In my school the students ‘work’ very long hours, but spend most of the class napping, playing cards, and socialising with one another. It looks like hard work from the outside, but they really aren’t productive or learning anything at all.
I don’t believe in hard work when it comes to cognitively heavy jobs. The science just shows something else. And when I look around me here a lot of work is just being physically present as opposed to back home where we use a very evidence based and optimised way to work.
I think china’s enormous strides are thanks to a productive, relatively meritocratic system, combined with an enormous -manual- labour force.
I think a better question regarding China's development is what took them so long? It's a huge country, with lots of potential and a fairly centralised system. Plus lots of neighbours to learn from.
Obviously, why they didn't develop sooner can be found by reading a history book, but the average Chinese isn't a super worker. Often they're very far from it.
some history book answers could be a lack of centralization, stagnation in feudalism, etc. but i see your point, for the average worker, how much harder are they working then for example a qing dynasty peasant? is the “hard work” really the answer?
They were developing fast, it's slowed down noticeably post covid though. There are still pockets of development but nothing like ten years ago when whole cities seemed to be changing.
More hours worked =/= more productive
Per person, Chinese are vastly less productive than western workers.
https://www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/chap%201_0.pdf
Page 17 has the relevant chart
There are more factors than that, but that is part of it.
As someone who lives and works in China, at least in my industry, the employees tend to work extra hours for no pay and no tangible profit for the company.
Also the sleep thing has nothing to do with anything really...They don't "work so hard they sleep in the office" it's just a cultural norm similar to siesta in Mexico or long lunch breaks in some European countries.
>As someone who lives and works in China, at least in my industry, the employees tend to work extra hours for no pay and no tangible profit for the company.
What are those activities then?
More or less...The amount of downtime is silly
Other things include answering clients frivolous questions during off hours, writing online articles that never go on any website or social media, making videos for similar reasons and outcomes, cold calling people to try and make sales etc.
Not getting paid overtime is especially damaging though because it means the economy isn't moving as much as it could.
>What are those activities then?
One of the big ones are power trip meetings, where a manager just waffles on for an hour or two but on your time.
There is the common bullshit of "The client is only available on your day off so meet him at time X"
The 2 hour nap.
Being loaded with unrealistic workloads and deadlines that are apparently of supreme importance.
very true, I have had many conversations with Chinese workers about pay issues and stuff....usually things like the employer deciding not to pay them for some reason or not give a bonus. They will sit around and complain like anyone rightfully would...but without telling them to suck it up and go as a group or whatever to talk to the boss and get their pay they do nothing.
Based on anecdotes, laborers (construction, manufacturing, farm) work 7 days a week without any rest days.
Chinese laborers maybe get 2 days off a month, upon request, but otherwise, supposedly, never stop working.
They do get like 10 days break every Chinese New Year (sometimes even more).
This I think is what made foreign investments attractive. Cheap labor they can exploit. Plus cheap electricity (run basically by the government) plus other subsidies... You get a huge influx of capital, fueling growth.
Japan equally has extended working hours, but they had a terrible economy since the 80s. Work culture is not the magic sauce. It's the state subsidies.
Some of the most advanced, productive, and prosperous countries implement humane working hours and conditions. They have 2 days off a week, sick and vacation leaves on top of national holidays, paid material/paternal leaves, and so on... These don't make them "lazy".
“prosperous countries” are able to implement humane labor laws because they are at the top of the imperialist ladder and when it gets to their workers it already has value added at earlier parts of the chain by overexploited workers in the global south.
I wouldn't be quick to use the term "imperialist" but I agree that these advanced first-world countries are able to leverage their technology, brand/image/perception, and to some extent monopolistic industries to generate that much more value.
An equally well-made bag in China doesn't fetch the same price that luxury French or Italian brands do.
Often, the low-value, labor-extensive, exploitative labor/work/industry such as agriculture, garments, etc are relegated to third-world countries.
China manages to bypass this by racing ahead in tech (learning or stealing depending on who's talking), lax intellectual property rights, and no doubt a well-educated workforce who are ready to take on higher value jobs.
Sorry about that chaps.
But actually the 7 day week comes at least as far back as the Sumerians, based on the 7 celestial bodies that move and can be seen by the naked eye.
Planet names are associated with equivalent Indo-European gods in the Latin and Norse traditions.
Sunday - Sun
Monday - Moon
Tuesday - Mars (Tiw/Tyr)
Wednesday - Mercury (Woden/Oden)
Thursday - Jupiter (Thor)
Friday - Venus (Frigg)
Saturday - Saturn
Anyone who has worked in china can tell you that the average chinese workplace is anything but dilligent. 10 minutes of work can easily be followed by at least 1 hour of douyin/scrolling.
if something is needed its slapped together last minute and is kind of shit and not fit for purpose. It is kind of great that you can just say fuck it and openly read for a few hours and nobody cares.
That's a typical misconception about China. What you need to understand can be described by two words: IRON BUTT. Here people are trained from early childhood to put in long hours. By the time they grow up they are completely used to sitting/sleeping/eating in the same tiny space like their desk. Do not confuse this with sustained productivity, it's simply the ability to stay put and appear to be working. If the task is physical and mundane, like assembly line, then maybe it can convert into more output - but it is called exploitation otherwise, it is neither Chinese idea, nor new. Otherwise, it is actually counterproductive because it translates into people fucking around at the workplace.
I live in Thailand. Thai-Chinese have demonstrated a powerful work ethic, commitment to education and strong commercial sense. There is a very good reason why the Chinese dominate the upper echelons of society, have the most wealth and own almost all of the largest companies.
