Author / Qin Shi
Editor / Mang Mang
This is Chen Zheming's third time receiving psychological counseling.
On the phone, he candidly stated that his psychologist charges 400 RMB per hour, which is his salary for three days. He feels pained by this, but he believes the money is well spent.
“At least after communicating with the therapist, I can sleep for the next few days,” Chen Zheming said. However, due to the exorbitant consultation fees, he cannot follow the therapist's advice to dedicate a day each week to this activity. As a result, he spends at least 10 nights a month unable to sleep, suffers from significant hair loss, experiences frequent body weakness, and has contracted shingles due to a weakened immune system.
The physical pain from shingles also makes it difficult for him to fall asleep at night, creating a vicious cycle of ongoing physical and mental suffering.
Chen Zheyuan feels distressed, but he feels powerless.
When did the pain begin? It's hard for him to say clearly. But he already has an answer in his heart regarding the root of his suffering.
Chen Zheyuan graduated in 2019 from an ordinary university in southern China with a degree in history. After graduating, he took the civil service exam, but after failing, he followed his classmates to Beijing to look for a job. However, after six months of searching, he found nothing.
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out in China, leading to a continuous rise in unemployment rates.
However, he soon encountered a turning point.
On February 6, 2020, Dr. Li Wenliang passed away. He was regarded by both domestic and foreign media as the "whistleblower" of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before officially "blowing the whistle," he had been reprimanded by local police in Wuhan, the initial outbreak location. The massive death toll from the pandemic, government negligence, and the various tragic narratives that emerged after Wuhan became a hell on earth made Li Wenliang's death a catalyst for mobilizing public emotion. For the first time since the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, the Chinese public expressed widespread anger.
In response to the sudden influx of "politically sensitive" information, an internet company headquartered in Beijing began to recruit a large number of reviewers. The unique allure of large tech companies (in China, major internet companies are collectively referred to as "big factories") made Chen Zheyuan very excited: “At that time, I had no idea what a reviewer did; I just knew I could enter a big factory and become someone others envied.”
Due to tight timelines and heavy tasks, the recruitment process, which usually takes at least two weeks, was expedited and completed in four days. He officially became a political content reviewer for the internet. Chen Zheyuan jokingly claimed that he had hit the jackpot by becoming an internet worker so quickly, but this momentary luck led to subsequent physical and mental trauma, which he had not anticipated.
Born in 1997, Chen Zheyuan has been immersed in the internet world since birth, and he, along with his peers, is regarded as part of China's "internet generation."
However, internet control in China officially began in 1996. Article 6 of the "Interim Regulations on the Management of International Connections of Computer Information Networks" states: “To directly connect computer information networks to the international network, one must use the international access channels provided by the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications. No unit or individual may establish or use other channels for international connections.” This regulation has since been widely used to punish "VPN" behavior.
The software and hardware systems that isolate the Chinese internet from the world are collectively known as the Great Firewall, which is the national firewall of China.
The emergence of the Great Firewall has meant that young people in China, including Chen Zheyuan, have faced a wall of "China-specific" information since the internet entered China, making the "internet generation" one that has grown up behind the wall.
In this context, why would they choose to become internet reviewers after growing up? How do they determine whether information is sensitive? How do they identify whether information is specific to the wall? And how do they view the roles they play and the functions they serve?
They breach walls, build walls, and fortify walls. What does the "wall" mean to them, and how do they survive beneath it?
Wang Jiakai is a college classmate of Chen Zheming and was the one who initially introduced Chen Zheming to his leader, actively inviting him to join the internet company he works for.
However, unlike Chen Zheming, he is now physically and mentally healthy. He also possesses a stronger sense of self-protection and information security awareness than Chen Zheyuan, so he only agrees to communicate via email.
In an email regarding his motivation to join the internet company as a reviewer, Wang Jiakai expressed that he has been interested in history since childhood, which led him to major in history at university. He admires some historical founding generals, such as Yuchi Gong and Qin Qiong from the Tang Dynasty, and hopes that one day he can also help a king expand and defend his territory like these historical heroes.
