Paper short abstract:

In hyper-uncertain China, the well-educated youth chooses to stick with tech giants, despite the highly alienated and cruel competition. With a strategic agency of active alienating, they are convinced that technology can bypass the hegemony of the state and the market and lead them into the future.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the existential condition of young employees in contemporary Chinese Internet companies, which in the past few years have sparked widespread concern among academics and society at large, because of their draconian management and cruel competitiveness leading to extraordinary overtime and working intensities, such as ‘the 996 schedule’ and karoshi. However, in the face of extremely alienated work situations, China’s young generation still aspires to stick with Internet companies or make it their top choice for job search. Based on fieldwork and unstructured interviews with six leading tech giants in Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, this paper tries to use the concept of 'alienation' as a diagnosis of human existence in the 21st century and would like to point out that well-educated youths generally have an in-depth understanding of the reality of alienation, but they still choose to actively alienate themselves not only to keep a position in neoliberal China, but also to pin their hopes on technology to get a place in a highly uncertain world. There, alienated ways of life and ethereal technological developments are integrated by a cognitive theory to overcome authoritarian regimes. ‘Alienating’, as their survival strategy, reflects the complex entanglement between contemporary Chinese dynamcis and the agency of the young generation.