Viral Videos Fuel Clash Over Work Culture

"The head of public relations at a major Chinese tech firm gained hundreds of thousands of followers seemingly overnight after posting a series of viral videos laying out her unapologetically tyrannical management style.

The videos also earned her a pink slip from her employer after they set off an explosion of criticism among Gen Z Chinese fed up with the intense work culture that prevails in their country's tech industry.

"I'm not your mother-in-law. I'm not your mom," Qu Jing, a vice president at Chinese search giant Baidu, said in one widely excoriated clip, referring to a colleague who was struggling with a recent breakup. "I only care about your results."

In other videos, she criticized employees who didn't want to work weekends and dismissed complaints from one subordinate that messages she sent to a group chat late at night had kept a crying child awake.

"Why should it be my business that your child was crying?" she said.

On Thursday, as public outrage soared, Qu removed the videos from her account on Douyin, TikTok's sister platform in China, and replaced them with an apology. She said she had tried to do a good job but had been too impatient and hadn't adopted "a proper approach."

Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li was furious at Qu and fired her on Thursday, according to people familiar with the matter.

A top Baidu executive told employees that Qu's comments were "inappropriate and didn't represent and reflect the real culture and values of Baidu," the people said. The management also promised to review the company's corporate culture and working systems, they said.

Qu declined to comment. Baidu didn't respond to requests for comment. In comments released on Friday, Baidu's head of human resources said the company wasn't free of internal problems, including pressure to work overtime, but wouldn't stop reforming itself.

China's hard-charging tech industry relies heavily on a Darwinian work culture that demands near-total devotion to the workplace. Tech workers coined the term "996" to describe the typical schedule: 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.

Half a decade ago, videos like Qu's were just as likely to garner a shrug as generate controversy. But younger Chinese, much like their counterparts in the U.S., are increasingly skeptical of the pressure to work themselves ragged in pursuit of financial success. They have coined their own terms -- "lying flat" and "letting it rot" -- to describe their antipathy to the grinding ethos of 996.

"The capitalists don't even bother to pretend now," wrote one user of Chinese social-media platform Weibo in a response to Qu's videos. "They just handed down their bloody rules to the public like a rapacious aggressor."

Some commenters, noting Qu's remit as a public-relations executive, likened the controversy to watching the chief of a fire brigade set his own department on fire. Baidu's shares dropped by more than 4% in the U.S. and 2.5% in Hong Kong this week as the company struggled with the fallout.

The incident has caught the attention of state media, with the Communist Party-controlled Youth Daily decrying the savage "wolf culture" it said was a byproduct of the country's market economy, in a Thursday editorial.

The backlash against Qu, it said, "was a counterattack on wolf culture by human nature."

Qu joined Baidu in 2021 after working at Chinese telecom-equipment giant Huawei Technologies, a firm famous for its aggressive work culture. In opening her Douyin account earlier this month, she joined a recent trend among Chinese business executives hoping to establish or expand their personal brands by posting regular video clips.

In her videos, she described the pressure she herself felt at work, saying she once forgot the birthday of the older of her two sons. "I actually don't remember which grade my younger son is at," she said.

Some online commenters defended Qu, casting her videos as an honest expression of the Chinese economy's gladiatorial nature. "Her words were nasty," wrote one Weibo user. "But what she said reflects reality."" [1]

Trump became America's president by posting on Twitter (now X). Everybody with some ambition dreams about something similar. Some of them get burned.

1. EXCHANGE --- Viral Videos Fuel Clash Over Work Culture in China. Fan, Wenxin.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 11 May 2024: B.9.