Lying Flat vs. Logging In: Remote Work Attitudes in China and Singapore

🇨🇳 China · 🇸🇬 Singapore

*By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In China, the fight over remote work got absorbed into a bigger fight over whether you're allowed to want a life at all — "lying flat" started as a joke about quitting and became a whole philosophy. In Singapore, the fight is narrower and more bureaucratic: a new law now makes your employer formally consider your flexible-work request, even as CEOs quietly summon everyone back to their desks five days a week. Neither country is where remote work went to die. Both are where it went to get negotiated down.

Do's & Don'ts

🇨🇳 China

🇸🇬 Singapore

China: The Hours Are Negotiable, the Negotiation Is Not Over

China's remote-work story can't be separated from its overtime story, because the real fight was never really about location — it was about hours. The "996" schedule (9am to 9pm, six days a week) became emblematic of the tech sector around 2019, defended openly by some of its most prominent executives: Alibaba's Jack Ma asked, rhetorically, "how do you achieve the success you want without paying extra effort and time?" while JD.com's Richard Liu dismissed work-life balance advocates as "slackers." China-Briefing reporting notes the obvious tension with the law on the books — an 8-hour day, 40-hour week, overtime capped at 36 hours monthly — which major employers including ByteDance, Huawei, and Pinduoduo were publicly blacklisted by workers for routinely exceeding.

What makes this genuinely interesting, rather than just grim, is the cultural response. Workers developed an entire shared vocabulary for the condition — manong ("coding peasant"), dagongren, shechu (borrowed from frustrated Japanese workers decades earlier), and moyu ("touching fish," meaning looking busy while doing as little as possible) — before the "lying flat" (tangping) movement crystallized the resistance into something closer to an ideology: deliberately choosing modest jobs, smaller cities, and lower expectations over the promised grind. As one tech worker quoted in Dissent magazine put it, starkly: "The real winners [of 996] are the bosses. They pay the same sum of money to buy more hours of labor." But the market gives workers limited room to act on that insight — Zhaopin reported a 32:1 applicant-to-job ratio for competitive tech roles in 2019, a ratio that makes simply walking away a much harder call for anyone without savings or seniority. Some younger workers interviewed by MIT Technology Review split the difference pragmatically: one Baidu employee noted formal six-day weeks have become less common at major firms, even as unpaid "staying late" persists, uncounted, as the new normal.

Singapore: Legislated Flexibility, Quietly Reversing

Singapore took the opposite institutional path — codifying flexibility rather than fighting over it informally — but the lived experience looks more contested than the legislation suggests. Government data from the Ministry of Manpower shows remote work hit 49% of employed residents in 2020, among the highest rates globally, concentrated heavily in information and communications roles (77%) and much lower among trades (14.6%). As of December 2024, Singapore employers are legally required to formally consider employees' flexible work arrangement requests — a genuine regulatory first for the region.

But the burnout numbers underneath that flexibility are striking: a 2022 index from The Instant Group found 62% of Singapore employees reporting burnout, ranking the country the most overworked in Asia-Pacific, ahead of Hong Kong and South Korea — and even among Singapore's millionaires, only 30% report satisfaction with their work-life balance, per Banque Lombard Odier & Cie research. And the return-to-office pendulum is swinging hard: ride-hailing giant Grab mandated five-day in-office attendance starting December 2024, with CEO Anthony Tan framing it around "face-to-face collaboration," while an employee told Channel News Asia the company had warned of "disciplinary action" for non-compliance. Not every employer is moving the same direction — DBS runs formal job-sharing with adjusted pay and retained benefits, and one 250-person firm, Radha Exports, reported a "happier team" and higher productivity after introducing staggered hours — but the overall signal is a negotiation very much still in progress, not a settled policy.

The Reckoning

The real contrast isn't remote versus in-office — both countries are visibly contesting that line right now — it's where the contest is happening. In China, the fight over flexibility plays out informally and culturally, through invented vocabulary, viral movements, and individual exit strategies (lying flat, moving to a smaller city) because the formal legal protections already exist on paper and simply aren't enforced at scale. In Singapore, the fight plays out formally and institutionally — new legislation, government statistics, CEO memos, documented burnout indices — because the state apparatus for negotiating these things is unusually functional, even when individual companies pull hard in the opposite direction.

The irony worth sitting with: Singapore, often characterized abroad as the more rigid, rule-bound of the two cultures, now has codified employee flexibility rights that China's loosely enforced labor law has never delivered in practice — while China's workers, denied formal remedies, have built one of the more inventive informal resistance cultures anywhere in the world. Rules on paper and reality on the ground point in opposite directions in both places, just along different axes.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Dissent Magazine — A tech worker's blunt diagnosis of 996 culture cut through the corporate framing entirely: "The real winners are the bosses. They pay the same sum of money to buy more hours of labor. The losers, on the other hand, are workers because they have to work many more hours for the same salary" — a practical frustration stated as plainly as it's ever likely to be.

MIT Technology Review — A current Baidu employee offered a more pragmatic, mixed verdict than the "lying flat" headlines suggest: formal six-day weeks have genuinely receded at major firms, he said, but unpaid "staying late at the office is still very common, which is not usually counted as overtime hours" — the practical frustration survived the policy change.

MIT Technology Review — A project organizer behind part of the 996 resistance movement summarized the stakes in a single, pointed line that doubles as advice for anyone weighing a Chinese tech job on paper alone: "996 will only make human machines. And the only result of a dry human battery is being thrown into the trash can."

Channel News Asia (via Malay Mail) — An unnamed Grab employee described the company's December 2024 return-to-office mandate as backed by explicit "disciplinary action" warnings for non-compliance — a cultural misread for anyone who assumed pandemic-era flexibility in Singapore was a permanent, settled benefit rather than a temporary accommodation now actively being walked back.

Conclusion

If flexibility matters to you more than almost anything else, look hard at what a specific Chinese employer actually practices rather than what the law technically allows — the gap there can be enormous, and your real protection is market leverage, not legislation. In Singapore, the legal floor is genuinely higher and rising, but don't assume it translates into remote-friendly daily reality at any specific company; the CEOs calling everyone back in are not bluffing, and the burnout statistics suggest the push for flexibility was never won so much as paused. Either way, the lesson is the same: read the room, not the handbook.