Interestingly, my Chinese friend is also out of town (in Bejing) now. I will ask her when she returns, too. She keeps threatening to register with us, though she hasn't yet.
I tried putting it into Internet translation programs (Chinese to English), and the translation is guolaosi. Perhaps that's one of those words that can't be translated? <said with trepidation!>
I used zhongwen, and I might be doing this wrong, but gùo 過 means "excessively", láo 勞 is "labour", and sǐ is "dead". So if I'm right the word is gùoláosǐ 過勞死. The first and last characters are the same as in the Japanese word, and I wouldn't be surprised if the readings of the three Japanese characters were borrowed from these three Chinese words.
And putting 過勞死 into google translate gives me "karoshi".
I looked around on the web, and it seems that guolaosi is a relatively modern term in China. It's only about a decade old, whereas karoushi goes back to 1969. at least that date is the first time a death from overwork happened. The Japanese are the only country that tracks these kinds of deaths. I cannot speak for the connotations of guolaosi or karoushi in Chinese and Japanese cultures respectively, but the denotated meaning is rather clear.
There were a number of suicides due to working long shifts in some factories in China recently. I wonder if these suicides count as guolaosi.