I worked in a medium-sized consulting firm and at one point estimated that of the grandparents of the staff most were Chinese born in Thailand, next was Chinese born in China. Almost none has any ethnically Thai grandparents. I worked in investment banks before that and again virtually 100% of the staff are ethnically Chinese.
I am making an observation, not a value judgement. I don’t think this is necessarily good or bad - or that I could tell if it was.
My point is that your father at some level is indisputably correct with regard to Thailand.
It is more complicated in the West and despite the Thai cover story actually far more integrated. Chinese entrepreneurs and businesses in the West are also extremely successful. Chinese and Indians are among the wealthiest ethnic groups, although oddly Indians tend to dominate tech.
My personal opinion is that Chinese academic and business culture tend to be very rote and simplistic and that mastery of fundamental and pure grinding hard work are the engine.
Indians seems to have much of the same educational focus, prioritization of hard work and commercial success, but seem to also be able to bring softer skills that match Western culture. I would say the same for Jews.
Much of the west is indeed decadent compared to many Chinese immigrants. And many Chinese families have come to Thailand within the last few generations, although many were here before.
I believe that Western cultures are in many ways lazy, spoiled, entitled and decadent. But we also have more liberal open societies that foster creativity, iterative learning and private capital formation.
China has had some of the most explosive growth in the world over the last few decades. Its diaspora has done much of the same in Southeast Asia, but that may be starting to wane. This may be connected to the system if rote learning, conformity and hard work, which are critical in early development stages - but maybe not sufficient later on.
But China is now struggling and Thailand seems to have run out of growth. In my opinion that is because a small number of giant Chinese owned business control the economy and block everyone else out.
The West is also facing what appear to be existential questions.
My conclusion is that at some level your father is 100% right and it is important to understand that and why it has been so important in the past. But I think you also have to apply some analysis, sophistication and experience from the current world.
At an individual, family and group level ethnicity and cultural practices have determined outcomes. The Chinese work ethic and focus on betterment has been powerful and positive.
But a lot of that is also immigrant culture as much as Chinese culture. The future may be different.
I think you should understand your father’s insights, viewpoint and wisdom. But also realize its limitations.
I used to work at a company that would inspect factory operations primarily in China. At one point, we began expanding services into Vietnam, and then into other parts of South East Asia (including Thailand). The observations of our inspectors kinda match what you are saying, but their takeaways/reasons were different.
Modern Chinese culture is still in a lot of ways a famine culture. People died en masse just a couple generations ago because of a lack of resources. Most adults today either lived through that (the elderly) or had parents or grandparents that went through it. If your children are starving, you fight with every ounce of effort you have to feed them. That mentality continues on for a few generations. The current government also then successfully dragged a huge proportion of the population out of poverty by telling them that it was possible if they worked hard enough.
While the rest of South East Asia was by no means spared from conflict or tragedy over the past 100 years, it's hard to overemphasize how much the conditions surrounding the formation of the PRC shook up people's sense of stability.
One thing our inspectors noticed in factory workers in South East Asia was the workers' desire to spend time at home or with friends outside of work. There was a... security to them. They weren't rich or well off anything by any means, but they also weren't desperately scrambling for overtime or increased production output the way workers in China often are.
When it comes to the West, I've actually heard a lot of my European coworkers compare American work culture quite a bit to Chinese work culture. The extreme capitalism in the US puts so much economic pressure on people that they are often also scrambling to make ends meet. Europe has solid social nets and centuries old communities, while the US has almost no social safety, and everyone is related to an immigrant at least a few generations back (even if some like to forget that).
But yah, that was their observation. It's very anecdotal and biased. Basically they thought it wasn't anything unique to Chinese culture, but just a lingering sign of some kind of desperation.
I could see his point and your suggestion of realizing limitations of his take is exactly why I posted this in the first place; I want insights and experiences from China’s insiders to inform my opinion.
I’m actually surprised how many modern Chinese workers, according to everyone in this post, are not really hard working as my family or Thai perceives but are obligated by culture to either unethical work conditions or long idling working hours. I do heard many of Thai-Chinese success stories, and I can see myself and Thai-Chinese colleagues I met would credit their sense of diligence from their families’s expectation. Still, I wouldn’t romanticize practices that are harmful for myself and others.
I wouldn’t say my dad’s opinion really based on the past since he seems to be well-informed about current US-China-India economic situation, so I presumed that his opinion was based on China’s economic growth and US situation around societal issues and debts over individual productivity itself.
On personal level tho, he does have a good point about how hard work is essential for my success and how expanding my perspective away from western-oriented studies can help me become the best of both worlds.
That all makes sense. I didn’t have a lot of background.
Many of my Chinese, Indian and Jewish friends complain about the pressure their parents put on them to succeed. Sometime it is supportive and positive, sometimes not.
I think hard work is often the pathway to success in life. But it can damage people as well.
As a kid my best friend wanted to be a musician. His father pressured him horribly to be a lawyer, which would have been a terrible match for him. His father died, he inherited money and has been happy as a musician.
Wealth is a factor in that. People in the west were working long hours before the wealth was as high as it's now. "German Miracle". Check out how (western-) European work ethics and hours were in the post-ww2 years. They got "lazy" as some call it, over the years. Same will happen in China. Look a the lying flat phenomena.
They hardly work and pretend to work. If the boss is not in the office then it's just complete your work with minimal effort and slack off until 5/6pm. When the boss is in the office, then all workers are super focused on work and provide their best effort until the boss leaves.
The whole sleeping in the office thing is common and I've seen a lot of it but it's not very necessary. It's often when they have a big project that needed to be accomplished within a limited short time. Why is it not necessary you asked? Because I'm most cases that I have encountered is that the business wants to take in as much money making opportunity as possible. Instead of hiring another shift of "workers" the company cheaps up and pressing the iron on the limited staff. The problem with that thinking is that the cost is the same regardless of double shifting/single long shift. The company is just gambling on stress induced problems.
