The girl who got off work in the early morning ended her life at the last midnight of the age of 22. The snow streamed across the streets of Urumqi.
In the autumn recruitment, the ideal company for Runfei was netease Cloud Music — she loves singing and has listened to 11,438 songs on this software and created 38 playlists — for which she participated in two interviews.
In the agitation of public opinion, many voices remind that Pinduoduo can offer twice the salary of the industry, fresh graduates can get a salary of 500,000 yuan or even higher — but this is not the story of Runfei.
On the last night of 2020, lights were blazing on several floors of the Shanghai Golden Hongqiao International Center as more than 7,000 Pinduoduo employees worked into the wee hours of the morning to prepare for a surge in traffic and orders on New Year’s Eve.
When Wu Wei called his colleague Runfei via Knock, an internal messaging software, the woman who answered the phone calmly said that the work had been handed over to another colleague and told him how to contact him.
“Didn’t I just go to Xinjiang?” Wu Wei was a little surprised — he was used to frequent changes of callers in this fast-moving Internet giant, but this was the first time he had encountered a special person on the line to inform him.
There was still a lot on the to-do list that day. Wu Wei didn’t think much about it. Then he made a phone call.
On the afternoon of January 3, 2021, Runfei’s circle of friends updated an update, announcing that Runfei suddenly fainted on his way to work at 1:30 am on December 29, 2020, and passed away after failing to rescue him. He was only 22 years old.
It was posted by Runfei’s boyfriend, who said he and Runfei had planned to get married. The news came as Runfei’s body was cremated in Urumqi.
Wu Wei saw the news through someone else’s screenshot. Like most of his colleagues, he didn’t add Runfei as a WeChat friend and didn’t even know her real name.
Runfei is the girl used for many years nickname, and her original name Zhang × fei similar pronunciation. After joining Pinduoduo in 2019, she used it as a flower name at work. At Pinduoduo, which has a name-sharing culture similar to Ali’s, it is common for colleagues to use code names rather than their real names.
3,800km away, the afternoon calm in the centre of Golden Rainbow Bridge is shattered. The news spread further, and the whole country knew that the girl who got off work in the early hours of the morning died at the last midnight of the age of 22, and the streets of Urumqi drifted across the snow.
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On the early morning of December 29, 2020, Runfei went off work and fell down on the snowy street in Urumqi. Photo 27, Urumqi snow, the lowest temperature dropped to minus 17℃. (Visual China/Photo)
“She’s not just a pretty girl who can sing”
In the story of the old people, Runfei is a lively and cheerful girl. She sang well and graduated to work at an Internet giant, both of which she was envied.
In 2015, Runfei was admitted to Xi ‘an University of Posts and Telecommunications from Weinan High School in Shaanxi Province, majoring in Communication Engineering. In the first semester, he won the prize in the school’s Top Ten Singers Competition. Later, she also appeared on the stage of The Voice of China in Xi ‘an, and formed a band named Chernobyl, as the lead singer.
Her motto for the competition came from the Shin Orchestra’s song “Bright Sea and Bright Sky” : “Indifference people, thank you for looking down on me, let me not flinching, more wonderful life.”
A college classmate who is familiar with Runfei told Southern Weekend that most of the graduates majoring in communication at the university work for operators and Internet companies. Runfei has a lively personality and is not interested in technology. He has been planning to engage in the work related to Internet products and operations for a long time.
In 2017, Runfei began to play an active role in various mobile Internet applications, such as Zhihu, Weibo, B website and Douban. She left the most footprints on Douban, listing 306 films and 11 books she watched in the past four years.
On the eve of joining Pinduoduo, Runfei marked the last book he had read, “Hua Shan Explears Sun Tzu’s Art of War,” with a cover that looked like a popular seller.
She wrote in her review: “Being held up by the cover. Although more than half of the examples and analysis are redundant, but the overall comprehensive interpretation of the various dialectic does not take sides, the structure is comfortable to read, worth a look.”
This is typical of Runfei’s critique, which emphasizes structure, illustration and analysis, as well as perception.
“She’s not some pretty girl who just sings.” A person who claimed to be a good friend of Runfei University told the Southern Weekend reporter that Runfei is very methodical and logical in his work, and tends to think like an engineering student.
These habits can be seen in her social media accounts, which contain answers in five categories: “beauty shopping,” “travel,” “learning about dry goods,” “work life,” and “movie reading.”
Among the updated collections after work, there are both e-commerce operation experience and afternoon tea solutions — the latest two answers collected on October 3, 2020 are cost-effective shampoos with good anti-hair loss effects.
On October 22, 2018, Runfei finished watching a short video about breakfast on Station B. It was clearly a video made from a template, but Runfei summed it up in the comments section:
- Breakfast should not be early, the best 7-8 o ‘clock
- Get protein and carbohydrates
- Breakfast should not be too nutritious
- Don’t eat on the go
Her tech-savvy comment may have been prompted by a message posted three days ago below the video that asked, “Will someone just tell me to save time?”
