Two Ways to Work Too Much: Overtime Culture in Egypt and China

🇪🇬 Egypt · 🇨🇳 China

By Priya Mehta, The Global Office

In Egypt, the law caps your week at 48 hours, and you'll work roughly that many anyway — not because a boss demands it, but because a slow, personal, relationship-paced economy means the workday simply stretches. In China, the law caps your week at 44 hours, and the actual average sits closer to 48.5, with entire industries treating 72-hour weeks as an unofficial badge of ambition rather than a violation to hide. Both countries have functioning labor law on the books. Neither country's actual working hours look much like what that law says, and the gap between rule and reality tells you almost everything about what you're moving into.

Do's & Don'ts

🇪🇬 Egypt

🇨🇳 China

Egypt

Egyptian labor law sets a standard 48-hour week — eight hours a day, six days, Sunday through Thursday — with legally reduced hours during Ramadan. On paper this is a moderate, unremarkable standard by global comparison. In lived practice, Egypt scores poorly on work-life balance metrics: the Remote.com Global Life-Work Balance Index 2025 placed Egypt among the worst-performing countries, combining a comparatively long 44.44-hour average workweek with one of the lowest reported happiness scores (3.82 out of 10) in that bottom tier. The gap isn't primarily about extreme hours in the Chinese sense — it's about a workday that stretches informally around relationship-building, personal networking, and a business culture where "the day ends when the relationship-relevant task is done," not necessarily at a fixed clock time.

Egyptian business culture, per multiple expat and employment guides, runs substantially on personal contacts and recommendations rather than purely formal processes — a dynamic that adds real, unscheduled time to a working relationship without ever appearing as "overtime" on a payslip. Hofstede's data characterizes Egypt as a culture of restraint, where social norms govern impulse and gratification more tightly than in many Western contexts — consistent with a workplace where the boundary between "working" and "building the relationship that lets work happen" is genuinely blurry rather than a clean line an employee can point to and say has been crossed.

China

China's overtime story is better documented and more dramatic: the 996 system — 9am to 9pm, six days a week, a 72-hour total — became, in the words of multiple industry retrospectives, "worn like a badge of honor" in tech and manufacturing through the 2010s, openly celebrated by some employers as evidence of hustle culture rather than hidden as exploitation. That changed on paper in August 2021, when China's Supreme People's Court and Ministry of Human Resources jointly declared 996 illegal, reaffirming the existing 44-hour legal cap with capped monthly overtime. The GitHub-hosted "996.ICU" protest — a widely circulated, tech-community-driven list of companies known to practice 996, including Alibaba, JD.com, Pinduoduo, Huawei, and ByteDance — remains one of the most visible pieces of labor organizing to emerge from China's tech sector, notable for happening on a coding platform rather than through traditional union channels.

The 2025-2026 enforcement wave is real and measurable: Tencent now requires staff out by 6:00pm, Midea by 6:20pm, DJI locks offices at 9:00pm, and Haier is promoting a five-day week — concrete, publicized policy shifts at major employers. But official 2025 surveys still put the average Chinese workweek at 48.5 hours, above the legal 44-hour ceiling, and Blind threads from workers inside Chinese tech firms describe 80-hour weeks as still normalized in some teams, where "996 is considered very good work-life balance" by comparison. The reform is genuine and the old norm is genuinely still present — both facts are true simultaneously, in different companies, sometimes in different teams at the same company.

The Reckoning

The core difference is visibility. China's overwork problem is loud, documented, legally litigated, and now the subject of publicized corporate reform — you can research a specific employer's clock-out policy before accepting an offer, because several major firms have made that policy a public statement. Egypt's overwork problem is quiet and structural, embedded in a relationship-driven business culture rather than concentrated in a few notorious sectors — there's no equivalent "996.ICU" list for Egyptian firms, not because the hours are shorter, but because the extra time doesn't take the form of a clock-based schedule anyone could name and protest.

The other divergence is what drives the excess. China's overwork is substantially institutional — company policy, sector norms, competitive pressure among tech firms racing each other. Egypt's is substantially relational — personal networking, informal extensions of the workday around trust-building, a business culture where efficiency isn't the primary value being optimized for. Neither is more forgivable than the other for the person living inside it, but they require completely different survival strategies: in China, you negotiate the policy; in Egypt, you negotiate the relationship.

The Part the Brochure Left Out

Quora — Answering a question about corporate office hours generally, one respondent described a pattern familiar to several other answers: being asked to stay until 8:30pm against a nominal 9-to-6 contract, with the extra time never formally logged as overtime or compensated, and being unsure whether to escalate it to HR.

Blind — A post titled "Help me understand Chinese colleagues" from a non-Chinese tech worker described genuine confusion at how casually teammates discussed 80-hour weeks as unremarkable, prompting a wave of replies confirming that on majority-Chinese teams at some companies, the informal expectation still runs well past the legal 44-hour cap regardless of official policy.

Expat.com forum ("The work culture in Egypt" thread, Egypt forum) — A new arrival asking what to expect was told by longer-term expats that formal working hours were almost beside the point; what mattered more was understanding that personal relationships, not the clock, ultimately determined how much of your evening a given work relationship would consume.

Blind — A thread titled "Overtime or not skilled enough?" captured a common anxiety among engineers at Chinese firms: uncertainty over whether being asked to stay late reflected a company-wide 996-adjacent norm or a signal that their individual performance was viewed as insufficient — the ambiguity itself was described as more stressful than the hours.

A China labor-law blog (Harris Sliwoski) aimed at foreign employers described the practical reality for expat hires: Chinese labor protections legally apply regardless of nationality, but the "bigger risk is usually social pressure rather than the contract" — foreign staff who strictly enforced their legal hours sometimes found themselves subtly excluded from decisions made during the extra hours everyone else stayed for.

Conclusion

If you're weighing either move, the practical due diligence differs in kind. For China, you can and should ask a prospective employer directly for their actual clock-out policy — several major firms now have a public, citable answer, and the 2025-2026 reform wave means the question isn't naive to ask. For Egypt, that same direct question will get you a legally accurate but practically useless answer, because the real driver of your hours will be the depth and pace of your professional relationships, not a written policy. Priya's line for a friend choosing between them: in China, negotiate the hours before you sign; in Egypt, budget your evenings for people, not tasks, because that's where the extra time is actually going.