There is a post currently doing the rounds of the Chinese forum websites; it’s a series of photos of a dead body lying on the pavement beneath a high rise building. It is accompanied by some text, translated below:
The 37th! Chengdu Huawei male employee dies after jumping from building
February 26, 2008 Chengdu Tianfu Technology Park
From the point of view of **, a new employee of Huawei in Building B7, it must have been a very difficult day. At 13:26, he jumped from the seventh floor to his death. This is the 37th Huawei employee to die. The dead are dead, but why, once again, is it Huawei?
Sina has also picked up the story, and linked it to a 2007 story about another Huawei employee who committed suicide.
The post about the affair linked above seems to be the original report, and at the time of posting (6:30pm) is still being updated by the author with information gleaned from the dead man’s colleagues.
Huawei, China’s most prominent network and telecom technology company, is on the radar of most of the country’s geeks, so it is not surprising that this suicide story has already been copied on to hundreds of forum websites, especially since Huawei has in the past been in the news for employee suicides. From Answers.com:
Huawei has been criticized by some Chinese media and people for its highly competitive work environment. There have been several employee suicide incidents at Huawei since 2000. The most recent one was on July 18th 2007: 26 year old Zhang Rui, graduate of Wuhan University hung himself after worked at Huawei for 60 days. Before the suicide, Zhang Rui had complained to his father few times about the stressed life in Huawei. However, Huawei claimed that Zhang Rui’s work pressure should not have been so detrimental to his health, because he was still under probation when he died and was not allowed to undertake a project independently. Huawei offered also his family 10,000 RMB, even though his death was not covered by the company’s workers compensation policy. Another Huawei employee, Hu Xinyu, died in May 2005 from encephalitis. It is unclear whether the death was caused by the excessive overtime shifts at Huawei.