“So becoming a political reviewer, filtering out information that may harm the country to ensure national stability and peace, is no different from ancient generals helping the country and the king quell rebellions. My job is truly helping the country maintain order,” Wang Jiakai emphasized.
He also openly admitted that he is a "Mao fan" (a fan of Mao Zedong). In his eyes, Chairman Mao's contributions are timeless; he drove out the Japanese and defeated Chiang Kai-shek, earning the title of an eternal emperor. During his university years, he even led a "Mao Zedong Selected Works Study Group" at his school.
Chinese history textbooks have undergone several revisions. For example, in 2018, the middle school history textbook removed the phrase "Mao Zedong mistakenly believed that the Central Committee had produced revisionism, and the party and country faced the danger of capitalist restoration."
When "Mao fans" become reviewers, they work particularly hard. “I really don’t understand those people online who always criticize the country. What good does it do them to sing the country’s praises? So when I encounter these people online, I directly ban their accounts. Without an account, how can they be traitors?” he said.
For reviewers, banning accounts is never a difficult task. The "power of life and death" over all internet users is entirely in the hands of young frontline reviewers. They do not need to report, seek approval, provide reasons, or even think too much; they can directly make a netizen disappear from the internet.
As their positions began to diverge, Chen Zheming and Wang Jiakai, who were once close, started to develop misunderstandings. “To be honest, I really don’t understand his (Chen Zheming's) thoughts,” Wang Jiakai said.
Unlike his classmates' spirited ambitions, Chen Zheming's initial joy at joining a big internet company faded after six months. Instead, he began to feel suppressed and anxious, developing a sense of guilt and questioning his work.
“I don’t have the same strong sense of mission and value as he (Wang Jiakai) does. My joining the internet company was a coincidence. If I had found another job at that time, perhaps I wouldn’t have ended up here, but the fact is, I didn’t find another job,” Chen Zheming said. This made his choice to become an internet reviewer feel more like drifting along with the current, and the "current" was driven by the continuous decline of the Chinese economy and the intensified content control brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to a significant increase in demand for content reviewers.
Data shows that by the end of 2020, in the first year after the massive recruitment of reviewers, Bilibili, the most popular video platform among young people in China, had 2,413 employees in content review positions, accounting for 27.9% of the total company workforce. Meanwhile, ByteDance, the parent company of Douyin and TikTok, which has developed the fastest in China and is now the largest internet company, has over 20,000 reviewers, also accounting for more than 20% of the total number of employees.
“This is just data from 2020. As the pandemic ends and the state secrets increase, and public emotions become more agitated, the number of reviewers will only continue to rise,” said an anonymous employee from ByteDance, who oversees content capture on the platform.
Unlike reviewers on foreign internet platforms like Facebook and X, who mainly filter content related to bloodshed, violence, and pornography, reviewers on Chinese internet platforms primarily conduct political reviews of users' speech and submitted content, promptly filtering out "inharmonious" voices.
“Political stability and regime security have always been the top priorities for the Chinese government, which is a key difference between China and foreign countries. Based on the differences in national systems, the main work direction of internet reviewers will naturally differ,” said a political science professor from a well-known university in China. This professor had been completely silenced since 2017 for stating that “the constitution has become a scrap of paper,” and similar dissenting voices have been thoroughly suppressed by reviewers like Wang Jiakai and Chen Zheming.
The increasing difficulty in distinguishing "right" from "wrong" was also the initial mindset of many young people when they chose to become reviewers, as the information they could see on the internet before becoming reviewers was always politically correct.
Regarding this viewpoint, Chen Zheyuan agreed and candidly admitted that when he chose to join his current internet company as a reviewer in early 2020, he had no idea what "sensitive information" was. He did not "breach the wall" and had never known what the scenery outside the wall was like.
So initially, when he accepted the offer to become a reviewer, he was ecstatic to have found a job and finally had the opportunity to enter a big factory.
Li Wenbin, who also works in political content review at another internet company, shares the same sentiment.
