A Whisper for Change:
An Offshore Clinic for 996 Workers

MArch Year 1, Diploma 21 in Architectural Association, 2021-22

Tutor: Didier Faustino, Anna Muzychak, Frederique Paraskevas

996, working from 9 am to 9 pm, 6 days a week, best known in the Internet companies in China from 2019, has triggered heated debates on working conditions. 

Tencent is a monopolistic internet company in China. The company claims to become the pseudo-family that cares for its workforce, providing an illusion of leisure, thus hijacks the lives of their workers.

The company colonizes the employees through the tyranny of time. However, even the notion of time is nothing neutral and innate, it has to be imposed. The manipulation of time disciplines people’s lives and constructs stable administrative frameworks.



If we look back to the Chinese traditional calendar, it serves as an encyclopedia of daily life. It provides the guidelines for everyday life of what is suggested to do, and what not to do. The initial concept for a new calendar creates different rituals and new festivals, the workers can have their ways of celebration for their own, establishing new social phenomenon.


The fortune legend of the Internet economy weaves a beautiful dream of financial freedom. The 996 culture is also the result of the competition that pushes everyone to think and fight for the same.

In 2019, a group called Shachiku Care centre launched an exhibition in Beijing named Shachiku Museum. This care center helps people realize their condition and actively try to find a way out of their condition.


So, if we have a clinic to detox the alienation of 996 lives, what should be used to counter it?

The notion of festival time is used to fight against the manipulated rigid time like 996, as a festival, in a temporal sense, enables the escape from the dominant reality and powers, and removes all the hierarchical relationships, privileges and norms temporarily.

 
Therefore, a festival is brought forward in the form of an offshore clinic to detox the alienation and abuse of 996 lives and find new alternatives for future.

The word is spread through the spreading of the festival flyers, that tells people the clinic is coming to town. The 996 workers secretly discuss whether to join the festival. They secretly collect evidence of the exploitation and secrets from the companies.

The festival consists of a 14-day therapy, that follows a sequence of pavilions.
The First day is for the welcome party. It marks the beginning of the festival.

The second day is the anonymous whistle-blowing day. “The patients” expose how they are exploited by the companies and communicate all the facts, their oppressive lives, their motives and demands behind 996. The discussion soon shows in the LED screen and uploaded on internet. The tired people turn from the confusion of their conditions to irrepressible anger. This pavilion helps both patients and other 996 workers to understand their condition more clearly, to form a solid common ground fighting against 996.

The 3rd day is the archive-building day. The upper part is the archive that keeps files about the 996 companies and victims of 996. The patients can see the bloody reality behind the affectionate camouflage, and also contribute to build the archive’s collection with their own experience.

The logos of the 996 companies are hung under the roof, rotating up and down. When the angry patients crack them with hammers, there will be candies and gifts burst from inside. It helps the patients release their accumulated negative emotions and symbolizes the break with their 996 lives.

In the 4th -5th days, the patients get chance to consult the doctors– those who successfully choose an alternative life instead of doing 996. This pavilion refers to a famous theme in traditional Chinese painting, the pedlars. They are important figures that appear in traditional festival celebration. The pedlars all have an umbrella with small gifts for children. The clinic cells are hung under the roof of the pavilion, like a gift for the patients, so that they can talk to the doctors about their own situations and suggestions for an alternative future.

The pavilion of the Lost Meals that takes form of a communal kitchen and dining. People can bring their own ingredients and keep in the lantern-like fridges with various categories like beef, pork, rice, oil, etc. Food ingredients are tagged with information and cooking suggestions. They can cook for each other and share their foods and stories.



The pavilion of the Disclosed Desires is a public bath with globes floating in the air as steam rooms. The patients can practice their suppressed desires inside under the disguise of the steam. If they find they are perfect match for each other, they get married directly on the stage below, congratulated by the people bathing underneath.


In the last day of the therapy, a grand parade is conducted on the sea to show their confidence towards an alternative life. At the end of the parade, the patients fly the lanterns with banners writing their ideas for the future. At the same time, the live broadcast on the Internet results in people’s further discussion, shock, and passion towards the ability to change their lives and break away from 996.

Finally, the recovered patients go back with their regained passion. They know what life could be like, cannot wait to reclaim what they have lost, while the clinic disappears, travelling to somewhere else, waiting for the start of the next festival.