For the second and third in our series of short communist responses to common questions about China, we split one common question into two. We are often asked: “Is China a capitalist or a socialist country?” This is possibly the most common and most complicated of the frequently asked questions about China, so we’ll cheat a little bit here and provide a longer answer by splitting it into its two component questions. First, addressed here, is the question: “Is China a capitalist country?” Then, in a forthcoming post, we will address the question: “Is China a socialist country?” In contrast with the first post in the FAQ series, which consisted entirely of responses from our Chinese members and friends, this and subsequent entries incorporate such individual responses into articles collectively authored by both our Chinese and our international members.
As always, we encourage readers to reformat these answers for use across platforms. If you’ve designed pamphlets or infographics using these materials, please send them to us (e-mail: chuangcn@riseup.net) so that we can archive them here and repost on social media!
Money
China is capitalist. It is capitalist both because it is fully integrated in the global capitalist system and because capitalist imperatives have penetrated all the way down to everyday life. The population in China, as elsewhere, depends on the market for survival, either directly or indirectly. In other words: you need money to survive. Since money is the lifeblood of capitalist production (in technical terms, we say that it is the necessary form of appearance of value), this dependence on money for survival is the clearest signal that a population has been incorporated into global capitalism.
But part of the problem you run into with this question is that the basic definitions are often unclear. So, let’s backtrack a bit and start with the fundamentals: Capitalism is a form of society that obscures its own social character, treating relationships between people as purely economic relationships between different things that are bought and sold. In other words, it is a society that pretends not to be a society. At the heart of this system is the requirement of infinite growth. It has always been an international system and it has always needed to both expand its geographic boundaries and to incorporate more and more aspects of human social interaction into the market. Within this society, the survival and prosperity of every individual is fused to the survival of “the economy.” Money is the expression of all this: it is how we calculate “growth,” it is the way that relationships between people are reduced to market transactions, and it is our everyday measurement of how well we can live or if we can afford to live at all.
For most people in China, as elsewhere, the money they need to survive takes the form of wages paid for work. It doesn’t matter if these wages are disguised as “sales” (i.e. for street vendors), “donations” (i.e. for livestreamers) or as some sort of “bonus” or “social insurance payment” (common names for additional wages earned by industrial workers in China). These people are forced to depend on wage income because they have no collective control over production itself, and production is the source of the goods they need to survive and live a full life. Even when unemployed, people in this group (called the proletariat) still need money to survive, so they end up depending on others’ wages (i.e. borrowing from family), going into debt (i.e. depending on loans from the wealthy) or subsisting on meager unemployment or pension payments from the state, which are just second-hand wages (or second-hand profits) since welfare funds are paid for by taxes, including an income tax.
Government of the Rich
For a small share of the global population, the money they use to survive is obtained from profits, which are returns on money invested in some sort of business. This doesn’t just mean casual investment of spare cash. To receive enough to survive on, you must already have a large sum of money to invest. In other words: you have to be rich. In China, this latter group (called the bourgeoisie or simply the capitalist class) is split into two important sub-categories: those “inside the system” (体制内) and those “outside the system” (体制外). In both cases, the “system” is the party-state, which is an organization of the Chinese members of the global capitalist class.
In the party-state, capitalists hold all major decision-making power. At first glance, this might seem different than the “democratic” governments of other countries, even if we recognize that these democracies are, in fact, oligarchies where the rich exert indirect control through political middlemen. But direct rule by the rich is almost universal for countries in the first stages of capitalist development—at least for those that have successfully triggered periods of rapid growth. The first countries called “state capitalist” or even “state socialist” (in the late 19th century) were places like imperial Germany and Japan, where the wealthy had more or less direct control of the state and used it to implement wide-ranging developmental projects and forms of social welfare, often in an effort to undercut opposition from below. This included outright state ownership of key industries, such as railways, as well as the emergence of enormous monopolies that were thoroughly integrated with the state—in some cases even tasked with printing the official currency and running the national bank. Similarly, rapid development in places like South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore in the later 20th century took place under one-party dictatorships that implemented state-led economic plans.
Even the classic cases of capitalist development in “democratic” countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States took place in eras where the political system was entirely populated by the wealthy, whether landed aristocrats in England or the early industrialists and slaveowner plantation elite in the US. These were “democracies” in which the vast majority of the population (women, slaves and men without property) could neither vote nor stand for office. In other words, they were effectively also “party-states” in their own way, even if different factions of the wealthy organized into competing “parties.” In all cases, the state is the government of the wealthy.
China today follows in the same footsteps, but in conditions of even more intense global competition. So it is not surprising that the union between Chinese capitalists and state power is similarly intense. In the Chinese party-state, all upper-level positions (roughly county level and above) are staffed by guanliao (官僚), a term often translated simply as “bureaucrats,” but which actually designates only these higher-level government posts—almost universally held by wealthy individuals who, in any other country, would clearly be seen as capitalists. The guanliao form the official core of the group of capitalists who are “inside the system.” But almost all major capitalists in the country can also be categorized as lying “inside the system,” including those who hold no official bureaucratic post but are nonetheless party members, such as Jack Ma. Similarly, all major companies, including “private” ones, have party members placed in upper management.
One objection that might be raised is that the party can’t be called a capitalist organization, when most party members and most lower-level civil servants (called gongwuyuan – 公务员) are not themselves capitalists. But this is true everywhere. As in any country, the bulk of membership in political parties and state bureaucracies will always be drawn from the proletariat, who are the majority of the population. However, the fact that most registered Democrats and/or state employees in the US are workers hardly makes the Democratic Party a “workers party” helming a “workers’ state.” Just like the Democrats and Republicans, the Chinese Communist Party and the party-state it helms are ruling class institutions, adapted to settle disputes between major capitalists and help keep the economy running smoothly, which mostly means keeping growth rates up, keeping inflation down and suppressing any unrest. Those “inside the system” have privileged access to the resources controlled by other capitalists inside the same system and have some influence in the collective decisions made by the party.
Nor is this a system on the decline. The exact opposite is true, as the past two decades have seen an active attempt to recruit more and more capitalists into the party, visible in the 2002 reform of the party constitution that enabled “entrepreneurs” to join (and gave after-the-fact endorsement to the many party members who had already used their positions to become capitalists in the 1980s and 1990s). Similarly, the wealthy who refused to submit to the leadership of the more powerful capitalists in control of the party or who pursued their own interests in a way that threatened to produce instability for everyone else were targeted in various “anti-corruption” campaigns, often resulting in their imprisonment and execution. The result is that, today, those “outside the system” are mostly smaller capitalists who have not (yet) joined the party, or oppositional larger capitalists who have refused to do so—often because they are able to have one foot in China and one foot overseas.
This is important, however, because it is a reminder that capitalism is global, meaning that the capitalist class is also global. Capitalists in China are only one fraction of this class. Even if they’re able to solve some of their own internal conflicts through the party apparatus—and even this ability is unlikely to last forever—they still face harsh competition from capitalists elsewhere. This competition is often expressed as “geopolitical” conflict or as a “trade war.” In a simpler way, it is already evident in the very existence of multiple, competing nation-states, each overseeing a “national economy,” often riven by its own internal divides between capitalists. At root, though, these are all battles between competing groups within a single ruling class.
State and Nation
Most of the confusion about whether or not China is a capitalist country is to be found in two related errors: the first is the incorrect assumption that individual countries somehow choose economic systems which are then largely confined to those countries, making it possible to speak of “socialist” countries, “capitalist” countries and any number of possible variations; the second is the assumption, already mentioned above, that “the state” and “the market” are two fundamentally separate institutions, and that capitalism is defined by the dominance of the market, whereas “socialism” is defined by the dominance of the state.
Both errors are rooted in a misunderstanding of what the “state” is. In the first error, it is assumed that the nation-state is a natural or inevitable form of human community and that the economy is subordinate to it. It’s easy to imagine, then, that people in a given territory, so long as they agreed, could just reorganize their economy to their liking. They could, for instance, choose some sort of Northern European-style social democracy with free healthcare and lots of investment in education, infrastructure and renewable energy. In this way of thinking, it is only greedy, stupid, or confused people who prevent this from happening.
In imagining the country as a community, though, real conflicts of interest are ignored. What if “bad” people are not what is preventing the “good” choices from being made? What if, instead, many of the bad things in society actually benefit those in control of society? In reality, it’s actually worse than this: the bad things are made necessary for everyone because they’re necessary for “the health of the economy” on which we are all forced to depend. If inflation gets too extreme it means your wage buys less. If growth slows it means it’s harder to find or keep a job. We are all chained to the economy. In wealthy countries these chains are looser. More concessions are always possible. If you’re at the very top of the system, you might even feel as if you aren’t chained to it at all. But as soon as it begins to slide down a cliff, those chains become an undeniable reality. If it sinks, we sink with it.
But the poor sink first. That’s why, as soon as an economic crisis breaks out, the state is mobilized to “restore the health of the economy” by bailing out the rich. Those at the bottom might get some support, but it will always be a fraction of what the wealthy receive. Since the wealthy are the ones in control of production, “rescuing” the economy means that their interests will be prioritized because they have cultivated a situation in which all of our interests are dependent on theirs. This is a clear demonstration that the country is not a “community” of shared interests. It is one territory in a global capitalist system. That territory is mostly owned and controlled by the rich. It is not your country, and it never has been. It is theirs.
The state is the expression of this ownership (but that’s not the same as just saying that the rich “own” or “control” the state). More specifically we can say that, since capitalist society pretends that it is not a society, its unity appears to us as an expanse of separations.[i] The apparent separation of the “political” from the “economic” is what produces the nation-state as we know it today, which is the specifically political form taken by capitalist social relationships. In simple, functional terms, we can think of the state as the way that certain capitalists in certain places negotiate their disputes, forge temporary allegiances against competition from capitalists elsewhere, coordinate to repress uprisings of the poor and attempt to save the economy from its own extremes. In a broader sense, it is also the way that relationships between people appear to be “naturally” regulated by things like lawmaking and citizenship. In an even broader sense, this results in the idea of the “nation” as the “natural” form of human community. But the nation-state did not preexist capitalist society. It evolved within that society because it served a function for it. This isn’t conspiratorial—it’s not a bunch of rich people getting together and scheming about the best ways to trick people—it is instead adaptive, in the evolutionary sense, where features helpful for certain purposes become more important over time and those that serve no function slowly wither away.
Since we are all chained to the economy, we are also chained to the capitalists in control of the economy in the places that we live. This means that there is a real interdependence that lies beneath the myth of the nation-state, since the failure of one territory’s capitalists also means that regular people suffer. This is what is being talked about whenever there is a debate about how to “create jobs” in an area. It’s also why developmental programs led by capitalists in a certain country do, in fact, lift many people in those countries out of abject poverty, even if they do so unevenly. In recent decades, China has repeated the sort of “economic miracle” seen in many other capitalist countries in the past, often using similar methods: the construction of public utilities, national road and rail systems, the (sometimes forced) relocation of the poorest ruralites and the extension of basic education and healthcare.
But this interdependence doesn’t really take the form of a universally shared “national” interest. Instead, it is a complex chain of shifting and competing dependencies, inset within a global hierarchy of social power. On the one hand, it is always inherently international. This is visible in the simple fact that the success of so many factories in China (and therefore the prospects of China’s own capitalists) depends on both investment and consumption demand from wealthier countries. Similarly, capitalists in these wealthy countries benefit from this relationship both in the direct sense of deriving profits from this production, and in an indirect way, since a steady supply of cheap consumer goods for workers in rich countries helps to mute unrest by creating a credit-fueled veneer of prosperity.
On the other hand, these dependencies are also often sub-national, in the sense that certain regions in a country often benefit far more than others. This means that interests can diverge within individual countries as well, since the success of rich coastal cities might not spill over into the poor landlocked regions in the interior, even if these poor areas still benefit in a distant way from the fact that they lie within a “wealthy” country. Similarly, the success of a country’s capitalists is enabled by the exploitation of workers in their own country just as much as workers elsewhere. The accumulation of vast wealth by Chinese capitalists was obviously enabled by the exploitation of Chinese workers, even if plenty of this wealth also got distributed to multinational corporations headquartered in Japan, South Korea, Europe and the US. Even though the workers do ultimately get back some share of this enlarged social wealth, it is only a small fraction of the total. More importantly, they have no control over society’s productive power despite being necessary to production.
One Big Company?
Before concluding, it will be helpful to approach the question one final time from a slightly different angle. Above, we emphasize the lived reality of dependence on money for survival and give some explanation of the way that the capitalist class is structured in China. This explanation is something of an oversimplification, though, because capitalism can actually make use of many different types of labor deployment (some of which, like slavery, might not force people into dependence on a money “wage”) and many different forms of organization among the ruling class (sometimes, for example, a class of non-capitalist or semi-capitalist landed elites is equally important to government). In order to illustrate the flexibility of capitalist production when it comes to questions of government, let’s use simple thought experiment:
Often, China is spoken of as if the government was in complete control of production and the population were brainwashed into obedience. This is absolutely not true in any sense and myths like this have a long, racist history stretching from the “Yellow Peril” narratives of the 19th century through to similarly orientalist portrayals of the country in today’s media. But we can take this extreme distortion of the facts to make a point about the nature of capitalism. Let’s re-imagine the question in these terms: what if China were, in fact, organized as a single large monopoly corporation? What if the state really was in control of all the productive forces? What if these forces weren’t even organized into individual “enterprises” that competed with one another for profit, but had their activity planned by a central planning agency? Again: none of this is true! But let’s imagine. Certainly, you might think, it would no longer be correct to say that China is capitalist, if this were the case.
However, even this non-existent “China Inc.” scenario changes very little. This hypothetical nation-wide monopoly, within which every Chinese citizen would be an employee, would still be a capitalist firm. That’s because, at the end of the day, it would still be competing with other firms on the global market. Its survival would remain dependent on the survival of capitalism as a global system.