Born in 1995, the same year China fully connected to the international internet, Li Wenbin, a child from a poor family, stumbled his way through university. After the college entrance examination, he filled out an application for a seemingly prestigious major—business administration—without understanding the various fields and their future job prospects, only to find himself unemployed upon graduation.
“Children from poor families don’t have family businesses or connections to directly go into management. I really didn’t understand anything at that time. It’s hard for outsiders to imagine that when I was in college, there was still a portrait of Chairman Mao on my wall. Before I established contact with the outside world, the only way was to use a cheap phone to open Baidu,” Li Wenbin said over the phone.
After graduating from university in 2018, Li Wenbin worked in various roles, including warehouse manager, foreign trade sales, and safety inspector in state-owned enterprises, in cities like Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Dongguan, until 2020 when internet companies began massive recruitment for content reviewers, and he first went to Beijing.
In his view, this was the best job he had found so far. “The company pays for five social insurances and one housing fund, so I have nothing to complain about. People should be content, right?” he said.
What made him feel that being a reviewer was worth it was that this job opened the door to a new world for him. “I really learned a lot and understood many things I had never known before. I also acquired additional skills, such as ‘breaching the wall.’”
What was the first thing he did after “breaching the wall”?
“Check how people on Twitter (now ‘X’) comment on China’s pandemic control policies,” Li Wenbin said.
This was also a required course for him to become a qualified reviewer.
“Breaching the wall” was not a requirement from the company but a skill Li Wenbin learned on his own after asking colleagues for advice to cherish the hard-won job opportunity. Colleagues believe that only by learning to breach the wall and understanding what people outside the wall are opposing can they better grasp sensitive words and then convert exports to domestic sales, filtering, reviewing, and deleting these sensitive words on the Chinese internet.
If they cannot effectively grasp these sensitive words, any mistakes during the review will leave no room for negotiation, and the reviewer will be immediately dismissed.
“So everyone is very nervous while working, afraid of making mistakes, and even more afraid of being fired. In this situation, they become particularly focused, preferring to mistakenly kill a thousand rather than let one slip through,” Wang Jiakai said.
Based on this principle, Chen Zheming deleted a large number of voices that insulted senior Chinese political officials and questioned China’s pandemic control policies within the first month of becoming a reviewer, along with countless videos and images.
“At that time, many people in Wuhan were recording videos to seek help from the outside world, with requests for medicine, food, and of course, many were wailing, hoping to go to the hospital for treatment. I cried while deleting these contents. In that moment, I truly felt I was doing evil, but there was no way; it was my job, and I had to do it,” Chen Zheming said. This also became the initial source of his psychological pressure.
During breaks at work, to relieve this pressure, he would seek help from friends outside Hubei and hope to find comfort from them.
His friends did not let him down, comforting him by saying: “The state has been working hard to dispatch medical personnel to Hubei, and people nationwide are donating to Hubei. If the public opinion line is lost at this time, the whole country will fall into chaos, and orderly medical assistance will be forced to interrupt, making society anxious, which would not be good for anyone.” The consensus among his friends was that Chen Zheming was doing well, that his work was very valuable and meaningful, and that he played an indispensable role in building a stable social order.
Unlike the somewhat comforting words of others, Wang Jiakai genuinely attributed high social value to the work of reviewers. Therefore, when Chen Zheming sought his help, he calmly told him that they are the guardians of the republic. Every country has its own problems, and he also saw on the wall that floods and hurricanes in the United States caused property damage, leaving many people homeless, and that many people in Europe and America were protesting and directly cursing the president. “This shows that these countries are not doing well either. Natural disasters bring loss of life and property wherever they occur. The COVID-19 pandemic is also a natural disaster, and the state has been working hard to provide assistance. Disharmonious voices will only complicate this assistance,” Wang Jiakai said.
As for the human factors behind the “natural disaster,” such as why the infectious disease monitoring and reporting system built with billions by China’s health system failed, why local officials collectively derelicted their duties at the beginning of the outbreak, and why Wuhan suddenly went into lockdown without any contingency plans, leading to severe shortages of daily necessities for the public, Wang Jiakai admitted he did not understand but stated that it was not his job, and he did not need to know too much.