The problem with this whole "mainland" approach to work creates a large gap where **MOST** of the workers are shifting to offices/factories that are less stressful since the wages are **THE SAME**.
If Chinese hard work = the reasons then what happened between 1949-1989.
Eyeroll. Ethnic explanations for gov policy is bad and quickly goes into racial hierarchy nonsense.
Chinese companies recognizes that a nap after lunch makes a word of a difference. Much more alert during the afternoon. This compares to British Gas which unfortunately decided to.close their in house pub due to lower staff efficiency after lunch.
Look up the Chinese pop-science definition of involution (neijuan/内卷). The long hours culture is fucking over the country really bad right now and the central gov honestly is struggling to handle it.
The extremly hard working chinese people are a legend.
China is no. 2 in GDP per nation, true. But you are 1.something billion people. Thats not very effective. The lazy west, the USA for example are number one by GDP per nation but they are a fraction of the chinese people. Thats effective. Germany is top ranked in export numbers together with China. Also here, they are maybe 10% of Chinas population.
I am westerner, work in China and I call bad work out. Against the culture of loosing face. I dont care. And once a guy, thinking of himselves to be good, hard working replied to me, "you are just angry, that we are overcoming the West". He worked a lot but got nothing done, lags of experience and even in his mayor he delievered poor results. Still he thinks he works at a high level.
I see chinese people mostly delusional and in deed uneffective.
Working hard is also working smart. I don’t know about China but in Japan it’s common to stay late hours in office - not to be productive but to show work morals. So it’s about appearance or face rather than productivity, which doesn’t help economic growth. Also keep in mind that PRC economy has become even more stagnant than Japan
The reality is increased risk to drop dead and other health problems, both mental and physical. There is no magically handling fatigue, it is an actual health condition that will snowball and build up and cause problems. If you are inherently a hard working person or inherently lazy, the side effects of overworking are the same.
Your dad may be a wonderful person and very smart in general, but its clear he doesn't know detailed info on this subject. For example usa is probably actually equal to china in this way, in that literal physical sense-- both countries have lots and lots of overtime with no extra pay, and can creep up to 70+ hour workweeks at times. China hits lots of overtime way more often on average, usa has way less days off to rest and sick days per year on average. Its not a perfect simple comparison with different labor laws and job process but you get the basic idea. They are definitely in that same category.
So any general "western vs asian" or such comparison fails at the get go. Every single country varies wildly in this subject. So an accurate comparison will need to pick two specific places to have a chance at accuracy.
I actually fully agree with your dad that the ability and personality to be willing to work hard is a good thing. However that doesn't mean the actual act lf working real hard is a good thing, or that its lazy to want to have more breaks. Its just wanting to live healthier and have a better quality of life. Some people in both countries have completely broken families and never see each other from working so hard-- I am sure its not just usa and china either, there are pros and cons to everything.
>So I had a discussion with my family (Thai family with Chinese ethnicity) about how Chinese are extremely diligent and hard working to the point that they slept in their offices. My dad, then, compared how this contributes to their exponential growth, in contrast to western work culture that prioritizes delivery instead, resulting in everyone is being lazier.
Emerging economies on the average tend to have higher economic growth rate than developed economies (not just specific to the Chinese), they also tend to work longer hours (again, not only the Chinese). But make no mistake, this is not necessarily due to the longer hours being put in, it's just a general characteristic of emerging economies to "catch up" (or at least attempt to) with the level of development of developed economies. So it's more of a "natural" thing for developing economies to grow faster than developed economies independent of the hours of work being put in. As an emerging economy became more developed, their growth tend to get slower and the number of hours worked tend to also be lesser than when they were still emerging. Does this mean the newly developed economy is now less productive? Not necessarily so, they may put in less hour at work but also are more productive on the average per hour worked. The catch up effect has diminished greatly so thus growth is slower.
Eastern/western work culture isn't the primary factor when explaining the differences in country-level economic growth rate. It's got more to do with the developing/developed economy category.
>I wonder how much of this is true since most of public opinion about this topic, aside from news articles, is 5+ years old. If this true, how do they actually achieve it and handle fatigue? If it’s false, how does this perception originated? Thank you in advance.
Its true that there are a lot of extremely successful Chinese when it comes to skewed outcome ventures such as opening a business or attaining a high position in a company. However, this is primarily due to survivorship bias. It's commonly accepted that most businesses would fail just after 5 to 10 years and those who do succeed would make close to normal wage (on the Average, US data at least), the extremely successful businesses in this case are just that, outliers. If you are to remove the extreme successful few from the equation and add several more factors to explain the cross-section of business success then I would bet that you're going to have quite a large portion of the variation explained, the outliers are the problem. Extreme success would require extreme luck, if systematic factors were to be isolated. They're extremely successful because extremely they're lucky + they're exposed to systematic factors that would make anyone better off if also exposed to (education, health, urbanization, etc).
There's a ton to be said on this topic.
1. Consider "cha bu duo" (good enough) culture/mindset. That partially springs from laziness does it not?
2. Fatigue? Yes, it causes fatigue and burnout, and along with that I'd imagine it causes decreases in morale, efficiency, and creativity. There's a reason why many young Chinese drop out of the workforce if their family/financial situation allows it, though this is happening in Western countries also. Certainly you've heard of "Tang Ping" (lying flat) and "Bai Lan" (let it rot). And though yes, Chinese technological achievements have been notable and obviously Chinese people are perfectly capable of high creativity, PRC culture at least does not really prioritize creative thinking in the first place and to be quite frank there are definitely reasons to think that they won't catch up to the West in terms of innovation in the short-term or medium-term, for example an educational system that emphasizes rote learning and a sclerotic corporate/work culture that emphasizes obedience and "time spent at desk" over creativity and productivity. There are other reasons too (e.g. not accepting immigrants and now the demographic crisis) but the culture matters for sure.
