04. China’s Increasingly Distorted Workplace, Vitality Held Captive: How Do We Build a Happy Workplace?
Summary
- The 11.79M graduates entering the job market in 2024 face more than employment pressure—they face simultaneous mismatches in field of study, geography, and practical experience. The graduating class is up 2% from last year, or about 210K people; Beijing has cooled, while the Yangtze River Delta, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, and “hidden world champion” companies in places such as Shaoxing still have demand. AI has also put some digitalization projects that once might have required RMB10M on hold. Phoenix sums up the gap this way: young people arrive “with incredibly passionate hearts, only to face a society that is waiting.”
- A happy workplace is an organizational mechanism that can be screened for, cultivated, planned, and built. What Phoenix saw at Apple centered on an assumption of good intent, tolerance for error, complementary strengths, and constructive feedback: negative emotions make “the brain shut down,” while self-denial sets off a negative cycle of workplace PUA; respect and inclusion allow employees to acknowledge weaknesses, seek collaboration, and combine scattered capabilities into “a great circle.”
- Intense competition does not inevitably produce pressure, chaos, and endless overtime, as the fierce rivalry between Grab and Gojek demonstrates. Grab used clear timelines, task decomposition, capability and resource checks, and continuous PDCA adjustments to absorb pressure into the management process. Many Chinese companies instead pass unplanned targets down the chain until “the thing that went wrong may fundamentally not have been the employee’s fault, and then the employee gets blamed.”
- The deeper risk in China’s distorted workplace lies in governance, not merely in managers having poor attitudes. Phoenix argues that many managers themselves were never treated with sufficient respect and operate without meaningful behavioral oversight. The foreign companies he experienced would remove managers who delivered strong results but crossed cultural red lines; in China, senior executives may stay or go at the CEO’s discretion, and CEOs may “look the other way” on misconduct, sacrificing long-term organizational trust for short-term results.
- 卫诗婕 describes the AI-era labor market as a K-shaped curve, while warning that companies are underestimating junior talent. People with experience, resources, and frameworks are temporarily harder for AI to replace and may use the shift to leap forward; young workers within 3-5 years of graduation who have not yet built a “handle” are more likely to become “a brick moved wherever it is needed,” or be laid off in the name of cost reduction and efficiency. Phoenix argues that once a company enters a new business and discovers that the market no longer has enough outstanding people, the old model of “if someone doesn’t fit, replace them” will turn against growth.
- Happiness has tools that can be understood, measured, and improved; it does not depend solely on a leader’s goodwill. The Fogg Behavior Model frames behavior as motivation multiplied by ability, with a trigger needed to start the action; Gallup’s Q12 examines organizational-climate issues such as having a good friend at work, clarity of tasks, and training; the Life Balance Wheel exposes the cost of work consuming family, health, and growth. The real dividing line is not whether a company runs assessments, but whether it takes the results “very seriously” enough to change managers’ behavior.
- Individuals need both defense and offense: deepen their strengths to create optionality, and be willing to say no when boundaries are crossed. 卫诗婕 uses immersion, enjoyment, and becoming “desensitized to pain” to distinguish love from aptitude, while Phoenix’s “Five-Part High-Joy Test” asks whether one feels limitless attraction, learns quickly, works with flow, outperforms others, and genuinely enjoys the activity. Their shared conclusion is to do concrete work, stay patient, protect energy and agency, and believe that “every era has a place for you.”
Deep dive
1. 11.79M Graduates Are Colliding With a “Waiting” Society
卫诗婕 defines this episode as a letter to the graduating class: 11.79M students graduated in 2024 into “the toughest graduation season in history,” while the hopes she held at 20 have been rewritten in just 8 years by sweeping changes in employment, labor relations, and organizational structures.
Phoenix relays a content-platform CEO’s observation that young people “graduate straight into unemployment,” while the society in front of them looks nothing like the narratives in textbooks and the news. The problem is not simply a lack of jobs; they also lack a handle for understanding a period of upheaval, become hopeless too early, and see their enthusiasm drained before they have begun.
This was the starting point for Phoenix’s research into happy workplaces. He has 14 years of HR experience, including 8 years at Apple, followed by stints at 贝壳, 快手, Grab, and ClassIn. His experience across foreign companies, internet businesses, and education companies convinced him that workplace happiness is not an abstract aspiration but an organizational state that can be screened for, cultivated, activated, and designed.
2. Apple’s Day 1 Makes People Feel Welcome Before They Feel Evaluated
Phoenix’s strongest memory of Apple is a training session: veteran employees formed 1-2 lines at the entrance to high-five new hires; the music was as energizing as a party; people danced, hugged, and laughed from the heart. After joining other companies, he says he “never once” saw anything similar.
