The Chinese Resignation Letter That Caused a CEO-Toppling Storm

sixthtone.com

33 points·firexcy··4 comments

> Since 2025, the Chinese government has made “anti-involution” a priority in its economic agenda, introducing policies to strengthen labor protections and curb race-to-the-bottom price wars among e-commerce platforms, solar panel companies, and electric vehicle manufacturers.

I don’t know enough about the Chinese government to know whether I should feel cynical about such resolutions, but as an American it would be so refreshing to hear about this as a platform for improvement. Can’t say I’ve heard anyone on a national level ringing the bell for this kind of reform.

There is no platform to discuss labor in the United States at the national level.

Just like there was no meaningful way to discuss individual data rights and privacy, or anything else that might have broken our proverbial Googles over the past two decades.

Domestically it would seem difficult to balance "anti-involution" and "anti-trust". I think American consumers might enjoy some additional worker protections, but would also likely complain about paying artificially high prices.

China is just exercising its oligopolistic power over many of its export categories. Now that China has finally achieved >50% of global manufacturing, they are shifting towards raising prices and extracting as much value as they can from the nations they export to.

Speaking of forcing employees work until midnight, in 1999, there were dotcom startups in San Francisco that used to pull down shutter in the evening to make employees work all-night. This was quite a common practice.

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