Good day comrades and welcome to my first Hexbear post.
Like many others here, I have participated with delight in the Western invasion/migration to 小红书. Hearing from the Chinese people directly has truly restored some of my faith in humanity.
Also like many others I am grateful every day for their revolution and steadfast and peaceful development over the decades, especially lately with climate change looming and no other nations rising to the challenge.
Thirdly, after understanding CIA media operations and anticommunist agitprop I now don't personally object to what we call "censorship" over here. It seems legitimate to me for the dictatorship of the proletariat to manage the "Overton Window", (lest it be managed instead by capital and its convenient alliance with jingoism).
Now for the hard questions.
I spoke with a Chinese citizen and acquaintance about all this. Aside from their reluctance to discuss politics I was also troubled by their assessment of the labor situation in China.
According to them, there are unions but they are state controlled and useless. They say the work culture is brutal and unsustainable and that doing true organizing will result in imprisonment.
I am coming to this question from a place of wanting to learn from the premier Marxist country and government, but I can't make it reconcile in my head. I would perhaps ask this question on 小红书 but I don't think this discourse would be welcome in that community.
Were unions weaponized by foreign powers in China's past? Is my acquaintance biased/unrepresentative? Is the connection between organized labor and Marxism less ironclad than I always assumed? What do you think comrades?
My understanding is that even in 996 they get way longer lunches than us. Tradionally they had a ten hour work day with a two hour lunch in the middle. So like, siesta. However. China is still doing it's best. I think the GDP per capida is still in the underdeveloped range. However things change so fast it is hard to keep up. I know they aren't doing as well as they would like to and they have said as much. When you compare data evety sector is improving year over year. As it stands now every time I find an article about a labor probelm in China it is years old and they fixed it a few years after we heared about it. So they are doing more than us with less and building momentum
I'd be really wary of trying to soften how bad 996 is. Everyone I've known who's worked it has described it as pretty hellish and the government really does need to work harder to stamp it out.
Fair. is it still common?
Honestly couldn't say. I know a fair number of people who still do it but I don't want to extrapolate to wider society.