In May 2019, the government of Xiangzhou District in Zhuhai, Guangdong, issued rules on its officials’ WeChat work groups. Each department could keep only one official group. One rule read: “In principle, work information is not posted outside working hours.”
A few days later, the Yangcheng Evening News commented: “WeChat brings convenience, but it has also blurred the line between life and work, and produced more and more hidden overtime.”
In work groups, most managers end a message with 收到回复, “reply ‘received’,” to make sure that staff have seen it. A report by the business site Sanyan Caijing, republished in February 2022, described the custom. It added that a request to reply “received” does not mean that the employee must 秒回, reply within seconds.
The same report quoted a notice from a management consulting company in Guangdong. The company had posted a holiday notice in its group at 5:56 p.m. on January 10, 2022. No one replied within two hours. Citing its rules for the use of WeChat Work, the notice said that the company would fine every employee 200 yuan.
A supermarket store manager in Shenyang, named in the report as Zhao Linlin, belonged to 38 WeChat work groups. In April 2023 she asked her employer for about 37,000 yuan in overtime pay. Arbitration rejected the claim, and she went to court.
The court held that her after-hours work on WeChat went beyond simple communication, was substantive labor and clearly took up her rest time. It counted as overtime. The case ended in mediation, with the employer agreeing to pay 8,400 yuan. China News Service reported the case in March 2024.
In September 2020, the China Youth Daily reported a survey of 2,002 people by its social survey center. 73.2 percent said that the volume of messages in work groups disturbed their lives. 35.6 percent said that the groups blurred the line between work and life. The report put it this way: “People have less and less time of their own. They must keep an eye on WeChat at all times, and work at all times.”
Before the national Two Sessions in March 2026, a survey of 1,998 people by the same center found that 55.5 percent hoped the “right to offline rest” would be protected.
In October 2026, the Workers’ Daily reported on employees who handle work groups after hours. One worker deals with more than 100 groups a day. Another has nearly 10,000 group chats. According to the report, this work brings no overtime pay at all, and a late reply can bring a customer complaint and a cut in performance pay.
Jiang Yiqin, a deputy presiding judge at the Daxing District People’s Court in Beijing, was quoted as saying: “Employers cannot treat ‘always online’ as an implied duty of workers.”
At the national Two Sessions in 2024, Lü Guoquan, a member of the national political advisory body and head of the general office of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions, submitted a proposal on protecting workers’ lixian xiuxi quan, the right to offline rest. He suggested bringing it into law.
The proposal defined it as “the right of workers, outside statutory or agreed working hours, to refuse work contact or work matters through digital tools.” In December 2024, Xinhua reported that experts were divided. Shen Jianfeng supported the idea. Lou Yu said that overtime already requires agreement by both sides, so a new right was not needed.
DingTalk, Alibaba’s app for workplace messaging, launched its version 1.0 on January 16, 2015. Among its first features were a company directory, yidu weidu (“read and unread”), DING messages, company groups and free calls.
As its name says, yidu weidu marks each message as read or unread for the person who sent it.
On June 30, 2026, People’s Daily published a commentary by Pan Jiangping of Huangping County in Guizhou. “Every holiday,” it said, citing media reports, “some grassroots officials fall into helplessness. Higher units send out notices in a rush before the holiday and require all kinds of materials to be reported on the first day after it ends.”
The author warned that rushed tasks before holidays, and orders forcing all staff to work overtime at their posts during them, wear down officials and drain their will to work.
According to a report from January 2019, an official of the Ministry of Public Security had said the year before that “5+2” and “white plus black” had become the daily working state of China’s police.
“Five plus two” adds the weekend to the five working days. “White plus black” adds the night to the day.
Ms. Li joined a technology company in April 2019 and was dismissed in December 2020. She claimed pay for more than 500 hours of overtime. Her evidence included chat records, screenshots from the DingTalk app and a duty roster for the company’s social media accounts on weekends and holidays. The court of first instance rejected her claim.
On appeal, the Beijing No. 3 Intermediate People’s Court ordered the company to pay her 30,000 yuan. According to the reports, the court held that the idea of a workplace should be weakened. What counts is whether the employee provided substantive work. The Beijing News called it the first case in China to address yinxing jiaban, hidden overtime, in a judgment.
In 2024, the Supreme People’s Court wrote the test for hidden overtime online into its annual work report: “substantive work” and “obvious use of time.”