What Do 10,000+ GitHub Stars Reveal About China’s 996 Work Culture?

Data collection

The analysis is based on two datasets extracted from the public GitHub repository 996.ICU:

39,987 user profiles that starred the repository (as of 28 Mar 2019).

10,037 comments from the repository’s issues page.

These data were used to examine the demographic and professional background of the supporters, as well as the topics discussed in the issue threads.

Company affiliation of supporters

The ten companies with the highest number of supporters are visualised below.

Key observations:

Alibaba‑related firms lead with 148 users.

Tencent, Baidu and JD.com follow.

Huawei appears at rank 9, indicating a smaller but still notable presence.

Other contributors come from Xiaomi, Microsoft, Google, ZTE, Lenovo, ThoughtWorks and many additional companies.

University affiliation

University affiliation is also prominent. The top ten universities by number of supporters are shown below.

Notable institutions include Zhejiang University (59 supporters), Shanghai Jiao‑Tong University, Tsinghua University, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Wuhan University, Harbin Institute of Technology, University of Science and Technology of China and Fudan University.

Geographic distribution

The top ten locations of supporters are visualised below.

Beijing leads with 2,094 users, followed by Shanghai, Hangzhou, Shenzhen and other major Chinese tech hubs. International contributors from Singapore, Japan and the United States also appear.

Profile of supporting programmers

Average GitHub metrics for the 39,987 starrers:

Followers: 10.9

Following: 14.6

Public repositories: 19.1

The distribution is heavily right‑skewed; most developers have fewer than 10 followers.

After filtering out users with more than 50 followers, the majority cluster at the low‑end of the distribution.

Account age (time since first GitHub activity) averages 3.2 years, with most users having less than five years of experience.

High‑visibility supporters

Among the 39,987 starrers:

47 users have >1,000 followers.

110 users have >500 followers.

598 users have >100 followers.

The top‑10 most‑followed users include well‑known figures such as “Wheel Brother”, Coco (Tencent), singwhatiwanna (Didi) and tech blogger Yan Haijing.

Issues: most discussed topics

The issues page turned into a high‑traffic forum. The ten most frequent discussion topics are visualised below.

Key concerns include:

Legality of the 996 work schedule.

Strategies to push the repository into the top‑star rankings.

Concrete suggestions for workers facing over‑work.

Criticism of excessive overtime.

Even personal matchmaking among programmers.

Word cloud of GitHub bios

Analyzing the free‑form bios of the supporters yields the word cloud shown below.

Prominent terms:

Roles: frontend , iOS , Android – indicating many front‑end and mobile developers.

Languages: Python , C++ , Java – reflecting a broad technical skill set among ordinary engineers.

Overall, the data reveal a large, nationwide (and increasingly global) backlash against the 996 work regime, driven primarily by ordinary developers who use GitHub to voice their concerns.