One Country Subsidizes Your Startup Salary for a Year; the Other Might Just Expect You at Your Desk for Twelve of Them

🇹🇳 Tunisia · 🇨🇳 China

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

Tunisia will legally guarantee you can return to your old job if your startup fails, and pay a state-funded salary for up to three founders in year one — a safety net most Silicon Valley founders would find almost suspicious. China's tech sector, meanwhile, spent the last decade normalizing 9am-to-9pm, six-day weeks so thoroughly that "996" needed its own Wikipedia entry, and the backlash against it is now itself a defining feature of the culture.

Do's & Don'ts

🇹🇳 Tunisia

🇨🇳 China

Tunisia's startup ecosystem is a genuine policy success story layered awkwardly on top of an unreformed bureaucracy. The country's 2018 Startup Act — offering a state-funded founder salary in year one, tax incentives, and a guaranteed right to return to a previous job after up to two years building a company — is, per multiple ecosystem reports, a real draw, and Tunisia's startup ecosystem grew 36.6% in 2025 alone, ranking second in Africa on entrepreneurial-ecosystem health metrics. But that formal openness sits inside a business culture still shaped by hierarchical, network-gated access: founders report that 61% cite bureaucracy as a major obstacle, closing a local funding round can take six-plus months, and the country's colonial-era administrative inheritance has never been meaningfully cleaned up. The practical upshot is a startup culture that's genuinely supportive on paper and genuinely slow in practice — a combination that rewards patience and government-program literacy over pure hustle.

China's corporate-versus-startup divide is less about formal structure and more about a live cultural argument over what ambition should cost. TechNode's guide to Chinese tech culture and Foreign Policy's 2026 analysis both note that while 996 (endorsed at various points by figures like Alibaba's Jack Ma) became internationally infamous, its actual prevalence is narrower than the international press narrative suggests — Chinese labor law technically caps the standard workweek at 40 hours with mandated overtime pay beyond it, even though enforcement is inconsistent. Meanwhile, state-owned enterprises, once seen as the unglamorous, institutional choice, have become newly attractive to younger workers precisely because of their relative stability and closer-to-normal hours — to the point where major tech firms are now sometimes derisively called "the new state-owned enterprises" by job seekers optimizing for security over prestige. The counter-movement — tangping, "lying flat," a quiet refusal to over-invest in the hustle — is itself now a defining generational feature of the culture, not a fringe position.

The Reckoning

Here's the real inversion: Tunisia's state actively subsidizes entrepreneurial risk-taking, yet its surrounding business culture remains cautious, hierarchical, and slow-moving — the safety net exists, but the surrounding infrastructure doesn't always reward moving fast. China's tech sector has no comparable formal safety net for founders, yet cultivated (and is now actively unwinding) one of the most intense high-velocity work cultures in the world — the risk wasn't subsidized, it was simply normalized as the price of admission, until a generation decided it wasn't worth paying.

Both countries, in other words, are mid-correction in opposite directions: Tunisia is trying to build cultural speed on top of structural support that already exists, while China is trying to build structural sustainability on top of a speed culture that already burned a generation out. A newcomer chasing "startup energy" in the Western sense — fast iteration, high risk tolerance, informal hierarchy — will find pieces of it in both places, but attached to very different institutional realities.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Medium (Ahmed Hadhri, "Tunisian Startup Ecosystem: The Ironic Paradox") — A Tunisian founder described the central irony of building there as having genuinely strong government support on paper undermined by mentors and incubator staff who had never actually built anything themselves, leaving founders to learn the hardest lessons from failure rather than guidance.

Quora — Someone answering "what is the work environment like in China" wrote that the 996 reputation obscured real variation — his own experience at a mid-sized firm was closer to standard hours, while a friend at a hot startup genuinely lived the stereotype, and the difference came down entirely to which specific company and team you landed on.

Quora — A respondent on whether 996 is "as bad as Western media makes it out to be" argued that Western coverage flattens a live internal Chinese debate into a fixed cultural fact, when in reality the backlash — tangping, lying flat — is one of the most discussed workplace topics among Chinese youth right now.

Rest of World (Tunisian tech startups feature) — A founder profiled in the piece described incorporating the parent company in France specifically to reassure international investors and transact in hard currency, while deliberately keeping all engineering talent and day-to-day operations in Tunis — a structural workaround, not a vote of no confidence in the local ecosystem.

Quora — Someone answering how Chinese workers feel about long hours noted that framing it purely as exploitation missed how many employees, particularly those over 35, actively chose SOE stability over tech-sector pay specifically to reclaim personal time — a trade-off he said younger foreign hires often didn't realize was even on the table.

Conclusion

If you're weighing Tunis against Shenzhen, ask which risk you're actually more willing to carry: bureaucratic slowness while building something the state is genuinely rooting for, or a live cultural negotiation over how many of your evenings belong to your employer. Tunisia's system is patient by structural necessity; China's is renegotiating its own intensity in real time, and you'll land somewhere on that spectrum depending entirely on which company picks you. My honest read: bet on Tunisia if you have runway and patience, bet on a Chinese SOE if you want China's ambition without China's reputation for taking your Saturdays.