After the pandemic control in China ended and the country and society returned to “normal,” the review work also returned to normal.
Wu Qing joined China’s largest internet search engine company at the beginning of 2023 when the review returned to normal. After the pandemic, the downward trend of the Chinese economy became evident and severe. To cut costs, the search engine company moved all non-core departments to small fourth-tier cities. After the advertising company he worked for went bankrupt during the pandemic, Wu Qing took the opportunity to join this internet company as a reviewer.
Thanks to this, he also had the chance to learn how to breach the wall for the first time.
The opportunity to learn to breach the wall came from the job training when he joined. At that time, the leader in charge of review work quickly presented a set of PPTs to the new employees. The PPTs contained photos and text but were very simple. The leader slid through the PPTs quickly, like showing a movie, and told these employees several key words: 1989, 64, Tiananmen, massacre, suppression, People’s Liberation Army, and stated that when encountering these keywords, they must be blocked without any negligence or mistakes.
In addition, the company regularly trains reviewers on issues such as the Xinjiang concentration camps and Falun Gong. The process is similarly simple; the leader does not want them to understand the whole matter, only to master the keywords like machines and then, like machines, filter and delete these keywords when they see them on the internet.
Born in 1997, Wu Qing was learning about this series of events and coming into contact with these terms for the first time. Shocked, he wanted to know more, but the leader did not give any positive feedback to his request, instead brushing him off by saying he did not need to know too much; knowing the keywords was enough.
Chen Zheming's onboarding training was very similar to Wu Qing's: quick, concise, and no questions allowed. “The company and the leaders seem very afraid of us knowing these things, always being evasive. Of course, they are afraid of being fired, and we usually don’t dare to ask too much,” he said.
Unable to openly ask leaders and colleagues, Wu Qing self-taught the skill of breaching the wall. The first thing he did upon opening YouTube was to check what really happened at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
After watching several videos, he suddenly realized that it was such a matter: students protested, threatening national security, and the state took action to suppress; everything followed logically. So what was the big deal? He did not understand.
Therefore, every year around June 4th, he deletes related posts and discussions without hesitation. Even beyond AI review, he actively discovers loopholes in the machine and reports them to the leaders, then plugs those loopholes.
Regarding this practice, Wu Qing is very candid: “This is my duty,” he said. Additionally, he emphasized that working as a reviewer for a long time reveals patterns, as machines are far less adaptable than humans. For example, machines can only mechanically review keywords but cannot effectively identify euphemisms or homophonic combinations invented by people to evade scrutiny, which requires human reviewers to continue auditing and ensuring quality based on the machine's work.
General review mainly includes three processes: the first process is to set up keywords, after which AI initiates filtering; the second process involves junior reviewers further screening the content that has passed through the machine, focusing on identifying homophones and phrases; the third process is for more senior reviewers to double-check the results of junior reviewers to prevent any oversights.
Wang Jiakai, as a senior reviewer, simply summarized the iterative process of these three procedures in content review: “If only machines are used, many problems will arise. For example, when the word ‘democracy’ is automatically identified as a sensitive word by the machine, it will replace the original word with the phrase ‘sensitive word,’ which internet users will see directly. This is definitely not acceptable. Once humans intervene, they can directly delete the word, meaning it cannot be posted. Later, it advanced to recognizing a series of words like ‘democratic’ and ‘min pig.’ Whether much information can ultimately be posted depends on the context and requires human judgment again,” he said.
In the current economic environment in China, unemployment looms like a ghost over young people, lingering and refusing to dissipate.
In June 2023, the National Bureau of Statistics of China temporarily suspended the publication of youth unemployment rates, sparking widespread speculation. Prior to this, the unemployment rate for Chinese youth aged 16-24 had risen for six consecutive months, reaching a historic high of 21.3%.
However, Chinese netizens generally hold a skeptical attitude towards the statistics bureau's data.
