Slacker generation’s social-media movement against ‘996’ work culture is a warning for Beijing

Never mind that old Naxalite boomer line. China’s chairman is not Infosys’ emeritus chairman. Be that as it may, “birds” perched across trees in China have been tweeting a story that isn’t music to those in China who have been pushing the infamous “996” system for decades on end: working 9 am to 9 pm 6 days a week. That’s actually two hours more than the duration of a working week suggested by our favourite task master.

In viral videos, young people in China have been engaged in a serious, new form of sticking it to The Chair-Man. Reacting against Xi Jinping’s version of JFK’s “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” finger-wag, the new social media trend has young people—what policymakers insist on calling “youth”—record themselves with their hands tucked inside oversized t-shirts, perched on any piece of furniture, and then change the video backdrop to make themselves look like they’re sitting on trees. The effect is powerfully, even scarily, surrealistic.

And the purported message is in the captions with the video posts: “Don’t go to work, just be a bird instead.” This is not your usual leave application While this should not, in any way, disrespect hardworking—or even workaholic—cuckoos, it is a powerful agitprop against China’s version of “Protestant work ethic” (read: slave driving). Overtime work is what made China the “factory of the world”. Capitalism with “Chinese characteristics”, conjoined to Confucian values of obedience and hierarchy (callout to Manusmriti fans), produced more than a generation of grunt workers in the Mao-mai-baap communist state.


While this has, understandably, been a wet dream for employers and modern-day galley slave line managers—especially if the manufacturers happen to live in territories that hold such working conditions to be verboten for their own employees and consider them “third world” ever since the Dickensian Wild West ended—for employees, it has resulted in the rise and rise of sweatshops.

The overtime “996” culture in China has fuelled a rat race-on-steroids culture—where not working inhuman hours is seen as slacking, with your KRA slip showing. In her 2020 study, “How managers use culture and controls to impose a ‘996’ work regime that constitutes modern slavery,” Jenny Jing Wang of Australia’s University of Wollongong’s School of Accounting, Economics and Finance, analysed interviews to determine the extent to which managers used “controls to exploit power and distance, high levels of insecurity, and unenforced labour rights to impose harsh working conditions” in China. The picture is “Sivakasi firework factory bad” across China’s white-collar sector. Beijing , Shanghai and Guangzhou, over decades, have been just the tip of the iceberg of drone worker incubation centres. Employees across industries have suffered from work-related fatigue, sleep disorders, eating disorders and work-home imbalances. Even the Chinese state-owned media outlet, People’s Daily, reported a survey in 2013—since removed online —registering that 98.8% of Chinese IT sector employees suffered from health conditions.

China today leads in work exhaustion-related deaths in the world. So, it’s tough to spin China’s latest resist ance against “It’s glorious to overwork” as a First World—or First World-instigated—problem. Which is when the Chinese people started to realise that it’s not silly to believe that “#ChineseLivesMatter”.

The world is lying flat
But before the “birds” arrived, there was the first passive-aggressive movement of “tang ping”—literally, “lying flat”—that coincided with the Covid outbreak in 2020. It can be traced back to a post by the then 26-year-old factory worker from Sichuan, Luo Huazhong, who quit his “soul-sucking” factory job in 2016.

In his post, titled “Lying Flat is Justice,” Luo wrote, “I can just sleep in my barrel enjoying a sunbath like Diogenes, or live in a cave-like Heraclitus and think about ‘Logos’. Since there has never really been a trend of thought that exalts human subjectivity in this land, I can create it for myself. Lying flat is my wise movement, only by lying down can humans become the measure of all things.” The dialling down of “996” had begun.

By August 2021, the Supreme People’s Court and Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security declared that it was illegal to fire, or take action against, an employee who chose to refuse work under a company’s “996 policy”. The “996 culture”, which the since-shamed Alibaba cofounder and ex-business poster boy Jack Ma had called a “blessing” in 2018, now turned into a Chinese “embarrassment”.

But Chairman Market had reacted even before the de jure intervention. In July 2021, stocks of Meituan, one of China’s biggest food delivery platforms, dived by nearly 14% after new rules required the company to pay social insurance covering accidents and sickness for food delivery drivers and pay at least local minimum wages to them. The “invisible hand” kept “996” alive inside company offices despite its official ban. “Lying flat” was a reaction to a manufactured celebration of (over)work. The latest movement of “birding” is proactive, pre-empting Luo Huazhong-style burnouts—and worse. China’s Gen Z—not to be confused with General Zhang Youxia, of the People’s Liberation Army and first-ranked vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission reporting to chairman Xi Jinping —born between 1995 and 2010 are the equivalent of the Western world’s punks. Except that here, being countercultural has more severe consequences than in 70s-era Thatcherite London. Less financially and socially secure than their parents, with slimming chances of owning a house and dealing with rising costs in China, this is the advent of China’s “Slacker Generation”. Yes, it is, in its truest sense, a political movement arguably more worrying for Beijing than the putdownable angry romance of 1989’s Tiananmen Square.

These “Work less, chirp more” “birds” on video posts may not herald the swansong of the Great China Story yet. But it certainly showcases what happens when you push too many people to too much work with the signature tune of “national wellbeing”, while tossing individual well-being to the side wok.

Keeping in mind what the secondmost populated economy in the world thinks today, the most populated economy could consider making its workers—blue-collared, white-collared, Chinese-collared—work with more comfort, dignity and less communistic zeal. For quality, as the birds have it, has a quantity of its own.