Think about it for a moment: there already are large capitalist monopolies—fully “private” companies like Amazon and Walmart—that command quantities of resources and populations of workers comparable to small countries. Inside these companies, there are no markets guiding transactions. Resources are moved between departments according to large-scale plans formulated in corporate headquarters distant from the actual worksites.
But these are hardly “socialist” institutions. Ultimately, their internal plans are geared toward growth, which can only be guaranteed if the company successfully competes against others in the global market. In other words: they’re just forms of corporate accounting. And extensions of corporate accounting to more spheres of the economy is not in any way a challenge to capitalist society. In fact, it is capitalism’s own long-run trend! One of Marx’s most consistent predictions is that the “social scale” of production will increase. The example he most frequently gives is a tendency toward precisely this sort of monopolization. But this does not mean that such monopolies contain a pre-made socialist planning infrastructure in embryo. They are forms of class domination, plain and simple. Marx saw this as an important trend not insofar as monopolies give communists ready-made machinery for coordinating production, but because the increasing scale of production also means that more workers are drawn into interaction with one another across the world in more complex ways, making the social character of production more visible even as it poses difficult strategic questions for any potentially revolutionary movement—evident in the case of global food and energy systems, for example, where immediate destruction would lead to mass starvation and death, while the failure to dismantle such systems in the long term will lead to environmental devastation with even worse results. At every stage in the general increase of the scale of production, the possibility and even necessity of alternate, socialistic methods of coordination become more and more obvious. But, again, such methods are distinct from and opposed to the existing methods of coordination visible in today’s monopolies. This is precisely the reason that Marx saw revolution as a necessity. Corporate accounting and capitalist statecraft never simply evolve into socialism.
One might then suggest that the solution lies in “delinking” the Chinese economy from the global market. At first, it might seem like this fixes the issue: all the planning that was conducted to serve the global market—and which could therefore be thought of as “capitalist” planning, as occurs in existing monopolies—is severed from this market, leaving only the planning apparatus intact. Even if not “socialist,” this planning seems as if it would, at least, cease to serve capitalist imperatives. But this makes about as much sense as arguing that Amazon or Walmart could “delink” themselves from the global economy.
Even if this were a political possibility, there are simple, practical limits that make the proposition absurd: since the bulk of planned activity in these companies is geared toward making profit and serving the market, “delinking” would leave the vast majority of their internal planning mechanisms useless. The entire corporate structure is built around capitalist imperatives such as making a profit and serving the market. Remove them, and the “plan” collapses. Preserve them, and the “plan” will immediately seek to relink to the global economy or, if this is not feasible, to simply fracture and again give birth to capitalist imperatives at the local scale, recreating a market within the “delinked” sphere based on competition between spin-off enterprises or departments within the monopoly (regardless of whether they are “state-owned”).
The same basic problem applies to the prospect of “delinking” the Chinese economy from that of the world. In fact, such a delinking is even less feasible in this case, given the degree to which global production as a whole depends on Chinese industry and, more importantly, the reverse: the degree to which Chinese industry depends on the global market. An enormous portion of production in China is currently geared toward serving the global market, either directly or indirectly. In 2019, China’s total bilateral trade in goods totaled some 4.6 trillion USD (about a third of its GDP that year), meaning that China imported or exported goods roughly equivalent to the entire GDP of a country like Germany. Even if China were a single large monopoly dominated by planning mechanisms, this sort of delinking would be effectively impossible, because a huge portion of that monopoly’s business is serving the international market.
But, of course, China is not a single large monopoly and its economy is not dominated by planning mechanisms. Chinese firms are structured very similarly to firms elsewhere in the world. Growth and profitability are their bottom-line goals, and the entire structure of these corporations is oriented around securing these goals. Given this reality, “delinking” is even more laughable, because it would require thousands of Chinese enterprises to willingly leap into bankruptcy. This is no more likely to occur in China than it would be in any other country in the world.
Summary
Let’s review the basic points: China is a capitalist country. This is evident in the fact that everyone needs money to survive and therefore has to depend on “the economy.” Most of the population is proletarian, which means that they don’t have any control over production and therefore must work for wages to survive. Only the minority of the population who are extremely rich, called the capitalist class, can instead survive off the profit from their investments, which demonstrates their ownership of production. While this dictatorial ownership is the core feature of capitalist rule, nation-states emerge as the political expression of this social power. The state serves as a necessary means for capitalists to coordinate and compete with one another, but it also helps to maintain the baseline conditions for capitalist society to exist in the first place. This includes repression (police, prisons, the military, etc.), the maintenance of a legal system founded on property rights, and the mobilization of public investment (in infrastructure, healthcare, education, etc.), all involving the creation of a myth of shared “national interests” rooted in “national culture.”
In China, the capitalist class rules directly through the party-state. Capitalists hold all the leading positions within the communist party and the government. Similarly, most large capitalists who hold no bureaucratic position are, at minimum, party members. This allows them to be “inside the system,” where they have preferential access to resources (through credit), greater protection from competition with capitalists in other countries (through tariffs and subsidies) and a seat at the table for all the major decisions (through the party infrastructure). Those left “outside the system” are mostly smaller capitalists who have not yet joined the party, rebel capitalists who refuse to submit to the others and/or capitalists more aligned with foreign interests. In reality, the party infrastructure is messy and often violent, since capitalists have competing interests. But even if it were perfectly coordinated and coordinated, enrolling all Chinese capitalists as members, this would still only represent one fraction of the global capitalist class in competition with others.
[i] This idea of “unity in separation” is central to the communist critique of capitalist society. It’s often used to describe the way that most of us are part of the same class (the proletariat) and subject to very similar fundamental conditions of life (we need to make money to survive), but at the same time we can’t really experience this basic unity without first confronting the ways that we are clearly different, often expressed in terms of identity. The liberal viewpoint emphasizes this difference and takes identity as its starting point, denying any underlying unity. What appears to us as debates between “liberals” and “conservatives” are mostly debates about how these identities are weighted and organized within society. Often, “Marxism” is portrayed as being a “class reductionist” viewpoint. In this caricature, communists just want people to forget about their real differences, recognize the underlying unity that exists in those fundamental conditions of life, and work together. But this is a strawman—a weak version of an opposing argument that someone invents just so that they can easily tear it down. The real communist position is to emphasize “unity in separation,” recognizing the reality of both that really-existing unity and the many separations of circumstance and identity that divide us. In fact, the two are interdependent. Separation is the form that unity takes under capitalism.
Below is a translation of “China: Neijuan” from issue #107 (spring 2021) of the German magazine Wildcat – fourth in their series on trends and struggles in China since 2018, the second and third installments of which we published here as “Winter is Coming” and “Trade War or Redistribution of Wealth?” This translation is directly reposted from Wildcat without any revision, except changing the title to the standard English rendering of the Chinese term neijuan (内卷) as “involution.”
We repost this article because it contains many insights into how things have been changing on the ground in China over the past year. It musters a multitude of data, original calculations, first-hand observations and analysis of a broad range of topics from Hong Kong to Xinjiang, Africa, Sino-US relations, espionage, poverty, gender and the demographic crisis. We hope this may help combat the recent rise, in international left circles, of pro-CCP “tankie” positions on such issues.
But this article differs from the previous two Wildcat pieces in its more despondent attitude toward the possibilities for the emergence of widespread linkages between workers in China and elsewhere. This reflects the European author’s own frustrated experience in trying to initiate such connections over the course of several years living in southern China. Specifically, the article remarks on rising xenophobia and nationalism among different sectors of society—a trend that has only escalated in the year since the COVID-19 pandemic got under control domestically last spring—facts which have made any organizing difficult and have posed particular challenges for anyone seeking to cultivate a true internationalist perspective. The article also outlines an account of China’s economic and social “involution” consistent with the recently popular Chinese discourse of neijuan—used to describe the widespread sense that no amount of hard work will result in happiness or significant improvement of one’s conditions. (Our forthcoming blog piece on suicidal protests will explore one disturbing symptom of this “involution.”)
We too have lost hope at times, and the present moment does feel like one of the most hopeless periods in recent memory, especially with regard to the possibility of a mass movement emerging. China today seems to stand in striking contrast to the dramatic mobilizations that have illuminated the world over the past decade. However, we caution readers to put such sentiments into a broader historical perspective. Many of the great insurrections of history, from the 1870s through the 1960s all the way up to the Arab Spring and the George Floyd Uprising, emerged from conditions where an economic boom was running out of steam and simmering discontent seemed to have been skillfully channeled into some form of conservativism, nationalism or racism. Those who witnessed such explosions often described how shocked they were that people could transform so radically in such a short period of time. Even in China itself, such rapid shifts are not unprecedented if we extend our horizon by just a few decades. Surrendering to the cynicism of our era is tempting. But hope hides in the shadows of even the worst repression.
In addition to this divergence in tone, there is also an important difference between our own economic analysis and the framework used in this piece. This framework appears to be drawn largely from “balance sheet” accounts of crisis, as can be found in the work of authors like Michael Pettis. Such accounts draw from classical Hobsonian theories of imperialism, which prefigure the later “Keynesian” emphasis on the lack of effective demand as the cause of crisis, and extend this logic to explain trade wars, imperial conflicts and even long-run “secular stagnation” itself, arguing that such phenomena are caused by domestic inequality and the diminishing income of “consumers.” The implication is that a “rebalancing” of trade will lead to a reduction of inequality, rising consumption and increased prosperity for all. This position has been critiqued elsewhere, such as in this piece by Aaron Benanav. Dismantling such positions is important, because it also remains the basic ideological framework used by the Chinese state in its own industrial policy. For decades, the state has been posing its own goals in the same terms, emphasizing the need to cultivate domestic consumption, to reduce reliance on exports and US financial assets (i.e. “rebalance” trade) and to funnel money into R&D to assist domestic industry in advancing up the “value chain.” In contrast to such accounts, we argue that none of these policies, even if successful, would reduce conflict, crisis, inequality or the imperial inequities of the global economy. In fact, we argue that such measures will only worsen global industrial overcapacity, intensify competition, induce further imperial expansions, and even then ultimately prove unable to truly diminish relative stagnation and the growing “surplus” conditions of labor in China itself, epitomized by the intense exploitation of gig workers (leading to several strikes and resultant repression over this last year, documented in our translations here and here), rising informality and the discourse on neijuan documented below. This case will be made in more detail in the forthcoming third installment of our economichistory.
—Chuang
China: Neijuan 内卷
The word ‘Neijuan’ is composed of the characters for ‘inside’ and ‘roll’ or ‘to roll’ and is intuitively understood as something like ‘turning inwards.’ It can be translated as ‘retreat’ or ‘involution’. It means stagnation or stasis due to loss of friction or a process that binds its participants without benefiting them. Involution also means the opposite of evolution.
Neijuan is fashionable right now, like Sang culture a few years ago, or currently (Hunshui)Moyu (‘fishing in muddy waters’, see below). Originally used to describe a self-reinforcing process in agrarian societies that prevents them from progressing, ’Neijuan’ has now become the term that the metropolitan Chinese use to describe the ills of their modern lives, their sense of frantically treading water in a hyper-competitive society. Intense competition with low chances of success, be it in high school exams, on the job (or marriage!) market, or when working mad overtime. Everyone is afraid of missing the last bus – and yet knows that it has already left. Johannes Agnoli used the concept of involution to describe the “regression of democratic states, parties, theories into pre- or anti-democratic forms.”
If you want to read more about Neijuan / Involution – please do: Wang Qianni, Ge Shifan: ‘How One Obscure Word Captures Urban China’s Unhappiness’, www.sixthtone.com, 4th of November 2020.
Due to the length of the text, we follow the bad Anglo-Saxon tradition of putting an abstract ahead:
The strike wave of 2010 and the struggles against factory closures happened a long time ago. For the last few years, the China Labour Bulletin records a marked decline in labour struggles, with a low point in 2020. While there have been protests by construction workers, parcel delivery workers, food delivery workers, and still some against factory closures, the protests have remained very modest relative to the sharp drop in incomes, layoffs, widespread wage arrears, and the harshness and irrationality of the lockdowns. Politically, the CCP was able to skilfully use Corona, and the massive criticism of the first lockdown has since died down. There is widespread fundamental support for and defense of the government and public figures against criticism. Even many leftists and ‘critical thinkers’ ultimately assume that the state or state representatives actually mean well. However, it would be completely wrong to explain authoritarian structures as a result of ‘brainwashing’ or East Asian characteristics such as Confucianism.
Why didn’t the Chinese government use the chaos under Trump for creating new alliances and to increase its own international standing? Why has it achieved rather the opposite effect by annexing Hong Kong, expanding forced labour and re-education camps in Xinjiang, enforcing border closures, engendering nationalism and border skirmishes with India, initiating a trade war with Australia, in addition to kidnapping and other forms of Rambo-type diplomacy? In Wildcat 104, we had explained the state’s willingness to escalate was to form a blockade within China, where growing prosperity and continued CCP rule no longer ran in parallel. The strikes of the 2000s had shown that increasing industrialization could also lead to increasing workers’ power. The phase of development of capitalist industrialized countries usually called ‘Fordism’ managed to make class struggle the engine of development through growing private consumption and trade union rights – until workers’ struggles from 1969 onwards plunged capitalist accumulation into crisis. The CCP studied both this context and the demise of the Soviet Union and determined to avoid this fate. That is why the system switched to authoritarian rule. This switch happened, as is customary in China, in the form of factional struggle when the ‘paramount leader’ Xi Jinping came to power. Since then, state economic policy has attempted to stimulate the economy without increasing the disposable income of the working class. This exacerbates social inequality and entrenches the ‘Great Social Divide’. China is falling into the ‘middle income trap’ precisely because class struggles are successfully suppressed as a transformative force. China will not pull the world economy out of the crisis – rather the opposite.
