25-year-old Pan Jie will no longer work in front of this desk.

After being employed at the Shanghai office of PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the world’s leading accounting firms, for just six months, Miss Pan, died from acute meningitis in April last year.

Before her tragic death, she was working overtime for a consecutive three months, and only had three to four hours of sleep each night.

She often complains on her microblog about her constant tiredness and her increasingly poor health, conditions she believed resulted from overwork.

She once wrote "Whenever there’s a chance to take a break, a fever comes."

Death came at last.

Such a tragic incident is not uncommon among white-collar workers in large Chinese cities.

25-year-old young man Hu Xinyu, died from organ failure after overworking for almost one month.

He was once the employee of the Huawei Company.

Shi Hong, the former editor in chief at Tencent, died of cerebral haemorrhaging at the age of 37.

Many say heavy workloads and unhealthy diets have made white-collar workers susceptible to diseases. It seems most employees have forgotten the English saying, if you don’t have your health you don’t have anything.

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