A new generation of young workers at China's technology giants is demanding an end to forced rankings, harsh working conditions, and the “996” work culture
By the time he arrived at Alibaba, Tim had been working to get there for years. Raised in a small town in Zhejiang province … Tweets: @yuanfenyang , @gaberivera , @mollymckew , @jchengwsj , @financialtimes , @yuanfenyang , @hollybell8 , @financialtimes , @aishagani , @johnreedwrites , @financialtimes , @financialtimes , @financialtimes , @rch371 , @mmpiatkowski , @wongdouglas , @evasiu21 , @financialtimes , @mmpiatkowski , @mikeelgan , @yuanfenyang , and @financialtimes Tweets: Yuan Yang / @yuanfenyang : China's tech giants have grown at breakneck speed. But their young professional staff are increasingly unhappy with how they're managed. Our @FTMag cover piece this weekend takes you inside the lives of China's self-styled “code peasants” — w @QianerLiu https://www.ft.com/... Gabe Rivera / @gaberivera : @FinancialTimes I read somewhere that this was actually good. Oh, it was in the Financial Times: https://www.ft.com/... Molly McKew / @mollymckew : “Code peasants” is a term I need to remember to use. https://twitter.com/... Jonathan Cheng / @jchengwsj : Postcard from Shenzhen: “He beat 80 other engineering masters graduates for his position, but the company ‘hires masters graduates to do something a high school student could also do,’ he says. When I ask him why, Jun responds, ‘involution.’” @YuanfenYang https://www.ft.com/... @financialtimes : Jun, a 23-year-old working for Tencent Cloud, beat 80 other engineering masters graduates for his position, although he says the company hires graduates to do what high school students could do. When asked why, he responds, ‘involution’ https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Yuan Yang / @yuanfenyang : 3/ In recent years, new ways of complaining about work and management have entered the Chinese lexicon: 996, involution (neijuan), PUA. In an internal memo, Alibaba acknowledged the “immense” dispute over its ‘forced ranking’ system and promised to relax it @hollybell8 : If you think capitalism is harsh on workers, read this to see how much worse socialism can be. https://giftarticle.ft.com/... @financialtimes : Allegations of overwork, abuse and injury at China's large tech companies have become the subject of nationwide debate in the country - @YuanfenYang reports on China's new generation of tech workers and their fight for fair working conditions: https://www.ft.com/... Aisha S Gani / @aishagani : Working conditions in China's booming tech industry are such that software developers launched the campaign “996 ICU”: Working 9am to 9pm, six days a week - as some managers demand - will have you end up in intensive care https://www.ft.com/... @johnreedwrites : Do read this by @YuanfenYang @QianerLiu on China's tech workforce. “A pervasive sense of the drudgery of uncreative, repetitive tech work has led them to self-identify with manual and agricultural labourers. Many refer to themselves as ‘code peasants’” https://giftarticle.ft.com/... @financialtimes : Chinese software developers launched the ‘996 ICU’ awareness campaign, which says that if you work 9am to 9pm, six days a week, you'll end up in intensive care. In two years, they have crowdsourced allegations of mistreatment at 200 Chinese companies https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... @financialtimes : While older Chinese tech workers have a stake, both financial and cultural, the younger generation missed out on the years of rapid growth and equity shares, and want an end to long working hours and cut-throat competition https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... @financialtimes : Next up is an FT Magazine piece on the brutal working conditions behind China's tech boom. Allegations of abuse and overwork at the country's biggest tech groups, including Alibaba and Pinduoduo, have become the subject of national focus https://www.ft.com/... Robert Hockett / @rch371 : The myth that Marx didn't flesh-out communism still f-cks the world. A ‘republic of freely associating independent producers’ was clear enough. Capitalist state encirclement assured state capitalism's win over soviet (worker coop) republicanism. And so... https://www.ft.com/... Marcin Piatkowski / @mmpiatkowski : “In 2019, in the highly renowned Peking University 17% of all the graduates went into #China Communist party work/govt., up from 11%. In total, counting those who had gone into state-admin./SOEs, 3/4 of graduates had gone “into the system”. @YuanfenYang https://www.ft.com/... Douglas Wong / @wongdouglas : ‘While older workers have a stake, both financial and cultural, many of those born after 1995 fear they missed out,’ @yuanfenyang writes. ‘This new generation wants... in short, an end to everything their predecessors thought essential’ https://www.ft.com/... Evita Siu / @evasiu21 : Despite socialist-era labour protections in Chinese law, local governments are loath to enforce prohibitions on forced overtime. In fact, many seem more inclined to accommodate the companies on which they rely for economic growth and tax revenue https://www.ft.com/... @financialtimes : In 2020, a leaked memo by Alibaba's chief people officer acknowledged the company's forced ranking compensation system, in which nearly every junior staffer got a hefty bonus but the ‘losers’ — or the worst performers — got close to nothing https://www.ft.com/... https://twitter.com/... Marcin Piatkowski / @mmpiatkowski : “Chinese netizens have latched on to a newly fashionable term: “involution” (nei juan). Anthropologist Clifford Geertz posited that ever-increasing amounts of labour had poured in but output remained constant. No innovation had occurred. Geertz called this involution.” Mike Elgan / @mikeelgan : Phrase of the moment: “code peasants” https://twitter.com/... Yuan Yang / @yuanfenyang : 2/ Thanks to all the tech workers who spoke to me and @QianerLiu, often late at night after work. “When we consider why some products succeed, it's not necessarily because they have better technology...it's because they simply have more people labouring away,” said one @financialtimes : Last year in China, two young staffers at Alibaba competitor Pinduoduo died: one of them collapsed after work, the other died by suicide. Allegations of abuse and overwork at the country's tech groups have since become the subject of national focus https://www.ft.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The backlash had already moved beyond private complaints: developers built the “996 ICU” campaign to collect allegations across roughly 200 companies, while related coverage described a cycle of surveillance and overwork driving severe stress and fatigue. Worker demands now put forced performance rankings alongside long-hours culture as a common workplace issue.
Alibaba’s leaked internal memo acknowledged disputes over its ranking system and promised to relax it, giving the worker push a concrete test inside one of China’s largest technology employers. The later combination of layoffs and workers’ relief at leaving 996 shows how labor conditions remained central even as the sector’s growth outlook changed.
First-order effects
- Alibaba is under immediate pressure to follow through on its stated relaxation of forced rankings, while young staff gain a shared vocabulary for challenging the system.
- Tencent, Xiaomi and other firms associated with the earlier restrictions on access to the 996 protest page face a more visible employee-relations problem as the campaign’s concerns enter mainstream coverage.
Second-order effects
- Forced-ranking systems become a retention and recruitment liability for technology groups whose workers increasingly identify the work as repetitive “code peasant” labor.
- Local governments’ reluctance to enforce overtime prohibitions leaves workplace reform concentrated in company policies and employee pressure rather than a uniform regulatory response.
Third-order effects
- If large employers continue to answer worker pressure with internal changes rather than enforcement, Chinese tech labor standards may fragment by company, with performance-management design becoming a competitive employment issue.
- The pattern links workplace surveillance, ranking systems and extended hours into one governance question: how fast-growing technology firms organize professional labor without relying on coercive intensity.
The trend: China’s technology workforce is turning opposition to 996 from an online developer campaign into a broader challenge to the management systems that sustain it.