After two years in the marketing department of a Mercedes dealership in Jinhua, a medium-sized city in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, 22-year-old Haiyao (who does not wish to be named) has decided to quit. “Most of the employees were much older than me and no one seemed very motivated,” she justifies. But, when leaving her post, the young woman did not choose discretion.
She invited friends to a restaurant to make this decision a party. On a large red banner, slogans are written in yellow sinograms: “The pretty little one isn’t going to work anymore; no need to be depressed! Enjoy the resignation, the future will be cooler. » She herself ordered the banner in yellow on a red background, reminiscent of the country’s propaganda posters, with its political slogans plastered in the streets or its calls to work harder, hung on the walls of factories.
Haiyao immediately posted photos of the event on Xiaohongshu (literally “little red book”), the social network for urban youth, often compared to Instagram. It is on this platform that she found inspiration: hundreds of young people stage their resignation by playing with the codes of companies that exalt model employees. A way of rejecting the work culture of their parents’ generation.
Former employees of large companies
What good is it to be exhausted at work when Chinese growth is slowing down, wages are no longer rising and the future is uncertain, ask young Chinese. While the country is far from experiencing a wave of mass resignations, the phenomenon has caught the attention of the restaurant chain Haidilao, which now offers the services of its employees to sing a “joyful resignation” to the guests, as for birthdays.
Many of the quits who testify on Xiaohongshu are former employees of big tech companies: e-commerce giant Alibaba, telecom champion Huawei, or TikTok owner Bytedance. So many companies renowned for their culture of frenzied work. In 2019, already, a movement had emerged within these large groups to denounce the timetables “996” : in the office from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week.
A questioning of the sacrifices imposed by their leaders, at a time when the economy was showing signs of running out of steam and the possibilities of getting rich quickly were being restricted. The health crisis and a long campaign to regulate tech companies have reinforced this feeling.
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