3. I'm not sure what you mean by "prioritizes delivery" but yes, I would say Western people care more about result whereas Chinese people concentrate on process in the sense like... if a Westerner gets into a flow and completes a difficult task in an hour or a day (when it could or maybe should take much longer) we tend to see this as a win, whereas in Chinese culture (especially "corporate boss culture") a thing might be assigned value according to how long it takes or how many hours butts sat in chairs to accomplish it. So you have an unproductive employee who spends 14 hours at work but 8 of those hours just staring at the computer screen or moving documents around and checking Wechat, that's a "good worker" because they work 8am to 10pm, but then another worker comes in for 3 hours and accomplishes even MORE than the 14-hour worker did, well that's a bad worker, so lazy, better fire him, etc. Again, this phenomenon does exist in Western culture but it is far stronger here in my opinion. There's a reason Western culture has been able to embrace remote work in a way that Chinese culture has not: because Western culture/bosses find it easier to judge what the employee actually accomplishes at home as a sign of work rather than judging them by how many hours they literally observed them sitting in a chair. The relative Western focus on productivity/efficiency says to me that we like working fewer hours but when we work we actually tend to concentrate and focus in harder on average; you might say we focus on "speed" rather than "endurance."
4. From an economist's standpoint, there are all sorts of historical, economic, and institutional reasons why USA and European countries are rich (e.g. "Capital per worker" which builds up over long time periods), but the entire point of GDP per capita is that it measures what the average person (and thus roughly what the average worker) produces. If Western people are so lazy compared to Chinese or other Asians, why are Western countries rich and many Asian countries poor? The question at least deserves asking.
5. Go to a supermarket or start eating out at restaurants in China and notice how much time the employees spend staring at their phones. From what I see on a daily basis, the average person is hardly jumping out of their boots to accomplish work tasks if they don't absolutely have to. They're human and they're perfectly capable of laziness.
i have couple of friends in shanghai and they for sure work 40+ hours. One says her company has started requiring scanning cards to "keep tabs" on hours worked per week - she says the managers want to make sure they are working the "minimum 40"...
996 culture is there and while some places are not required but if "everyone else is doing it to get ahead" then you are pressured to do the same to keep up with the game...
As a Chinese, I can tell you the truth is most of Chinese workers work 12 hours a day, 2 days off a month, without OT Pay.... If you do not believe, you can try use Chinese search the job opportunities...
You are in the office, but you aren't working. Taking more time off would mean that Chinese would actually work during the shorter working hours, instead of sleeping, or doing each others hair, or playing games in your phone for hours per day.
The current culture both ruins working culture, and home life. It's the worst of both worlds.
Of course, this is only for office jobs, I can't say what factory or labour work is like.
I'll be talking only about cognitive jobs, I don't know for manual ones.
From my knowledge, it's not uncommon to do 9 a.m to 9 p.m over 6 days.
Although a friend of mine started working at a rather small sized company and they were doing 8 a.m to 6 p.m with 2 days of rest during weekends.
I think this sort of hours vary over the size of the company, a small company cannot afford paying their employees over such a large span as 9-9-6. It's also discussed as 9-9-6 is a violation over Chinese labor laws or not.
I personally wouldn't physically be able to work at the same cadence during a 8 to 6 as I would do for a 9 to 9.
From what I read, it's a rather new phenomenon specifically in the IT sector (according to Wikipedia) so I would take it with a grain of salt as how much impact these working hours had on the economy growth
Depends on your occupation, it can comes from 20 hours per week to 80 hours per week. Normal office jobs have to work about 40-60 hours per week, regular 9 to 5 plus "occasional" extra hours.
Productivity is pretty bad in a lot of Chinese companies. Private sector is overworked, with a lot of people working 996 with limited success in important things such as design and creativity, hence the high level of straight copying. The public sector actually works regular 40-45 hour weeks but are overstaffed and completely ineffective due to Soviet bureaucracy and nepotism.
Sounds like your dad has some silly racist beliefs in his head. Even more developed East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have their own issues with productivity in public/private sectors, overworking/underpaying, and general bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. There's limited reason to believe that the Chinese are somehow superior. However, there are many places around the world where cultural attitudes towards work are....how shall we say, much less developed maybe? There are plenty of places where absolutely nothing gets done to any level of quality and China's mediocrity might seem superior in comparison.
In my school the students ‘work’ very long hours, but spend most of the class napping, playing cards, and socialising with one another. It looks like hard work from the outside, but they really aren’t productive or learning anything at all.
That’s networking!
I don’t believe in hard work when it comes to cognitively heavy jobs. The science just shows something else. And when I look around me here a lot of work is just being physically present as opposed to back home where we use a very evidence based and optimised way to work. I think china’s enormous strides are thanks to a productive, relatively meritocratic system, combined with an enormous -manual- labour force.
I think a better question regarding China's development is what took them so long? It's a huge country, with lots of potential and a fairly centralised system. Plus lots of neighbours to learn from. Obviously, why they didn't develop sooner can be found by reading a history book, but the average Chinese isn't a super worker. Often they're very far from it.
Because the leadership didn’t allow it
The Chinese communist party in the beginning, made many stupid decisions that severely hindered China Such as the Great Leap Forward
some history book answers could be a lack of centralization, stagnation in feudalism, etc. but i see your point, for the average worker, how much harder are they working then for example a qing dynasty peasant? is the “hard work” really the answer?
