Last week, a friend who works at a Beijing internet company told me her office cafeteria started charging for milk. Not all milk. Just the second carton. The first one is still free, part of the “three free meals” package that drew her to the job two years ago. But the second carton now costs three yuan. She laughed when she told me. “It’s not about the milk,” she said. “It’s the message.”
I keep thinking about that milk. Because 2025 was the year China’s tech industry stopped pretending the feast would last forever.
In December, JD.com announced it would pay its procurement staff an average of 25 months’ salary for the year. Twenty-five. The news made headlines. ByteDance raised its cash bonus ceiling to three months’ base pay for top performers. Tencent spread its thirteenth salary across monthly paychecks and added performance bonuses of two to five months. On the surface, the big platforms are still handing out money.
But the surface is thinning. A survey of company filings shows the real picture: Shangtang Technology dropped from 3,756 employees in 2024 to 2,472 in 2025. That’s 1,284 people gone, about a third of the company. Other firms are using softer words. “Optimization.” “Graduation.” “Slimming down.” A NetEase article from January put it plainly: year-end bonuses are disappearing across industries, from private firms to state-owned enterprises. One auto company employee hit 97% of their sales target and still saw their bonus canceled. A state-owned enterprise worker with seven years on the job lost nearly 20,000 yuan in expected bonus income and had to cancel his family’s Spring Festival trip.
The platforms themselves are tightening the screws in quieter ways. A July report in Caijing Tianxia Weekly described how internet companies use cafeteria policies as “implicit management.” Dinner subsidies at Alibaba expire the same day, so not eating in the office feels like losing money. Kuaishou hands out 30-yuan “energy coupons” only to workers who stay past 8 p.m. You save on dinner, but you also stay late. The system is elegant. It costs far less than a raise, and it binds people to their desks without ever writing the rule down.
I noticed something else this year. The people I know who still have jobs are working harder to look busy. A Hangzhou-based engineer at a major platform told VOA his expected bonus is about four months’ salary, same as the past two years. But he also said the money “doesn’t make up for the brain cells I’m killing.” The 3:6:1 performance distribution at his company means the bottom 10% are pushed out every cycle. Everyone knows the math. Everyone acts like they don’t.
Meanwhile, the people delivering our lunches are getting new rules too. In December, China’s market regulator issued a national standard for food delivery platforms. Riders should not work more than eight hours a day. After four continuous hours, they must get a 20-minute break. Platforms cannot use algorithms or bonus incentives to force overtime. The rules are “recommended,” not mandatory. A rider in Foshan told a local TV station he used to make 200 yuan a day. Now he struggles to hit 100. To make up the gap, he works 15 or 16 hours. Another rider admitted he runs red lights because “if I don’t, half my orders are late.” The algorithm didn’t change. The human body just got a new set of suggestions it cannot afford to follow.
What strikes me is how these two stories rhyme. The office worker counting subsidized milk cartons. The delivery rider calculating whether a 20-minute break is worth the lost income. Both are trapped in systems that pretend to care while optimizing for extraction. The free lunch was never free. It was a way to keep you at your desk. The algorithmic break is not a break. It is a performance of concern.
I don’t know why but I keep returning to a number from a research report I read this month. The National Bureau of Statistics said industrial profits for the first eleven months of 2025 grew by 1.8%. That is basically flat. In a flat world, every yuan of bonus, every free meal, every minute of rest becomes a zero-sum negotiation. Someone pays. The question is who.
My friend in Beijing still takes her one free milk at breakfast. She says she might start bringing her own from home. The cafeteria is still there. The food is still decent. But the spell is broken. She knows now that the company is counting every carton. And she is counting too. Not the money. The days.