But as China has gotten richer it's only natural that Chinese citizens will want to convert some of their hard earned wealth into more leisure time instead of more physical goods so average hours worked per week will tend to decline.
The same sort of thing happened in America and elsewhere.
I don't see the connection, help me here.
"There's no such things as "human rights standards" for how much you should work per week."
A 40 hour work week isn't (in my view) a "human right" in the way that life, liberty and property are rights. It's an exchange of time/work for money. People can choose to work a lot or work a little depending on how they value their time vs their leisure.
The 40h a week is pretty artificial default that has been imposed on most of the people by business interests. That's how I view it historically at least.
So we might not agree on slippery terms like "basic human rights" but modern phenomena as burnout and work depression are pretty widespread already and can thus serve as an example as to how the current workload standards might be broken.
What's more likely however is that 40h a week seemed more reasonable than the baseline at the time.
Still doesn't make it good for the humans in general though. Time and again studies show humans have no flat productivity rate, and some studies are trying to prove that 40h a week is too much and the people don't have enough productive hours left outside of that to actually tend to family, house cleaning, cooking, leisure hobbies etc.
Past excesses are how we got to current "human rights standards". Also, rationally, good feeling from being tough on those entitled lazies should not be reason to stop discussion about whether such schedule is reasonable.
While you are right that life was difficult, your sense of the past is warped to the point of caricature.
However, the rest of the time was spent with military duty (feudal levy), preparing/preserving food, collecting firewood, takig care of livestock and general homesteading like repairing your mudbrick house.
You still can, but not death in the sense of your target ceasing to breathe, rather the death of everything they've worked for in life being violently ripped out from under them, such as their careers, by the court of public opinion. Still sad when it happens though.
I made that point because someone referred to "human rights" when it comes to working hours. There is just no such thing and there has never been.
The argument that there never has been such a thing is basically arguing that we should stop all progress. That nothing that doesn't already exist should ever be created
Only after developing agriculture do societies start having 12 hours a day of work
Besides, modern times have allowed us to avoid raising children if we don’t want to. We just don’t have to wait until the baby is a fully formed human and born from its mother’s womb to make that decision. In practice it may feel better to do it that way, but the basic effects are the same.
There's no such things as "human rights standards" for how much you should work per week. For most of human history people lived in abject misery and precariousness and in comparison 72 hours a week and most folks having all the comfort of modern city life is not as bad as it sounds like.