification was velocity. The AI race was moving too fast, the competition too intense, the stakes too high for conventional work-life boundaries. Companies needed to build quickly or be rendered obsolete.

California labor law provided cover. Section 515.5 of the California Labor Code exempts employers from providing many software engineers with overtime pay. A loophole written for one context was being exploited in another.

The irony was profound. American tech workers had watched Chinese 996 culture with a mixture of horror and superiority. Now it was migrating.

What Guido Saw

Guido van Rossum created Python, one of the most widely used programming languages in the world. His code runs in applications from Instagram to scientific research to artificial intelligence systems. When he commented on 996, his words carried weight in a community that revered him.

"Inhumane," he wrote.

The word cut through the euphemisms. Not challenging. Not demanding. Not competitive. Inhumane—a term usually reserved for conditions we consider beneath human dignity.

European entrepreneurs weighed in with their own perspective. Some argued that 996 was contrary to European values, where labor protections and work-life balance were considered features rather than obstacles. Others noted that such schedules actually impeded competitiveness by driving away talent. The bigger problem for startups, they suggested, wasn't lazy workers—it was financing.

The Uncomfortable Questions

996 forces us to confront assumptions about work, success, and human limits.

Is extreme labor a path to prosperity or a trap that enriches shareholders while burning through human capital? Can countries compete economically while protecting workers, or does global capitalism inevitably race toward the most exploitative baseline? When do cultural values about hard work become instruments of control?

The Chinese government's response to 996 illuminates its own contradictions. State media criticized the practice even as the economic model it served generated the growth the Communist Party claimed as its legitimacy. The Supreme Court ruled 996 illegal even as enforcement remained spotty. Workers were told they were valued even as their deaths became statistics.

American tech's flirtation with 996 raises different questions. The United States built labor protections precisely to prevent such exploitation. Yet those protections were eroding—through legal exemptions, through contractor classifications that stripped workers of rights, through a cultural narrative that treated any limit on work as a personal failing.

What Gets Lost

The defenders of 996 talk about competition and success, about building companies and capturing markets. They rarely talk about what the schedule destroys.

Children grow up with absent parents. Marriages strain and break. Friendships wither from neglect. Health deteriorates in ways that compound over years. Creativity—supposedly the thing tech companies value most—dulls under chronic exhaustion. The research is clear: beyond a certain threshold, additional hours produce diminishing returns and then negative ones.

But these costs don't appear on quarterly earnings reports. The deaths of young workers make news briefly before being displaced by product announcements. The slow erosion of health and relationships happens privately, visible only to those living it.

996 is efficient in a narrow sense. It extracts maximum labor in minimum time. What it's not efficient at is sustaining human beings—their bodies, their minds, their connections to each other.

The Future Unwritten

The 996.ICU movement demonstrated something important: workers organizing through digital tools could generate pressure that traditional labor actions could not. A GitHub repository became a weapon. Code licenses became leverage. Visibility became power.

But movements peak and fade. The repository still exists, but the initial fury has subsided into something more diffuse. Companies adjusted their official policies while finding new ways to extract the same hours. The deaths continued, if less visibly.

What remains is a template. Workers discovered that tech's own infrastructure could be turned toward labor organizing. They found allies across borders who recognized shared interests. They forced state media and courts to address what they'd preferred to ignore.

None of this guaranteed victory. But it demonstrated that 996 wasn't inevitable—it was a choice made by companies and tolerated by governments, and choices could be changed.

The question now is whether workers will remember this when the next crisis comes, when the next boom creates the same pressures, when the same billionaires offer the same advice about blessings and limits and brothers.

The bodies of the fallen deserve an answer better than silence.