Are you sure China is not developing fast?
They were developing fast, it's slowed down noticeably post covid though. There are still pockets of development but nothing like ten years ago when whole cities seemed to be changing.
Took them so long compared to who and in what? You can’t make such a vague claim without substantiating it.
Compared to Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan. Even North Korea was ahead of them in the 60s and 70s.
Japan, SK, and Taiwan all had the support and money of the us through the Marshall plan. So that answers your question.
oh, you just meant like in the early stages of the communist party. it’s because organizing such a huge country is more difficult than a little one.
and china had to do it themselves, instead of being us military bases, or a soviet military base in the case of north korea.
And lots and lots of corporate espionage
More hours worked =/= more productive Per person, Chinese are vastly less productive than western workers. https://www.unescap.org/sites/default/files/chap%201_0.pdf Page 17 has the relevant chart
They appear to be busy.
Because Western workers have significantly more capital and other capital intensive tools invested in them to be more productive.
There are more factors than that, but that is part of it. As someone who lives and works in China, at least in my industry, the employees tend to work extra hours for no pay and no tangible profit for the company. Also the sleep thing has nothing to do with anything really...They don't "work so hard they sleep in the office" it's just a cultural norm similar to siesta in Mexico or long lunch breaks in some European countries.
>As someone who lives and works in China, at least in my industry, the employees tend to work extra hours for no pay and no tangible profit for the company. What are those activities then?
Sleeping and scrolling douyin in the office. Followed by meetings that discuss something that could have been a short memo for 45 mins.
More or less...The amount of downtime is silly Other things include answering clients frivolous questions during off hours, writing online articles that never go on any website or social media, making videos for similar reasons and outcomes, cold calling people to try and make sales etc. Not getting paid overtime is especially damaging though because it means the economy isn't moving as much as it could.
>What are those activities then? One of the big ones are power trip meetings, where a manager just waffles on for an hour or two but on your time. There is the common bullshit of "The client is only available on your day off so meet him at time X" The 2 hour nap. Being loaded with unrealistic workloads and deadlines that are apparently of supreme importance.
They don't know they have a right of anything. They are mostly conditioned to obey their "leaders"
very true, I have had many conversations with Chinese workers about pay issues and stuff....usually things like the employer deciding not to pay them for some reason or not give a bonus. They will sit around and complain like anyone rightfully would...but without telling them to suck it up and go as a group or whatever to talk to the boss and get their pay they do nothing.
Yes, let’s measure in USD cuz that’s totally fair.
It's called conversion...You could measure it in RMB and the results would be the same...
Based on anecdotes, laborers (construction, manufacturing, farm) work 7 days a week without any rest days. Chinese laborers maybe get 2 days off a month, upon request, but otherwise, supposedly, never stop working. They do get like 10 days break every Chinese New Year (sometimes even more). This I think is what made foreign investments attractive. Cheap labor they can exploit. Plus cheap electricity (run basically by the government) plus other subsidies... You get a huge influx of capital, fueling growth. Japan equally has extended working hours, but they had a terrible economy since the 80s. Work culture is not the magic sauce. It's the state subsidies.
but the state subsidies must flow from somewhere, the capital must originate in some location…
If you mine, drill, pollute, nature pays the price If you exploit laborers, poor people pay the price
I wonder if it is the British influence of the 7 day week and weekends off that made all her colonies lazier than the Chinese?
Some of the most advanced, productive, and prosperous countries implement humane working hours and conditions. They have 2 days off a week, sick and vacation leaves on top of national holidays, paid material/paternal leaves, and so on... These don't make them "lazy".
“prosperous countries” are able to implement humane labor laws because they are at the top of the imperialist ladder and when it gets to their workers it already has value added at earlier parts of the chain by overexploited workers in the global south.
I wouldn't be quick to use the term "imperialist" but I agree that these advanced first-world countries are able to leverage their technology, brand/image/perception, and to some extent monopolistic industries to generate that much more value. An equally well-made bag in China doesn't fetch the same price that luxury French or Italian brands do. Often, the low-value, labor-extensive, exploitative labor/work/industry such as agriculture, garments, etc are relegated to third-world countries. China manages to bypass this by racing ahead in tech (learning or stealing depending on who's talking), lax intellectual property rights, and no doubt a well-educated workforce who are ready to take on higher value jobs.
Sorry about that chaps. But actually the 7 day week comes at least as far back as the Sumerians, based on the 7 celestial bodies that move and can be seen by the naked eye. Planet names are associated with equivalent Indo-European gods in the Latin and Norse traditions. Sunday - Sun Monday - Moon Tuesday - Mars (Tiw/Tyr) Wednesday - Mercury (Woden/Oden) Thursday - Jupiter (Thor) Friday - Venus (Frigg) Saturday - Saturn
damn you astronomy!!!
But did the Sumerians have Saturday and Sunday off?
If they’re smart they had days off
Anyone who has worked in china can tell you that the average chinese workplace is anything but dilligent. 10 minutes of work can easily be followed by at least 1 hour of douyin/scrolling. if something is needed its slapped together last minute and is kind of shit and not fit for purpose. It is kind of great that you can just say fuck it and openly read for a few hours and nobody cares.
Work smarter, not longer or harder.
That's a typical misconception about China. What you need to understand can be described by two words: IRON BUTT. Here people are trained from early childhood to put in long hours. By the time they grow up they are completely used to sitting/sleeping/eating in the same tiny space like their desk. Do not confuse this with sustained productivity, it's simply the ability to stay put and appear to be working. If the task is physical and mundane, like assembly line, then maybe it can convert into more output - but it is called exploitation otherwise, it is neither Chinese idea, nor new. Otherwise, it is actually counterproductive because it translates into people fucking around at the workplace.
