I remember Jack Ma coming out as in-favour of this sort of work ethic. I find it nauseating that people believe this stuff, I don't usually want to yuk someone's yum, but enforcing this on people is just unhuman. I would consider myself a productive individual, but realistically I only have 4 or so hours of optimal work in me a day. Everything else is diminishing returns and, long-term, probably makes me less productive.

Your brain is probably working on the problems outside of these said 4 hours, without you actively knowing about it.

This is an old system and is a serious problem for Chinese mental health. They have something called "revenge bedtime procrastination", which is a product of how badly overworked they are.

But in other news water is wet. Chinese government is completely inhumane with little regard to labor laws. etc etc

Some companies in the US do that too, but it's called hustle culture (positive, self-empowered, fast lane to burnout) or crunch culture (either negative or expected of you in e.g. the video game industry).

You (the person reading this) are also doing it if you work in e.g. software development during the day, then volunteer in e.g. open source at night / weekends.

actually, a lot of young people in China are actively denouncing 996. Google 'tangping'.

For those who are wondering how much it would pay, assuming you only get paid per hour, 996 is 1.8 times more hours than a 40 hour work week.

It’s like they need a socialist revolution in China. Workers of the world, unite!

I mean, yeah, but unironically.

China is state capitalist, not communist, despite having a "Communist Party". It's governing ideology is Dengism, which replaced Maoism (which itself in practice was state capitalist just like Leninism was in the USSR) and defines "special economic zones" which are explicitly capitalist and are ideologically justified as being temporary, promising that the capitalists they create will be disowned by the people when the time has come (whenever that is).

Ending capitalism not only means "getting rid of" the capitalists (which state capitalism does by substituting them with the state) but getting rid of the capitalist mode of production, i.e. the employer-employee or capitalist-worker dichotomy. The easiest way to understand this when coming from a capitalist realist mindset (which is probably most people on HN) is in the form of worker cooperatives, where workers either decide how the business is run democratically or delegate decisions to a representative (and being able to revoke this delegation at any moment if their interests are not reflected properly). There's no single "owner" external to the "workers", the workers control the company.

State capitalism was intended as a "transitional state" to enable a communist revolution. The USSR justified it by stating that a communist revolution would require a level of industrial development Tsarist Russia didn't have (being a primarily agrarian society) and then claiming that a communist revolution would have to be global in order to succeed (which is a great justification for imperialist expansions and authoritarian rule to "maintain order" until then). Some people would say that if you contrast Lenin's writings with the politics he supported directly following the Soviet revolution, he was more of an opportunist seeking political power than an actual ideologue.

Mao was similarly focused on "creating the conditions" to enable communism at some point in the future rather than actually promoting radical democracy and equality directly, although his death count was mostly the result of authoritarian bureaucracy going wrong and naïve optimism about foreign technological accomplishments, which arguably was a problem he inherited rather than created.

That said, I don't think revolutions work, certainly not at scale and not if you want to create a more egalitarian society rather than another autocracy. The dynamics of revolutions require a small group exerting power on a larger system, which is in itself antithetical to the idea of how a communist society would be structured (hint: basically the opposite way). A lot of socialist revolutions during the Cold War were derailed by either side trying to turn them into a proxy war resulting either in violent defeat or a red authoritarian client state of either the USSR or China.

It's probably a better strategy to strengthen communal bonds by creating parallel local structures that can take over when capitalism fails. Worker cooperatives would help with this as they tend to contribute to local communities rather than merely exploit them as resources. (Small) unions can also be an important tool as they can force capitalist corporations to act more like cooperatives by enabling collective bargaining against the owners.

Oh, sorry for the lengthy response. You were probably intending this as an absurdist quip, not a genuine suggestion.