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Leon Li played a discreet but indispensable role at one of China's largest tech giants.
As an administrative assistant, she worked day and night scheduling meetings, preparing documents, and providing her bosses with any support they needed.
But in February she left the company, giving up a stable career and a comfortable salary for
a little less stressful: cleaning houses.
“Every morning when my alarm went off, all I could see was my boring future,” she told CNN, recalling her office job.
Li, 27, is part of a growing group of Chinese workers swapping busy office jobs for flexible working-class work.
Many of them worked for the country's largest companies.
But these companies are slowly losing their appeal as the Chinese economy faces headwinds including a real estate crisis, declining foreign investment and falling consumption.
China's economy grew 4.7% year-on-year in the second quarter of 2024, missing economists' expectations and marking the weakest growth since the first quarter of last year, according to the latest data from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) released on Monday.
The extremely long working hours and scarcity of resources have left workers like Li wondering whether it is worth trading their time and health for a higher salary.
“I like cleaning. As living standards improve (across the country), the demand for cleaning services is also increasing, with the market expanding,” said Li, who lives in the central Chinese metropolis of Wuhan.
But more importantly, she feels happier.
“The change it brings is that my head no longer feels dizzy. I feel less mental pressure. And I feel full of energy every day,” she said.
Employees reject '996' culture
Li is not the only office worker who has found a better work-life balance by swapping his office job for physical labor.
Alice Wang, 30, who uses an alias for privacy reasons, previously worked for one of China's leading e-commerce livestreaming platforms and earned 700,000 yuan ($96,310) a year.
But in April, she quit her job and moved from Hangzhou, a picturesque tech hub, to the more laid-back city of Chengdu, where rent is cheaper, to work as a zookeeper.
China's infamous “996” work culture — the practice of working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, common at Chinese tech companies, startups and other private businesses — has been a reason for many employees to quit.
Wang remembers feeling physically weak and “very lifeless and stagnant” at her old job, when she spent most of her time working.
But now she feels different.
“The sense of growth is relatively good,” she said, adding that she is pursuing a grooming degree and has ambitions to open her own shop someday. “That’s the long-term plan,” she said.
According to Chinese recruitment platform Zhaopin, the trend of switching from professional to manual jobs comes at a time when demand for workers is increasing.
The latest research published in June showed that there is demand for workers
jobs – such as food delivery workers, truck drivers, waiters and technicians – were 3.8 times larger in the first quarter of the year than in the same period in 2019.
Demand for delivery drivers grew fastest, by 800%, after three years of Covid lockdowns that created a takeaway culture.
And workers' wages have also risen, leading more people to take jobs they might previously have avoided.
According to the survey, the average monthly salary for delivery workers has increased 45.3% since 2019 due to the explosion of online shopping, from 5,581 yuan ($768) to 8,109 yuan ($1,116).
However, for some graduates, a manual job was not their first choice.
As the economy slows, graduate job openings are becoming harder to find in an increasingly competitive corporate job market.
The research also found that the number of people under 25 applying for working-class jobs in the first quarter of this year rose by 165% compared to the same period in 2019.
According to the NBS, China's unemployment rate among 16- to 24-year-olds reached a staggering 21.3% in June 2023. The figure was subsequently suspended for months to adjust the methodology.
Authorities returned the data in January this year, excluding some 62 million students, saying their primary task should be to study rather than look for a job.
According to the NBS, the unemployment rate among potential employees between the ages of 16 and 24 has fluctuated between 14.2% and 15.3% in recent months.
Macquarie economists Larry Hu and Zhang Yuxiao wrote in a research paper last year that China's service sector, private firms and small and medium-sized enterprises used to be the main sources of employment for young workers, but they have been hit hard by sluggish consumer demand.
David Goodman, director of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, said there
There is a mismatch between the type of graduates that universities produce and what the market actually needs.
He said China's economy is shifting toward high-tech, green technology and service sectors, while university education is still largely focused on manufacturing and public services, sectors that are outdated or saturated.
“(There is) a big problem if the higher education system has not adapted or has not been adapted
“Adjusted to meet the rapid changes in the structure of the economy,” he explained.
A different kind of pressure
However, some question whether blue-collar work is really the stress-free haven that people like Li and Wang imagine.
A recent video that went viral on Chinese social media showed how things can go wrong. The clip showed a barista in Shanghai losing his temper over a customer who threatened to file a complaint against him.
In a fit of rage, he threw coffee grounds at her, immediately becoming the center of a drama in the cafe that sparked an online debate about the challenges faced by service workers.
Complaints or bad online reviews can be disastrous for stores and restaurants in China, as many consumers blindly follow recommendations on popular social media platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok.
The threat of a bad review puts pressure on low-paid workers not to do it.
anything that could draw negative attention to the company.
Some Internet users criticized the barista's bad manners. But many more people sympathized with him.
“The pay is low to begin with, let alone the complaints. You might as well quit (if you are) being squeezed dry by both the company and the customers,” wrote one online commenter.
But for Li, who works as a freelance cleaner for only six hours a day, the experiences are positive.
She enjoys building relationships with her clients and says that with every cleaning she gets the feeling that she is doing more than just business.
“Customers carefully pour us water to drink. When it’s time to eat, they order food for us, bring us food, and constantly remind us to drink water and rest,” she said.
She says she has no regrets about quitting her office job so far.
“After a tiring day, I can go home, eat and do whatever I want without any extra mental pressure,” she said.
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