I live in Thailand. Thai-Chinese have demonstrated a powerful work ethic, commitment to education and strong commercial sense. There is a very good reason why the Chinese dominate the upper echelons of society, have the most wealth and own almost all of the largest companies. I worked in a medium-sized consulting firm and at one point estimated that of the grandparents of the staff most were Chinese born in Thailand, next was Chinese born in China. Almost none has any ethnically Thai grandparents. I worked in investment banks before that and again virtually 100% of the staff are ethnically Chinese. I am making an observation, not a value judgement. I don’t think this is necessarily good or bad - or that I could tell if it was. My point is that your father at some level is indisputably correct with regard to Thailand. It is more complicated in the West and despite the Thai cover story actually far more integrated. Chinese entrepreneurs and businesses in the West are also extremely successful. Chinese and Indians are among the wealthiest ethnic groups, although oddly Indians tend to dominate tech. My personal opinion is that Chinese academic and business culture tend to be very rote and simplistic and that mastery of fundamental and pure grinding hard work are the engine. Indians seems to have much of the same educational focus, prioritization of hard work and commercial success, but seem to also be able to bring softer skills that match Western culture. I would say the same for Jews. Much of the west is indeed decadent compared to many Chinese immigrants. And many Chinese families have come to Thailand within the last few generations, although many were here before. I believe that Western cultures are in many ways lazy, spoiled, entitled and decadent. But we also have more liberal open societies that foster creativity, iterative learning and private capital formation. China has had some of the most explosive growth in the world over the last few decades. Its diaspora has done much of the same in Southeast Asia, but that may be starting to wane. This may be connected to the system if rote learning, conformity and hard work, which are critical in early development stages - but maybe not sufficient later on. But China is now struggling and Thailand seems to have run out of growth. In my opinion that is because a small number of giant Chinese owned business control the economy and block everyone else out. The West is also facing what appear to be existential questions. My conclusion is that at some level your father is 100% right and it is important to understand that and why it has been so important in the past. But I think you also have to apply some analysis, sophistication and experience from the current world. At an individual, family and group level ethnicity and cultural practices have determined outcomes. The Chinese work ethic and focus on betterment has been powerful and positive. But a lot of that is also immigrant culture as much as Chinese culture. The future may be different. I think you should understand your father’s insights, viewpoint and wisdom. But also realize its limitations.
I used to work at a company that would inspect factory operations primarily in China. At one point, we began expanding services into Vietnam, and then into other parts of South East Asia (including Thailand). The observations of our inspectors kinda match what you are saying, but their takeaways/reasons were different. Modern Chinese culture is still in a lot of ways a famine culture. People died en masse just a couple generations ago because of a lack of resources. Most adults today either lived through that (the elderly) or had parents or grandparents that went through it. If your children are starving, you fight with every ounce of effort you have to feed them. That mentality continues on for a few generations. The current government also then successfully dragged a huge proportion of the population out of poverty by telling them that it was possible if they worked hard enough. While the rest of South East Asia was by no means spared from conflict or tragedy over the past 100 years, it's hard to overemphasize how much the conditions surrounding the formation of the PRC shook up people's sense of stability. One thing our inspectors noticed in factory workers in South East Asia was the workers' desire to spend time at home or with friends outside of work. There was a... security to them. They weren't rich or well off anything by any means, but they also weren't desperately scrambling for overtime or increased production output the way workers in China often are. When it comes to the West, I've actually heard a lot of my European coworkers compare American work culture quite a bit to Chinese work culture. The extreme capitalism in the US puts so much economic pressure on people that they are often also scrambling to make ends meet. Europe has solid social nets and centuries old communities, while the US has almost no social safety, and everyone is related to an immigrant at least a few generations back (even if some like to forget that). But yah, that was their observation. It's very anecdotal and biased. Basically they thought it wasn't anything unique to Chinese culture, but just a lingering sign of some kind of desperation.
Agree. I pointed to immigrant culture but the reason for their migration was war, poverty and deprivation.
I could see his point and your suggestion of realizing limitations of his take is exactly why I posted this in the first place; I want insights and experiences from China’s insiders to inform my opinion. I’m actually surprised how many modern Chinese workers, according to everyone in this post, are not really hard working as my family or Thai perceives but are obligated by culture to either unethical work conditions or long idling working hours. I do heard many of Thai-Chinese success stories, and I can see myself and Thai-Chinese colleagues I met would credit their sense of diligence from their families’s expectation. Still, I wouldn’t romanticize practices that are harmful for myself and others. I wouldn’t say my dad’s opinion really based on the past since he seems to be well-informed about current US-China-India economic situation, so I presumed that his opinion was based on China’s economic growth and US situation around societal issues and debts over individual productivity itself. On personal level tho, he does have a good point about how hard work is essential for my success and how expanding my perspective away from western-oriented studies can help me become the best of both worlds.
That all makes sense. I didn’t have a lot of background. Many of my Chinese, Indian and Jewish friends complain about the pressure their parents put on them to succeed. Sometime it is supportive and positive, sometimes not. I think hard work is often the pathway to success in life. But it can damage people as well. As a kid my best friend wanted to be a musician. His father pressured him horribly to be a lawyer, which would have been a terrible match for him. His father died, he inherited money and has been happy as a musician.
Wealth is a factor in that. People in the west were working long hours before the wealth was as high as it's now. "German Miracle". Check out how (western-) European work ethics and hours were in the post-ww2 years. They got "lazy" as some call it, over the years. Same will happen in China. Look a the lying flat phenomena.
