Gao Guanghui was a 32-year-old software engineer whose life followed a familiar arc of rural mobility and professional aspiration: born in a Henan village in 1993, he moved to Guangdong as a child, worked his way through university and the early years of a tech career, and by his late twenties had been promoted to department manager at Shiyuan, a listed display-technology company. He and his wife saved for a house, paid down a mortgage and planned to start a family. On the morning of 29 November he collapsed at home; emergency teams could not revive him. The official cause was cardiogenic shock and respiratory and cardiac arrest.
The details of Gao’s last months, supplied by his wife and medical notes she later shared, read like a catalogue of modern tech-sector stress. In June 2024 he was transferred into a “startup-like” business-display unit where staff cuts and relentless sales pressure dramatically increased his workload. His base pay was modest, but performance bonuses lifted his monthly take to around RMB19,000 even as he juggled code, customer liaison, recruiting and managing a team.
His wife describes a punishing routine: early morning management calls, back-to-back meetings, late nights and an unspoken cultural expectation not to leave before peers. Colleagues, she found on recordings, discussed being forced to shoulder the responsibilities of dozens with no extra headcount. The company, she says, monitored login times closely and fostered a “no-boundaries, family culture” that blurred the line between office and home.
Medical and procedural questions have followed his death. Shiyuan’s internal memo acknowledged that Gao had never undergone a company health check at its occupational-health center and said it therefore could not know his medical status. A hospital report from June 2024 showed a normal electrocardiogram, but ICU doctors later suggested his symptoms were consistent with sudden cardiac collapse, and offered broad causes—congenital heart disease, viral infection or prolonged high-intensity work—as possibilities.
Shiyuan has offered the family RMB390,000 as a humanitarian payment while denying legal responsibility. Gao’s widow recounts a fraught interaction with the company after his death: belongings returned in damaged condition, some items unaccounted for, and restricted access to company premises when she sought to recover personal effects. Those scenes have become part of the public framing: a young life ended, and then treated as an operational problem to be closed.
The public reaction in China to such episodes is shaped by a long-running debate about “996” and overtime in technology firms—practices that prize output and loyalty over predictable working hours. Regulators, courts and campaigners have at times pushed back, but enforcement is uneven and the economic pressure on firms remains intense. Gao’s case is painful precisely because it sits at the intersection of private grief and systemic patterns: high responsibility paired with limited occupational-health safeguards, strong incentives and informal norms that discourage stepping away.
For other companies, the immediate questions are both reputational and procedural. Firms face rising scrutiny over workplace health monitoring and posthumous treatment of employees and their families. For policymakers, the case underscores gaps in how occupational health checks are mandated, how overtime is recorded and compensated, and how employers should document and mitigate the health risks of sustained high-intensity work.
Gao’s widow has published his story publicly in part to prevent his death from becoming one of many anonymized headlines. She frames it as a warning: that personal health can be subordinated to work and that employers and the state need systems that protect workers beyond rhetoric about culture. Whether this personal tragedy will accelerate any substantive regulatory or corporate changes remains an open question, but it has already prompted conversations about accountability in China’s tech workplaces.
The human cost is immediate and final. For colleagues and family left behind, the arithmetic of mortgages, savings and plans for children has been superseded by grief. For the sector more broadly, the case is a reminder that long-term productivity depends on systems that preserve, not expend, the health of talent.