Category: China

Working Overtime or Being Laid Off: The Pressure under Hopelessness among Workers in Chinese Internet Companies

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“I’ve been working until 1:00 am or later, then getting up at 8:00 am to continue working this week, but my mentor still pointed out a lot of problems that need to be reworked. But there’s no space to escape, if I don’t work harder, I would be laid off in the next quarter. I couldn’t imagine if I lost this job, either I had a rich family to rely on or had some indispensable skills. Now there’s massive laid-off everywhere due to the economic downturn, and it would be extremely hard to find another job if I’m being dismissed. The most probable result of my life would be nothing.”
– Linda, a 26-year-old operation specialist in Tiktok, Shanghai

In China’s bustling urban centers, a significant number of young individuals are employed in Internet firms, driven by the desire for a more promising future characterized by secure employment and affordable housing. Linda’s experienced colleagues at Tiktok, who worked diligently like her, underwent a transformation in their lives. Originating as diligent students from rural or small-town backgrounds as Linda, known as “small-town swots,”(“小镇做题家”) they excelled academically, performing well in entrance exams and securing places in top universities. While they lacked broader perspectives and social networks, they nonetheless successfully transitioned into urban elites with competitive salaries, stock shares and options from China’s most valuable company in the early years, becoming firmly established in first-tier cities.

However, this once cherished aspiration has been shattered due to the end of rapid growth and the impossibility of significant salary advancements. The soaring property prices in China, especially in big cities, make it impractical for most people to purchase an apartment in such a metropolis, diminishing the chances of achieving such an exciting miracle. Returning to their smaller hometowns or cities is a challenging prospect for these individuals, primarily due to the limited Internet-related job opportunities outside major urban hubs such as Beijing and Shanghai. Furthermore, young individuals like Linda, who often belong to the first generation of college graduates in their families, face immense expectations of securing respectable employment and surpassing their parents’ financial achievements. These young people are swashed down by hopelessness.

Overtime pressure still grows under hopelessness. According to Chinese labor law, workers should not work more than eight hours a day or 40 hours a week, and overtime is restricted to 36 hours a month. However, staff in the Internet sector, especially at big tech firms, face unpaid compulsory overtime, working on average 12 hours a day. The pervasive overtime culture in Chinese internet companies is exemplified by the widespread adoption of the “996” work hour system (working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week) and the “big/small week” scheme (work six days a week, every other week).  Despite the alarming occurrences of sudden worker deaths due to long working hours, which serve as a warning to society, the common issue of excessive overtime work remains largely unchanged.

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Dependence and ecology in contemporary Latin America, part 2: Limits to sub-imperial autonomy

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Brazilian agribusiness’s fervour for Soybean cultivation has manifested itself domestically as much, if not more so, than externally, with deforestation accelerating as plantations abound with similar velocity in both the Brazilian Amazon and the Paraguayan Chaco. The domestic intensification of Soybean cultivation can, in large part, be attributed to growing demand from China, the world’s primary soybean consumer (Song et al, 2009). China is the largest market for both Paraguayan and Brazilian soy, with both nations essentially relying on continued Chinese imports to balance their trade deficits (Giraudo, 2020). Accordingly, the impact of Chinese demand on Brazilian agriculture, and on other resource sectors across the region (Ganchev, 2020; Oviedo, 2015), replicates many of the dynamics previously mentioned with regards to Brazilian ‘Subimperialism’ in Paraguay.

As soybeans are typically exported with minimal processing, and monocrop agriculture generates comparatively little employment (Giraudo, 2020), few of the benefits of the soybean supply-chain are appropriated within Brazil. Meanwhile, cheap Brazilian soybeans indirectly support the Chinese labour system by lowering the price of staple foods, especially pork, allowing Chinese manufacturers to keep wages low, thereby maintaining the competitiveness of Chinese exports (Wise & Veltmeyer, 2018). With Chinese demand likely to remain high, it seems inconceivable that either the Brazilian or the Paraguayan economies will wean themselves off of soy and will instead remain conditioned by, and dependent on, the whims of the Chinese industrial system

Furthermore, this integration of soybeans into the Chinese industrial economy exacerbates the existing China-Brazil trade imbalance. 98.4% of Chinese exports to Brazil are manufactures, whilst the majority of Brazilian exports to China are primary-resources, with soybeans representing the single most valuable export-commodity (Jenkins, 2012). Low-price Brazilian commodities thereby fuel an industrial system which exports value-added goods back to Brazil, creating a trade-deficit which entrenches the nation’s dependence on the industrialised core, reproducing the fundamental dynamics observed by dependency theorists in the mid-twentieth century (Frank; 1966; Prebisch, 1962).

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The Co-evolution of Diversity in Property and Economic Development: Evolutionary Economics and the Vertical Dimension (Part 2)

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Having laid out the horizontal dimensions of diversity in property in Part 1, I here offer a critique of the assumption in mainstream economics that all kinds of property institutions need to be or will be transformed into private property to promote economic development. I also reflect on my previous work that applies and develops Darwinian mechanisms of variation, inheritance, and selection—which has been extensively discussed in evolutionary biology and evolutionary economics—to study property regime transformation in China.

While working on our co-authored paper, Professor Erik Reinert introduced me to two very important books and encouraged me to think about the relevance of the work of Darwin and Veblen to study property regime transformation in China: Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002), Harvard biologist and historian of science; Thorstein Veblen: Economics for an Age of Crises edited by Erik himself and Francesca Viano. Erik also introduced me to the work of evolutionary economists including Professor Richard Nelson of Columbia University.

