In the world’s cyberspace, finding an unpatrolled spot most censored region of
to air shared grievances is hard. Yet disgruntled Chinese software developers have
recently found one at their fingertips:
GitHub, a platform owned by Microsoft
that allows developers to help each other
build software. Fed up with the grindingly
long work hours imposed on them by China’s internet giants, this collective has recently built something else—a movement
demanding more humane office hours and
calling out the worst corporate offenders.
Their beef is the “996” regime, which refers to a work schedule of 9am to 9pm, six
days a week, often without extra pay. Toiling such hours has become an unspoken
rule in the frenetic world of Chinese tech.
In late March anonymous activists created
a webpage called 996.icu (the letters standing for “intensive care unit”). On it they
listed firms at fault, including 58.com, a
site for classified ads that popularised the
996 approach in 2016. A page with the same
name was also set up on GitHub, which was
also used to host a sister project called
“955.wlb” (standing for “work-life balance”). This celebrates firms with more relaxed working hours. Almost all of those
listed are foreign ones.
The anti-996 campaigners have a point.
In 2016 Didi Chuxing, a ride-hailing giant,
ranked the most “hardcore” internet companies by their overtime hours. Staff at
jd.com, an e-commerce firm, clocked out
at 11.16pm on average (the latest). Relative
idlers at Didi left at 9.24pm. Fewer workers
now regard such long hours as something
to be proud of. Tempers flared in January
when Youzan, a firm that helps run others’
online shops, implemented a 996 schedule
and told non-compliers with it, more or
less, to quit. (Staff complained to the labour authorities: the law limits the working week to 40 hours and requires overtime
pay after that.) To the disappointment of
his many fans, Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, a tech giant, spoke dismissively of
the protesters, saying that “being able to
work 996 is a huge blessing.” Richard Liu,
the chief executive of jd.com, wrote:
“Slackers are not my brothers!”
The Chinese government is normally
quick to censor discussion of protest. However, in this case it is the internet companies themselves that seem to be taking the
initiative. Users say that web browsers including those of Alibaba, Qihoo 360 and
Tencent have failed to load the 996.icu
pages. The irony has not been lost on social-media users. “So 996 developers at 996
companies had to work 996 to block a website about 996,” one wrote on Weibo, a
Twitter-like service. Jeffrey Knockel of Citizen Lab, an internet research group at the
University of Toronto, says that tech firms
must fear that the protesters have clout.
The 996.icu page has been GitHub’s
most popular for weeks. That is because
Chinese developers are such avid users of
the platform for work purposes: their contributions are second only to those of
Americans. They also know how useful it is
for spreading sensitive information and
evading China’s vast web-filtering system.
Because GitHub is encrypted, it is harder
for the state to censor bits of it selectively.
Blocking it entirely would cripple China’s
technology champions, whose programmers rely heavily on code shared on
GitHub. In 2013 the government did try
blocking the platform. Complaints from
developers brought it back online within
days. Its appeal is not limited to techies.
Mengyang Zhao, who researches tech activism at the University of Pennsylvania,
says that Chinese ngo workers now use
GitHub to back up articles posted on WeChat that are at risk of being censored.
The GitHub page for 996.icu says that it
is “not a political movement”. But if the
government does decide to crack down, it
has leverage of its own that it can try to deploy, says Mr Knockel. That is, it has sway
over Microsoft, whose other services, including Bing and LinkedIn, are allowed to
operate in China with censored content. In
the meantime, vendors on Taobao, Alibaba’s retail platform, offer a “996” t-shirt
with a more alluring interpretation: “Sleep
at 9pm, rise at 9am, work six hours a day.”
Not one for Mr Ma, then. 7
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