Currently, the CCP seems firmly in the saddle, but time is running against it. That is precisely why it is fuelling nationalism and foreign policy adventurism. How then is international solidarity possible? How can it survive the current phase without siding with one of the major geopolitical adversaries, and instead stick to a class perspective? To find answers, the international left must stop looking at things through anti-imperialist and culturalist lenses and sharpen its gaze on Chinese class society.
My own situation
In South China, where I live, the Corona crisis has made contradictions more visible to me; it raised questions and caused conflicts to erupt. Since the Wuhan lockdown in January 2020, I have had to repeatedly rethink my political perspective on the world around me. This included many emotions that I now find difficult to keep out of a factual observation. Therefore, I will start with my observations. I make no claim to their general validity.
In the beginning, my friends here compared Covid-19 to the 2003 SARS epidemic, which had a fatality rate of nearly ten percent per case in China and Hong Kong. The initial cover-up from the authorities, general uncertainty and lack of information did the rest. Like most here, I was very scared and hardly dared to leave the house. In the first few weeks, there was a lot of lively online dissent and criticism of the CCP and the government. This made me feel more optimistic that the lies and blatant lockdown measures would not be accepted without dissent. But the more the epidemic became a global pandemic, the quieter and smaller the criticism became. This was based not only on censorship and the relative success in controlling the disease in the country, but also on the widespread spread of conspiracy ideologies that either the US army, Italy, India or frozen meat were the original sources of the Corona virus.
I did not go to China for a lucrative expat job with a lavish expatriate allowance, nor as an academic. I came on my own, had saved money so that I wouldn’t have to work at first and would have time to learn Chinese, and wanted to get to know life, society and working class reality in China. China’s rise to become the workbench of the world represents one of the most influential changes in recent decades, and I wanted to see that up close and make contacts.
At the beginning, a lot of time was spent not only on learning characters, but also on recognizing and discarding unconscious prejudices. My guiding principle was that cultures which differed to the one in which I had grown up do not arise from any inherent “otherness” but are a consequence of geographical distance, and the consequent lack of social exchange.
In contrast to the widespread idea in the West of the passive, acquiescent Chinese workers, who were primarily victims, what stood out for me was the high rate of conflict and wildcat strikes, non-conformity and everyday anarchism compared to Europe. Although at the time I thought that the image of the ‘iSlave’ in the Foxconn factory was portraying workers too much as victims, I nevertheless joined symbolic protests in front of offices of international corporations that profit from sleazy and dangerous exploitation in China. International solidarity with Chinese workers and their struggles seemed natural to me – despite having never talked to them about it. Even back then, in the early 2010s, it was almost impossible for even a fluent Chinese-speaking foreigner to talk to Chinese workers during a strike. In the meantime, repression, epidemic and xenophobia have further reduced my opportunities for contact with workers. A year or two ago, I was able to visit labour NGOs regularly, teach English once a week in a working-class neighbourhood, and talk much more easily on the street with truck drivers or warehouse workers.
At the time, I wondered what international solidarity could look like, but took it for granted that it was right, important and wanted. In recent years, I’ve had to realize that it’s much harder – you usually run into the wrong people first; and the hopes and desires you project onto others are often the entrance to a maze. Since my encounters with nationalism, chauvinism, xenophobia, and the lack of criticism and resistance, I have developed fundamental doubts about the possibility and usefulness of international solidarity projects that don’t consider the methods they use and the people they work with.
My workplace: collective blockade due to competition
I have been working in an international IT company for several years. One good thing about the job is that unlike in almost all Chinese IT companies, there is rarely any overtime. My colleagues are all Chinese – except for one Frenchman in another city. They belong to the urban middle class, but many without local hukou (see below for more details!). I have no special role as a foreigner, my employment contract and my responsibilities are the same as those of my Chinese colleagues. There is no language barrier because basically everything is discussed in Chinese, which I now speak reasonably fluently.
Racist prejudices and derogatory remarks about colleagues in India are common among Chinese team leaders. For me, it is also disconcerting that I cannot find the slightest movement of solidarity among colleagues. Everyone dances to the boss’s tune, no one voices criticism or even rejection, and there is no discussion of any kind at work meetings. Resistance is expressed silently at best: people slow down when the boss isn’t looking. But everyone is isolated. Most wouldn’t think of even winking to their fellow worker in solidarity. Even in informal conversations, a critical attitude is almost never even hinted at – at least to me – and I hardly ever get a reaction to ironic remarks.
In contrast, I regularly see dissent, expressions of opinion and defensiveness from team leaders and managers. If the boss comes up with modernization programs, the lower managers dilly-dally and stonewall, they water down the programs and explanations are put forward as to why they are unsuitable. They pass the bucket. These mechanisms are very pronounced. My French colleague says he has not experienced such a “kindergarten” in any other country for fifteen years. With this (quite successful) defence against modernization – even for changes that could reduce their own work stress! – team leaders and lower managers defend their privileges and their power of command, often with a good dose of arrogance and by turning against each other. Knowledge is monopolized in order to increase one’s own position. All of this forms an almost impenetrable wall for the department head.
Unfortunately, the colleagues at the bottom seem to have very little confidence in themselves and almost never voice concerns or objections. They are indifferent to issues of work organization. It seems like an act of mercy every time one gets an important piece of information, or even if two or three days of vacation are approved!
Management like in the classroom
In the last two months, two deaths related to overwork and overtime at online retailer Pindoudou have revived the debate about 996 (working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. 6 days a week) and (unpaid) overtime has been revived. When I asked why there was so little collective resistance if everyone was complaining about the pressure to do overtime, a friend replied that it was due to a lack of trust. She herself has worked as a graphic designer in five different companies over the past few years and has never lasted longer than a year anywhere. Everywhere, she says, the bosses were anxious for the employees to distrust each other. As soon as she became friends with an office colleague and was able to work well together, the bosses became suspicious and set her as far apart as possible. “Just like school!” For the boss, control is more important than productivity. Because if he loses control, his authority suffers; low employee productivity, on the other hand, leads to overtime and low wages for them, not for the boss.
Another acquaintance whose friend had worked at Pindoudou explained the willingness to work 300 or more hours a month with the high starting salaries at Pindoudou. Young college graduates try to do crazy overtime for a few years with the hope of saving up and buying a home. Most of them actually leave after one, two or three years. There is a lot of distrust among colleagues, he says, and everyone fears being ratted out immediately if they suggest refusing to work overtime together. My question was met with understanding by others – and at the same time was seen as an indication of me being an outsider, because within the tread-mill no one apparently even thinks about refusing overtime as a team.
Against individual forms of working slow or other unwanted behaviour, schools, like factories and offices, now use all sorts of monitoring technology such as facial recognition, seat cushions with sensors, and the like, to automatically detect (and punish) ‘misbehaviour’ such as daydreaming, resting on the table, or going to the bathroom a few seconds too long. 1 This justifies pay deductions and trains behaviour geared toward avoidance of mistakes, criticism, and especially punishment. Everyone keeps quiet and no one actively steps forward with new ideas and solutions either. Pointing out gaps in knowledge and small mistakes in others is associated here with marking superiority and authority to a degree that I wasn’t used to before – and unfortunately extremely common among men.
As long as bosses insist on the exploitation of absolute surplus value, i.e., on long working days, colleagues will continue to dawdle and put the brakes on modernization. If individual bosses stop insisting on long workdays and hard deadlines, then everyone feels encouraged to slow down even more. Under these conditions, it’s just as hard for me to imagine the bosses pushing through significant productivity increases as it is for my colleagues to collectively force the shortening of long workdays. How could the team collectively become aware of the fact that the boss depends on us and that we basically already have all the knowledge to implement the job, and therefore can influence the organization of work and the setting of deadlines?
These examples all concerned well-educated office workers. Two years ago, I was still hopeful that the 996 complaints would contribute to a rethinking of the work culture here, because the IT people have certain leverage that they could use. But the leverage is not their technical training or their place in the production chain, the leverage can only be in solidarity by doing it together; as individuals they are as interchangeable as a worker on an assembly line. But while the latter have managed a whole series of strikes, the former don’t get anything done at all!
Racism in everyday life
I have lost count of my own encounters with racism. Several times, as a foreigner, I was denied access to neighbourhoods and transportation, I was told that foreigners could not handle the pandemic responsibly, were unreasonable, and did not wear masks. I had hotel reservations cancelled at the last minute, I was yelled at and threatened, I was told to my face that incoming foreigners, as opposed to returning Chinese, would carry the virus, etc. The special attention shown to me as a white European can turn into rejection and discrimination in the next moment. The same person who just praised my Chinese can – for example because he has ‘authority and responsibility’ as a gatekeeper – apply racial profiling and drive away ‘the foreigner’ using obscure excuses. Racial profiling is taken for granted in the eyes of the vast majority and is built into facial recognition software by Alibaba, for example. Racist portrayals on television are virtually the norm.
Friends published a small report of mine online about racist discrimination in Chinese, which received attention and approval in my close circle of acquaintances. Outside this narrow circle, I either encounter denial (I’m just misunderstanding something), or what-about-ism (in other countries there would also be racism), or I am told that Chinese are even worse to each other than they are to foreigners. In fact, discrimination against Chinese with slightly darker skin or from poorer parts of the country is widespread. Construction workers, for example, can be seen from afar by their stocky stature and sunburned bodies, as they work in construction and come from poor and malnourished parts of the country. They erect the multi-million-dollar residential and office towers – and earn not much more than the minimum wage. Their work crews are barracked in containers and have no contact with urban society. They have long workdays and hardly any days off, wash their clothes by hand in vats in front of the housing container, and I have never seen anyone in construction wearing safety shoes or a welder wearing welding goggles. Even during the pandemic, when most hotels were empty, they were not paid for even the cheapest hotel rooms.
Compared to the stigmatization and exclusion of construction workers, my own encounters with xenophobia are almost trifles.
All three of these typical defences people used to relativise the problem show a lack of confrontation with racism and an absence of universalist values. In the US and elsewhere, people take to the streets against racism. In China, ‘leftist’ students made a documentary in April 2020 about the eviction of Africans in Guangzhou by landlords and authorities, which ends by insinuating that non-Chinese should better understand Chinese culture and language! 2
Three everyday observations
In 2017, informal film screenings and discussions in cafés were moderated, but the people who did the moderation were pretty openly and relaxed and didn’t seem to have a particular sense of mission. Today, moderators act like authoritarian village schoolteachers as they ‘explain’ a film they know no more about than anyone else present. They give moralizing lectures and do not allow free discussion, but comment on every contribution from the floor. The increasing authoritarianism does not even stop at small, quasi-private and ‘leftist’ circles.
In December, uniformed officers systematically forced passengers at the main train station and in the subway to install a cell phone app ‘against online fraud’ without giving any explanation. With such a spy app on the cell phone, insights into the user’s life can be gained that are comparable to a ten-hour police interrogation. We have not been able to observe any protests or outrage.
An acquaintance with a university degree, who had worked for some time in an NGO for environmental protection, became pregnant unintentionally and decided to have a child and get married. Since then, she has been living with her in-laws in a city of about a million people and already has a second child. Her husband works about an hour’s drive away and only visits her every week or two. She can’t move in with him because he has an eight-year-old sister whose child-rearing duties have largely been assigned to her. When cooking, the eight-year-old calls her mother who had left the house for errands to give her daughter-in-law minute cooking instructions over the phone. Marriage still serves to appropriate female labour. Through marriage, the woman becomes part of the man’s family and subject to the mother-in-law’s command. The social hierarchy in businesses, administration and kinship relations is still strongly based on the principle of seniority, which is embellished with meritocracy, a monopoly on knowledge and all kinds of honours. Elders measure their power and position by how many others they can give orders to. Under what conditions do the young and highly qualified decide to go against the hierarchy? And when do they comply?
How propaganda works
In addition to the corporate culture, state propaganda is also having an effect. The CCP basically propagates Chinese exceptionalism: Chinese-style socialism, Chinese culture, medicine, history, Chinese food, Chinese rule of law, and so on. Everything melts down to the formula that China is special. Therefore, non-Chinese could not judge China and non-Chinese values cannot be applied to China (but other countries are very much supposed to “learn from China”!). Imperialism, which all left and right Maoists and nationalists reject, is defined as the imperialism of whites; no matter how China acts in Central Asia, Africa, or elsewhere, it cannot be imperialist per se.
The accusation of double standards against the West is correct; but it becomes absurd once we see it against the background of the CCP’s rejection of universalist values as ‘western’. For, according to the CCP, there cannot exist a uniform morality at all. 3The twelve core values of Chinese socialism of the Xi era include democracy, freedom, and the rule of law (rule of law, but without separation of powers, so rather rule by law). Many believe that China is democratic. This may be helpful when trying to disarm democracy propaganda from abroad, but it is easily attacked: In my Chinese class four years ago, everyone laughed when the teacher claimed that China was democratic.