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The Co-evolution of Diversity in Property and Economic Development: Key Concepts and the Horizontal Dimension (Part 1)

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This blog post builds on the ‘Institutions, Economic Development, and China’s Development Policy for Escaping Poverty’ piece and comprises two parts dealing with the key concepts (Part 1) and mechanisms (Part 2) for evaluating the co-evolution of diversity in property and economic development. I argue that diversity in property plays a key role in economic development and that there are two dimensions that are important for examining the co-evolution of diversity in property and economic development—horizontal (Part 1) and vertical (Part 2).

In this post, I offer a critique of the assumption in mainstream economics that private property is the only kind of property institutions that can stimulate and preserve economic development (I am, of course, not the first to offer critiques of this assumption; for existing studies, see e.g., Kennedy 2011). I focus on the meaning of ‘diversity in property’, which concerns the horizontal level analysis.

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Institutions, Economic Development, and China’s Development Policy for Escaping Poverty

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I recently have had opportunities to reread the works of Professors Erik Reinert and Peer Vries and to reflect on my previous work on the relationship between institutions, economic development, and China’s development policy for escaping poverty. Professors Reinert and Vries have studied, along with a few other distinguished economists and economic historians, ‘poverty traps’ at national and transnational levels for decades (eg, Serra 1613; Landes 1998; Reinert 2007; Reinert 2009; Vries 2013). Both argued that innovation and structural change are the keys to escaping poverty.

Professors Reinert’s and Vries’s work on economic development has brought the work of Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) to light. In this blog post, I will review how the work of Schumpeter, Reinert, and Vries helps us explore three key questions: First, what kind of development does a country need to escape poverty? Second, what kind of institutions can promote development? Third, how to develop? These three questions are crucial to understand China’s escape from poverty.

Professors Reinert’s and Vries’s arguments can be well supported by China’s national development policy. Below are a few highlights of rich empirical evidence. In 1984 the Chinese government proposed a development-oriented poverty reduction policy to replace the previous aid reliance policy (Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council 1984; for critiques of relying on massive foreign aid to escape poverty, see e.g. Moyo 2009; Hubbard and Duggan 2009; Banerjee and Duflo 2011). On 18 January 1992, Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997, leader of the PRC from 1978 to 1989) made a famous speech in his Southern Tour, emphasising that ‘development is the absolute principle’ (fazhan cai shi ying daoli). Since then, China’s economic development has entered a new stage. In 1994 the Chinese government fully adopted the development-oriented poverty reduction policy as a national policy.

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Community Infrastructure and the Care Crises: An Evaluation of China’s COVID-19 Experience

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This blog post was originally published on the India-China Institute/The New School’s Pandemic Discourses blog.

COVID-19 has exacerbated the gendered impact of care work globally, but lessons can be learned from countries like China that have relied on community organizations for solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed a severe care crisis throughout the world. The measures to contain the infection – lockdown, social distancing, quarantine – severely disrupted activities crucial to the basic functioning of society from cooking to cleaning, childcare, elder care and more. The experience of China shows the critical role of the community in providing essential services.

Like in many other countries, women in China assume disproportionately more care responsibilities than men. With the care crisis intensified by the pandemic, women from different socioeconomic backgrounds were all significantly affected. Urban women mostly saw themselves shouldering more household chores when hiring domestic workers or seeking extra help from family members became impossible or difficult during the lockdown. As most female migrant workers are employed in the precarious informal sector, they had to endure job losses and economic hardship, in addition to extra childcare and household chores. Female healthcare professionals risked their health working on the frontline while having to bear the added mental stress of possibly carrying the virus and spreading it to family members.

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The Socialist Market Economy in China, Vietnam and Laos: A development model to embrace?

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By Jo Inge Bekkevold, Arve Hansen and Kristen Nordhaug

China, Vietnam and Laos have for three decades been among the fastest growing economies in the world. In other words, three of the best growth performers in global capitalism are authoritarian states led by communist parties with socialism as the official development goal. This fact has received surprisingly little attention, especially when considering their strong performance on a wide range of development indicators. Many claim China and Vietnam indeed represent some of the most impressive “development success stories” the world has seen in recent decades. The three countries claim to have found their own model of development combining a market economy with socialism – ‘the socialist market economy’. According to official definitions, this is not capitalism, but a more sustainable and socially just way of making a market economy work for national development and the improvement of living standards. In “The Socialist Market Economy in Asia: Development in China, Vietnam and Laos”, an edited volume newly published by Palgrave Macmillan, we engage with the coherence, achievements and failures of this particular development model.

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Sino State Capital and the Strengthening of Serbian Stabilitocracy

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Chinese labour workers and their team manager laying the tracks on the Belgrade-Stara Pazova section of the Belgrade-Budapest railway. Source: author’s own.

The Belgrade-Budapest Railway has been lauded as the flagship Belt and Road project of the wider Central and Eastern European (CEE) region, and as such is promoted by Beijing as a successful template for Sino-CEE cooperation concluded via the 17+1 initiative, established in 2012 to foster relations between China and 17 CEE countries. In its host context of Hungary and Serbia, the investment has been politicised from the get-go, wherein criticism has largely focused on the project’s violation of EU public procurement rules, which require competitive dialogue and open-tender processes for projects of substantial size.

We would expect the Belgrade-Budapest Railway to be subject to greater scrutiny in both Hungary, as an EU member state, and Serbia, where external legitimacy of the EU is an important cornerstone of regime legitimacy, stemming from broad-based support for EU integration and cooperation. While this has played out in Hungary where there have been protests and where the EU launched infringement proceedings against the construction for non-compliance, the Serbian section has proceeded relatively unhindered.

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