“You can’t blame the public for losing trust in the government. It has become an open secret that the statistics bureau fabricates data. My team and I privately calculated based on multiple data sources from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, universities, local tax authorities, and social security bureaus, and found that the current unemployment rate in China is at least 40%, meaning nearly half of the people are unemployed and unable to find work,” said a sociology professor from a well-known 985 university in Beijing, who wished to remain anonymous.
The fear of not finding a job after quitting is also a reason why Chen Zheming has been unable to make up his mind to resign from his reviewer job, despite feeling angry and repressed inside.
“To be honest, deleting content related to June 4th doesn’t feel significant to me and many colleagues, as this event is too distant from us, and it’s hard for us to empathize. But the videos I reviewed and deleted of people in Wuhan, Xi'an, and Shanghai being confined by the government due to the pandemic, and their pleas for help to the outside world, really troubled me to the point where I couldn’t sleep,” Chen Zheming said.
So when he saw these pleas for help, did he ever think about “raising the gun a notch”? In the long run, this would save others and himself.
“Not at all,” Chen Zheming answered without hesitation. In his view, “raising the gun a notch” is merely a beautiful imagination of intellectuals, because if he were to actually raise the gun a notch, it would be considered a major work error for a reviewer, and he would face a series of life dilemmas, including being fired and unemployed. The beneficiaries of his self-sacrificing act would never even know of his existence, let alone thank him, while all negative consequences would be borne entirely by him alone. He cannot accept this outcome.
His closest friends are also trying to persuade him to consider resignation very carefully.
In Chen Zheming's friends' view, major internet platforms in China have been state branches since their inception, so the political review functions that seem to belong to the platforms are essentially a necessity for the state. Even if Chen Zheming does not do it, someone else will. Therefore, even if he bears moral pressure and leaves, nothing will change; the castration of the Chinese internet will continue.
“So this is not your problem; you are not wrong. But if you really can’t bear it and must leave, before making the final decision to resign, you need to think about how you will make a living in the future,” his friend advised.
Beyond friends, the psychologist also told Chen Zheming that he was merely completing the work he was supposed to do according to his leader's arrangements, and whether this work was evil or just, it is two sides of the same coin; there is no absolute evil, and of course, there is no complete justice.
Thus, making the decision to leave is not easy.
After experiencing the initial joy of “opening his eyes to the world,” Li Wenbin found it increasingly difficult to accept the work of a political reviewer.
“I need to concentrate intensely every day to review 60,000 to 70,000 pieces of content. During the National Day, June 4th, and when international society and media focus on the Xinjiang concentration camp issue, I need to work overtime day and night, but my salary has never increased during this time,” he said.
Li Wenbin's salary is 4,700 RMB per month, and after deducting the five social insurances and one housing fund, he only takes home about 4,000 RMB each month, making it difficult for him to make ends meet in Beijing.
Interviews with multiple platform reviewers reveal that their average salaries range from 4,000 to 7,000 RMB. In a high-cost city like Beijing, after basic living expenses, little remains.
“So this profession really offers no hope. This job can only keep us from starving; it is fundamentally impossible to establish a foothold in a big city,” said a reviewer from ByteDance.
In addition to the survival pressure caused by low wages, the monotony of the position and work content also leaves Li Wenbin feeling disheartened.
Internal competition among reviewers is fierce, and it is not easy to get promoted. If one cannot get promoted, all reviewers, including Li Wenbin, can be easily discarded and scapegoated by the internet company.
“If a review has mistakes, such as failing to identify sensitive information including the names of national leaders, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, etc., we will be immediately dismissed on the grounds of a major work error, and we won’t receive a penny in compensation. Moreover, when the platform faces criticism from regulatory bodies like the Cyberspace Administration of China, the company will likely throw us under the bus, and the outcome will also be immediate dismissal,” Li Wenbin said.
This situation complicates his ability to defend his rights, making it nearly impossible to rely on current labor laws in China. Unlike platforms like Kuaishou, ByteDance, and Didi, the internet platform he works for has not directly signed labor contracts with any reviewers. Strictly speaking, all reviewers, including him, are employees of an outsourcing company, and the internet platform only has a project cooperation relationship with them. This directly leads to reviewers like him being unable to enjoy employee benefits from the internet company.