The CCP’s greatest propaganda success is not the ‘erasing’ of historical events from collective memory, e.g., the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Massacre, but the fact that most young people have lost their curiosity. Even those with access to VPNs (virtual private networks) feel little curiosity to find out what they are actually being deprived of. A recent study in the journal Political Behaviour explains very well the social mechanism behind this: people know that everything is censored and stream-lined according to official propaganda and don’t believe the stupid stuff themselves, but they think that their fellow human beings believe it. Propaganda works because the individual then keeps his or her mouth shut in order not to get into the line of fire – and thus in turn suggests to the others that they believe the propaganda. 4
The Power of the Party
The People’s Republic of China has been described as a “cryptocracy.” This is because the main decision-makers and their internal conflicts remain obscure. A circle of extremely powerful and wealthy oligarch families, often like Xi Jinping ‘princelings’ (descendants of the old guard), holds the reins. They base their power on the military (Xi’s most important title is chairman of the Military Commission), the party and state bureaucracies, the security apparatus, state-owned enterprises, the Communist Youth League (Hu Jintao’s pole of power), and informal power centres such as the Shanghai Gang (Jiang Zemin’s pole of power). All large and many medium-sized private enterprises are directly or indirectly caught up in the power elite’s web of relationships in the party, state, banks and state-owned enterprises. In early November and at the last minute, the regime halted the initial public offering (IPO) on the stock-market of Ant Financial, the banking arm of Alibaba. Ant has risen to become the world’s largest money bank by brokering consumer loans without being subject to banking regulation. Because such online loans now account for about 20 percent of GDP, the risk must be contained through tighter regulation and tech companies put on a shorter leash. As things progressed, it turned out that Xi Jinping’s opponents in the power apparatus would also have benefited from the IPO – economic policy also continues to serve the factional struggle, or vice versa.
The state and state administration are not a monolithic block, however. The higher authorities set the direction, while the lower ones must put things into practice and have a relatively large amount of leeway for decision-making and interpretation. They are evaluated against KPIs (key performance indicators) such as GDP growth. Therefore, local and provincial governments tend to favour the short-term achievement of predefined KPIs and neglect sustainable but less spectacular developments.
A large share of taxes flows to the central government, and local governments lack revenue sources. They privatize communal land and borrow from shadow banks to pump money into the local economy in order to meet the targets set for them. In doing so, they often overlook environmental regulations imposed by the central government. Minimum wages, on the other hand, are set locally by city governments….
In education and vocational schools, the situation is similar: The central government wants to raise the educational level of workers, but does not provide local governments with sufficient funds for vocational schools. The latter falsify reports on schools, outsource to private providers (which leads to poor teaching) and hire out students in their third year of training to Foxconn or other companies!
On July 1, 2021, CCP China officially celebrates its centennial. Its representatives are everywhere, in every pore of society. Every state-owned enterprise and all large and many small private – including foreign – enterprises have committees or Party union representatives. Every university, every school has committees, and for every student there is a political overseer responsible for punishing inappropriate behaviour. All streets and housing complexes are part of a grid, and for each grid there is a person in charge who reports to the party bureaucracy.
Most ordinary members probably join the party out of family tradition, career awareness, or by invitation offered to the best students. They tend to be among the better-off, more patriotic, and more conservative in their respective environments without necessarily being nationalists. For several years now, party members and employees in government and state-owned enterprises have been forced to watch propaganda films and solve small exam questions every day via the app Xue Xi, Qiangguo (Study Xi, Strengthen the Country). More recently, ordinary students in nursing, for example, have also been required to listen to Xi’s speeches for fifteen minutes a day via the app.
The central government often controls society with campaigns like under Mao (“Let 100 flowers bloom,” “The Great Leap Forward,” etc.). At the beginning of the pandemic, the entire country and every village was called to lockdown. Such campaigns are effective (targets are met) but very inefficient (large waste of resources). Incidentally, but not surprisingly, there has never been a national campaign to raise wages, reduce working hours, improve working conditions.
Is China once again pulling the global economy out of the crisis?
With growth of more than two percent, China is the only major economy that did not shrink in 2020. However, the economic growth figures have been tweaked to look better than they actually are; they mask debts and unproductive large-scale projects. The situation regarding the Corona pandemic is also not as clear as officially claimed. New infections are usually responded to with mass tests and local lockdowns, which can include curfews for 22 million people in Hebei, as in Wuhan last year, as in early January 2021. And the current entry bans on most foreigners – and many Chinese, too! – show that everything is far from back to normal. The fact that the WHO drags their feet when it comes to epidemiological causal research also suggests that much remains to be done.
According to a study published in the BMJ on February 24, 2021, excess mortality in Wuhan between the end of January and February 12 was about 5000 deaths. This suggests that the infection outbreak in Wuhan started much earlier and was much more massive than officially stated. Deducting from the excess mortality, there are about 100-250,000 infections that must have occurred before the official lockdown on January 23. Thus, the situation in local hospitals was likely already dramatic in early/mid-January. And despite the relative success of the measures that began thereafter, in retrospect one must not forget the harshness and arbitrariness of the lockdowns. 5
China’s stimulus program during the Corona crisis was small compared to that of other developed countries and compared to that in the 2008/9 crisis. Growth occurred particularly in the construction industry and exports. Foreign iron ore exporters are benefiting from the construction boom, and German ‘premium car makers’ are enjoying the fact that luxury consumption is estimated to have increased by almost 50 percent year-on-year. China is now home to more US-Dollar billionaires than the USA and India combined. But private consumption fell by about five percent. The slump in private purchasing power and, in particular, the increased foreign trade surplus suggest that this time China is not once again emerging as the engine of global demand, but on the contrary is having its own upswing financed from abroad. For this upswing has been bought with debt: Total debt rose rapidly by about 25 percent of GDP and now stands at 279 or 335 percent of GDP, depending on the calculation. Private debt has grown from 55 percent to 62 percent of GDP in 2020, or to an extremely high 150 percent of total annual disposable income. And the economic recovery has exacerbated huge social and economic inequalities. The vast majority of migrant workers, as well as many urban workers, have lost one or more months of income due to lockdowns, lost overtime, and cancellation of allowances.
Doubts about actual growth
According to official forecasts, per capita GDP in China will reach $13,000 in about three years; and in eight to ten years, GDP is expected to be nominally larger than that of the United States.
In light of this, Premier Li Keqiang’s statement in May that 600 million Chinese live on 1000 RMB (about €125) or less per month was a slap in the face. This sparked a lively debate among my colleagues as well, with many refusing to believe that China was so poor. Caixin has confirmed Li’s statement based on research from Beijing Normal University and the National Bureau of Statistics. According to the report, 600 million were living on a monthly disposable income of RMB 1090 or less at the end of 2019. According to Caixin, the poorest households typically live in rural areas, have an average of one minor child and one member over 60 years old. The median per capita disposable income is about 1300 RMB (165 euros). China’s ‘middle class’ (defined as per capita income above 2000 RMB = 252 euros), thus consists of 250 million and not 400 million people as officially claimed.
Based on these figures, if we try to estimate the total amount available for private consumption each year and put it in relation to the official GDP of 2019, we get a share of private consumption in GDP of 22-28 percent. This would not only be historically unique, it would also probably be simply impossible (officially it is about 38 percent). In other words, it can be estimated from Li’s statement that the real GDP can only be about 65-80 percent of the official figure of RMB 99 trillion. A comparison with figures on income and income inequality by Piketty leads to a similar result considering the high savings rate and interest service. Doubts about the actual level of GDP are not new, and the figure tinkering on the part of provincial governments is well known. My calculation serves only as a conservative estimate, but if the growth of the last ten years had been productive, incomes would have to be much higher than Li indicates. But if his figures are correct, the debt burden as a percentage of GDP is also much higher than indicated above.
Michael Pettis points out that Chinese GDP should be understood as an input (!) measure used to determine how much economic activity provincial governments should generate. The CCP sets growth targets. Most of the GDP is channelled into infrastructure, propaganda, and the like, according to its interests. This public infrastructure was largely built for GDP growth and has limited utility (empty bridges, underutilized high-speed rail lines…). Growth is generated with debt-financed prestige projects that de facto increase social wealth hardly at all. Pettis estimates the actual annual growth at about two to three percent.
Li’s income figures mean not only that 600 million Chinese live on less than 125 euros a month, but also that a considerable part of the economic growth of the last ten years has not taken place. It also follows that future growth will be correspondingly lower and will slow down even further due to an ageing population, debt, etc. The chimera of rapid growth could then not be maintained for much longer, and overtaking the USA would only be possible if the USA economy collapses (which is also what Chinese propaganda keeps alluding to). In other words, time is running against Beijing. 6
Regarding my own calculations: The report gives the number of people for specific income groups, e.g., that 202 million receive a monthly disposable income p.p. of RMB 500-800. I estimated averages and added them up in a weighted way to approximate the total sum of all household disposable incomes. However, the latter cannot be meaningfully determined because the incomes of the richest percentile are not precisely known. For private consumption, however, this percentile does not play a decisive role; they cannot eat up all the money at all, so I cap above a certain sum. I reduce the total sum by a savings rate of about 20-35% and the interest service of about 10-15% and increase this by the annual new debt of 9%. to Piketty see: World Inequality Database, www.wid.world Michael Pettis: What Is GDP in China? Jan. 16, 2019 [https://carnegieendowment.org/chinafinancialmarkets/78138]
The Great Divide
There are political reasons for the high levels of social inequality in China. In the Mao era, the CCP divided the growing working class into privileged state employees and precarious workers. By the time some 50 million were laid off from state-owned enterprises in the late 1990s, a new local stratum of privileged homeowners and bosses had already emerged in the coastal regions. This was because the 1990s had seen the largest privatization of all time: that of China’s housing market.
Social groups in China can be described in terms of their proximity to or distance from centres of power. Access to social resources and power depends on relationships (party cadres), local privileges (hukou, home ownership) and proximity to wealthy metropolitan areas. Cities are officially divided into grades from 1 to 4 according to size, economic performance, and political importance; Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou are 1st tier cities, other provincial capitals are counted as 2nd tier, important other cities are 3rd tier, and so on. 7. Power and wealth are concentrated in 1st and 2nd tier cities, where the upper class (state elite, billionaires) and a rich layer of administrative officials, real estate owners, entrepreneurs, managers comparable to industrialized countries are located… But professors, doctors, teachers, (non-tenured) employees in state-owned enterprises, as well as the local working class are each also better off here than in other cities. Cities of the 4th tier and below are part of the periphery; cities of the 3rd tier can be counted partly in the first, partly in the second group. Again, there is a local upper and middle class that owns real estate or businesses and exploits local labour at low wages. In the four decades since the ‘opening’, the working class has grown enormously. Hundreds of millions of migrant workers came to the coastal industrial metropolises from the countryside or from cities without sufficient earning opportunities. It is they who have carried Mandarin Chinese to all parts of the country and made it the universal lingua franca (while local elites in Guangdong, for example, continue to cling to their dialect of Cantonese as a mark of distinction). And only they have a material interest in dismantling the hukou system with its local privileges, which denies them (about 40 percent of the workforce) and their children access to the public health and education system at the place of work and is diametrically opposed to egalitarian (equal pay) and universalist (equal access to justice) values. The majority of migrant workers are not given employment contracts at all. Where labour contracts do exist, they are often invalid or virtually unenforceable in the event of a dispute. Your employment contract is worth nothing without the favour of the boss, and neither is your rental contract. There are no universally applicable norms and laws to rely on instead of the word of your betters.
Because of these multiple divisions, it is not at all easy to describe the Chinese industrial working class, at least sociologically; here are just a few bullet points to make the picture clearer.
In the Pearl River Delta young workers’ wages in simple factories start at 3000 RMB (just under 400 euro), which then goes up to 4-5000 or even 6000. Car workers in the ultra-modern BMW factory in Shenyang also earn only 4500, because the factory is situated in the rust belt. (For comparison: social workers with a bachelor’s degree in the Pearl River Delta sometimes earn starting salaries of only 4-5000; programmers with a bachelor’s degree in a German IT company were also hired for 4500 in 2017). Top wages are paid by VW in Foshan, where one earns about 7000 on the assembly line, technicians even 10.000 – but hiring requirements are a technical college degree and municipal hukou! And still, the vast majority of VW workers sleep two to a room and cannot buy an apartment locally which would allow them to live with their family. Experienced textile workers can make up to 5000-8000 in the Jiangtse or Pearl River Delta (in recent years, several factories have relocated to Cambodia and Vietnam, where wages are much lower). Some of the wages in state-owned enterprises are better, and you can’t be fired so easily either. But you only get in through connections and have to pay several monthly salaries in bribes to get hired. In the interior of the country, wages are lower.
Factory work is still characterized by long working days, authoritarian regimes with all kinds of punishments, and the hukou system that makes it impossible for workers to live with their families close to their workplace. None of these three issues have been improved. The Foxconn workers I met through English classes were doing all sorts of things to get away from the factory: besides learning English (to work in marketing or sales), they were getting driver’s licenses (cab drivers), or trying to get jobs with real estate agents.
In the old state-owned factories, these three issues were or are better. But here management had completely failed to increase productivity. The new, private-capitalist factories on the coasts were the answer to the productivity crisis. Since quite a few years, the wages of migrant workers have been growing much more slowly than those in formal and especially in (highly) skilled occupations. Wages of semi-skilled service jobs such as waiters, cashiers and cleaners are barely keeping pace with inflation and, according to my observations, have declined since Corona. Regional inequalities also continue to grow; an average income in Shanghai is ten to twelve times the average income in poor parts of the country.
To return to my company: Here, people with bachelor’s degrees in technical subjects start at 5-6000. In the hellish IT units at Pindoudou or Huawei, they could get starting salaries over 10,000. My colleagues buy an apartment on the outskirts of town after getting married with a 30 percent down payment, the rest as a loan that they pay off over 30 years. Interest rates of 4.8 percent mean that for many of them, one spouse’s entire salary goes towards the mortgage payments. Such technical college or university graduates are also part of the migrant workforce. Unlike workers, they have the hope of acquiring an apartment and the hukou on the outskirts of the city. This hope persists because millions have made it. They work 996 for it, but the chances have shrunk in the last ten years. Xi’s campaign of nationalism and of exaggerating of his own achievements seems to be particularly effective among these wage earners with high formal education and the hope of moving up into the middle class.
