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After the tragic death of one Pinduoduo's employee on the New Year's Eve, and the suicide of another employee on Jan 9, one brave former employee came out on internet after posting anonymously about a colleague being taken in by an ambulance and got fired soon after.
Wang Taixu (pseudonym), a former front-end engineer of Pinduoduo's newly formed e-commerce grocery team, posted on Maimai, an "anonymous workplace sharing platform" after he saw one co-worker taken away by ambulance, saying "the second Pinduoduo-er has fell". The post went viral.
Soon after that he was approached by his supervisors and the HR team with threats about his future career. He was offered a deal to leave the company "voluntarily" if he promised to never mention this again, but he refused and was immediately fired and escorted out.
There was no solid proof yet but the popular suspicion is that Maimai, the self-proclaimed safe and anonymous online community of working professionals, leaked his personal information to Pinduoduo.
Maimai and Kanzhun, both Glassdoor-like Chinese platforms, have all been alleged to take down negative reviews of companies and leak personal informations before per companies' request.
After being fired, Wang made this video disclosing that Pinduoduo requires most employees to work at least 300 hours a month. For staff on the new grocery e-commerce team, if one's working hours sum fewer than 380 hours/moth, he/she will be questioned by supervisors.
In the meantime, Pinduoduo's stock price remains stable. Why? As someone who used to work as a tech reporter who covers the internet giants for a living, I know the insane amount of money/efforts the company has spent on international PR.
And yes, I know that Pinduoduo is a high-paying client of almost all small tech new outlets but still, I want to urge my fellow tech reporters friends to focus on this issue. Human beings are dying and I don't think this should be framed as a "PR crisis" or merely "996 culture".
I also want to point out that Bilibili, the video sharing site took down Wang's video once and then, after receiving serious backlash, made the video available again. Both Pinduoduo and Bilibili are Shanghai-based internet upstarts that are listed in the US.
I want to end this thread with something Wang said in his video. "Internet companies are becoming the new sweatshops in China, only the people they enslave are the smartest in this county". When investing in Chinese big techs, please do consider the people who are building them.
