The recent death of a Pinduoduo Inc employee renewed criticism of the long hours commonly practiced at China’s tech companies, which are already under scrutiny by regulators for anti-competitive business practices.

The e-commerce company confirmed that a female employee collapsed while walking home with colleagues at 1.30am on Tuesday. The employee, who was born in 1998 and joined Pinduoduo in July 2019, could not be resuscitated and died after nearly six hours of first aid, according to a statement. Her death sparked a social media backlash against Pinduoduo and the relentless working schedules expected of its employees, with a hashtag about the incident drawing more than 200 million views on the Twitter-like Sina Weibo service.

The so-called 996 office schedule - 9am to 9pm, six days a week, plus overtime - has spurred criticism in previous years following complaints from tech workers and earlier deaths. Still, tech billionaires from Alibaba Group Holding Ltd founder Jack Ma to JD.com Inc chief Richard Liu have endorsed the practice as necessary for survival in an intensely competitive industry and the key to accumulating personal wealth.

The online criticism adds to the challenges for China’s largest tech companies, which spent the past year fending off efforts by the Trump administration to curb their growth while navigating heightened regulatory scrutiny at home. Beijing in November unveiled regulations designed to root out monopolistic practices in the Internet industry, sparking a sell-off in the previously high-flying tech sector.

Despite the year-end sell-off in Alibaba and its peers, Pinduoduo has emerged relatively unscathed with its stock rising to a record on Dec 30. Shares of the firm, which spans a US$218bil e-commerce empire and is aggressively seeking to further bolster growth by expanding into the red-hot sector of online groceries, ended the year up nearly 370%. That helped elevate founder Colin Huang to the position of China’s second-richest man, overtaking fellow Internet entrepreneurs like Alibaba’s Ma and Tencent Holdings Ltd chairman Pony Ma, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

 - Bloomberg