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A few days ago, a Chinese repository became popular on GitHub . Instead of a code, it contains complaints about working conditions and illegal processing. The name itself refers to the meme of Chinese developers about their work: "From nine to nine, six days a week, and then in intensive care" (Work by '996', sick in ICU). Anyone can commit to the repository if they confirm their story with screenshots of internal documents and correspondence.
In case of The Verge and found inside stories about working conditions in the largest IT companies in the country - Alibaba, Huawei, Tencent, Xiaomi and others. Almost immediately, these companies began blocking their access to 996.ICU without responding to foreign media comments.
I don't know what could be more mundane than this news - like our reaction to it: “The Chinese are complaining about GitHub? Ok, soon they will block it and make their own. We are used to the fact that only such things are written about China - blocking, censorship, cameras, social rating a la Black Mirror, persecution of Uyghurs, hellish exploitation, absurd scandals with memes about Winnie the Pooh and so on in a circle.
At the same time, China provides the whole world with goods. Giant companies that denounce unfreedom are willing to abandon their principles in order to enter the Chinese market. China has the most powerful industry and the IT industry, astronautics is developing there. Wealthy Chinese are destroying real estate markets in Canada and New Zealand, buying everything for any money. Chinese films and books that come to us are simply beautiful.
These are interesting contradictions (combinations?). In a world where truth has finally died under the knives of viewpoints, it seems impossible to understand the whole context of what China really is. Without even hoping to figure it out, I talked to several people who have lived and worked there for a long time - just to add a couple more opinions to the piggy bank.
Frontend student vs shitcode
Artem Kazakov has been living in China for six years and is engaged in Frontend development. He is from Angarsk in the Irkutsk region. Until the 9th grade, Artem studied at a school with in-depth study of the English language, but in the middle of the semester he abruptly decided to change direction and go to the Polytechnic Lyceum. There they treated him with doubt - they did not want to take a person from a humanitarian school.
A year later, he won a trip to the USA under the FLEX program, the fifth in the history of the Lyceum.
Artem also turned his craving for languages upside down - he changed natural languages to programming languages, and English to Chinese. “In the 2010s, no one was surprised by knowing English, so I entered Dalian Normal University for a Chinese language course. After studying for two years, I passed the HSK exam (like IELTS, TOEFL) at a level sufficient to enter the university for a bachelor's degree,” he says.
After Dalian, Artem moved to Wuhan, Hubei province, and entered Wuhan University, the eighth in the ranking of universities in China. In parallel, he is studying at the Angarsk University in absentia and in June he will defend two diplomas at once.
Artem lives in China on a student visa, and working on it - even remotely - is not entirely legal. “In China, it is strictly forbidden to work with a study visa, but you have to survive,” he says, “I personally taught students TOEFL, IELTS for several years, both in Dalian and Wuhan. There is an option to work as models, or bartenders, but it is more risky. If caught once, a fine of five thousand yuan from you and twenty-five from the employer. The second time - deportation, and in some cases up to fifteen days and a black seal (you can not enter China for five years). Therefore, no one here needs to know about my work remotely. But even if they find out - I do not take money from the Chinese, I do not break the law, so there is no problem with this.
In his second year at university, Artem did an internship at a Chinese IT company. There was a lot of routine, I had to type up HTML pages day after day. He says that the tasks were boring, no magic at the back, no new solutions at the front. He wanted to gain experience, but quickly ran into local peculiarities: “The Chinese work according to a very interesting scheme - a task comes to a project, and they don’t cut it into small parts, don’t decompose it, but just take it and do it. Often there were cases when the same module was written in parallel by two different developers.
It is only natural that there is huge competition for places in China. And it seems that local developers have no time to learn new and advanced things in order to become valuable - instead, they write as quickly as possible on what they have:
“They don't do it well, they have a lot of shitty code, but in some magical way everything works, and it's weird. There's a lot of manpower out there, and outdated solutions, judging by the JS. I did not see that the developers were eager to learn something new. Roughly speaking, they learned PHP, SQL, JS, and they write everything in it, using jQuery on the front. Fortunately, Evan Yu came, and the Chinese switched to Vue at the front. But this process was not fast.
In 2018, after an internship at one company, Artem was called to another to finalize a WeChat mini-application. “Nobody there has even heard of ES6 in javascript. Nobody knew about arrow functions or destructuring. The very style of coding made the hairs on my head stand on end. At both companies, Artem spent a lot of time editing the code of the previous developer, and only when he brought everything back to normal did he start his original task. But after a while he again found the same pieces corrected by him spoiled.