“Half a million or more” is not true
Autumn 2018, entered the university recruit season runfei in cattle from — a Internet job seekers, on September 6, 2018 to four days on September 9, runfei brush in the cows from the nine sets of exercises, the content including combinatorial mathematics, probability and statistics, product manager, special intellectual practice, the highest score 70 points, the lowest scored 24 points, which is a set of outstanding papers.
During that time, she was active on the platform, asking for the written test experience of the test post, watching the great people who collected the offer from the big factory, and asking how to drag and sign the offer in their hands.
On November 4, 2018, the last message she left on Niuke was also related to Pinduoduo. The questioner was also a fresh graduate. She was urged by Pinduoduo’s manpower to sign a tri-party agreement, but the offer did not indicate the penalty, so she asked for help in the forum.
Runfei wrote: “There is only one tripartite [agreement] for each graduate… So carefully sign three parties!!”
The previous Runfei student told the Southern Weekend reporter that Runfei got the offer from Pinduoduo at the very beginning of the autumn recruitment, but her ideal company is netease Cloud Music — she loves singing and has listened to 11,438 songs on this software and created 38 playlists — so she participated in two interviews.
In October 2018, she waited anxiously for news from netease Cloud Music. From the beginning of the National Day holiday, Runfei has been retweeting the koi on Weibo and praying for good luck.
Runfei’s microblog is full of longing for Dachang, humbly comparing herself to a product to be tested — she even created a playlist called “Holding together for warmth while waiting to enter the bar,” and the introduction reads, “Did you get the quality stamp today? No “.
It was a tumultuous fall recruiting season — Internet game regulation tightened, big companies cut jobs and layoffs came one after another, and even some companies unilaterally tore up their offers. Pinduoduo and Bytedance are the most generous employers in this season’s offers, with research by workplace data firm Tailor Research showing that Pinduoduo has been the third most attractive to students at top colleges in the past few years, after Bytedance and Tencent.
Runfei finally failed to wait for the offer of netease cloud music. In March 2019, she joined the “Shanghai Rent” group and searched for properties near Loushanguan Road, where Pinduoduo’s headquarters is located, at which point she should have made the decision to join the company.
Wang Qi met Runfei in June 2019. Both of them are Pinduoduo management trainee students from Northwest China. They got to know each other in a job-hunting group and agreed to look for an apartment together.
“Runfei did a lot of homework and told me to make sure I looked near my office, otherwise my commute would be troublesome.” Instead of sharing an apartment together, Runfei chose to live in an older house closer to the company, while Wang lived farther away.
“When I started, I was able to leave at 10 o ‘clock [at night]. Since the outbreak, 11 o ‘clock, 11 o ‘clock, six days a week has become the norm.” Wang said she was forced to move to a neighborhood closer to her company because they jokingly called their work schedule “11116” compared with the popular “996 work schedule” of Internet companies.
In the agitation of public opinion, many voices remind that Pinduoduo can offer twice the salary of the industry, fresh graduates can get a salary of 500,000 yuan or even higher — but this is not the story of Runfei.
According to Wang Qi, an undergraduate in an operation position like Runfei can earn a starting salary of 10,000 yuan, or 14 yuan a year. According to the convention, Pinduoduo has a salary adjustment every six months, each range is 1000-6000 yuan.
Runfei successfully passed two salary adjustments, and the monthly salary should be about 13,000 yuan. Until August 2020, Pinduoduo entered the community group purchase and tested the water of Duoduo’s vegetable business in Wuhan.
It is located in a second-tier city, which needs a lot of operation manpower support. Each department leader is assigned to the quota of personnel to be transferred to another post, and the salary adjustment of operation personnel is also tied to the post transfer — willing to “buy vegetables”, normal adjustment; If you don’t want to go, you can’t get a raise.
The more core technology departments are exempt from this rule, and Pinduoduo proudly wrote in its 2019 annual report that “the proportion of technical engineers in Pinduoduo’s team has always been above 50%.”
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In November 2020, Runfei Diaogang rushed to Urumqi to join the fierce community group buying war. A citizen walks past a small supermarket packed with group buying e-commerce posters in Tianjin on December 19, 2020. (Visual China/Photo)
“I guard the frontier for more.”
Runfei is willing to “buy food”, his colleague is not surprised, “she is a very aggressive young man.”
Wang Qi also saw the original food shopping business is very rejection of the school enrollment, but after the transfer of self-rationalization, and persuade other colleagues to go together to “buy food”.
“Everybody seems to only go to buy some food and stay at head office two choices, don’t want to say that you can leave the company”, the britain-based authority said, especially for 2019 years into the spell of the enrollment, job-hopping also lack some experience, leadership is usually so advised leaving idea of young people, “a lot of spelling is the fastest growing companies in doing something manufacturing, agricultural change, very valuable.”
Older employees are more tied down, and the company’s options have a five-year lock-up period, which means that if you don’t go “grocery shopping,” you have to give up stocks that keep rising on the Nasdaq.