The demographic crisis
In 2008, Giovanni Arrighi justified his belief in China’s continued economic growth by pointing out that the population had a high level of education and good health. Today, neither is true. Among middle-income countries, China is the least educated (just over 30 percent of the working population has a secondary education); it has a relatively high median age (apart from Thailand and Cuba, only former Eastern bloc countries have a higher median age among middle-income countries); more than 70 percent of children are near-sighted, more than 50 percent of adults are overweight; more than 15 percent of all couples are infertile. According to just-published statistics, the number of births in 2020 has plummeted by 15 percent compared to 2019, to about 12.5 million. In the generation of the parents of these new-borns, the number of births was almost twice as high (between 1985 and 2000, an average of 21.7 million children were born annually; in the generation of grandparents, the number was 24.8 million). Society is aging rapidly; the demographic crisis is accelerating.
In the 1990s and 2000s, booming factories were still able to pick and choose from the large masses of young men and especially women in their 20s who flocked to industrial cities. In the years after China joined the WHO in the early 2000s, about 25 million young people entered the labour market each year, and only about one million had university or technical college degrees. These migrant workers assumed that after five or ten years of factory work, they would go home to the countryside and open a store, restaurant or small business. Many, if not most, of these ventures ended in bankruptcy and they had to return to toil in the industrial metropolitan areas. By now, however, they are too old for the tough jobs that were never designed to be done for a lifetime. The prospects of owning their own small store are also dwindling, as large corporations are pushing into the kiosk business and have turned almost all kiosks and many restaurants into franchises. Many conflicts are ignited by the disappointed expectations regarding the supposed temporary nature of the hard labour and its health consequences!
In parallel, the influx of young migrant workers is drying up. In 2010, about 21 million had come, 2.5 million of them with university or technical college degrees. This year, 15 million young people are still entering the labour market, including nine million with university or technical college degrees – and many of the other six million would rather do low-paid service jobs than go into the factories! In 20 years, roughly speaking, the ratio of blue collar workers to white collars has fallen from 24:1 to 2:3. There is an increase in ‘qualified labour’, yet already in 2011, the supply of fresh graduates exceeded demand by 15 percent! 8
The only age group in the active workforce that will continue to grow over the next 20 years is the group over 50. The hundreds of millions of workers who have been uprooted from the countryside are still there, but they have grown older. The age limit for hiring in many factories has now been raised to 40, but there has been no qualitative change in work processes that would allow them to work until retirement. Ageing workers face poverty, and even the cheerful proclamation of the ‘end of absolute poverty’ (defined as an annual income of less than 4,000 RMB = 519 euros per person, or 1.42 euros a day; the World Bank sets the threshold for extreme poverty at 1.59 euros a day and for poverty in upper middle income countries like China at 4.60 euros) does not change that. Even the official propaganda reveals that poverty reduction is more about handouts than profitable jobs. By the way, the CCP had already celebrated the victory over absolute poverty in 2000.9
Nationalism not egalitarism
Xi Jinping has been General Secretary of the CCP and Chairman of the Central Military Commission since 2012 and State President since 2013. His accession to power marked the beginning of the third phase of the People’s Republic of China (the first was under Mao Zedong, the second from Deng Xiaoping to Hu Jintao). Xi’s “fight against corruption” eliminated all opponents in the apparatus (one and a half million party functionaries ended up in jail). Xi focuses on authoritarianism and nationalism instead of economic wellbeing like Deng and Hu Jintao. In 2015 he unleashed a wave of repression, first against feminists, then against human rights lawyers, then against labour NGOs. Confident posture – most recently the glorious victory over the Corona virus – is supposed to convey strength. China is building up its military and interfering massively, e.g. in the domestic politics of African countries.
At the same time, China is sealing itself off from “foreign influences”, although, from an economic point of view, it needs more, rather than less exchange with foreign countries; for example, for further developing its export industries, for industrial upgrading and generally for improving work processes and language skills. The decline of international cooperation will have a negative impact on productivity gains, including but not limited to key industries like microprocessors. In my workplace, in a department of Chinese-only software developers, work methodology and organisation lags behind “western” companies by about 15 years. This is less blatant in software projects managed from Europe. China’s economic development is paying a significant price for escalation external conflicts and increasing isolation!10
Economic policy (recently called the “dual circulation model”) encourages entrepreneurial activity while bypassing the equalising tendencies of a growing freely disposable share of the wage. Housing construction and related industries account for about a quarter of GDP. They create demand, jobs and make some people rich; but they keep sharp class divisions in place and the overall wage bill is kept low, which continues to limit people’s power over their own lives. Methods range from compulsory savings to home loans, and from the state’s investment policies to forced resettlement.
Compulsory savings: There are no legally guaranteed entitlements to social benefits, financial compensation and the like. People depend on the favour of local authorities. This forces them to save for a rainy day and leads to an extremely high savings rate. Money put aside does not go into consumption (this is why all attempts to expand the domestic market have failed).
Home loans: Regular employees have a “housing fund”. If the employer has paid enough contributions, a worker can apply for cheap loans to buy a house. Some employers pay more into their employees’ housing fund than into their pay-checks to save taxes; employees gladly accept this and even perceive it as a wage increase because the lion’s share of their income goes into buying a house anyway.
Most state investments flow into the rich cities and exacerbate the inequality between metropolises and the periphery. They lead to the over-exploitation of cheap labour in construction (for empty housing!) and have inflated a huge real estate bubble. Currently, the total real estate value is more than four times higher than China’s entire GDP. To get some perspective on this, in Japan it was 2.7 times higher than GDP at the peak of the bubble! When a real estate company builds a new innovation centre or an office complex for IT companies, local government not only pays the rent for the first three years but also subsidises each worker, for example, with 3000 RMB per month while the minimum wage is less than 2500 RMB. Hundreds of billions of euros are thus transferred to the metropolises for a speculative bubble and subsidy scam in areas such as e-cars and microprocessors, for office jobs in mediocre R&D, etc. – raising housing and living costs there.
Forced relocation: As part of so-called “extreme poverty alleviation”, 2.4 million people, or 2.4% of the population, have been forcibly relocated in Shandong province alone. The new village is built as a terraced housing estate in whatever location suits the local government. After completion or even before, villagers are thrown out of their old houses and the old village is razed to the ground. Many would not have voluntarily moved into the new houses because they are not an improvement (e.g. they are much too far away from the farmland). Here, too, poverty was fought and wealth was created on paper, but without the inhabitants’ participation and its egalitarian effect. If they had been allowed to decide for themselves, the “modernisation of the villages” would have required very different concessions from the government.
Now the state generates economic activity and growth while workers’ actual disposable share of GDP, i.e. the wage in their pay-check, stagnates or even declines and their personal dependence on mortgages, state handouts, jobs, homeowners’ assemblies and administration increases. State authoritarianism, as well as the economic model, are based on the lack of legal security. And while young Chinese people are proud and optimistic about the future of the nation, it is with with great concern that they look to their own economic future.
“Patriots rule Hong Kong”
Since the introduction of the National Security Law on 1 July 2020, Hong Kong has been gradually transformed into a Chinese city like any other. Since February 2021, Hong Kong schoolchildren are being “patriotically educated”: from kindergarten and primary school onwards, children will learn that secession and foreign influence are crimes against national security and that singing songs with political content is forbidden. On 4 March 2021, “one country, two systems” came to an end.
And while Beijing always claims that the Extradition Law of 2019 and the National Security Law are governed by the rule of law, they do not make the slightest effort to keep up this pretence: The first Hong Kongers to be tried in Mainland China (for attempting to flee to Taiwan) since the laws have been introduced don’t have a lawyer because their actual lawyer has just been disbarred.
Under repression and pandemic, the protest movement in Hong Kong has become radicalised (unlike at the beginning, a considerable part now calls for secession from China) and has largely come to a standstill. Many people are planning to leave the city, including some of my friends and comrades. In the past, they organised social movements against privatisation, gentrification, precarious wages, in short against Hong Kong-style extreme liberalised capitalism. Since last year, the situation in Hong Kong has changed so radically that they now see Xinjiang as an indication of how bad things can still get.
Xinjiang
Meanwhile, there are more and more testimonies, sources and leaked internal documents about the Uyghur camps in Xinjiang, where an estimated one million people are held. Repression ranges from replacing the Uyghur language with Mandarin Chinese, to preventing visits to mosques and pervasive surveillance, to imprisonment, forced labour, reduction of Uyghur births and torture.
There are ten million Uyghurs living in China, which is only about 0.7 percent of the total population. In Xinjiang, they make up 45% of the population. Many have gone to eastern China as migrant workers. They are not only construction workers, but play an important role in the catering industry in all Chinese cities. Migrant workers who would like to return to Xinjiang now think twice because they have little chance of being let out from there again. Han Chinese, whom the government deliberately settled in Xinjiang for decades, are leaving the province too.
CCP cadres in Xinjiang used to be Uyghurs. As part of the industrialisation policy in the 1980s, they were replaced by Han Chinese. Terrorist actions took place against this settlement of Han Chinese in Xinjiang. This alarmed the Chinese government, which has always cracked down on separatist aspirations. After 9/11, there was fear of a second Chechnya in Xinjiang. For about the last four years, the government has been tightening repression there. One reason for this is that the Silk Road passes through here. But it is certainly no coincidence that this is happening simultaneously alongside the entire domestic political development under Xi Jinping. Xinjiang is a kind of model and testing ground; the camps there are not only for the Uyghurs. (Incidentally, Han Chinese are also interned there.) In state propaganda, the labour camps are portrayed as training schemes, re-education, a fight against terrorism or, in the style of colonialism, as the enlightenment of uncivilised peoples.
China is the world’s largest producer of tomatoes; they come mainly from Xinjiang, often in the form of tomato paste. Similarly, 80 percent of China’s cotton is grown there. But while individual farms certainly benefit, the camp system cannot be explained by economic rationality. Its security costs are massive.
VW is the only foreign carmaker to operate a factory in Xinjiang; again, probably not a productive investment, but a gesture of goodwill by VW towards the CCP. The plant is designed to produce 50,000 cars a year, but has never produced even half of that (by comparison, the VW plant in Foshan, in southern China, has a capacity of 300,000 cars a year per assembly line). When asked, VW boss Diess claimed he had never heard of human rights violations in Xinjiang and could not say anything about the subject.
For a long time, NATO countries and Russia gave China a free hand in Xinjiang – after all, the “fight against Islamist terror” is a common concern (with many nuances obviously, see Syria!). In the meantime, however, the camps are being used as a tool by other countries in the confrontation with China; in mid-January 2021, the USA imposed an import ban on cotton and tomatoes from Xinjiang. We should criticise the propagandistic accusation of “genocide”; according to the evidence, what’s happening is oppression, not extermination, and Han Chinese are also among the victims. But revealing Western policies as propaganda should not mean denying the existence of the camps!
Domestically, the camps represent a conflict that the regime cannot end with a victory – unless it continues the repression for the next 50 years until hardly any Uyghurs will be left alive. If internment and surveillance ended tomorrow, the CCP’s lies would become obvious to all, and certainly quite a lot of people would take revenge on the security apparatus. In Chinese society, there is no public discussion about this and no opposition. A taxi driver who had been to Xinjiang told us about police checks there as if he was telling us about his holidays. He was not disturbed by the fact that Uyghurs are not allowed to go out on the street in groups of three: you have to treat them like that because they are always meeting each other and spending all their time with friends.
With Xi in power, a fundamental change of policies on Xinjiang is almost impossible. Until then, however, authoritarian despotism will not be challenged and legal security will not be possible in the rest of the country either; it would be too easy to use this to11 claim compensation for internment and torture. The draconian measures in Hong Kong and especially in Xinjiang lock the CCP into a one-way street in which the country can only move towards authoritarianism. And as we have seen above, without strengthening legal security, no effective increase of the share of consumption or the birth rate will be possible either. Camp despotism, poverty, low wages and demographic crisis are interrelated and mutually dependent.11
Is China in the Middle Income Trap?
Before the global crisis, the BRIC countries (Brazil-Russia-India-China; later also South Africa: BRICS) were presented as the big winners of globalisation. After the crisis, the perspective shifted. What had previously been propagated as almost “automatic development” was now problematised. In 2008, Gill and Kharas coined the term Middle Income Trap. Only 14 of the 101 countries defined as ‘middle income’ in 1960 have managed to become ‘high income’ by 2008 (including Ireland, southern European countries, as well as South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore). The Middle Income Trap theory explains this by saying that industrialisation in emerging economies enters a phase when certain industries relocate elsewhere due to increasing wages (in China, for example, the textile industry is doing that), but the countries do not (yet) manage to attract other industries and compete with more advanced industrialised countries. This process cannot be understood one-dimensionally as ‘technological development’. Economics describes it as a transition from “quantitative” to “qualitative” development, and Marxists would understand it as a transition from the production of absolute to relative surplus value. “External factors” play an important role, too: In the 1930s it was the class struggle; during the ‘Cold War’ many frontline states were heavily supported by NATO… And since the Volcker shock in 1979, only (the former frontline state) South Korea has managed to become a ‘high income’ country. In 1987 alone, there were more than 3000 strikes that could push through 25 to 30 percent wage increases. Most importantly, these struggles broke down the military work discipline in the factories! In the period that followed, giant China became an “external factor”, using dumping prices to deny smaller countries this opportunity for development. In the wake of the global crisis of 2008/9, a discussion has now arisen as to whether China itself is caught in this trap.12
In the years of double-digit growth, it was very easy for entrepreneurs in China: they could flood global markets with cheap products, for which falling wages in the industrialised countries created the demand. And the combination of rural labour, use of machinery and extension of working hours guaranteed sufficient profits.
Under Hu Jintao, there were certainly efforts to increase the wage and consumption share. There was talk of introducing industrial unions like in Germany. Massive state investment programmes were brought in to cushion the effects of the global crisis of 2008 onwards, and even after the Honda strike in 2010 there were brief experiments with company trade unions in Guangdong.
