https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

With a society that had been dealing with famine, poverty, and labor opportunities consisting of subsistence farming in living memory, working 72 hours a week to receive a steady paycheck and a full belly seems like a pretty decent trade.

When you look at the history of the Industrial Revolution and the Western labor movement, I have to have doubts that this "speed and agility" will last. People who are prosperous start to have higher standards, especially as new generations enter the labor market. There is already significant pushback against the 996 system.

It's not hard to out-produce when the average person is working almost double the Western standard.

I thought the documentary "American Factory" was an interesting window into the lives of Chinese and American factory workers. My own analysis/opinion: the factory workers in China were indeed shown to be working quickly, obediently, and working long hours. The Americans looked lazy at times.

I thought the reasoning for this difference was that American workers used to union protections already had generations of knowledge about why they should not become wage slaves risking their health and safety for their capitalist employers, despite having few other options in a town where most of the factory jobs left.

I personally wonder when the typical Chinese worker will wake up to that same reality: that speed, agility, and fast innovation aren't really worth selling your weekends and joints and tendons away just so that the boss can buy a third vacation home.

Increasingly distant as labor costs continue to soar in China that their demographic crisis will only exacerbate. China speed now is only possible due to a never ending debt stream that gets eternally refinanced.