In China, 1,600 People Die Every Day From Working Too Hard

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Chinese banking regulator Li Jianhua literally worked himself to death. After 26 years of “always putting the cause of the party and the people” first, his employer said in June, the 48-year-old official died of a heart attack rushing to finish a report before the sun came up. China is facing an epidemic of overwork, to hear the state-controlled press and Chinese social media tell it. About 600,000 people a year die from toiling too hard, according to the China Youth Daily. State-controlled China Radio International puts the toll at 1,600 a day.

Microblogging website Sina Weibo (WB) is filled with complaints about stressed-out lives and chatter about press reports of people working themselves to death: a 24-year-old employee at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide, a 25-year-old auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers, a designer of fighter planes. “What’s the point of working overtime so you can work to death?” asks a Weibo user, noting that his own boss told employees to spend more time on the job.
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The state, however, is holding up worked-to-death employees as heroes akin to earlier Communist martyrs such as Lei Feng, a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army who’s been lionized in propaganda campaigns since the 1960s for his selfless devotion to the party. Li’s employer released a statement on June 10 praising him as “a model for party members and cadres of the China Banking Regulatory Commission.” It said that to “learn from Comrade Li Jianhua, one must be like him, always firm in ideals and beliefs, the broader interest, loyal to the cause of the party and the people, unremitting struggle sacrificing everything.”

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Because the link between these deaths and work-related stress may not always be clear, the death toll can be subjective and difficult to compile. Death from overwork is as much a cultural phenomenon as a medical one, though the governments of Japan and Taiwan officially recognize cases for insurance compensation. The actual underlying causes of death encompass a wide range of illnesses such as heart attack or stroke that are aggravated by the stress of overtime. In the U.S., people don’t die from overwork, even though the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say heart disease is the leading cause of death, and studies have linked sitting too long to an early death. Americans work an average of 45 hours a year more than the Japanese, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
In China, white-collar worries about overwork reflect a tipping point in economic development. The Chinese service sector has eclipsed manufacturing in terms of economic output, while factory workers are taking advantage of their shrinking numbers to negotiate shorter hours and better pay. Office workers are still paid more than factory hands but have few of the protections a union can offer. They have bigger bills to pay for housing and cars. There is also demographic pressure: China’s one-child policy has created a generation of only children supporting aging parents and their own families.
In exchange for starting salaries that are typically double blue-collar pay, office workers put in hours of overtime often in violation of Chinese labor law, according to Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for the China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based labor advocacy group. “China is still a rising economy, and people are still buying into that hardworking ethos,” says Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at the Japan campus of Temple University in Tokyo. “They haven’t yet achieved the ‘affluenza’ that led to questioning in Japan of norms and values.”

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In Japan, death from overwork is called karoshi. (In China it’s guolaosi.) Karoshi includes deaths from stroke, heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage, or other sudden causes related to the demands of the job. In 2012, the Japanese government compensated 813 families who were able to show a link between overwork, illness, and death, including 93 suicides. The Parliament passed a law on June 20 calling for support centers, aid to businesses for prevention programs, and more research on karoshi.
Work-life balance still gets short shrift in China, a society that combines a modern pursuit of riches with an ancient belief in putting the community above the individual, says Yang Heqing, dean of the School of Labor Economics at the Capital University of Economics and Business. In Beijing’s business district, he’s surveyed hundreds of workers about their lives at home and at the office. Sixty percent of workers complain of clocking more than the legal limit of two hours a day of overtime, which is taking a toll on their families and health, he says. “More than in the Anglo-American corporate system, in Korea, China, and Japan—the countries of the Confucian belt—there’s a belief in total dedication,” says Temple University’s Kingston. “Any job worth doing is worth doing excessively.”