Chinese e-commerce giant squeezes workers with noncompete agreements

For Chinese tech workers, jobs at e-commerce behemoth PDD Holdings are highly sought after. The pay at the company, a challenger to Alibaba and parent to Temu, is relatively generous and a position there lifts any résumé. The trouble, for some workers, comes after they leave. That is because of noncompete agreements, a tool lawyers say is increasingly being used against rank-and-file workers in China, even as their use wanes in the U.S. Former employees and court data suggest that PDD has enforced such agreements with particular determination to thwart potential rivals. PDD's competitive zeal helped propel its meteoric rise—the…