But the transition to “qualitative growth” would have required – or even provoked – profound changes. Wages would need to rise not only faster than GDP, but also faster than corporate profits. To reduce the savings rate, social security and labour laws would have had to be improved and enforced (as well as rent law and more). All of that in a global crisis situation in which the high growth rates of the last two decades were no longer possible – as well as against the backdrop of fierce domestic class struggles…
When Xi took over from Hu in 2012, the experimentalists soon retired. Wage and consumption shares of GDP had risen between 2010 and the 2015/6 economic slump, partly as a result of the strike movement, but Xi was able to use the economic slump to fully consolidate his power and tightened repression. Since then, the wage and consumption share has declined again.
Ultimately, this intensified the constellation which had been the basis of the Chinese economic miracle: rising wages with a declining wage share (i.e. the share of wages and benefits in relation to GDP; the wage share can be taken as a measure of workers’ power). The wage share had declined from 51.4 percent in 1995 to 43.7 percent in 2008. In recent years it has declined further to around 40%. And as shown above, the real wages of the lower sections of the working class are now also declining. That ship has sailed, and more autonomy for company unions or even independent unions are unimaginable at present.13
According to the Asian Development Bank, three things are essential to escape the Middle Income Trap: Making labour processes more effective, finding new markets to sustain export growth and increasing domestic demand. However, the recent rehash of economic policy as a “dual circulation economy” continues to boost domestic demand through a dangerous mix of debt and real-estate bubble; a lot of government money continues to flow into infrastructure projects of dubious benefit. And we have discussed how the economic policy prevents the domestic market from actually shifting towards growth through wage increases and mass consumption.
China’s greatest competitive advantage in the phase of rapid growth is now blocking the “qualitative development” demanded by all economic advisors. The Hukou system is similar to the Bantustan system in Apartheid South Africa: workers were taken to where they were needed, while their families and children had to stay in places where the costs of reproduction and living were cheap. This created and maintained a huge urban-rural wage gap. With the Hukou system, the state has guaranteed cheap labour for enterprises. They could therefore save on investments in the improvement of the quality of labour processes. The low level of formal education of older workers is a consequence rather than a cause of this economic development. South Africa, by the way, is one of the typical examples of countries in the ‘middle income’ trap! Incidentally, the Hukou system has recently been relaxed only in the smaller 3rd and 4th tier cities with less industry and jobs; the 22 first- and second-tier cities, on the other hand, have made it even more difficult to get a local Hukou.
“When the pool of cheap labour from the country has been exhausted … other qualities are required. From that moment on, in order to master the next stage of development it is necessary to apply more efficient production methods, to produce higher-quality goods and to push on with homegrown research and development”, wrote business journalist and former China correspondent Elisabeth Tester in a China special issue of Schweizer Monat in 2018 (Elisabeth Tester “Middle Income Trap” October 2018). But she is wrong! If the pool of cheap labour is already exhausted – and you don’t want to bring many millions of foreign workers into the country – it is already too late!
China has followed the advice on how to avoid the Middle Income Trap (education, research, infrastructure…). But formal education alone is not enough to create suitable jobs. Cutting-edge research and rockets to Mars do not make industrial mass production more effective. Technological catch-up in telecommunications, electric cars, high-speed trains, computer chips, aerospace, quantum computers, etc. works well as import substitution but is not enough to open up new markets. Nor can China hope that the rest of the world will be capable and willing to absorb a growing share of exports without import growth. Robotisation is also proving more difficult than envisaged in the Made in China 2025 industrial plan. ##[https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3122430/chinas-robotics-revolution-falls-behind-target-technology] According to the World Bank, Total Factor Productivity, a measure used by economists to determine “technical progress” or growing productivity, grew by 4% annually before 2010, then by about 2 percent, and most recently by only 0.7 percent.
Some of the growing sectors are control technology and the security service business which yield zero social benefit. China is failing to “make labour processes more effective” as economists call it. The productivity of the industrial working class is lacking. The hundreds of thousands of young female workers who have very profitably filled a technology gap at Foxconn and elsewhere have ruined their eyes in the process, but have not acquired the necessary skills “to master the next stage of development”. China’s factories are stuck in authoritarian “pre-union Fordism” (Gambino) – and are therefore also shunned by young proletarians.
China is stuck in the ‘middle income’ trap. In contrast to South Korea, the ruling structures have so far been able to politically defeat workers’ struggles without having to change themselves. Authorities have not been removed, working conditions have not been improved – that is why productivity is stagnating! The mechanisms of maintaining power block the inner contradictions at the price of stagnation. Economics professor Eva Paus has called the situation of countries in the Middle Income Trap the ‘Red Queen Effect’: Like the Red Queen in Alice Behind the Mirrors, such societies must run faster and faster – just to stay in the same place and not slip. The ‘Neijuan’ slogan thus captures the situation quite aptly!14
Potholes in the Silk Road
Like “Made in China 2025”, the Silk Road was an attempt to escape the Middle Income Trap, but it too is languishing… Many African countries have suspended payments to China or are seeking debt relief. Since 2016, lending around the mammoth project has steadily declined from around $75 billion to a low of $4 billion in 2020. Reasons are a lack of economic viability, Corona travel restrictions and political tensions. In many places, large-scale Chinese investments have been promised, but are not making any progress. Reports on working conditions in Chinese factories in Serbia and other places have done further damage to the reputation of China’s initiative. Many Silk Road projects are being continued, but will not fulfil the high expectations that were raised. The Silk Road is not a win-win for all parties involved, as the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung hallucinates. Nor is it China’s diabolical strategy of deliberately luring countries into a debt trap. Pettis sees the debt problems of many projects as the kind of banal rookie mistakes that happen to aspiring powers.15
War gestures
Until a few years ago, the image of the USA in China was predominantly positive, despite anti-Americanism. In terms of private prosperity, consumption, legal security and gender equality, the western industrialised countries represented a goal to strive for. This was shown in the widespread wish to study abroad in the USA, the enthusiasm for Hollywood and various US brands, and it lead to brain drain to the USA. For decades the West had tried to influence domestic political development in China with cultural goods, NGOs, sports and the like. And even before Xi came to power, CCP began to try and seal off society against these influences, little by little. Besides culture and ‘foreign agents’ (which all NGOs were labelled as), real spy agents were targeted. In 2010, several espionage cases were uncovered. Publicly, they were presented as corruption cases to avoid the embarrassing admission that the CIA had several agents of influence in the party and the military, who had even been paid bribes for promotions. If Xi had not intervened with the continued anti-corruption campaign, the takeover of Hong Kong, tightening of censorship and surveillance, visa restrictions, control of NGOs and, more generally, expanded repression, the Party’s cultural and ideological power would be severely eroded today (and the state no doubt riddled with spies).
The trade war with Trump only slowed down the brain drain of Chinese students towards the US. It took the pandemic to turn the tide: About 700,000 Chinese people returned from abroad in 2020. The high infection and death rates, especially in the USA, have been an opportunity for Chinese propaganda to portray their own system as superior: “The East rises, the West declines.” And many people believe and perpetuate this. Even some farmers who invited me to dinner in their village explained to me, when they asked where I came from, that Germany is good (in relation to China), but the USA and Britain, and now also France, aren’t, and that in China the pandemic was beaten successfully because life has the highest priority. Zhongguo hen niu, China is great, as my colleague says.
Even if it continues to look as if the main goal was to distract/mobilise its own population, China is arming itself vigorously and at the People’s Congress in March, Xi called on the army to be “ready for battle” (which led US military officials to warn of a Chinese attack on Taiwan). With hundreds of bases spanning the globe, the US will remain militarily superior for a long time to come. But China is actively engaged in the arms race. In terms of the number of warships and gross tonnage, its navy is the largest in the world and is set to expand from 300 to about 425 ships including 90 submarines and at least six aircraft carriers in the near future. This belies the hope of Arrighi and others that it could be inferred from China’s history that it will be a peaceful hegemon.
Long live …?
Their rejection of a new Cold War leads many leftists and liberals in Western countries to long for good news from China. A few small strikes are then taken to signal the return of class struggle, Xi’s propaganda promise of CO2 neutrality is fantasised to bring about the salvation of the planet. (By the way, in a police and censorship state, who would be able to verify whether the promise has actually been kept? The obstruction of the WHO in their search for the origin of the virus does not leave much room for optimism!) The Left in the West must understand that organised groups, journals, public debates and meetings can only exist where people have at least some freedom to express their own rejection of public order. Such a Left does not exist in China. Instead, here young people dissatisfied with the society like a woman who decorated a Xi poster with ink are sent to a psychiatry.16
These are additional reasons why the call “against a new Cold War” by anti-war alliances and Chinese nationalists in the US and elsewhere17 8 may sound good but unfortunately is unrealistic and naive. Celebrities from state propaganda television have signed it too – but none of them would ever criticise militarism and nationalism in China. The website Qiao Collective is another example of such two-faced politics: in English they are against war, but in China they would never protest the CCP’s sabre-rattling. They are openly patriotic, justifying police violence in Hong Kong and the Tiananmen Square massacre, denying the camps in Xinjiang…why are they even considered leftists? Many Chinese nationalists use leftist, internationalist or anti-neoliberal rhetoric, but promote authoritarianism. They are using “Sinophobia” as a politically charged term to denounce any criticism of China as racism – while defending a regime that is not based on universalist values nor a fundamental rejection.
In September 2020, a Maoist online magazine targeting workers claimed in an article on Covid infections that there had been no Covid outbreaks in factories in China, but there had been many in the US, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, etc. “Capitalists only care about profit, they don’t care about workers’ lives.” In reality, there have also been Covid infections in Chinese factories. What sounds critical of capitalism easily turns into nationalist propaganda. Anyone who translates texts about the epidemic in Europe for such people or organises solidarity protests abroad must expect to be used for nationalist propaganda.
On the other hand, I know many Chinese people who do not want to shut themselves off from the world at all and who, on the contrary, are fighting against authoritarianism together. We can only fight together with them if we criticise nationalism and authoritarianism and do not buy into the (false) leftist rhetoric. Anyone wanting to avoid this mistake must do three things: 1) Stop seeing things through anti-imperialist glasses, criticise nationalism and exploitation. 2) Stop focusing on the middle class. 3) Judge cultural phenomena in their social context.
The left that is critical of capitalism outside China must finally understand that the CCP does not offer a better alternative to liberal capitalism. From a waged worker’s point of view, China has long been capitalist – combined with a high degree of repression and authoritarian despotism! The struggles of the working class in South Korea were politically thwarted by democratisation and trade unions in the 1990s, but have “paid off economically”. The working class in China has been stopped with censorship, despotism and violence; it has been marginalised politically and economically. Under today’s conditions, is it possible to fight and win massive material improvements – and will this subsequently also lead to something like the emergence of the rule of law? Or must the vicious circle of censorship, propaganda and despotism be broken first before common struggles become possible again? Here in China, both sides (economic and political suppression) are strongly interlocked. Those who don’t understand this will only continue to embarrass themselves, like the German journal Konkret celebrating Hong Kong police truncheons against “Asia’s Pegida”. The workshop of the world is controlled by Chinese bosses. The main benefactor of low wages and long working days is the ruling class in China, and the counter-pressure must come from people in China. There is a lot of misunderstanding around this, for example in the claim that Chinese workers pay the price for the global demand for masks. Their sweating bodies pay for long working days, speedy work pace and poor conditions, but not for local or global demand! As waged workers, we suffer from being forced to work and from our working conditions, but not from anyone offering us wages for our labour power.18
When rich middle-class homeowners protest against real-estate market reforms, there is definitely no need to build solidarity with them! They might be best described as BMW or Porsche drivers with a sense of class. The upper middle class in China who now has western standards of living cannot even be considered a potential ally! (By the way, their own assessment is quite materialist: Western democracies would not bring them any advantages.) Many of the movement’s ‘heroes’ also come from the middle class. The CCP has always lauded “heroes of labour” or “heroes in the fight against the pandemic” and it even has the power to name the “heroes of the opposition”. It goes like this: Influencial activists in NGOs or other critical social circles are arrested to make an example of them as a warning to others; supporters (often left-wing Maoists) then organise a solidarity campaign for the imprisoned and celebrate them as examples and heroes. This makes the contributions of all the other “non-heroes” invisible and reinforces hierarchies. We don’t need individual heroes, but broad and egalitarian solidarity!
When Chinese people protest, foreign democrats often see the beginning of fundamental rebellion against the “unjust regime” while in reality, the protesters are actually fighting for the reimbursement of school fees or wage payments. There is a popular hope in the West for anti-systemic protests in China but it is based on the misunderstanding that people living in the dictatorship suffer permanently from the dictatorship as such (such “well-meaning” paternalism is also encountered by friends from mainland China – full of curiosity – travelling to Hong Kong or Taiwan and then being patronised as brainwashed or clueless). First of all, people in China, like everywhere else, suffer from low wages, expensive rents, mean bosses, sexism, etc. From their perspective therefore the fight is primarily about higher wages, social security, cheaper housing, despotic bosses … about concrete problems and improvements and not about abstract principles and political freedoms, and also not about revolution so far.
Out of disappointment, in recent years some Westerners have turned their attention to Chinese subcultures, often overlooking the strong individualistic character that goes with them. People accept the extension of the working day and retaliate by “fishing in muddy waters”, (Hunshui) Moyu, slacking off at work.19
Social changes through women are more important. As in many countries, a silent gender revolution through education has taken place in China. Women account for the majority of university graduates, but remain grossly underrepresented in industry and society. In a typical school, male teachers hold a BA from a mediocre to sub-mediocre university while female teachers have graduated from top universities and many hold an MA! It’s similar in my workplace. Since the 1990s, the female labour force participation rate has dropped from 75 to 60 pecent. The labour market and the education system do not allow women with children to combine paid work and childcare; not to mention an equal distribution of child-rearing and household tasks between women and men! More and more young women prefer to remain single or unmarried rather than give up their autonomy for a dismal marriage and family (and this in a situation of great shortage of women!). At some point, the patriarchal bulwark will no longer be able withstand this change. Already now, most men are not able to fulfil traditional role requirements any longer. Today’s rampant sexualised violence against women in families, at work and even in socially critical circles can also be seen as a reaction to this development.