In his experience, almost everyone at Apple leaves with praise for the company, from the interview process through their departure. Apple was also named the world’s most admired company by Fortune for 10 consecutive years. What stayed with people was not the brand halo, but the consistent sense of respect, welcome, and belonging in interviews, training, and daily work.
As an interviewer, Phoenix interviewed more than 10K people over 8 years. Apple told candidates in advance to relax and treated the interview as a sincere conversation, including asking about the hardest moment of their lives. Some candidates choked up because “no one had asked about or cared for those moments in a very long time.”
One boy who was ultimately not hired said he had skipped school and climbed out of windows, then worked hard after seeing his father’s aging back during his senior year of high school and eventually got into a top university. Phoenix did not interrupt his sobs; he sat quietly with him, waited, and shared his own associations with his parents. The interview became a moment when the candidate could see himself again and realize, “I’m actually this strong.”
3. An “Assumption of Good Intent” Shifts Hiring From the Résumé to the Person
Phoenix says respect is both part of Apple’s stated culture and a deliberate hiring choice. The company looks at “what kind of heart a candidate has”; knowledge, systems, and technical thinking can all be taught. Even someone shaped by trauma in their family of origin and accustomed to self-protection may gradually become candid in an environment built on openness.
Apple does not expect every person to be good at everything. It looks for “the one most distinctive point in a person”; if that point is strong enough, the team can combine its members into “a great circle.” The logic accepts that weaknesses exist and assigns the organization responsibility for complementarity, rather than trying to turn everyone into the same standardized part.
When an employee admits in a meeting that something was not done well, the leader first says, “It’s okay—you did your best,” and only then discusses what could be improved. Once the pressure is lifted, the employee becomes more willing to find people who can fill the gap, allowing the team to deliver a better result and share the credit.
An “assumption of good intent” also serves as an anchor in disputes. When someone worries that a colleague may be harming the company’s interests, the team first assumes the colleague’s starting point was benevolent and reasons from there. 卫诗婕 describes this as management grounded in the belief that people are fundamentally good—drawing out their better instincts and strengths and pooling the group’s energy.
4. Tolerance and Inclusion Are Cognitive Productivity, Not Soft Decoration
When dealing with employees who have forceful personalities and views that may not be right, Phoenix believes managers need broad life experience: the ability to remain unshaken, show tolerance, and hold space for people to grow. Tolerance for error means allowing imperfection into the discussion, not abandoning the demand for results.
Apple is notably inclusive while also emphasizing essentialism; it does not pile on emotional pressure that drains employees’ energy. In meetings, employees may be told, “You don’t need to be so perfect. Just do this small thing well.” People can seek help only after they are willing to acknowledge shortcomings. If mistakes first trigger shame and fear, information is harder to surface in time and the team loses its chance to correct course.
卫诗婕 contrasts this with a large Chinese tech company, where employees were afraid to say anything that differed from their leader’s view and some broke out in rashes as soon as meetings began. One person who had left 2-3 months earlier would experience an immediate racing heart and physical discomfort merely from seeing videos posted by a former leader about workplace life.
Phoenix’s mechanism-level diagnosis is blunt: “When people are in negative emotions, their brains are shut down.” Employees cannot show their best side and begin internalizing failure as proof that they are inadequate. When managers then use that self-doubt to prove employees are incapable, the result is a negative cycle of workplace PUA.
5. Constructive Feedback and PDCA Turn Pressure Into Executable Problems
Phoenix emphasizes that employees must recognize and protect their own boundaries and be willing to say no when those boundaries are crossed. But refusing does not mean, “I can’t do this, so I simply won’t.” The more mature response is to take responsibility while offering constructive suggestions that can move the work forward.
Apple’s constructive feedback is not an order—“This is how you should do it”—but an invitation: “I have an experience I could share. I’m not sure whether it would be helpful to you.” Leaving the other person the right to choose makes the same advice more likely to become collaboration rather than defensiveness.
Chinese employees are often forced to take on tasks beyond their capabilities and resources while their emotional foundations are unstable. The result is that “everyone works in a total tangle every day, and going to work feels like going to a funeral.” Phoenix urges managers to reduce arbitrary expectations and dissatisfaction because boundaryless pressure only causes the target to become further distorted.
