In January 2021, a 22-year-old employee of the Chinese e-commerce company Pinduoduo died after leaving work at around 1:30 a.m. She collapsed on her way home. Her exact cause of death was never publicly confirmed, and that uncertainty matters: it is precisely what turned a private tragedy into a public argument about how Chinese tech companies treat working time.

The case did not become famous because of the death alone. It became famous because of what happened next. An account bearing Pinduoduo's name responded to questions about the death on Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A platform, with a message that essentially told readers that ordinary people survive by trading their health for money, and that this is simply the age we live in. The reply was deleted within half an hour, but screenshots had already spread across Weibo, where the topic drew hundreds of millions of views. Pinduoduo later said the reply did not represent the company, attributing it to an employee of a supplier who had forgotten to log out of the company's account. Shanghai's labour authorities opened an investigation into the company's employment practices.

Strip away the corporate damage control and you are left with the real subject: 996. The term describes a schedule of 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, which adds up to roughly 72 hours. China's Labour Law sets a standard of no more than 8 hours a day and 44 hours a week. The gap between the law and the lived schedule is the whole story, and everyone involved knows it.

996 was not new in 2021. In 2019, tens of thousands of programmers staged a rare online protest over working hours, and the debate reached the founders of China's biggest tech companies. Alibaba's Jack Ma publicly defended the schedule as a kind of blessing; the heads of JD.com and Xiaomi voiced support for intense work cultures as well. The protest changed very little. A 2019 survey by the recruitment platform Zhaopin, cited by the BBC, found that more than 80 percent of over 10,000 respondents regularly worked overtime, and 70 percent said that overtime was unpaid. Product and engineering roles reported the worst of it.

Why does the schedule survive when the law, on paper, forbids it? Legal scholars quoted in the BBC's coverage pointed to the escape hatches companies use: unfinished tasks, and the fiction of voluntary overtime. When promotion, bonuses, and even keeping your job depend on staying late, overtime is voluntary in the same way that breathing underwater is optional. The choice is formally yours and practically absent.

Pinduoduo itself is a useful lens because its rise was so fast. Founded in 2015, it reached a market value above 200 billion dollars by the end of 2020 on the back of low prices and discount-driven growth in smaller cities. Former employees told the BBC that a typical day started at 11 a.m. and ran more than twelve hours, six days a week, with lunch breaks cut from two hours to one and even bathroom habits policed by signs. Pay was reportedly higher than at peers like Alibaba and Tencent, and far above average Chinese wages. That is the bargain in its bluntest form: more money, in exchange for more of your life, with the exchange rate set entirely by the employer.

The 2021 case is worth revisiting not because it resolved anything, but because it exposed the three layers of the problem at once. First, the human layer: a young worker dead after a midnight finish, with no confirmed medical explanation made public. Second, the corporate layer: a company whose first instinct was to minimise, then to disown its own account's words, then to blame a supplier's employee. Third, the structural layer: a labour market where the legal ceiling on hours is widely ignored, where enforcement arrives only after a death makes headlines, and where public anger burns hot for a week and then moves on.

There is a temptation to treat 996 as a Chinese curiosity. It is not. Every industry that pays by output while measuring commitment by presence eventually invents its own version of it. The pattern is always the same: a schedule that nobody formally mandates, a promotion system that quietly rewards it, and a vocabulary that reframes exhaustion as ambition. When a founder calls overwork a blessing, he is not describing a schedule. He is giving employees a story that makes it harder for them to object.

So what actually changes a 996 culture? Not slogans, and not one investigation opened under media pressure. Three things have to move together. Overtime has to be paid and recorded, so that the real cost of the schedule shows up on a company's books instead of in its employees' bodies. Promotion criteria have to be written down and audited, so that staying late stops being an unspoken requirement. And workers need a channel to refuse without fear, which is the one thing no internal handbook has ever provided on its own.

The Pinduoduo case ended the way most of these cases end: an investigation, a round of apologies, and a debate that flared and faded. The schedule it was about did not fade. That is why the story still deserves a retelling, not as a scandal, but as a question that has never been answered: if a company can only win by working its people 72 hours a week, what exactly is it winning, and who is paying for it?

I write about work, building, and the human cost of moving fast over at Airgrix (https://airgrix.com), where I also run a small independent store.