Consumers Boycotted Pinduoduo’s Sponsorship of the Spring Festival Gala – Here’s Why
Pinduoduo (NASDAQ: PDD) is one of China’s largest e-commerce platforms, known for its Xiachen (lower-tier city) marketing strategy, extremely low prices, and its famous use of social group-buying. The company stock surged 295% in 2020, becoming the second largest ecommerce platform in China. And in late December, Colin Huang, the founder and chief executive overtook Alibaba Group Holding’s Jack Ma and Tencent Holdings’ Pony Ma Huateng to become the country’s second-richest person with a current net worth of US$63.1 billion.
Yet at the same time this was happening, a young employee died from overwork and now the company is facing a PR crisis so bad that consumers boycotted its sponsorship of the annual Spring Festival Gala, one of the most-watched TV programs in China. The boycotting was so sever that it has been confirmed that Pinduoduo has pulled out of the Gala.
So what happened?
Mishandling of Employee’s Death From Overwork
At 1:30 am on December 29, a Pinduoduo employee suddenly collapsed while on a work trip in Xinjiang (新疆). After 6 hours of attempted rescue, she passed away. The time that the employee fell to the ground (1:30 am) was the usual time that she finished her work.
The accident was kept silent until January 3, when a user on Maimai (脉脉), a Chinese platform similar to LinkedIn, posted on the platform saying the girl was her friend and asking why there was no official response from Pinduoduo for the past few days. The next day, the page featuring this post was blocked.
People also discovered that on Zhihu (知乎), the official Pinduoduo account had responded to questions about the accident with a cold-hearted response saying that “People at the bottom of society are making a living with their lives. If they want to have better lives, they need to pay for it with their health.”
1 minute after it was posted, Pinduoduo quickly deleted the post and claimed that the screenshot was faked. Well, the official Zhihu account came out and said that the Pinduoduo account was verified and Pinduoduo indeed posted those words. So Pinduoduo responded to Zhihu’s announcement saying that it was posted by its employee’s personal mobile phone and wasn’t approved by the company.
After this incident, people were very angry with Pinduoduo’s cold and irresponsible response.
What made people angrier was a video published by a former employee of Pinduoduo, Weibo @王太虚 (Wang Taixu). In the video, he was saying he got fired because he saw one of his colleagues being carried to an ambulance and he posted the news on the anonymous platform Maimai.
Wang also said that at the Pinduoduo headquarters, employees are required to work for 300 hours every month, and in the department which the woman who died in Xinjiang worked for, which manages the fresh produce business, its employees are required to work for at least 380 hours every month.
Consumers Showing Support and Sympathy
Across China’s internet, people are showing an outpouring of support for the woman that died. Some of them are saying they are so happy to see young people bravely standing out and speaking for themselves, and some are sharing their similar experiences working in some of China’s other major internet giants. In China, employees often need to stay up late until 11pm or even 1 am. Getting off work on time sounds impossible for the majority of them.
This Problem is Not New, and Unlikely to Change Anytime Soon
In fact, this issue is not new, in 2019 China’s 996 work culture (a reference to working from 9AM to 9PM for six days a week) became a buzzed-about topic worldwide after the number one trending GitHub repository was a collection of work grievances against China’s biggest tech companies including Alibaba, Huawei, Bytedance, DJI, and others.
This recent Pinduoduo scandal goes to show that despite the complaints, little has changed. If anything, things became worse this year as consumers were stuck at home due to COVID, and it became even harder to create boundaries between work and personal life.
This Bad PR Will be Hard for Pinduoduo to Get Over
To make matters worse for Pinduoduo’s PR team, Pinduoduo had planned to be a headlining sponsor of this year’s Spring Festival Gala, which is one of the most-watched TV programs in China, it is a CNY tradition for Chinese people and almost every household in China will have the gala playing in the background during family gatherings.
In response to the overwork scandal, people began going online to boycott Pinduoduo’s sponsorship of the Gala and request CCTV to remove them as a sponsor.
This incident has also let loose a whole host of other complaints about the platform. For example, many people are saying they are sick of seeing so many Pinduoduo links in their WeChat Moments or WeChat groups, and that they don’t want to see those anymore.
Unfortunately, we’re not optimistic that this incident will drive any meaningful change, considering the results of past incidents and Pinduoduo’s response to date. But will it have a long term impact on the company? Only time will tell.
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