Inside Duoduo, a new city is called “Kaesong,” and the head of the city is called a “chengzhu,” who can invite employees from any department to join his team without the approval of the previous department head.
End of October 2020, runfei accepted an invitation by the xinjiang team, relet out gold hongqiao building near the house, ready to go to urumqi, a line, because a lot of spelling, many employees to mobilize to buy some food on the line, in the autumn of 2020, west of Shanghai hongqiao district some of the rental market chaos, spell of employees to sublease housing within 1 to 2 weeks to go out, for a lot of cheap renting, mediation called “buy dish room”.
In Wang Qi’s memory, Runfei went to Xinjiang in mid-November.
Duo Duo Mai Cai has a team of about 10 people in Urumqi, rented five or six warehouses and managed more than 2,000 outlets, China Business News reported, citing a third-party local Twitter source in Xinjiang. The company began trial operation on December 1.
After arriving in Xinjiang, Runfei’s daily work began after lunch, and the responsibility was to find the right supplier. During the day, she needs to meet the supplier’s supply willingness, determine the quantity available, and form a daily product page.
Every day at 23:00, Duo Duo Buy Food will update the activity page, that is, “open group”. Runfei’s main work is also transferred to the warehouse — from 23:00 to 6:00 is the supplier’s centralized distribution link, she needs to track their goods, when the goods safely arrived in the warehouse, she can end the day’s work.
Lung-moistening was a difficult job from the start.
On the evening of December 3, the first day of Duo Duo Mai Dai’s official tour in Urumqi, supermarket owners who had been picking up the food found that Duo Duo Mai Dai’s food was priced lower than their own purchase price. The next day, they jointly sent a letter to the brand to boycott the following brand products, asking the brand to stop supplying Duoduomai vegetables.
In the days that followed, large FMCG brands, including Coca-Cola, Yihai Kerry and Mengniu, promised to stop supplying Duoduo and penalized wholesalers who supplied to the platform without their services.
Runfei’s job is to find alternative categories and products, coordinate as much as possible with the brand and wholesalers, and withdraw the promise to stop supplying. Her work has certainly paid off, as many of the boycott vendors have found that products with the promised brands still appear on Duodo’s vegetables — “some in special packaging, some from other wholesalers.”
The tug of war left participants exhausted. “We were blocked from buying anything, and we were watched by brick-and-mortar shopkeepers every day,” Runfei complained to colleagues. It was also during that time that her signature on her work software was changed to “Lung Bao guarding the frontier for Duo Duo”. This girl, who loves the second dimension, also internalized this warlike narrative into her own expression.
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Pinduoduo released the death of employee Zhang Fei (Runfei). (infographic/figure) *
The official response did not address the cause of death
The Golden Hongqiao International Center, where PinduoDuo’s headquarters is located, is known as “100 million buildings per month”, with a monthly tax amount of more than 100 million yuan, and houses six of the world’s top 500 enterprises.
On the evening of January 3, 2021, an anonymous Pinduoduo employee first disclosed the news of Runfei’s accident on the workplace social software “Maimai”. The post was in a very angry mood and asked, “Does nobody dare to speak out?”
This giant enterprise has not set up the staff community forum, the whole network open context, has repeatedly become the company staff disclosure and discussion platform.
January 4 8:19 and certified as a spell of zhihu account under questions about runfei events answer say: “you look at the bottom of the people, which are not YongMing get the money, I didn’t think that is a problem of capital, but the social problem, this is an era of YongMing spell, you can choose to comfort, but you have to choose the consequences of a comfortable, people can control their own efforts, we can”, the answer is to be deleted after 30 seconds, but will still be some zhihu user screenshots, and spread on the Internet a lot.
At 4 PM that day, Pinduoduo released an explanation of the incident, saying that it had never released the above response and that the screenshot was a rumor. Later, Zhihu officially confirmed that the above response was indeed issued by Pinduoduo’s verified account. Pinduoduo then explained that it was issued by employees of the company’s cooperative suppliers using their personal mobile phones, and apologized for the lack of strict account control.
None of the above responses involved the cause of death of Runfei and whether overwork was questioned by public opinion.
In the afternoon of January 4th, Shanghai local media quoted the Changning District Labor and Security Supervision Team as saying that the labor and security supervision department had investigated the labor and employment situation of Pinduoduo Company, and would check the employment contract and working hours of the company.
At 1:00 am on December 29, 2020, half an hour before he lay down on the street of Urumqi, Runfei shared his 2020 annual netease cloud song list in the circle of friends.
The song list is full of powerful songs. It is not hard to see that the listener is a young, trendy and independent girl. She likes Imagine Dragons’ loud voice and is also fascinated by Lady Gaga’s ever-changing sound.
The last song she sang in the Internet world was in May 2020, when she participated in the “Cloud Choral” activity of her high school Alma mater. The song was “I wish you peace” — Runfei appeared in the last few seconds of the singing video, and the lyrics were:
“Peace to you, oh, peace to you/To you always happy, is my greatest wish.”
(At the request of interviewees, Wang Qi and Wu Wei are aliases)
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