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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2026
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On 996: it is way less common than people seems to think. It was a fringe practice in ~40 companies during the tech boom. It has since been made illegal and is declining from it’s already fringe position.
While overtime pressure which was more common and 996 still does unfortunately exist, the trend is clearly negative. As in, it’s being actively cracked down on. The Supreme Court ruled 996 illegal in 2021, and recent policy pushes like the 2025 Consumption Boost Plan are specifically targeting illegal overtime and pushing for better enforcement of rest/vacation rights among other benefits. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s hugely improved from where things were in the 2000s or even 2010s, and honestly it’s just not the omnipresent norm that English-language coverage sometimes makes it sound like.
Good for them. It's 2026 and they finally made illegal a year ago something that Europe made illegal (and enforced) decades ago.
Now China is almost at the level of USA when it comes to workers rights forced to work vastly too long hours without repayment.
But since I have you here, what is the gig economy rate and workers protection in China? We're seeing a boom of gig economy of the worst exploited kind (Uber, Glovo, etc) among immigrants from muslim and asian countries in Poland (first it was gig economy and then migrants were imported en masse).
More on 996: it only became a "major" phenomenon around 2016–2019. It was ruled illegal in 2021. That's a 3–5 year window, most of which the government spent doing the groundwork to draft enforceable legislation. Comparing that timeline to Europe's decades of labor law development isn't a fair metric, it should be about trajectory, not starting point.
On worker rights: yes, China still has gaps. However it's important to note it's rapidly moving in the right direction. While China is tightening overtime enforcement, expanding social insurance coverage, and piloting portable benefits for flexible workers, many US and EU jurisdictions are eroding protections through austerity, gig-classification loopholes, and weakened collective bargaining. Improvement vs. decline isn't a tie.
To add to that is the hukou system. It's extremely flawed in it's own way, no question. But for rural hukou holders, it does guarantee land use rights and homestead eligibility, a subsistence buffer that doesn't exist in the same form in the US or Europe. It is a structural fallback against total destitution, which changes the risk calculus for work.
On China's gig economy: platforms like Meituan and Didi are now included in pilot programs requiring occupational injury insurance contributions, and several provinces have issued guidelines mandating minimum earnings floors (tied to local minimum wages) and rest periods. Enforcement is uneven and rollout is gradual, but regulatory pressure is moving toward protection, not extraction. The "worst exploited kind" framing ignores that China's gig workers generally retain rural land-use rights, face lower cost-of-living baselines in hometowns, and operate under a system actively testing mechanisms to curb platform abuse, not one that universally treats them as independent contractors to dodge all liability.
Totally agree. Although it's like the old saying 瘦死的骆驼比马大, right? Do you remember EU's Forced Labour Ban that affected Apples companies in China, and that the exploited Chinese workers complained to EU instead of CPC? Or Brazils BYD scandal that for Brazilians Chinese workers treatment by BYD was tantamount to slavery, while for the workers it was an improvement?
Lets leave USA on the side. I'm not from there, from what I've seen I wouldn't like to live there as a worker.
Let's call spade a spade. Hukou is system made to stop urbanization. It's effects are that there's a lot of rural workers lacking social safety nets in cities that still migrated to the cities looking for better work opportunities, and because of missing social safety net they had no choice but to agree to be exploited by the capitalist class (no matter if privately owned or if state owned, if a company exploits the workforce it's a capitalistic leech, agreed?).
Sources: uh... Literally definition and exceptions under which migration was allowed, and the hukou wages are, what, 40% (?) lower for the same job today, see this or one of the sources (too many links opened on the phone, sorry) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ecot.12412#ecot12412-bib-0029
Look, I'm rural minority. I've filled the forms. I've seen the wage gap. I know the barriers. Saying it has flaws isn't news. I said that already. But pretending the land-use rights, the homestead eligibility, the hometown fallback don't materially change a worker's risk calculation? That's idealism. That's ignoring the concrete for the sake of a slogan. You can critique the system and acknowledge its positive material effects.
I've just realised I've replied to you on another comment. I don't have time for people who brag about targeting random Chinese players in games, buying into propaganda to dehumanize us, then show up pretending to champion Chinese workers' dignity. So I'm just going to stop here and leave it at this.
Awesome, thanks for letting me know! I knew it was on the decline, but solid evidence on material movements like declaring it illegal are great to see. I myself once worked a similar schedule for a while, here in the States.
Sorry to hear that.
Something I always find interesting about people bringing up 996 and that era is that at its peak it was about as bad as Japanese work culture while being far less prevalent as a percentage of the population affected.
Now China is putting multi year plans in place to fix it and support workers and yet is still demonised for it while Japan under the cart titan is continuing to push workers harder and doesn't get half the blowback especially among westerners.
I understand propaganda and racism play a big part in it it's still an interesting sight to behold.
I don't know about USA. In the Europe it was met with the same disgust (for the companies and the failing country) and pity (for the affected).
Thanks!
And from a western perspective, a huge amount of why Japan gets a pass even though we are aware of the abysmal working conditions is because anime is so popular here. It has a cultural strangehold among younger generations. The ROK has similar cultural exports. Media from the PRC is gradually becoming more popular, but it takes time for that to actually develop to a higher stage, development isn't something smooth as we both know, it works in leaps once the new overpowers the old.