Grab and Gojek were competing fiercely for market share and needed to move quickly, but Grab did not make everyone work overtime every day except in isolated periods. The team set a timeline, repeatedly broke down the work, confirmed employees’ capabilities and resources, and used PDCA—plan, do, check, act—to correct course in real time. The management process absorbed the pressure instead of dumping it directly on employees.
6. The Problem in Chinese Companies Is Not That They Grow Too Fast, but That Management Responsibility Is Pushed Downward
In his first week at a Chinese internet company, before completing formal systems training, Phoenix was asked to present a 6-month plan to the CEO. He proposed improving the candidate experience, but the CEO asked, “Why do we need a good interview experience?” The prevailing culture valued pressure interviews and screening for people who could withstand stress.
Phoenix does not see rapid growth as a sufficient explanation. Grab was also operating in intense competition, yet its interview experience could still be strong. The deeper reason may be that many Chinese executives, including CEOs, were not treated with enough respect during their own education and therefore neither developed the need for nor the awareness required to build a healthy environment.
The difference is clearest in meetings. Chinese workplaces often use force of presence to make employees admit fault first; anyone who resists may be punished informally, and the discussion collapses into a black-and-white judgment. The foreign companies Phoenix experienced were more likely to analyze causes with employees rather than assign the error directly to the individual.
If the plan was never properly broken down and the process was not checked in time, the eventual failure may not reflect the employee’s ability. But when middle managers continue passing down the target from above, a management failure is rewritten as an employee failure—and “the employee may end up taking the blame.”
7. Without Executive Accountability, Corporate Culture Is Ultimately Written Only for Rank-and-File Employees
Phoenix saw 2 business leaders at a Chinese company tear apart cross-team collaboration for personal gain instead of making decisions in the company’s overall interest. He does not believe foreign companies are free of the problem, only that it is less common there. In China, managerial behavior is subject to weaker oversight; even when HR sees favoritism and unfairness, it may struggle to uphold basic rules.
In the foreign companies he experienced, a manager could be removed even after delivering excellent business results if they crossed a red line, drew widespread employee complaints, or violated the culture in talent development and cross-functional collaboration. The company understood that there would be short-term damage, but viewed tolerating such an executive as the larger management failure.
When the CEO controls the fate of senior executives in a Chinese company, performance may lead the CEO to “look the other way.” The result most damaging to organizational trust is that “the complainant gets disciplined while the accused is retained.” Employees then conclude that the company is not genuinely committed to the long term.
HR becomes the painful middle layer: one hand must support a difficult business, while the other must help employees keep pace with change; HR must select talent and also wants to develop it. Many HR professionals have empathy and a desire to do good, but may be unable to turn those ideals into organizational reality.
8. Human-Centered Management Is Not a Trophy for Excellent Companies; It Can Also Be Why a Company Improves
卫诗婕 relays an entrepreneur’s view: “Only excellent companies are entitled to talk about human-centered management.” She understands that companies emerging from the pandemic first had to survive, but questions whether human-centered management can be postponed indefinitely if short-term profit remains the permanent endpoint.
Phoenix does not dismiss the statement as simply cold. He sees its “positive intent” as evidence that entrepreneurs also want human-centered management, but have never seen a living, workable example. What may be missing is not conviction but concrete cases and mechanisms.
He cites a startup built around creative dining and birthday parties. Its management team consisted of top graduates from Tsinghua and Peking University with a strong humanistic sensibility, yet the business continued to grow so rapidly that friends could barely see them. A humanistic atmosphere and business expansion were not mutually exclusive.
He also cites a traditional media company that rose alongside 360 and had operated for more than 10 years. Its CEO wanted to build a “utopian corporate culture,” and many employees have stayed with the company from its early days. During this year’s transformation, those employees were willing to learn how to operate media accounts they had never handled before; long-standing relationships made them more willing to continue changing with the business.
9. Happiness Can Be Broken Down Into Motivation, Ability, Triggers, and Feedback
Phoenix uses the Fogg Behavior Model to explain that behavior equals motivation multiplied by ability, with a trigger needed to start the action. His personal example is wanting to wear a sleeveless dress: looking in the mirror became the trigger, after which he found 3 dumbbell exercises and has kept at them for 2 weeks. In management, the first step is to break a goal down to a level within the employee’s reach—something they can get to on tiptoe—then add a little motivation to activate their internal drive.
In summarizing the “6 Laws of Happiness Management,” he first defines happiness as a feeling: the stronger the desire, the greater the happiness when it is fulfilled. But satisfaction is usually brief; once the old desire fades, a new one takes over. When you want ice cream, the first bite is the happiest moment, and the feeling drops sharply after you finish.
