Workplace or "Campus": Youth Identity Construction and Labor Control in China’s High-Tech Industry

China’s high-tech industry has witnessed rapid growth given the country’s emphasis on technological innovation and digital transformation over the past decades. High-tech giants have embraced new workplace ideals of non-authoritarianism, anti-bureaucracy, and informality, and aspire to construct an image as the utopia of ‘freedom, equality, and openness’ against existing social hierarchies in the workplace. However, Chinese tech workers experience a prevalent ‘996’ overwork norm and a severe age-bounded unemployment crisis. This study examines how such contradictions are formed based on a workplace culture with a metaphor of ‘campus’. Unlike the well-known cultural imaginaries of ‘family’ and ‘religion’ in existing labor scholarship, the ‘campus’ metaphor poses hegemonic control by evoking workers’ spirit and experience of being young. Drawing on 12 months’ participant observation at a high-tech company in Shenzhen (China’s Silicon Valley) and 36 in-depth interviews with its employees, this study finds that the metaphor of ‘campus’ emerged in the daily interactions and work practices of tech workers. This youth-admiring culture effectively disciplined their behaviors by shaping worker’s subjectivities, workplace discourses, and employment norms. This study develops a conceptual framework of ‘doing metaphor’ to explain the processes where employees internalize and reproduce work culture, values, and hierarchies. Findings demonstrate three processes of identity construction: (1) employee as apprentice: workers identify themselves as apprentice in the company; (2) workplace as campus: workers perceive the organizational structure as flat, equal, and open; (3) layoff as graduation: workers view layoffs as a natural end to a periodic life stage. Correspondingly, these cultural processes impose informal labor control on workers by: (1) encouraging competitive self-management; (2) creating an imaginary of equality and cultural fit for youths; (3) justifying precarity and instability of programmers’ occupation. The findings reveal how a workplace culture that promotes belonging, passion, and satisfaction also sustains traditional power relations and social hierarchies.