How Social Trends are Fuelling Workaholism in China

In 2000, the Japanese Prime Minister, Obuchi Keizo, suffered a fatal stroke. The cause of death was supposed to be work-stress. "Karoshi" or death from overwork, is now seen as a cause of social-strife in Japan, and workaholism as a serious disorder. Whereas in the west, parents will generally pick up their kids from school, in Japan, it is not uncommon for children to show up at their parents' place of work, and take them home. This culture of workaholism was at its height in the 70s and 80s, when Japan was rising as an economic power. Now it's China that is becoming the manufacturing base of the world, and taking its culture of workaholism with it.

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Yao Jing, 27, works in Shenzhen as an engineer for a company that makes telephones. She is by most measures a successful person. But living in such a large and competitive city, she can't afford to get complacent. To earn her 8000 RMB a month, she works overtime three nights a week, and comes into work on both weekend days, all for no extra money. It is taken for granted that to keep a job in Shenzhen, one must work more than one's contracted hours. Her lifestyle choice is in contrast to her former high-school classmate Yang Yali, who instead of descending on Shenzhen or any other boomtown, decided to stay in her hometown and be a teacher. She has chosen to take a pay cut so she could stay close to her octogenarian grandparents.  

Yao Jing's decision is more fashionable than her former classmate. Now, in China as with anywhere, it is a good time to rise up through a big company. China's corporate culture is very much an American import, and the disparity between the highest earners and lowest earners is similar. In the US (and the UK) CEO salaries went from 42 times that of the average worker in 1980 to 531 times in the year 2000, and the rise continues unfettered. A Chinese city-dweller is at all times visually bombarded with ostentatious displays of wealth, from cars to restaurants to jewellery, to mistresses. Getting rich is a national obsession, which is leading to an increasingly materialistic population, where house prices, the cost of education, and the income-gap are openly discussed in all media and at all levels of society. China is beginning to fit George Carlin's description of America: "The rich do none of the work and pay none of the taxes, the Middle-Class do most of the work and pay most of the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the shit out of the middle-class. "  

As a Westerner, I have seen workaholism lionized, and workaholics idolized. Hollywood has made an acclaimed film about the heroism of self-made Wall Street businessman Chris Gardner. Sports fans always have a soft spot for their teams' grittiest, though not necessarily most talented, workers. If you look through Fortune or The Wall Street Journal it will be hard to find a profile of the worker who reduced their working-hours to 40 a week in order to spend more time with their family.

Downscaling career-responsibilities in order to have a more simple existence has not become a social trend. But there are examples of it. In fiction, there is the example of Kevin Spacey in American Beauty; in real life there is Hubei Province's Chen Zhen. He was steadily climbing the career-ladder at China Central Television, but later decided to return to his hometown and work as a school-board administrator. He decided he wanted to raise his children away from the pressure and pollution of Beijing.  

Modern corporate culture is a very American phenomenon. Its roots are in America's protestant work ethic, and the term "workaholism" itself was coined by an American in 1968. As Kurt Vonnegut observed about the United States：

“Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor.”

There may yet be an alternative to China becoming a horribly insecure society in which workaholism is considered the norm. It is to recognise that the strength of a person is not in how respected they are at work, but in how respected they are at home.
 

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