Difficulty along the way amplifies the reward. If getting a Harbin popsicle requires wearing a thick down jacket and enduring a difficult journey, the experience is stronger than simply buying one on impulse. Material satisfaction is ultimately temporary, Phoenix concludes; “spiritual happiness is the more lasting kind.”
10. Relationship Quality and Q12 Make Workplace Atmosphere Observable
The two discuss an 80-year Harvard study showing that, regardless of income, position, or family background, strong relationships are closely tied to lifelong happiness. Phoenix also cites a European area where neighborhood design makes it easy for residents to drop in on one another; the area has a high number and share of centenarians, illustrating how physical space can shape relationships.
At work, when subordinates are afraid to communicate with superiors, the door to communication closes. Managers no longer know the details of the work or how employees are feeling, and the organization gradually stiffens. Phoenix uses LEGO and similar exercises in training to break down departmental walls, temporarily suspend hierarchy, and restore communication through shared play and conversation.
Gallup, a big-data company with a 70-year history, uses Q12 as a classic tool for assessing organizational climate and engagement. Its questions include whether an employee has a good friend at work, whether their manager clearly assigns tasks, and whether they receive training. Phoenix notes that Fortune 500 companies and large Chinese companies both use it; the key is whether the data actually changes managers’ behavior.
卫诗婕 also mentions an unnamed large Chinese company that used Q12 for 5 consecutive years. Its management department had a strong atmosphere, employees were close-knit, and the company stood out during the pandemic. Measurement itself does not create happiness; the dividing line is between “going through the motions” and making serious corrections.
11. Long Hours, Frequent Restructuring, and Talent Replacement Gradually Drain Vitality
The Life Balance Wheel asks people to examine work, wealth, family, growth, health, and interests at the same time. Phoenix says many people devote 80% of their time to work. 卫诗婕 adds that when work supplies only repression while private life and physical care are squeezed out, people begin to “wither,” and the organization loses its creativity.
Flexible work can provide a buffer—for example, working in the office Monday through Wednesday and from home Thursday and Friday. Employees gain time with family, while their minds are less likely to become trapped in a single environment. Work arrangements need to leave room for life rather than shifting the entire burden of recovery onto individuals.
It normally takes 6 months to 1 year to learn an industry, get up to speed, and improve after joining a company. Yet some Chinese companies restructure 3-4 times a year, and employees may have 5-6 different bosses during their tenure. Before any accumulation forms, the direction has already been reset; proficiency, trust, and happiness cannot take root.
Foreign companies, facing high development costs, invest in quality training, psychological support, and cross-functional mentors, and are less likely to fire employees casually. China’s abundant labor supply makes “if the person is no good or not a fit, just replace them” appear cheap. AI has intensified the push for cost reduction and efficiency, but companies entering new businesses eventually discover that the replaceability logic no longer works when scarce talent is required.
12. High-Performance Teams Start With Managers Taking Responsibility for Themselves
Phoenix relays 7 recommendations from the Gallup team: build relationships, communicate clearly, establish accountability, develop talent, motivate others, lead change, and think critically. The first 6 connect tasks with people; the seventh requires those who hold power to reflect on their own behavior.
Accountability must be fair whether responsibility falls on the boss or the employee. Critical thinking is not merely a manager’s right to challenge employees; it also means asking whether the manager’s own behavior matches their values. “Do employees always have to be the ones criticizing you?” Employees are already in the weaker position.
Apple’s “set by example” standard requires leaders to lead by example. If managers cannot do something themselves, they have no sufficient basis for demanding it from employees. 卫诗婕 agrees: whether the person at the top practices the culture personally determines whether it is an operating principle or merely a slogan on the wall.
13. Rather Than Lift Weaknesses From Zero to Mediocre, Push Talent Toward Excellence
A strengths-based view asks managers to allocate work according to people’s advantages. If a new project requires both strategic judgment and execution sequencing, and few individuals are elite at both, the work can be divided between 2 people with complementary strengths. Team design is more effective than forcing everyone to shore up every weakness.
Phoenix cites Drucker’s approach to talent: most people spend huge amounts of time repairing weaknesses, merely “starting from 0 and working very hard to reach mediocrity.” A talented person may reach excellence with modest additional investment, so more attention should go toward extending the long pole.
His analogy is simple: if an employee is a fish, put them in water. Once the fish grows, give it a river and then an ocean, rather than asking it to swim on dry land. The core of positive psychology is to identify people’s strengths and release as much of them as possible, using strengths to compensate for shortcomings.