“Although I was not the most experienced, I decided to move from code.aliyun to GitHub, began to review the code myself and send it back to the developer for rework if I didn’t like something. I told the management - if they want their application to work as they intended, they need to trust me. The tech lead was extremely dissatisfied, but after the first week of work, everyone saw progress, the frequency of code uploads with a minimum number of minor bugs to WeChat users, and everyone agreed to continue. Chinese developers are smart, but they love to code the way they once learned and, unfortunately, do not strive to learn something new, and if they do, it is very difficult and long.
In turn, there are no surprises in the backend. Like us, Java and C-languages seemed to be the most popular for Artem. And just like ours, working in IT is a quick and risk-free way to get into the middle class. According to his observations, salaries vary between a high figure in the Russian Federation and an average in the United States, despite the fact that you can live well on the average Moscow one hundred thousand rubles a month. “Good shots are valued here, you just need to break through and hold on to your place, otherwise you will be replaced.”
What the developers complain about in 996.ICU, Artem confirms: “Startups that start making money sit on development day and night. Many companies provide offices with berths. All this is done in order to do as much as possible and complete the plan as quickly as possible. This is pretty standard in China. Eternal processing and long working weeks.
Production manager against laziness
“To say that the Chinese are such poor fellows, they recycle… yes, they feel fine,” says Ivan Surkov, Tion’s production manager in China, “It seems to me that the stories about how the Chinese are driven into factories in slave conditions are all fairy tales just to discredit the companies for which they produce. I have not yet seen a single enterprise where there would be hellish labor. Probably, this is how it seems to Europeans who have lived all their lives in a city where everything is cool, clean, the paths are lined with stone - and then they come and see how people stick around at the factory from morning to evening.
Ivan has been seeing this every day for several years now, but he came to China from Ivanovo, a place where not everything is cool and clean. Six years ago, he began to learn the language at a school for foreigners at the university. Now Ivan works for a Russian company that manufactures smart breathers in China. He goes to enterprises with his documentation, and they take up production. Ivan sends orders, monitors their execution, resolves conflict situations, travels to contractors and manages everything related to contract manufacturing. And if I, reading about eternal overwork, imagine selfless diligence, then Ivan says that every day he struggles with Chinese laziness.
“For example, I come to the account manager, who has to run with me around the plant. She just needs to go down to the first floor, go into the next building and say a few words to people. But it starts: “Come on, go yourself.” Damn, you're not doing anything right now, you're stupid in the monitor, get your ass up! No, she would rather find another person. And that's all - to make the Chinese work - they really need to be forced. You can negotiate with them, but you always need to watch so that you are not deceived. In rare cases, you even have to put pressure, hysteria, say that you will not accept the goods, that they will get money. To make them move, you need to constantly act.
This is not the first time I have heard such things, and it always seemed strange to me: on the one hand, carelessness, old technologies, shitty code - but China in a matter of years replaces the entire Internet industry with its own and releases services that can withstand billions of users. People talk about laziness and unwillingness to work - but in the same place, twelve-hour days and six-day work weeks are normal. Ivan believes that there are no contradictions in this:
“Yes—they work, but not hard. It's just the amount of time, not the quality. They work eight hours, and then an additional four. And those hours are already paid at a different rate. In fact, it is voluntary-compulsory, and this is how everyone works. They have the option not to come in the evening, but money is money. Moreover, when you are in an environment where this is normal, then this is normal for you.
And the speed of production is the conveyor. Even Henry Ford figured out how everything should work. And if your staff is trained, then here are the volumes. In addition, the Chinese are not afraid to invest, they are quite brave in this regard. And if they have invested, they squeeze everything they can out of them.”
Who is good in China
Now Ivan lives in the city of Shenzhen - this place is called "Chinese silicon valley". The city is young, about forty years old, but during this time it has developed at a breakneck pace. Now more than ten million people live in Shenzhen. The city stands on the sea, recently two very large areas from other provinces were attached to it, which used to be completely industrial, one of the most beautiful airports in China was built. Ivan says that his district is being actively renovated, the old is being demolished, and it is being built up. When he arrived there, there was a continuous construction site around, piles were still being driven. Two years later, developers began renting finished apartments.
Almost all Chinese electronics (except, for example, Lenovo) are produced here. The Foxconn factory is located here - this is a giant electronics assembly factory, where, among others, Apple equipment is produced. Ivan told how his friend went to this plant, and they barely let him go there. “You are of interest to them only if you order from a million mobile phones a year. This is the bare minimum just to talk to them.”
