Cindy Yu Cindy Yu

Be more tiger mum!

Getty Images 
issue 18 May 2024

Cindy Yu has narrated this article for you to listen to.

‘What’s it to do with me if your boyfriend wants to break up with you? Or if you cried, or had a fight, these are not things that I as a supervisor care about. I’m not your mother. All I care about is results. Our relationship is just employee-employer.’

In a series of videos posted on Douyin (China’s version of TikTok), Chinese tech executive Qu Jing was a little too candid about her management style. Sharply dressed and with hair cut formidably short, she said she expected her staff to be on call 24 hours a day, including at weekends, even at the cost of their personal relationships. If Qu thought these videos would give her a ‘girlboss’ image, she was wrong. They went viral and she became a national hate figure.

In my three years of primary school in Nanjing, the days were ten hours long, after which there was homework

Watching the clips, I shudder to think of the life I might be living had my mother not taken me out of China when I was a child.

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