“Exploiting grassroots employees like us is a collusion between the state and big enterprises,” Li Wenbin said indignantly. To this end, he specifically breached the wall to search for European and American laws regarding the use of outsourced employees by large companies. He found that relevant laws in Europe and the United States require that the number of outsourced employees cannot exceed 20% of the total number of employees, and outsourced employees can also join unions to protect their legal rights.
“In our country, there is nothing.” Therefore, he decided to look for other job opportunities.
Unfortunately, after four months of searching on job websites, Li Wenbin only received an offer from a short video platform, and the position was also for political review. His applications for assistant, marketing, and even advertising review positions went unanswered.
Fortunately, the short video platform that sent the offer provided Li Wenbin with a formal employee position rather than an outsourced one.
After a brief period of disappointment and consideration, Li Wenbin accepted the offer. “I need to grow, changing companies and fields might be a good choice,” he said.
However, the anticipated growth did not come as expected.
The management of this short video platform company is strict, and every minute and even every second that review employees leave their posts is clearly recorded by cameras. Employees must click the “leave” status in the work system when going to the bathroom or picking up takeout. If they are caught on camera leaving their posts without clicking, they will face penalties such as fines or overtime. Each employee cannot be in a “leave” status for more than 40 minutes a day.
Video reviews require even more focus than text reviews because many sensitive pieces of information that cannot be “shown” are hidden in the details. If not careful, they can be missed, such as whether a fleeting map of China in a film and television adaptation includes Taiwan, whether a war drama video contains derogatory parts about the Chinese Communist Party, or whether a longer video includes “private goods” like tanks appearing in Tiananmen Square, or whether video clips involving ethnic minorities question party and national policies, etc. Reviewers need to pay extra attention to these potentially “reactionary” pieces of information hidden in videos.
Because once missed, if discovered by leaders or reported, it will be considered a major work error. According to current labor laws in China, if an employee is dismissed due to work errors, even if they are a formal employee, the company is not required to provide any form of compensation. Although when signing labor contracts initially, the company, as the stronger party, imposes extremely harsh requirements on employee responsibilities in the contract and employee handbook, the individual, as the weaker party, has no space to negotiate with the company. They can only be forced to sign an “unequal agreement” in the form of a contract and leave immediately after making a mistake.
“Anyway, China is never short of people; they (the company) never worry about not being able to recruit labor,” Li Wenbin said.
However, compared to the harsh “unequal treaty,” what angers Li Wenbin even more is the salary offered by the company. “My current salary is still only over 4,000 RMB per month, which is completely disproportionate to the responsibilities I bear. When it comes to salary increases, the company always has an attitude of ‘if you want to do it, do it; if you don’t want to, then forget it.’ But if I don’t do this, all that awaits me is unemployment,” he said helplessly.
The continuous decline of the Chinese economy is an undeniable fact, and various macro data directly reflect the loss of confidence in the economic outlook across industries. Public opinion does not shy away from calling this “historical garbage time.”
In this historical garbage time, unemployment and pay cuts come one after another. Regarding the unemployment status of young people, a scholar once commented in official media that young people are unemployed because they cannot take off “Kong Yiji's long gown.” “Kong Yiji's long gown” even became a trending term online. This phrase originates from Lu Xun's novel “Kong Yiji,” where “wearing a long gown” represents scholars, and “standing while drinking” indicates a relatively difficult life, equating education with “Kong Yiji's long gown,” suggesting that the struggles in work and life are all bound by the “long gown.”
Therefore, in the eyes of scholars with official backgrounds, young people's unwillingness to lower their demands and job expectations, while only yearning for glamorous positions, is the main reason they cannot find work.
The most basic threshold for recruiting reviewers at major internet companies is that candidates must have a bachelor's degree. Although some companies may state that the educational requirement is an associate degree or higher, in reality, candidates with associate degrees are often filtered out when the recruitment process starts. This means that in China, tens of thousands of internet reviewers likely hold a bachelor's degree or higher.
