Ambition and burnout : the “Niuma” generation and the overwork regime in urban China

In contemporary China, overwork has become not merely a condition of employment but a defining feature of white-collar life. Drawing on 85 in-depth interviews with employees in non-state-owned enterprises across China’s major metropolitan cities, this dissertation investigates how ambition collides with exhaustion in China’s professional workplaces and how overwork is sustained through managerial control, embodied harm, and gendered precarity. The first empirical chapter analyzes how managerial domination operates through what I term “workplace PUA” (Pick-Up Artist)-style control. It is a form of mental and emotional manipulation that blends coercive and normative control mechanisms. Managers deploy techniques such as gaslighting, compliance testing, and moralized self-discipline to elicit guilt and self-blame, inducing employees to internalize organizational goals and cultivate employees’ “consent” to overwork even as material rewards decline. This chapter demonstrates how emotional manipulation sustains compliance in professional workplaces. The second empirical chapter, When Success Feels Hollow, explores how overwork becomes embodied harm through two interconnected mechanisms: time poverty and institutionalized exploitation. Time poverty captures how long working hours erode rest, recovery, and social connection, while institutionalized exploitation describes the organizational and cultural pressures that generate guilt, self-doubt, and disillusionment. Together, they reveal that burnout is not merely an individual failure but a structural and embodied outcome of organizational control. The third empirical chapter, Racing Against a Career–Fertility Countdown, examines how women of childbearing age navigate the prospective motherhood penalty, which penalizes women based on reproductive potential rather than actual maternity. I develop the concept of the Career–Fertility Countdown to capture a gendered temporal regime that compresses women’s career advancement and fertility planning into a narrow window of social acceptability. Women respond through strategies such as meticulous fertility timing, public disavowal of motherhood, or strategic gender and identity performance. This chapter reveals how overwork, ageism, and gendered expectations intertwine to produce new forms of precarity. By tracing how overwork is legitimized, internalized, and experienced, this dissertation advances sociological understanding of how labor control extends into the mind and body under digital capitalism. The findings highlight critical concerns about the future of work, health, and gender equality in China’s economic change.