In February 2025, DJI started turning off the lights at 9 p.m. Security guards walked the floors. Employees who used to camp at their desks until midnight were sent home. Some said they felt relief. Others said they felt panic, like a fish suddenly pulled from water.
This was not a startup experiment. This was a drone company with 60 percent global market share deciding that overtime had become a liability. Midea followed, banning after-hours meetings and PPT presentations. Miniso’s CEO issued a memo: no meetings over 30 minutes, no approval processes that span overnight. Even Haier, a company whose factory floors once ran 12-hour shifts as standard, began talking about weekends.
I keep thinking about what changed. For a decade, Chinese tech sold itself on hustle. The 996 schedule, nine to nine, six days a week, was not a secret. It was a badge. Jack Ma called it a blessing. Job postings listed “strong ability to endure pressure” as a skill, right next to Python and SQL. Then, sometime in 2024, the conversation shifted. The government mentioned “involution-style competition” in the March 2025 work report, a phrase that sounds bureaucratic but landed like a verdict. The message: stop grinding for no reason.
The data explains part of it. Alibaba cut its workforce from 254,941 to 124,320 between 2022 and 2025. Baidu shrank by 21 percent. Tencent, ByteDance, JD.com, all pulled back. The jobs that remained paid well but offered no shelter. A 2025 study found that 48 percent of Chinese job ads explicitly excluded certain ages. For women, the bias started at 29. For men, 31. By 35, you were expensive, tired, and likely to need time off for a child or a parent. In a market flooded with 12.7 million new graduates in 2026, youth won every time.
But this is not just about layoffs. It is about a culture running out of steam. I read an interview with a Ctrip employee who joined in 2024 because the company was famous for being an “internet nursing home.” Flexible hours. Generous parental leave. Subsidies for egg freezing. She quit in four months. Her manager asked why she left at 7 p.m. Her colleague reported her for taking a walk during dinner. The policies existed on paper. The expectations lived in the air.
Another employee, a 15-year veteran, described the old Ctrip as a place where the CFO chased people out at 6 p.m. That was before Meituan, before Douyin started selling hotel rooms, before JD.com entered travel. Now Ctrip’s net profit is 17.2 billion yuan and its employees still work until 10. The “nursing home” was a myth built on monopoly. Competition killed the myth.
Meituan, meanwhile, is trying something stranger. In late 2024, the company promised to cancel timeout penalties for delivery riders by the end of 2025. It launched a points system in Guangxi. Riders who are late lose points instead of money. They earn points back by being on time. The company says this has been in testing since 2022. I do not know if it will work. A rider named Xiao Gu, profiled in a January report, said her daily orders dropped from 45 to 30 while her pay per order fell from 8 yuan to 7. She now works “almost without rest” to match her old income. The algorithm is softer, but the math is the same.
There are more than 10 million delivery riders in China now. Most last less than three months. Only 11 percent stay a full year. The job pays 8,000 to 9,000 yuan a month, better than factory work, better than retail. It is also a job where you are tracked by GPS, scored by an app, and replaced the moment you slow down. In 2021, 62.6 percent of riders worked more than 10 hours a day. The figure in 2018 was 36.5 percent. The algorithm got kinder. The work got harder.
I noticed something else this year. Young people are not arguing about overtime anymore. They are leaving the argument entirely. A record 3.4 million took the civil service exam in late 2025. State media scolded them for wanting “lying flat” jobs, but the scolding did not change the numbers. When the private sector offers instability dressed as ambition, the public sector offers stability dressed as mediocrity. For a generation that watched their seniors get fired at 35, mediocrity looks like a strategy.
The anti-overtime policies are real. The feelings behind them are complicated. A DJI engineer told a reporter that going home at 9 felt like “a vacation.” Another said the same workload now followed him home. The lights were off, but the laptop stayed on. This is the problem with reforming a culture from the top. You can ban the hours. You cannot ban the fear.
What I find most tiring is the language. Every announcement uses the same words: efficiency, balance, simplification. They read like self-help books. Meanwhile, the 35-year-old threshold hardens. The delivery points accumulate. The civil service exam rooms fill. The tech industry is learning to speak like a human resources department while operating like a machine.
I do not know if 2025 is a turning point or just a rebranding. The policies are better than nothing. The points system is better than fines. The 9 p.m. lights-out is better than the midnight office. But I keep thinking about that Ctrip employee who said, “I never really worked overtime, but I never really got off work either.” The phone was always there. The group chat never slept. The algorithm knew where she was.
Maybe the real change will come when someone figures out how to turn off the algorithm too.