卫诗婕’s media career illustrates the approach. She chose journalism when filling out her university preferences, then kept interning and working, accumulating positive feedback and a methodology while feeling less anxious because her inner world was full. She assesses passion by whether someone can become immersed and happy, and aptitude by whether they can become “desensitized” to the necessary pain and enter a state of flow more easily.
14. The “Five-Part High-Joy Test” Requires Years of Practice to Become a Real Strength
Phoenix summarizes strength discovery as the “Five-Part High-Joy Test” (“无一型高乐”): Do you feel limitless attraction to it? Do you learn it quickly? Does the work flow naturally? Are you better than others at it? Do you genuinely enjoy it? Interest is only the starting point; substantial time must still be invested to turn an inclination into a dependable strength.
卫诗婕 warns that finding what you love may not be the hardest part; what is truly scarce is maintaining focus and crossing the next level. Even if she imagined graduating again today, she would still tell her younger self to keep doing what she liked and focus on learning, because doing concrete work can relieve some anxiety by itself.
Neither speaker romanticizes passion. Many people in the industry enjoy interviewing but hate writing, while every meaningful result requires long hours at a desk and monotonous training. The difference between liking something and being good at it is not an absence of pain, but the ability to keep working through pain and draw nourishment from the process as a whole.
15. The Employment Mismatch Is About Aggregate Pressure as Well as Field, Geography, and Experience
Phoenix cites 11.79M university graduates in 2024, up 2% from last year, or about 210K people. The downturn has magnified structural mismatches across fields of study: majors created for an earlier era no longer align with demand in the AI era, and jobs and job seekers do not map one-to-one.
Geographic activity is also uneven. Beijing appeared relatively quiet that year, while the Yangtze River Delta, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen offered more opportunities. Smaller cities such as Shaoxing still have component manufacturers that rank among the best in the world, but graduates do not know where the demand is. Friends also described employment for Chinese people in Canada as weakening, suggesting the pressure is not unique to China.
The pandemic reduced students’ access to internships and real work, widening the gap between theory and practice. Fields such as surgery depend especially heavily on hands-on training. Young people can access information faster, but may not have enough real-world feel to judge what suits them; personalized exploration still takes time.
Phoenix says he has lived through 2 economic crises, including downturns in real estate and other sectors. Recalling the 2008 crisis, he was once afraid to apply to Fortune 500 companies until his boyfriend—now his husband—asked, “If you don’t apply, how can you have a chance?” Apple was secretly recruiting for its first retail operation in China, with only 50 spots. They were both hired. Part of opportunity comes from ability; another part is simply knowing in time and having the courage to act.
16. In the AI Era, the Way Forward Is to Relearn, Return to the Real World, and Protect Agency
卫诗婕 describes the post-AI talent curve as K-shaped. People above the median are further amplified by experience, frameworks, and resources, while those below it become “a brick moved wherever it is needed” and are more vulnerable to layoffs in the name of cost reduction and efficiency. People within 3-5 years of graduation have not yet built a system and are especially short of a handle for navigating upheaval.
Phoenix left Apple for the internet sector in 2016 because he believed that if he did not “get into the fray,” he would miss the point where the K-shaped split began. He sees moving across industries as “going back to college”: people must keep relearning after entering the workforce rather than treating an existing degree as a finished state. The company is still paying a salary, which lowers the psychological cost of changing direction.
People born in the 1980s entered an era of explosive expansion, when startups appeared everywhere. The range of choices available to people born in the 1990s was already narrower, as the internet absorbed massive amounts of capital and young talent. People born in the 2000s have stronger views of their own, but also endured the pandemic, lost internships and the experience of youth in the real world, and then faced the shock of AI. Phoenix’s 2 nieces show that real experimentation creates conviction more effectively than parental advice: one is now happily dancing hip-hop, while the other shifted from education to jewelry design, a field she has long loved, and sees new possibilities created by technologies such as 3D printing.
The two speakers’ final method is to return to the real world and connect with real people, allowing hearing, sight, and the body to take in experience together. Phoenix says language conveys perhaps only 20% of the information. Communities can counter atomization; 3-5 years of focused work can build professional accumulation; sensitivity to what one loves should be preserved while sensitivity to noise is reduced; and people and environments that constantly drain energy should be avoided.
Phoenix notes that 75% of people ultimately end up on a path different from what they studied, so mismatch itself is not failure. 卫诗婕 places the bottom line in “not giving up” and protecting one’s agency. The goal of work should not be narrowed to whether one can land a job this year; it should ask, when considering “the one great thing you came into life to do,” what you are willing to invest in for the long term—“every era has a place for you.”