Chinese banking regulator Li Jianhua literally worked himself to death. After 26 years of “always putting the cause of the party and the people” first, his employer said this month, the 48-year-old official died rushing to finish a report before the sun came up.

China is facing an epidemic of overwork, to hear the state-controlled press and Chinese social media tell it. About 600,000 Chinese a year die from working too hard, according to the China Youth Daily. China Radio International in April reported a toll of 1,600 every day.

Microblogging website Weibo is filled with complaints about stressed-out lives and chatter about reports of others, young and old, worked to death: A 24-year-old junior employee at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide Inc., a 25-year-old auditor at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP; one of the chief designers of China’s next-generation fighter planes at state-run AVIC Shenyang Aircraft Corp.

“What’s the point of working overtime so you can work to death?” asked one commentator on Weibo, lamenting that his boss told employees to spend more time on the job.

The rising death rate comes as China’s workforce appears to be getting the upper hand, with a shrinking labor pool able to demand higher wages and factory workers regularly going on strike. The message hasn’t gotten through to China’s white-collar warriors. In exchange for starting salaries typically double blue-collar pay, they put in hours of overtime on top of eight-hour workdays, often in violation of Chinese labor law, according to Geoffrey Crothall, spokesman for Hong Kong-based labor-advocacy group the China Labor Bulletin. 

“China is still a rising economy, and people are still buying into that hardworking ethos,” said Jeff Kingston, director of Asian Studies at the Japan campus of Temple University in Tokyo. “They haven’t yet achieved the affluenza that led to questioning in Japan of norms and values.”

Japan is where the term karoshi, or death from overwork, gained notoriety in previous decades. It encompasses deaths from stroke, heart attack, cerebral hemorrhage or other sudden causes related to demands of the workplace. Because the causal relationship to work-related stress may not be evident, the death toll can be subjective and difficult to compile.

Japan’s parliament passed a law on June 20 calling for support centers, aid to businesses for prevention programs and more research on karoshi. The government in 2012 compensated 813 families able to show a link between overwork, illness and death, including 93 suicides.

The actual death toll may be higher. Japan’s police agency counted more than 2,000 work-related suicides in 2013, and lawyers in 2009 said 10,000 deaths a year may be from overwork.

In China, such deaths are known as guolaosi.

“We have noticed that excessive overtime in China has become an issue,” the director of the International Labor Organization’s China office, Tim De Meyer, wrote in an emailed response to questions. “It is worrying as a physical and mental-health hazard.”

Work-life balance gets short shrift in a society that combines a modern pursuit of riches with an ancient belief in putting the community above the individual, said Yang Heqing, Dean of the School of Labor Economics at the Capital University of Economics and Business in Beijing. In parts of China’s capital he’s surveyed, 60 percent of workers complain of clocking more than the legal limit of two hours a day of overtime, taking a toll on workers’ family and health, he said. He’s skeptical of the 600,000 figure, which he said may include other causes, and is working to compile his own data.

“More than in the Anglo-American corporate system, in Korea, China and Japan ― the countries in the Confucian belt ― there’s a belief in total dedication,” said Temple University’s Kingston. “Any job worth doing is worth doing excessively.”

China’s banking regulator Li had reason to be stressed. He ran the China Banking Regulatory Commission’s division overseeing the boom in China’s trust products, investments considered part of the estimated $6.2 trillion shadow-banking system that Chinese officials have sought to bring under government control. He had traveled to 10 provinces in the second half of last year and met with all of China’s 68 trust companies.

Employees in Li’s department regularly worked until midnight or later, according to a colleague who asked not to be identified because he’s not authorized to speak publicly. His death, categorized as from “long-term overwork” by the CBRC, was the latest in a string of cases garnering media attention.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers auditor in Shanghai had chronicled on her personal blog working through weekends, wanting a vacation and suffering fevers, according to official news agency Xinhua. A colleague in the Beijing office said employees were given tasks “impossible to finish without overtime,” as the case drew more than 30,000 comments on Weibo from users attributing her death to overwork, Xinhua reported.

A statement by PricewaterhouseCoopers at the time of her 2011 death said that Angela Pan, a first-year associate, had contracted encephalitis and had taken sick leave to check into a hospital where she later died, according to spokesman Wayne Yim, who said the firm didn’t have further comment on the case.

The Ogilvy employee, who worked in the technology department of the agency’s Beijing office, died in May 2013, crying out and keeling over as he stood up from his desk on his first day back from medical leave, according to a report in the Beijing Times provided by Ogilvy. Asia-Pacific chief executive officer Scott Kronick declined to comment further on the case. (Bloomberg)