In China, almost everything is business-to-business, and there are a lot of large and small contract enterprises in Shenzhen. At the same time, there are few full-cycle enterprises among them. “On one they make electronics and components, on the second they pour plastic, then on the third something else, on the tenth they put it together. That is, not as we are used to in Russia, where there are full-cycle enterprises that no one needs. It doesn't work that way in the modern world,” says Ivan.
Shenzhen has a warm climate, and unlike the north of the country, there are a lot of electric vehicles. All of them, like ordinary cars with internal combustion engines, are mostly local. “In China they make really cool cars - Gili, BYD, Donfon - there are really a lot of car brands. Much more than presented in Russia. The slag that is brought to Russia, it seems to me, is not even sold here, except perhaps somewhere in the west of China. Here, in the east, which is all in production, if the car is Chinese, then it is worthy. Good plastic, interior, leather seats, ventilated butt and whatever you want.
Both Artem and Ivan say that China is much more convenient for life than they thought before their arrival: “The PRC has everything that an ordinary Russian person might need. Gym, swimming pools, places to eat, huge malls, shops. On the weekends, we go out with friends for a walk, to the cinema, sometimes to a bar, or we go out into nature,” says Artem, “That’s just the expectation that Chinese food is delicious – for me it was a fiasco. After living in China for six years, I found only a few Chinese dishes that I like, and even those that are vaguely reminiscent of Western food.
“A lot of the things we know about China are greatly exaggerated,” Ivan says. “You don’t really feel overcrowded here. I have been living in China for six years and only now I saw how someone stuffed a person into the subway. Before that, I lived in Beijing, I was on the subway and I have never seen anything like this - although Beijing is a fairly densely populated city. We constantly show this garbage on TV, they say, in China, this is commonplace. And I saw this for the first time in six years, only in Shenzhen during rush hour! And it's not as bad as they say. Half an hour and that's it - you won't see the crowd anymore.
Freedom is good or bad
But in their views on the notorious censorship and freedom, the guys differed in their views. According to Artyom's observations, the social rating seeps into all corners of China. “Already now you can meet people who cannot buy a plane ticket or a good class train because of a low rating. You can raise your rating in many ways. There is an application in which the Chinese can turn in their neighbor an illegal foreigner and get a good reward for it. A couple of touches on the phone screen and that's it. I bet it helps the rankings too. Or, it is enough for a Chinese to simply think that his foreign neighbor is not working on a work visa, and the police will soon come with a check,” says Artem.
Ivan has never encountered such cases, and in general with discontent and negativity. “People immediately begin to compare it with the Black Mirror, they love to mystify everything very much, they want to see only the bad in any attempt to streamline something. Or maybe social rating is a good thing,” he said.
“I think that now everything is only being tested, and when it goes to the masses with legislative support, we will see. But I feel that this will not change life fundamentally. It's just that in China there are a lot of different kinds of deceivers. According to popular belief, they only like to deceive foreigners - in fact, the Chinese too. It seems to me that this initiative is aimed at improving everyone's life. But how it will be implemented in the future is a question. With a knife you can cut bread and kill a person.
At the same time, Ivan said that he does not use the local segment of the Internet - except perhaps Baidu, the local analogue of Google, and only for work. Living in China, he continues to surf the Russian-language Internet. Artem uses, but believes that the Chinese Internet is a complete censorship.
“On a large scale, it began in 2014, when Google was banned. At that time, Chinese activists such as AiWeiWei were tweeting the whole truth about life in China. There was a case: there was an earthquake in China, and since they saved on the construction of schools, there were a lot of victims. The real number of deaths was concealed by the government.
AiVeyVey was a hyper and created a program - he was looking for the parents of all the victims of the tragedy in order to tell the world about the real state of things. Many followed his example, began to upload stories to the global network. All this came to the attention of the government, and they began to block Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and many sites that I now need to develop my skills as a Frontend developer.”
What does the Chinese internet look like?
I expected that the Internet speed would be at least the same as in my homeland, but no - the Internet is very slow. Plus, you need a VPN to freely navigate any site.
Around 2015, Chinese analogues of foreign services began to be created in the country. Jibo's video streaming was very popular at the time. Any content was posted there, the Chinese liked it, and it was possible to earn money there. However, later a service appeared - DouIn (Tik Tok), which is still "shaking". Quite often, content is copied from foreign analogues and shown in DouIn. Since more Chinese do not have access to foreign resources, no one suspects plagiarism.
