This could be us if we let our housing bubble pop, but the people in charge will never let that happen. Can’t have people being able to afford to live working 20 hours a week, wouldn’t be generating nearly enough profits for our masters.
It’s been repeatedly proven that lowering the weekly hours improves productivity.
So keeping the pressure is purely for fun.
Wow crazy stuff. She saved up nearly 300kusd and rent is just over a 100usd a month. Whole apartments from 3k to 13k.
Retired and now does online yoga to pay the bills!
Good work. FIRE china style!
I too wish I could work in finance and save 300k
Just work 996. Working 72 hour weeks will do wonders for your bank account, and murder your personal life.
The chinese way.
FIRE china style!
Right
996 is way less common than you 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.
From everything I’ve read it’s still a problem, only workers are being shafted harder by being coerced into ‘voluntary’ overtime.
Sounds very capitalistic, to me.
I see two main issues with your comment. First, it feels like you’re relying mostly on non-Chinese sources here(correct me if I’m wrong). I feel if you were in China or actually reading Chinese-language reporting, you’d see that while overtime pressure and stuff like 996 still 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. It’s not perfect, obviously, but it’s hugely improved from where things were in the 2000s, and honestly it’s just not the omnipresent norm that English-language coverage sometimes makes it sound like.
Second, capitalism vs. socialism isn’t really defined by work hours, pay conditions, or how hard people are pushed, that’s a misunderstanding of what those terms actually mean. What matters is who owns the means of production. In China, it’s without a doubt the people, exercising that ownership through the state. The state being the apparatus through which people collectively wield power. Around 70% of the largest companies are state-owned, and all the strategic sectors (energy, transport, telecoms, finance) remain under public control. So yeah, China is socialist. The real question isn’t if, just how far along it is in the transitional period that socialism entails.
Guess how much 😁