Summary
In Wildcat 103, I still assumed that societies in the West and in China would converge, putting this down to the privatisation of education, growing inequality, rising housing prices and similar developments. While many similar social phenomena, some of them new, will continue to appear in China and in the “West” I would like to raise the fundamental question of whether “systemic convergence” or “alignment” is still a meaningful perspective on the current social developments in China when we consider the politicisation of the economy, the compartmentalisation of society and the suppression of egalitarian and universalist social forces.
In mid-December, the Central Economic Work Conference adopted “five fundamental tasks” and decided that for 2021, security would be prioritised over development – certainly not an indicator of liberalisation.20 It remains to be seen whether the Winter Olympics in Beijing in Spring 2022 will take place as planned. Let’s see how much international media access China will then allow into the country. The isolation of society and the chauvinism, nationalism and racism that go with it may even increase further. Perhaps new opportunities will open up again as the pandemic subsides, but for now things remain difficult.
Neither an abrupt financial crisis nor one of the political order seem likely under Xi. It is more likely that repression and militarisation will continue at the price of stagnation. Xi and the CCP appear overpowering, spreading a sense of paralysing powerlessness. While the political conditions seem stable, the working class has changed significantly: it has aged statistically, young people avoid the factories, they are more mobile geographically, they have not experienced the horrors of hunger first hand, many went to school much longer and are bored at work. Parcel and food delivery workers, as well as construction workers will continue to protest against upaid wages – even if such conflicts remain local. Contradictions are so stark, inequalities so glaring and the young generation so pessimistic about their own future and their place in society, that I wonder how long political stability can be maintained by the over-consumption of resources and the postponement of social change.
Footnotes:
[1] Tiffany May, Amy Chang Chien: Slouch or Slack Off, This ‘Smart’ Office Chair Cushion Will Record It. New York Times, 12/1/21.
[2] Africans in Guangzhou: misunderstanding, discrimination, and communication. Published on Youtube on 8/18/2020
[4] Haifeng Huang and Nicholas Cruz: Propaganda, Presumed Influence, and Collective Protest. “… We test this indirect mechanism of propaganda using a survey experiment with Chinese internet users … they believe that propaganda reduces other citizens’ willingness to protest, which in turn reduces their own willingness to protest….” See Political Behaviour, Jan. 8, 2021.
[5] Excess mortality in Wuhan city and other parts of China during the three months of the covid-19 outbreak: findings from nationwide mortality registries. The BMJ, Feb. 11, 2021. See: BMJ
[6] Wan Haiyuan, Meng Fanqiang: China Has 600 Million People With Monthly Income Less Than $141. Is That True? Caixin, 6.6.2020.
[8] On the struggles of workers suffering from pneumoconiosis, see Wildcat 103: 6 million workers suffering from pneumoconiosis live on an average of just 51 euros a month. Source: Sidney Leng: China’s 6 million ‘black lung’ workers living on just US$61 a month, with most struggling to survive. www.scmp.com, 5.3.21. on the oversupply of graduates, see Vivian Wang: China’s College Graduates Can’t Find Jobs. The Solution: Grad School. NYT, 1/18/2021.
[9] Cf. the 2019 documentary “China’s Unstoppable Rise: The World of Xi Jinping”
[10] David Bandurski: Propaganda Soars Into Orbit. JAN. 29, 2021. https://chinamediaproject.org; Nicholas Eberstadt: China’s Demographic Prospects to 2040: Opportunities, Constraints, Potential Policy Responses. www.hoover.org, Oct. 29, 2018; Beijing claims victory in poverty fight, SCMP Nov. 18, 2000.
[11] Rémi Castets: Bleierne Zeit in Xinjiang [Leaden Time in Xinjiang]. Le monde diplomatique, 7 March 2019. Interview with Darren Byler: Standing with the Oppressed. On Colonialism and Terror-Capitalism in Xinjiang. Exklusive Einblicke: Wie China die Uiguren bekämpft [Exclusive insights: How China Combats the Uyghurs], German WDR TV documentary, on youtube. On VW: Does VW profit from Uighur forced labor in Xinjiang? DW News, 12 November 2020. VW boss ‘not aware’ of China’s detention camps, bbc.com, 16 April 2019. Darren Byler: ‘Only when you, your children, and your grandchildren become Chinese’: Life after Xinjiang Detainment, https://supchina.com, 6 January 2021
[13] For comparison: in the 35 most developed industrialised countries, the wage rate declined from 54 per cent in 1980 to 50.5 per cent in 2014; however, one must bear in mind that the actual consumption of workers in China is even lower because of the high savings rate and private debt. The savings rate in Germany is a relatively high 12-15 per cent, private debt as a share of income is much lower, so interest service is much lower than in China, where about 20-30 per cent savings rate plus 10-15 per cent interest service are deducted from wages. In addition to the lack of social security, the high savings rate is also due to family structures; the parents have to buy the son a flat, otherwise he will not find a wife… For more details, see Wildcat 103.
[14] Sources on the Middle Income Trap: Gill, I., & Kharas, H.: An East Asia Renaissance; 2008. On the opinion of the Asian Development Bank: Rajat M. Nag: Realizing the Asian Century. Speech made on 18 October 2011, at https://www.adb.org An example that the CCP is well aware of the problem: “China May Be Running Out of Time To Escape the Middle-Income Trap” reports on a meeting between Obama and Xi Jinping in 2013, where Xi outlined his hope that China could escape the middle income trap: China May Be Running Out of Time To Escape the Middle-Income Trap, https://asiasociety.org On the ‘Red Queen Effect’ see Nahee Kang & Eva Paus: The Political Economy of the Middle Income Trap (2020). And for those who want to all the details: the Red Queen hypothesis originally comes from biology; see wikipedia.
[15] Slave-like conditions in Chinese state-owned enterprise in Serbia. https://www.forumarbeitswelten.de, 28.1.21. Rosa Luxemburg Foundation: The New Silk Road – On a Megaproject that Makes the World, Maldekstra No. 9
[16] Mimi Lau: China’s ‘Ink Girl’ who defaced Xi Jinping poster allowed to contact father after protest. SCMP, 2 December 2020
[18] China’s workers pay the price for growing global demand for face masks. China Labour Bulletin, 4 August 2020. https://clb.org.hk
[19] A good article on this (in German): “Fische anfassen” [Touching Fish], https://www.forumarbeitswelten.de/blog/fische-anfassen/, 6 January 2021. These are forms of individual isolation (neijuan!).
[20] See: China wants to initiate new growth phase with measures, http://german.china.org.cn, 21 December 2020.
Around the world, previously invisible delivery personnel have achieved a new prominence in popular consciousness as “frontline workers” throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. As the emergency has highlighted both the importance and the dangers of delivery work, strikes over working conditions have occurred alongside public displays of appreciation. In China, the sector had already become a focal point of unrest several years ago, as both capital and labor flowed from the declining factory sector into services in general and the minimally regulated new e-commerce platforms in particular. While lockdowns in the early part of this year limited in-person organizing, the past few months have seen a revival of labor actions combined with a flurry of media exposés about the industry. Express parcel couriers seized upon the lead-up to the November 11th shopping holiday, “Single’s Day,” with protests, slowdowns and mass resignations reported in multiple cities over the past weeks. And two months ago, one of China’s most widely read magazines, Renwu (人物, “People”), published a long-form inquiry into the horrors of food delivery work, based on six months of research. The report has been widely reposted and viewed 3.16 million times via the original link on Weibo alone, sparking a series of related articles. Below is our translation, prefaced by a summary and brief commentary. In the coming weeks we will publish an original text analyzing what these nightmarish trends in “platform capitalism” reveal about China’s economy as whole within its global context.1
The report, titled “Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System” (外卖骑手，困在系统里) and collectively authored by a team of unnamed journalists at Renwu, was published on September 8th, 2020. The monthly magazine Renwu was founded in 1980 under the People’s Daily Press and is now run by the state-owned People’s Publishing House, which mainly publishes political books. In March, Renwuran an interview with Ai Fen, one of the first doctors to share information about the COVID-19 outbreak despite warnings from her hospital to remain silent. The interview was deleted within hours but was shared widely through a variety of creative methods to circumvent censorship, including the use of emojis and the reversal of word order. The piece translated below provides another examination of individuals whose expression and lives are being held hostage by forces beyond their control. The article intersperses worker interviews with data about the industry, examining not only the impact of algorithmic controls upon the workers themselves (known as “riders” because they deliver food and other items by riding electric scooters), but also the ways in which outside actors contribute to this system, as it controls them in turn.
Summary
Since this is particularly long piece, it will be helpful to first give readers a summary of the contents. The opening section, “Order Received,” recounts the increasing pressure placed on riders by shrinking delivery time limits. As iterative machine learning processes push for ever shorter delivery times, an accomplishment celebrated as a triumph of technology by the algorithm’s creators, the riders have no choice but to violate systems of traffic control in an “inverse algorithm.” Later sections “Navigation,” “Smiling Action,” and “Five Star Ratings” delve deeper into the threats to public safety created by this process and the further displacement of responsibility away from companies and onto riders.
“Heavy Rain” begins to question this “triumph of technology,” revealing that a single weather event is enough to topple the algorithms’ utopia of efficiency. Like many allegedly “smart systems,” the platforms’ algorithms require human intervention (and even operation) to function. It is here that the curtain is pulled aside, with an Ele.me supervisor admitting that this intervention is done to make conditions more difficult for workers. Ultimately, those with power to change the system have chosen to do nothing – or even to exercise that power to further push riders to the limits of their ability in pursuit of even greater profit.
“Navigation” investigates how the use of an algorithmic system allows the platform to generate demands that would be unreasonable from another human, including driving against the flow of traffic, achieving delivery times that would only be possible by flying, and even going through walls. “Games” further investigates the impacts of algorithmic control, arguing that the gamification of rider wages gives the appearance of greater independence for workers while in fact subjecting them to a system of control that shapes their very perception of reality.
The sections, “Elevators,” “Gatekeepers,” and “Coca-Cola and Peppa Pig” delve into riders’ relationships with building management, restaurant owners, and customers, respectively. Each relationship represents a variable in the delivery process which the riders, facing the “constant” of delivery time assigned by the algorithms, must bear the burden of mitigating. Often these variables require the exercise of emotional labor, and the workers’ subjection of themselves to a system dominated by the whims of the consumer and the production of products over which they have no control. Notably, “Coca-Cola and Peppa Pig” demonstrates how the algorithms shape reality not only for riders, but for consumers as well – one customer notes that while previously he had been quite happy to watch TV while waiting for his food, he now finds it unbearable due to the unrealistic delivery time provided by the platform.
The sections “Scooters,” “Smiling Action,” “Five Star Ratings,” and “The Final Safety Net” investigate the systems that further push risks onto riders while ensuring that profits continue to accrue to the platforms. In “Smiling Action,” Renwu illuminates how the platforms’ attempts to defray public criticism regarding accidents involving delivery riders with random safety checks (given the Orwellian name “Smiling Action” by Meituan) further subject riders to heartless and inconsistent systems of control. Interviews with police officers in the section “Five Star Rating” demonstrate that government responses have further shifted blame and responsibility for threats to safety onto riders. Rather than constructing transportation infrastructure better suited to growing numbers of delivery riders, or enacting laws that address the algorithmic factors pushing riders to violate traffic laws, cities have instead opted to surveil and punish individual riders. Although the officers interviewed express sympathy for the riders’ plight, they continue to enforce these laws against riders. While punishing riders for infractions, these officers often take up the task of delivering food, ensuring that even though individual riders are punished by the legal system, the system itself remains unchallenged. The officers have ultimately become conscripts of the algorithm. “The Final Safety Net,” which covers the inadequacies and denials of insurance coverage by platforms further illustrates the vulnerability of riders in the absence of formal employment contracts.
The closing section, “Infinite Game,” briefly turns its attention to the programmers themselves, suggesting that they in turn are trapped in service of a larger system, with an educational background that has left them ill-equipped to adequately access the impact of the systems they designed on society. This section also alludes to broader concerns about personal data privacy that are gaining traction in mainland China, noting that even as riders’ data is used to refine the algorithmic systems of control, the ownership of that data remains under dispute. Ultimately, the article concludes, these actors are trapped in a “game” that they do not completely understand, with little choice but to keep playing.
Continuing the Struggle: Protests Escalate, But Can They Change the System?
Protests by waimai delivery riders2 had already begun to escalate prior to increased media coverage regarding the plight of gig workers. Strikes by food delivery riders have increased more than four-fold between 2017 and 2019, going from ten reported strikes in 2017 to at least 45 in 2019 according to China Labor Bulletin. Abuse of gig workers and delivery riders is a global and cross-sector issue. Riders in Brazil, South Korea, Thailand, and Romania have also joined protests calling for better working conditions in this year alone, according to data from ACLED. More recently, strikes and protests by kuaidi couriers, many of whom deliver orders from China’s flourishing e-commerce industry, have also increased, with Service Worker Notes reporting thousands of posts online regarding courier strikes just this year. Similarly to food delivery platforms, courier platforms have sought to expand their market share by cutting delivery prices, passing on those cuts on to their workers while the platforms’ revenue continues to grow. Workers from several major courier companies are protesting over wage arrears, with China Labor Bulletin noting that some expect these strikes to escalate around November 11, a popular online shopping holiday in China. According to Jinjiao Caijing (金角财经, “Golden Horn Finance”), Baidu search volume for keywords related to strikes by courier workers was up 2,235 percent year-on-year in late October, with deliveries already piling up in multiple cities.