This indicates that they have long since shed Kong Yiji's long gown but have not managed to escape their predicament. On the contrary, under external pressures, they continuously lose individual dignity and have never been able to escape the fate of becoming “beasts of burden.”
The reviewers interviewed, who are of marriageable age according to Chinese social customs, find it impossible to establish themselves in big cities with salaries in the thousands, let alone afford the exorbitant housing prices of tens of thousands per square meter. In their view, dating is even a luxury. “We have been almost stripped of all our rights as human beings, feeling that no matter how hard we try, it is difficult to climb out of the traps of life,” one interviewee said.
“Efforts really yield no returns” is also Wang Jiakai's sentiment.
As a qualified reviewer who sees himself as a guardian of the motherland, Wang Jiakai also has his own troubles. His goal is to get promoted and raise his salary through hard work to shed the label of “outsourced” employee. He achieved the former in two years, but becoming a formal employee of the internet company, thus enjoying benefits like a cafeteria, afternoon tea, and shuttle bus, and achieving promotion within the company has become an insurmountable gap in front of him.
“I am now a quality inspector, which is the last line of content review, but further promotion to ‘formal employee’ seems like a pipe dream,” he said.
In addition to benefits like cafeterias and shuttle buses, what other attractions does becoming a formal employee hold?
In this regard, Wang Jiakai stated that once he becomes a formal employee, he can have more authority, such as formulating review strategies, gaining insight into more national policy directions, and having more opportunities to communicate and interact with state power departments. “Compared to the work of a reviewer, these jobs are more valuable and meaningful. Such positions can better reflect a person's intellect, rather than simply executing tasks like a robot.”
Regarding why he cannot become a formal employee, Wang Jiakai said that perhaps both the company and the state need elites, and for someone like him, who comes from an ordinary background with an ordinary education, he is destined to be just a piece of ore in the mine, exploited from multiple sides, and ultimately presented as slag.
He is very aware that he is not far from becoming slag, but he does not know where the road ahead leads.
Having only the reviewer position in his work history makes it difficult for him in the job market. Beyond various hardware factors, the public's dislike and hatred for reviewers is one of the reasons for his difficulties.
The moral judgment of reviewers has never ceased on Chinese internet platforms, with some netizens angrily accusing reviewers of ultimately facing historical judgment.
Chen Zheming feels that perhaps he is suffering from so-called “karmic retribution.” His insomnia and deteriorating health are the best proof. But Wang Jiakai is furious about the statements online. In his view, being a reviewer is just a job, and like other jobs such as civil servants, taxi drivers, state-owned enterprise employees, and programmers, there is no difference. “Everyone is just trying to make a living; there is nothing wrong with that. Compared to the moral judgment online, survival is more important to us. If we can’t survive, what’s the point of considering morality? Besides, do those who point fingers online have a higher moral standard than reviewers? I don’t think so.”
However, even setting aside moral debates, many reviewers still feel confused about their career development and paths to survival. As they age, it becomes increasingly difficult for them to cope with night shifts, while there are many younger graduates eager to replace them.
Many people in reviewer positions have a clear understanding of their role as cogs in the machine. Wu Qing, reflecting on his not-so-long time as a reviewer, also realized that he seems to have learned no skills, merely mechanically repeating the instructions given to him, with all his hard work only aimed at obtaining the most basic material conditions for survival.
What should they do next? No one has a clear idea or path.
“I can only take it one step at a time,” Chen Zheming said. But he still cannot resign; he needs to spend money on psychological counseling every month to alleviate his guilt so that he can work and live better.
Original link: source
Further reading:
In-depth analysis of how Bilibili controls comments - Exploring the Avalon system
Burn After Reading: The Past and Present of the GFW, a History of the Father of the GFW, Fang Binhang
In-depth analysis | Why can't we access Google?
【404 Library】He Jiayan | The Chinese Internet is Accelerating Collapse