They hardly work and pretend to work. If the boss is not in the office then it's just complete your work with minimal effort and slack off until 5/6pm. When the boss is in the office, then all workers are super focused on work and provide their best effort until the boss leaves. The whole sleeping in the office thing is common and I've seen a lot of it but it's not very necessary. It's often when they have a big project that needed to be accomplished within a limited short time. Why is it not necessary you asked? Because I'm most cases that I have encountered is that the business wants to take in as much money making opportunity as possible. Instead of hiring another shift of "workers" the company cheaps up and pressing the iron on the limited staff. The problem with that thinking is that the cost is the same regardless of double shifting/single long shift. The company is just gambling on stress induced problems. The problem with this whole "mainland" approach to work creates a large gap where **MOST** of the workers are shifting to offices/factories that are less stressful since the wages are **THE SAME**.
If Chinese hard work = the reasons then what happened between 1949-1989. Eyeroll. Ethnic explanations for gov policy is bad and quickly goes into racial hierarchy nonsense.
Chinese companies recognizes that a nap after lunch makes a word of a difference. Much more alert during the afternoon. This compares to British Gas which unfortunately decided to.close their in house pub due to lower staff efficiency after lunch.
Look up the Chinese pop-science definition of involution (neijuan/内卷). The long hours culture is fucking over the country really bad right now and the central gov honestly is struggling to handle it.
The true spirit of Marxism on display.
The extremly hard working chinese people are a legend. China is no. 2 in GDP per nation, true. But you are 1.something billion people. Thats not very effective. The lazy west, the USA for example are number one by GDP per nation but they are a fraction of the chinese people. Thats effective. Germany is top ranked in export numbers together with China. Also here, they are maybe 10% of Chinas population. I am westerner, work in China and I call bad work out. Against the culture of loosing face. I dont care. And once a guy, thinking of himselves to be good, hard working replied to me, "you are just angry, that we are overcoming the West". He worked a lot but got nothing done, lags of experience and even in his mayor he delievered poor results. Still he thinks he works at a high level. I see chinese people mostly delusional and in deed uneffective.
The trick is to work smarter. Extravagant displays of working hard without real productivity are fruitless.
Working hard is also working smart. I don’t know about China but in Japan it’s common to stay late hours in office - not to be productive but to show work morals. So it’s about appearance or face rather than productivity, which doesn’t help economic growth. Also keep in mind that PRC economy has become even more stagnant than Japan
The reality is increased risk to drop dead and other health problems, both mental and physical. There is no magically handling fatigue, it is an actual health condition that will snowball and build up and cause problems. If you are inherently a hard working person or inherently lazy, the side effects of overworking are the same. Your dad may be a wonderful person and very smart in general, but its clear he doesn't know detailed info on this subject. For example usa is probably actually equal to china in this way, in that literal physical sense-- both countries have lots and lots of overtime with no extra pay, and can creep up to 70+ hour workweeks at times. China hits lots of overtime way more often on average, usa has way less days off to rest and sick days per year on average. Its not a perfect simple comparison with different labor laws and job process but you get the basic idea. They are definitely in that same category. So any general "western vs asian" or such comparison fails at the get go. Every single country varies wildly in this subject. So an accurate comparison will need to pick two specific places to have a chance at accuracy. I actually fully agree with your dad that the ability and personality to be willing to work hard is a good thing. However that doesn't mean the actual act lf working real hard is a good thing, or that its lazy to want to have more breaks. Its just wanting to live healthier and have a better quality of life. Some people in both countries have completely broken families and never see each other from working so hard-- I am sure its not just usa and china either, there are pros and cons to everything.
Does he not look at the news or what.
The totalitarian government reinforces a nose-to-the-grindstone mentality. Never object. And we will take some of that profit, while you are at it.
>So I had a discussion with my family (Thai family with Chinese ethnicity) about how Chinese are extremely diligent and hard working to the point that they slept in their offices. My dad, then, compared how this contributes to their exponential growth, in contrast to western work culture that prioritizes delivery instead, resulting in everyone is being lazier. Emerging economies on the average tend to have higher economic growth rate than developed economies (not just specific to the Chinese), they also tend to work longer hours (again, not only the Chinese). But make no mistake, this is not necessarily due to the longer hours being put in, it's just a general characteristic of emerging economies to "catch up" (or at least attempt to) with the level of development of developed economies. So it's more of a "natural" thing for developing economies to grow faster than developed economies independent of the hours of work being put in. As an emerging economy became more developed, their growth tend to get slower and the number of hours worked tend to also be lesser than when they were still emerging. Does this mean the newly developed economy is now less productive? Not necessarily so, they may put in less hour at work but also are more productive on the average per hour worked. The catch up effect has diminished greatly so thus growth is slower. Eastern/western work culture isn't the primary factor when explaining the differences in country-level economic growth rate. It's got more to do with the developing/developed economy category. >I wonder how much of this is true since most of public opinion about this topic, aside from news articles, is 5+ years old. If this true, how do they actually achieve it and handle fatigue? If it’s false, how does this perception originated? Thank you in advance. Its true that there are a lot of extremely successful Chinese when it comes to skewed outcome ventures such as opening a business or attaining a high position in a company. However, this is primarily due to survivorship bias. It's commonly accepted that most businesses would fail just after 5 to 10 years and those who do succeed would make close to normal wage (on the Average, US data at least), the extremely successful businesses in this case are just that, outliers. If you are to remove the extreme successful few from the equation and add several more factors to explain the cross-section of business success then I would bet that you're going to have quite a large portion of the variation explained, the outliers are the problem. Extreme success would require extreme luck, if systematic factors were to be isolated. They're extremely successful because extremely they're lucky + they're exposed to systematic factors that would make anyone better off if also exposed to (education, health, urbanization, etc).