TuDou and YouKu (analogues of YouTube) are not popular, since these services are state-owned, there is a lot of censorship - there is no freedom of creativity.
You won’t get confused in messengers in China – there are WeChat and QQ. This is both instant messengers and social networks. There have been other attempts to create something similar, but QQ and Wechat are used by about 90% of the entire population of China. The second problem is again censorship. Everything must be controlled. Both applications were created by Tencent.
QQ is more suitable for students because it is a great file sharing service. WeChat has features that allow you to pay for a communal apartment, buy plane tickets, train tickets, and even buy tomatoes from a Chinese grandmother on the street, who looks like 170 years old, and pay her using WeChat. There is another service for making payments - AliPay (Jifubao), and there you can also chat with friends there.
“I think the Chinese live well, although they all whine that they are not so free,” Ivan says, “They think that there is a stronghold of freedom somewhere in the west. But it is always good where we are not. There are a lot of articles on the Internet that in China there is totalitarianism and cameras are everywhere. But the city with the most cameras is London. And talking in this vein about China is pure propaganda.
At the same time, Ivan agrees that China has a serious security system: “The Chinese at the helm understand that you can’t give free will to the people, otherwise they will start heating each other up so much that they will create hell. Therefore, the society is well monitored.” And most of the technical innovations, according to Ivan, are needed to speed up processes in a country with a huge population. For example, electronic passport cards, payment systems in messengers, and ubiquitous QR codes are needed precisely for this.
“In principle, people in China are treated like human beings. In the circle where I communicate - these are directors of firms, and ordinary workers and office engineers - they are all right.
Process and bureaucracy on the way to WeChat
About a year ago, Dodo Pizza announced that it would be launching a no-checkout pizzeria in China. All payments there must go through WeChat, but it turned out to be very difficult to do this from outside of China. There are many pitfalls in the process, and the main documentation exists only in Chinese.
So, to his two diplomas, Artem also added remote work at Dodo. But getting their app on WeChat turned out to be a long story.
“In order to open a website in Russia, you just need to open a website. Hosting, domain and more. In China, things are much more complicated. Let's say you want to create an online store. To do this, you need to buy a server, but the server cannot be issued to a foreigner. You have to look for a Chinese friend so that he gives his ID card, you go through registration and buy a server.”
After buying a server, you need to buy a domain, but to get the site up and running, you need to get several licenses. The first is the ICP license. It is issued by the Ministry of Industry and Informatization of the People's Republic of China to all commercial sites in mainland China. “In order to get an ICP for a new company, especially a foreign one, you need to collect a bunch of documents and go through several steps on the government website. If everything goes without delay, it will take about three weeks. After receiving the ICP, it will take another week to receive the Public License Filling. And welcome to China."
But if opening websites differs only in bureaucracy, then working with WeChat is absolutely unique. Tencent came up with mini-apps for their messenger, and they became wildly popular in the country: “I would be happy to compare them with something, but there are no analogues. In fact, these are applications within an application. For them, WeChat came up with their own framework, very similar in structure to VueJS, created their own IDE, which also works well. The framework itself is new, and quite powerful, and although there are limitations, for example, AXIOS is not supported. Due to the fact that not all methods of objects and arrays are supported, the framework is constantly evolving.
Due to the growth in popularity, all developers began to rivet tons of the same mini-apps. They filled the messenger so much that Tencent put restrictions on the size of the code. For mini-apps - 2 MB, for mini-games - 5 MB.
“In order to be able to knock on the API, the domain must have ICP and PLF. Otherwise, you won't even be able to add the API address in one of the many Wechat admin panels. There is so much bureaucracy there that sometimes it seemed that I would never be able to go through all the instances, register all the Witch-admin cabinets, get all the licenses and accesses. This is possible only if you have developed logic, brains, patience, knowledge of programming (otherwise you don’t even know where to look), and, of course, knowledge of the Chinese language. Most of the documentation is in English, but the cream - exactly what you need - is only in Chinese. There are a lot of restrictions, and such self-closing chains are fun to watch only from the outside.
Having completed everything to the end, you get real pleasure - on the one hand, you defeated the system, and on the other ... you just figured out all the rules. To develop something in such a new environment, and at the same time be one of the first in this field, it's really cool.
Scene after credits
In fact, this article grew out of one simple question - is it true that Winnie the Pooh does not exist in China. It turned out there is. Pictures, toys and found here and there. But when Ivan and I tried to google memes about Xi Jinping, we found nothing but cute pictures.
Source: habr.com