Work plus stress kills 600k Chinese yearly

The China Youth Daily magazine reported that around 600,000 Chinese people die every year due to overworking and stressful living. China Radio International, on the other hands, estimates that as many as 1,600 Chinese die every day due to the same causes.

The figures are high and the situation is so grim that Bloomberg magazine called it an epidemic.

The life story of those who end up literally consumed by their own jobs usually goes like this: Li Jianhua was a banking regulator who had always put ‘the cause of the party and the people’ before himself, as his former boss explains. He began working for the state in 1985 and he was constantly traveling and putting in exhausting hours, even when he was ill. He even skipped a hospital visit because he ‘didn’t have time.’

Jianhua passed away this month while he was putting in extra hours overnight, at age 48.

What followed is that his bosses hailed his work behavior, calling him ‘a model for party members and cadres of the China Banking Regulatory Commission,’ and urging every employee to ‘be like him, always firm in ideals and beliefs, the broader interest, loyal to the cause of the party and the people, unremitting struggle, sacrificing everything.’

Jianhua’s case is not at all uncommon in a culture where community comes before the individual.

Because China is a rising economy, people still fight and believe in the harworking ethos. As one expert notes, in China, ‘any job worth doing is worth doing excessively.’