To survive at Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. (BABA.N) you need to work 12 hours a day, six days a week. That’s what billionaire Jack Ma demands of his staff at China’s biggest e-commerce platform.
Ma told an internal meeting that Alibaba doesn’t need people who look forward to a typical eight-hour office lifestyle, according to a post on Alibaba’s official Weibo account. Instead, he endorsed the industry’s notorious 996 work culture -- that is, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
“To be able to work 996 is a huge bliss,” China’s richest man said. “If you want to join Alibaba, you need to be prepared to work 12 hours a day, otherwise why even bother joining.”
China’s tech industry is littered with tales of programmers and startup founders dying unexpectedly due to long hours and grueling stress. The comments from Ma elicited some intense reaction.
“A load of nonsense, and didn’t even mention whether the company provides overtime compensation for a 996 schedule,” wrote one commenter on the Weibo post. “I hope people can stick more to the law, and not to their own reasoning.”

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    “The bosses do 996 because they’re working for themselves and their wealth is growing,” another comment read. “We work 996 because we’re exploited without overtime compensation.”
    Representatives for Alibaba didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
    Ma’s comments come amid a fierce debate. Programmers in China protested their labor conditions on the online code-sharing community Github in March under the banner 996.ICU, a topic that quickly became the site’s most popular, with more than 211,000 stars.
    “By following the ’996’ work schedule, you are risking yourself getting into the ICU [Intensive Care Unit],” according to a description posted on the “996.ICU” project page. The creator, whose identity is unknown, called on tech workers to come forward with examples of companies abusing staff by demanding uncompensated overtime. Alibaba and its financial affiliate Ant Financial were both named.


    China

    Millions of Chinese youth 'volunteers' to be sent to villages in echo of Maoist policy


    Communist Youth League students to ‘spread civilisation’ in countryside and ‘promote technology’


    China is planning to send millions of youth “volunteers” back to villages, raising fears of a return to the methods of Chairman Mao’s brutal Cultural Revolution of 50 years ago.
    The Communist Youth League (CYL) has promised to despatch more than 10 million students to “rural zones” by 2022 in order to “increase their skills, spread civilisation and promote science and technology”, according to a Communist party document.
    The aim is to bring to the rural areas the talents of those who would otherwise be attracted to life in the big cities, according to a CYL document quoted in the state-run Global Times daily on Thursday.
    “We need young people to use science and technology to help the countryside innovate its traditional development models,” Zhang Linbin, deputy head of a township in central Hunan Province, told the Global Times.
    Students will be called upon to live in the countryside during their summer holidays, although the CYL did not say how young people would be persuaded to volunteer.
    Former revolutionary bases, zones suffering from extreme poverty and ethnic minority areas will receive top priority, according to the CYL.
    Relations are often fraught between the Han majority, who make up more than 90% of the population, and ethnic minorities like the Tibetans and Muslim Uighurs.
    Users on the Twitter-like Weibo social platform reacted warily. Many evoked the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, when Mao sent millions of “young intellectuals” into often primitive conditions in the countryside, while universities were closed for a decade.
    “Has it started again?” wondered one user named WangTingYu. “We did that 40 years ago,” wrote Miruirong. “Sometimes history advances, sometimes it retreats,” noted KalsangWangduTB.
    President Xi Jinping, known for his nostalgia for the Mao era, himself spent seven years in a village in the poor northern province of Shaanxi from the age of 16.
    Agence France-Presse
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