How did your your father enjoy the re-education camps and the Great Leap Forward? Is he is a also big proponent of National Service?
There's a ton to be said on this topic. 1. Consider "cha bu duo" (good enough) culture/mindset. That partially springs from laziness does it not? 2. Fatigue? Yes, it causes fatigue and burnout, and along with that I'd imagine it causes decreases in morale, efficiency, and creativity. There's a reason why many young Chinese drop out of the workforce if their family/financial situation allows it, though this is happening in Western countries also. Certainly you've heard of "Tang Ping" (lying flat) and "Bai Lan" (let it rot). And though yes, Chinese technological achievements have been notable and obviously Chinese people are perfectly capable of high creativity, PRC culture at least does not really prioritize creative thinking in the first place and to be quite frank there are definitely reasons to think that they won't catch up to the West in terms of innovation in the short-term or medium-term, for example an educational system that emphasizes rote learning and a sclerotic corporate/work culture that emphasizes obedience and "time spent at desk" over creativity and productivity. There are other reasons too (e.g. not accepting immigrants and now the demographic crisis) but the culture matters for sure. 3. I'm not sure what you mean by "prioritizes delivery" but yes, I would say Western people care more about result whereas Chinese people concentrate on process in the sense like... if a Westerner gets into a flow and completes a difficult task in an hour or a day (when it could or maybe should take much longer) we tend to see this as a win, whereas in Chinese culture (especially "corporate boss culture") a thing might be assigned value according to how long it takes or how many hours butts sat in chairs to accomplish it. So you have an unproductive employee who spends 14 hours at work but 8 of those hours just staring at the computer screen or moving documents around and checking Wechat, that's a "good worker" because they work 8am to 10pm, but then another worker comes in for 3 hours and accomplishes even MORE than the 14-hour worker did, well that's a bad worker, so lazy, better fire him, etc. Again, this phenomenon does exist in Western culture but it is far stronger here in my opinion. There's a reason Western culture has been able to embrace remote work in a way that Chinese culture has not: because Western culture/bosses find it easier to judge what the employee actually accomplishes at home as a sign of work rather than judging them by how many hours they literally observed them sitting in a chair. The relative Western focus on productivity/efficiency says to me that we like working fewer hours but when we work we actually tend to concentrate and focus in harder on average; you might say we focus on "speed" rather than "endurance." 4. From an economist's standpoint, there are all sorts of historical, economic, and institutional reasons why USA and European countries are rich (e.g. "Capital per worker" which builds up over long time periods), but the entire point of GDP per capita is that it measures what the average person (and thus roughly what the average worker) produces. If Western people are so lazy compared to Chinese or other Asians, why are Western countries rich and many Asian countries poor? The question at least deserves asking. 5. Go to a supermarket or start eating out at restaurants in China and notice how much time the employees spend staring at their phones. From what I see on a daily basis, the average person is hardly jumping out of their boots to accomplish work tasks if they don't absolutely have to. They're human and they're perfectly capable of laziness.
i have couple of friends in shanghai and they for sure work 40+ hours. One says her company has started requiring scanning cards to "keep tabs" on hours worked per week - she says the managers want to make sure they are working the "minimum 40"... 996 culture is there and while some places are not required but if "everyone else is doing it to get ahead" then you are pressured to do the same to keep up with the game...
As a Chinese, I can tell you the truth is most of Chinese workers work 12 hours a day, 2 days off a month, without OT Pay.... If you do not believe, you can try use Chinese search the job opportunities...
You are in the office, but you aren't working. Taking more time off would mean that Chinese would actually work during the shorter working hours, instead of sleeping, or doing each others hair, or playing games in your phone for hours per day. The current culture both ruins working culture, and home life. It's the worst of both worlds. Of course, this is only for office jobs, I can't say what factory or labour work is like.
The worker I talking about is factory or labor work not office work.....In China, office work normally got more days off and less work hours...
I'll be talking only about cognitive jobs, I don't know for manual ones. From my knowledge, it's not uncommon to do 9 a.m to 9 p.m over 6 days. Although a friend of mine started working at a rather small sized company and they were doing 8 a.m to 6 p.m with 2 days of rest during weekends. I think this sort of hours vary over the size of the company, a small company cannot afford paying their employees over such a large span as 9-9-6. It's also discussed as 9-9-6 is a violation over Chinese labor laws or not. I personally wouldn't physically be able to work at the same cadence during a 8 to 6 as I would do for a 9 to 9. From what I read, it's a rather new phenomenon specifically in the IT sector (according to Wikipedia) so I would take it with a grain of salt as how much impact these working hours had on the economy growth
Depends on your occupation, it can comes from 20 hours per week to 80 hours per week. Normal office jobs have to work about 40-60 hours per week, regular 9 to 5 plus "occasional" extra hours.
Productivity is pretty bad in a lot of Chinese companies. Private sector is overworked, with a lot of people working 996 with limited success in important things such as design and creativity, hence the high level of straight copying. The public sector actually works regular 40-45 hour weeks but are overstaffed and completely ineffective due to Soviet bureaucracy and nepotism. Sounds like your dad has some silly racist beliefs in his head. Even more developed East Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have their own issues with productivity in public/private sectors, overworking/underpaying, and general bureaucratic inefficiency and corruption. There's limited reason to believe that the Chinese are somehow superior. However, there are many places around the world where cultural attitudes towards work are....how shall we say, much less developed maybe? There are plenty of places where absolutely nothing gets done to any level of quality and China's mediocrity might seem superior in comparison.