China Dictatorship (中国独裁统治)

13.1. 996.ICU (2019)

Repository published in 2019-04 protesting against excessive work hours by Chinese programmers.

At some point it moved its README to English.

This was not directly censored to our knowledge, but the fact that it was published on GitHub rather than Chinese social media highlights the obvious fact that Chinese programmers were weary of doing it under CCP controlled media which they do not trust.

The project name refers to:

"996": work from 9AM to 9PM 6 days a week. This is part of a wider tendency of Chinese netizens to use Internet number slang (网络数字语言)
"ICU": Intensive Care Unit

Reached 180k stars in a week, and was the second most starred repository as of 2019-10 https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E100&s=stars&type=Repositories (archive)!!!

This is therefore the best example for Chinese tech workers that freedom of speech is a good thing.

Coverage:

https://github.com/formulahendry/955.WLB a whitelist version of 996 ICU. Good thoughts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8wWoQ3_F00 The Extreme 996 Work Culture in China by VICE (2021)
https://github.com/wumaoland/Chengdu-IT-company-blacklist

Other interesting GitHub repositories: GitHub repositories with censored information (政治敏感的GitHub库).

Figure 152. 996.ICU logo. Source.