Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
Tuesday marks the start of the Lunar New Year, and hundreds of millions of Chinese are home with their families, many of them enduring complaints about why they’re not married yet and the hours-long, televised Spring Festival gala.
Welcome to Foreign Policy’s China Brief.
Tuesday marks the start of the Lunar New Year, and hundreds of millions of Chinese are home with their families, many of them enduring complaints about why they’re not married yet and the hours-long, televised Spring Festival gala.
Most people enjoy a break from work at this time. In honor of the holiday, this week we’re going to talk about China’s work culture and what the West misunderstands about it.
China’s Work Cultures
In recent months, certain corners of Silicon Valley have become obsessed with “996”: working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week. Though the term originated in China’s tech industry, it was coined as a critique of an unhealthy and illegal work culture, not an aspirational ideal. The 996 trend isn’t the norm—it’s closer to China’s version of start-up culture.
On paper, Chinese law limits the workweek to five days and 40 hours, with anything more requiring union-negotiated overtime pay. But in practice, labor law is something between a pleasant fiction and a cruel joke. The rules are rarely enforced, especially for lower-status workers, and the only legal union is state-run and toothless.
China has a long history of abusive work practices. Maoism borrowed from Soviet Stakhanovism, which idealized hard labor, and introduced the social dominance of the “work unit,” or danwei. China only formalized the two-day weekend in 1995. Today, gig workers and migrant construction laborers endure punishing schedules with few benefits or protections.
Yet the idea of 996 has caught on in the West in part because it plays into stereotypes of Chinese people as inherently industrious and work-focused and reinforces perennial fears about China out-competing the West. (U.S. productivity, meanwhile, remains roughly four times higher than China’s.) The trend is more flattering than older, racist tropes, but it is still dehumanizing, reducing 1.4 billion people to tireless worker-drones.
In 15 years working in Chinese offices, from private firms to state-run media, I found the reality to be far more varied—and that work was often the last thing on my colleagues’ minds. As in any other country, Chinese work culture differs depending on the sector.
Beyond the infamous 996, there are some broadly recognizable subcultures. One notable example is found in the public sector, which employs roughly 23 percent of the eligible working population. We might dub its culture as “323”: three hours of work, a two-hour lunch break, then three more hours of work.
The two-hour (if not three-hour) lunch break is sacrosanct, and repeated attempts to change it have largely failed. During this break, some offices organize group exercise, but most people use it to nap. This was the greatest culture shock I experienced working in China. In the private sector, firms even dim office lights or have designated nap rooms to make sleeping easier.
Another quirk of the public sector is the prevalence of fake jobs—posts given out as patronage to officials’ friends, relatives, and business associates. Depending on the level of expected scrutiny, these can be “no work” jobs where employees idle at their desks, often working at another job online; or “no show” jobs. In some cases, these jobs also serve to skirt legal requirements, such as disability hiring quotas.
The intensity of work fluctuates with the political climate. In calmer times, most government employees are content to submit low-quality work and devote their energies to side hustles or hobbies. This makes them both frustrating and flexible to interact with: If you need a form stamped, the office may be closed for a long lunch, but if you’re late with that form, the official will likely be lenient.
The state’s quota-driven demands create predictable cycles. It’s common for work to be slow at the start of the year, then suddenly frenzied toward the end of the year in the hopes of hitting targets—sometimes accompanied by creative accounting.
When political winds shift, the expectations change, and many of the perks vanish. The Chinese Communist Party leadership can sometimes treat government workers as an all-purpose tool, giving them arbitrary, difficult demands. In 2022, for instance, teachers in Guangdong were told they had to register a certain number of elderly people for COVID-19 vaccination, or else their performance reviews would be affected.
Then there’s the socializing. Official life involves endless mandatory group outings—one of the few things that the official trade union organizes—that also lubricate informal corruption networks. Evenings can devolve into exhausting rituals of drinking, deference, and debauchery, where power dynamics shape all social interactions. (I spent more nights than I care to recall watching middle-aged men letting their bosses win juvenile drinking games.)
When Chinese President Xi Jinping’s first anti-corruption campaign got underway in 2013, this style of socialization became temporarily unacceptable. Many officials were grateful for the shift, as it reduced their workloads, allowed them to spend more time with their families, and spared them from associated health risks. However, the discipline faded, and old habits soon returned.
As the Year of the Fire Horse begins, Chinese officialdom once again strains to prove its worth to an increasingly demanding leader, intent on curbing corruption. If history is a guide, these efforts to reform are no more likely to last than previous ones.
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