Wave of Employee Turnover Hits China’s IT Industry

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China’s IT industry has seen a wave of resignations and layoffs since last year, affecting the Chinese communist regime’s online censorship. Former employees believe political reasons and economic factors are behind the wave of employee turnover.

Liu Jiang (pseudonym), a former employee of ByteDance, which is the parent company of TikTok, told The Epoch Times recently that he resigned from the company right before the Chinese New Year (Jan. 23, 2023). He said he was involved in the incident of accessing TikTok user data of two American journalists. Adding that his job at the company was reviewing data and labeling user behavior.

Liu said his work unintentionally got involved in the situation, and he didn’t want to be pushed into the limelight.

According to Reuters, TikTok’s Chinese parent company ByteDance said on Dec. 22, 2022, that some employees improperly accessed the TikTok user data of two American journalists last summer and are no longer employed by the company.

The TikTok logo is displayed at a TikTok office in Culver City, Calif., on Dec. 20, 2022. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

TikTok’s upper management confirmed in 2021 that the Chinese regime had taken a stake in the parent company Beijing ByteDance, and then sent in an official from the regime’s Cyberspace Administration of China to serve as a director. Nearly half of U.S. states have banned the social media app owned by the Chinese company from state government devices due to security risks.

According to the Chinese regime’s national intelligence law passed in 2017, all Chinese organizations and citizens “shall support, assist, and cooperate with national intelligence efforts”, which includes providing any information requested by the regime for its “national security”.

Liu said that many younger employees have been dismissed from the company under the guise of restructuring, but they all know there are political reasons involved.

CCP Suppression of Freedom of Speech

Chinese Internet companies have long helped the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) suppress freedom of speech. Just before the Chinese New Year, the CCP Cyberspace Administration issued a document on Jan. 18 to increase the suppression of public discussion around the sudden massive COVID-19 resurgence on the Internet, with a focus on controlling people’s recounts of what they see from trips to their hometowns. The outside world questioned if this was to purposely cover up the truth about China’s real COVID situation and death toll.

Hospital workers wheel a body on a gurney in the busy emergency room at a hospital in Beijing, China on Jan. 2, 2023. (Getty Images)

Mr. Shi (pseudonym) from Lishui in Zhejiang Province, who used to be a Baidu Beijing Headquarters reviewer, told The Epoch Times on Jan. 28 that his job was to monitor data and help the regime identify and locate those users who freely posted messages that express “negative emotions” and the so-called “dark side of society” online.

He said that some key technicians had quit the company, and it will take some time to replace them. “Many technicians also deleted the [monitoring] data on servers when they left.”

The wave of employee turnover appears to have affected the CCP’s planned censorship around Chinese New Year.

China’s Economic Instability

Under the CCP’s “Zero-COVID” policy that lasted for three years, China’s GDP fell to a 40-year low last year.

Liu said that the current economic instability is the root cause of the wave of employee turnover, as many companies have laid off employees. Not only ByteDance, but other companies have also seen large numbers of employee layoffs. “I know dozens of the companies in Beijing [have let people go],” he said.

Well-known mainland financial citizen reporter “Ranjiyuan” said on Jan. 1 that a “list of companies who laid off employees in 2022” circulating online showed that from January to December 2022, big IT companies such as Kuaishou, Baidu, Didi, Tencent, JD.com, Alibaba, iQiyi, Zhihu, ByteDance, Xiaomi and other companies have all laid off employees.

The headquarters of Chinese technology giant Tencent is seen in Beijing on Aug. 7, 2020. (Greg Baker/AFP via Getty Images)

Li Wei (pseudonym), an employee of Tencent, told the Epoch Times, “In 2022, my department cut the number of employees by 50 percent, and I was also transferred departments twice.”

Ranjiyuan’s report questioned, “are there any IT companies that didn’t lay off employees?” The saying became an unanimous ridicule among the industry, and IT companies that haven’t had layoffs have become a rarity.

On Dec. 30, 2022, a number of Chinese media outlets reported that ByteDance had started layoffs, and the estimated layoff rate would be 10 percent. Employees in their sub-companies, such as TikTok, Lark, TopBuzz, and others, have also received layoff notices.

Ning Haizhong and Zhao Li contributed to this report