To come back to the question of, do I think we will continue to see layoffs?

I think it kind of boils down to this question of, is the tech industry in China able to find new areas for growth?

And at least as of now, I'm not sure that there is a ton of reason to believe so.

Yeah. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us. I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is J.S. Tan.

JS is a graduate student at MIT, a former tech worker and a member of collective action in tech, a project to advance the tech worker movement.

J.S. was last on the show in October of 2020. That was episode 30, quite a long time ago, if you want to go back and listen to it, where we talked about Silicon Valley nationalism.

Now, in this week's episode, we look at a recent article that JS wrote for Dissent magazine, looking into the live flat movement and the recent attention that has been given to 996, this particular set of work practices and expectations on Chinese tech workers and how long

they should be dedicating to their jobs and spending in the office and things like this.

After the attention that was given to this, after the pushback of tech workers in China to

these practices, there do seem to be shifts that are starting to emerge and changes to the

expectations for these workers and how much time they should spend at their jobs.

In this week's conversation, I wanted to learn more about this.

And so that's why I wanted to have JS back on the show, because we don't talk very much about

China and what goes on in the Chinese tech industry,

and it's something that I would like to spend a bit more time on in the future. And so I think that

this is at least a good way to get into that, to talk a little bit about some of the policies

that China has been enacting in recent years in its tech sector. We don't get into that too deeply,

but at least to give a general overview

and to touch on it, but also to examine this change in the work practices, the expectations

for Chinese workers in the tech industry. One of the things that JS presents in discussing

this is what is driving this change, right? Is it really the power of the tech workers?

Is it the initiatives of the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party and their desires

...