Following the release of Renwu’s article, Ele.me introduced a function that allowed customers to indicate that they are willing to wait an extra five or ten minutes for their delivery, a move that was widely criticized as simply passing responsibility onto customers, according to Ziben Yixian. The day after Renwu’s article was released, Meituan announced that it would be allowing riders eight minutes of flexible time, and would extend delivery time and even stop orders during bad weather, mitigating the problems highlighted in the section “Heavy Rain.” However, riders highlighted that other problems with Meituan’s algorithm, including unrealistic delivery directions, remained unaddressed and highlighted that the “system is responsible” for the risks entailed in working as a rider.
While Renwu’s article offers little vision of a path forward and ends with the image of delivery riders pushing onward in an infinite game that they have little ability to control or even completely understand, other articles have focused on riders’ exercise of agency within or against the system. “Feeding the Chinese City,” a collection of interviews with delivery riders originally published by “Awaken Club” on WeChat and translated by Progressive International3 provides an alternative vision of delivery riders’ future. The article highlights mutual aid groups and the beginnings of responsiveness to the plight of workers from the national bureaucracy. Ultimately, the difference in these futures comes down to different visions of workers’ power within an algorithmic system of control. “Feeding the Chinese City” depicts fellow riders rushing to the aid of a fallen comrade, a behavior that another interviewee urges Chinese society as a whole to emulate. In “Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System,” however, a rider watches a fellow colleague get hit by a car and rides away, the ding! of a new order ringing in his ears. Thus far, Renwu’s cynical assessment of the factors at play seem to be more accurate: according to China Labor Bulletin, although the official All-China Federation of Trade Unions has identified delivery work as one of its “eight major sectors,” the system itself remains unchallenged, with benefits from union interventions “[failing] to address the fundamental problems endemic in the industry.”
We have chosen to translate this article not only for its useful investigation of the structure of algorithmic labor governance, but also for the interesting position that its publication––and the outpouring of similar reporting on precarious delivery workers––marks in regard to the economic position of delivery workers and the platforms that employ them. While we will explore the history and current dynamics of China’s so-called “platform capitalism” in our upcoming piece, with an eye to the role that the current media recognition of platform workers might play in signaling an end of the anything-goes expansion of platform industries, here we want to note the conflictual terrain that gave rise to these forms of reporting: Renwu’s investigation comes as China’s sluggish recovery following the COVID-19 outbreak has seen broadening inequality. Government stimulus has focused primarily on enterprises and middle-class consumers, rather than on the migrant workers who saw the most significant loss of income (as much as 75 percent during the height of pandemic lockdowns in February and March, according to Stanford University’s Rural Education Action Program). At the same time, officials such as Premier Li Keqiang have highlighted the informal sector as the solution to China’s rising unemployment. Finally, Renwu‘s investigation of the negative impacts of the Meituan/Ele.me duopoly comes as the Chinese government is seeking to assert increased control over major tech companies, with new antitrust guidelines released November 10th targeting tech giants including Meituan. On the same day, a post by the Cyberspace Administration urged Chinese tech companies not to allow Chinese consumers to become “prisoners to algorithms,” echoing the framing used in Renwu’s article.
Ultimately, this report demonstrates that rising dependence on the informal sector without social safety nets is likely to result in decreased wages and increased vulnerability for workers. In addition, by directing stimulus through businesses, including Ele.me and Meituan, the state is subsidizing the systems that oppress them, further concentrating wealth in the hands of a few major companies. With its focus on a sector that intentionally displaces risk onto workers, Renwu’s article vividly demonstrates the negative repercussions of inadequate social safety nets and weak protection for workers, as well as the growing and largely unchecked control of tech firms over the nature of reality and consumption itself.
–Chuang and friends
Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System
Behind a recent series of data briefs produced by the traffic police bureau is a broader discussion of how delivery work has become a dangerous profession.
Why has the platform delivery industry produced tremendous value in one area while driving social problems in another? To answer this question, our team at Renwu magazine undertook a half-year investigation involving food delivery workers from across the country, participants at all points on the delivery chain, as well as social scientists. In the course of this investigation, the answer gradually emerged.
In this long-form report, we attempt to provide an in-depth look at the detailed workings of the delivery system, encouraging readers to contemplate this question: Exactly what form should algorithms take in the era of the data-driven economy?
(At their request, all riders’ names have been replaced with pseudonyms.)
Order Received
Once again, two minutes disappeared into the system. Ele.me rider Zhu Dahe distinctly remembers the day in October 2019 when, gripping the handlebars of his scooter with sweaty hands, he saw the delivery time set by the system: “Two kilometers, delivery within 30 minutes.” He had been working delivery in Beijing for two years, and before that day, the shortest time he had ever been given for that distance was 32 minutes. From that day forward, he never saw those extra two minutes again.
At around the same time, Meituan riders also experienced a similar disappearance of time. One long-distance Meituan rider in Chongqing discovered that the delivery time for orders of similar distances dropped from 50 minutes to 35 minutes. His co-worker and roommate started to see a 30 minute maximum delivery time for anything within 3 kilometers.
This was not the first time that time “disappeared” from the system. Jin Zhuangzhuang was a Meituan delivery station manager for three years, and he distinctly remembers how from 2016 to 2019 he received “speed up” notifications from the Meituan platform on three separate occasions. In 2016, the longest time limit for delivering food 3 kilometers was one hour. In 2017, it was reduced to 45 minutes. In 2018, it dropped by 7 minutes, with a new maximum delivery time of 38 minutes. According to available data, the average delivery time across the industry went down by 10 minutes from 2016 to 2019.
The system that governs delivery services has the power to continuously consume delivery time. For the system’s creators, this is a praiseworthy advancement, a real-world embodiment of the deep-learning capacity of AI. At Meituan, the real-time smart delivery management system is called “SuperBrain,” while Ele.me calls their system “The Ark.” In a November 2016 interview, Meituan founder Wang Xing stated, “Our slogan is ‘Meituan: Send anything fast.’ Usually our deliveries will arrive within 28 minutes.” He went on to state that this is a good application of technology.
But, for the delivery riders tasked with realizing this technological advancement, this can be a nerve-wracking and even deadly experience. Among the variables evaluated by the system, delivery time is the most important metric, and missing delivery targets is strictly forbidden. Exceeding the delivery time limit results in bad reviews, pay cuts, and even dismissal from the job. In a message board for delivery riders, one wrote that delivery is a race with Death, a competition with traffic cops, and a friendship with red lights.
In order to keep himself always alert, one Jiangsu-based rider changed his social media username to “Being late is for losers.” One rider living in the suburban Songjiang district of Shanghai said he drives against traffic flow on almost every order, which he estimates saves him five minutes per delivery. Another Ele.me rider in Shanghai roughly calculates that if he followed all the traffic laws, the number of orders he could deliver in a day would be cut in half.
“Riders can never rely on their individual power to fight back against the times assigned by the system. All we can do is exceed the speed limit in order to make up for lost time,” a Meituan rider told Renwu. His most ridiculous experience was a one-kilometer delivery, to be completed in 20 minutes. Even though the destination was not far away, he had only 20 minutes to wait for the order to be prepared, pick it up, and deliver it to the customer. That day, he drove so fast that he was bounced out of the seat of his scooter several times.
Speeding, running lights, and violating traffic laws––according to Sun Ping, assistant researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the delivery riders’ disobedience of traffic rules is a kind of “inverse algorithm.” Riders who have long been under the control and management of the algorithm have no choice but to use this labor practice. The direct result of this “inverse algorithm” is a sharp rise in the number of traffic accidents involving delivery riders.
In 2017, Sun Ping began researching the labor relations between delivery control systems and riders. While discussing the relationship between shrinking time margins for delivery and the growing number of traffic accidents with Renwu, she said it must be the most important cause. Real-world data strongly supports this assessment. In the first half of 2017, there was a delivery rider casualty roughly every two days, according to data from the Shanghai Public Security Bureau’s Traffic Police. In the same year, 12 delivery riders were a casualty of traffic accidents every quarter in Shenzhen. In 2018, Chengdu’s Traffic Police reported less than 10,000 traffic violations by delivery riders, 196 traffic accidents, and 155 casualties. Roughly one delivery rider violated traffic laws or was involved in an accident every day. In September 2018, Guangzhou Traffic Police reported 2,000 traffic violations by delivery riders, with half committed by Meituan riders and Ele.me taking second place.
A rear-end collision with a truck in Xi’an on July 28th led to the death of a delivery rider.
#Delivery has become one of the most dangerous professions# — This hashtag has already been a trending topic on Weibo several times. In publicly available news reports, individual cases are more moving than data—in February 2018, in order to make up time, an Ele.me rider was speeding in a road prohibited to scooters and ran over Li Mouqiu, the Dean of Shanghai Emergency Medicine and one of the founders of the emergency departments at Ruijin and Huashan hospitals. Li passed away after one month in ICU. In May 2019, a Jiangxi-based rider hurrying to complete a delivery ran over a pedestrian, who ended up in a coma. One month later, a rider in Chengdu ran a red light and collided with a Porsche, losing his right leg.
Zhu Dahe, the rider whose hands were sweating because of his anxiety over the delivery time, also experienced an accident. In order to avoid a bicycle, he swerved and spun out on an off-limits sideroad, and the mala xiangguo he was delivering also went flying. At the time, the first thought that entered his head, even before the pain hit him, was “Oh no, I’m going to be late!”
In order to avoid criticism for a late delivery, he called the customer and asked them to cancel the order. He used his own personal money to buy the spilled order of mala xiangguo. At 80 yuan, he said it was expensive but tasted good, so he ate it. He remembers it to this day, because at that time he had just started the job and lacked experience. The more reasonable way to resolve the problem would have been to return the money for the spilled mala xiangguo to the customer and let them order it again. “That way, I still could have kept the delivery fee for one trip,” he said, “6.5 yuan, I remember it very well.”
Scooter wrecks happen far too often, but the main question is whether or not the food spills, and not the injuries to the rider. Zhu Dahe told us that when he was delivering orders, he saw countless roadway accidents. Usually, though, he would not stop because his own deliveries could not wait. Meituan rider Wei Lai’s experience is similar to that of Zhu Dahe. One afternoon this spring, Wei Lai and another rider wearing the same color clothing as him were stopped at an intersection waiting for the light to change. There were only a few seconds before the light turned green, but the other rider darted into the intersection. At the same time, a fast-moving bus sped through and the rider and his scooter went flying. He died on the spot. Wei Lai said he saw the badly mangled body in the middle of the road, but he did not stop at all. His own order was late. At that time, another order came in and the familiar female voice of the app’s delivery assistant chimed in: “Order! From ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B,’ please respond after the beep to accept.”
Heavy Rain
According to the algorithm’s parameters, after a rider has accepted an order, the system will begin looking for another order for the rider to complete. In 2019, at the global ArchSummit, Wang Shengyao, the senior algorithm expert on the team that developed Meituan’s delivery management algorithm, introduced the AI’s basic operations––the moment a customer places an order, the system immediately begins looking for the closest rider with the most direct route. After determining which rider to assign the individual order, the system will usually assign that rider a batch of three to five orders. Each order involves two tasks: picking up the food and delivering the food. If a rider is responsible for five orders, that entails ten tasks, and the system will consider 11,000 possible routes. It is possible for the system to simultaneously assign 10,000 orders to 10,000 people in one second, with each rider receiving the optimum route for delivery.
In the real world, however, it only takes a heavy rain to shatter this ideal. Delivery riders like rain, because there are more orders to run on rainy days. But if the rain is too heavy, the system can easily become overwhelmed with orders and the riders themselves are more likely run into problems.
Geng Zi, a Meituan rider in Hunan, experienced a particularly horrible rainy night. It was storming all day and orders were coming in like crazy, overwhelming the system. At every station, each rider had more than ten orders at a time. Their delivery bags were full, so they put the rest of the orders anywhere on their scooters that they would fit. Geng Zi remembers that he had to carefully rest his feet on the edges of the scooter’s footboard, balancing a stack of food orders where he would normally rest his feet. As he ran orders from one place to the next, he would constantly look down at the boxes stacked between his legs to make sure that they had not spilled. The roads were so slippery that he slid many times, but each time, he would immediately get up and continue on his delivery. He worked without stopping until two in the morning, and only then could he finish all of his deliveries. A few days later, he received his pay for the month. Shockingly, his pay was lower than usual. There was a simple explanation: on the stormy day, many of his orders were delivered late, causing his pay to be docked. Gengzi was not the only one to have his wages cut––his station supervisor was also penalized.
Eating data: That’s how Meituan delivery supervisor Jin Zhuangzhuang describes his position.4 For a station, the most important numbers include the orders accepted, the rate of late orders, the rate of bad reviews, and the rate of complaints. Of these, the rate of late orders is the most important because many complaints and bad reviews stem from delayed deliveries.
Usually, delivery riders’ rate of late orders does not exceed three percent. If a rider does not meet this standard, the station’s rating can decrease, reducing the whole station’s cut of the delivery fee for delivery, including the cut for the station supervisor, quality control, and other personnel responsible for internal management. Even the salaries of the district manager and the regional manager could be affected.
At the end of every year, stations must face assessments by the Meituan and Ele.me platforms. The stations ranked in the bottom ten percent of every region face the risk of being eliminated.
Under the system’s metrics, late deliveries not only result in reduced wages, but can also have an impact on riders’ mental health. It can make a rider feel like a team’s weak link. According to Sun Ping, late deliveries are very serious. Not only do they impact your paycheck, but also what’s left in your bank account, and they even have the possibility to call the honor of delivery teams into question. When a rider lets everyone down by running behind, the station supervisor talks to him first. After the station supervisor is finished, the neighborhood supervisor will come looking for him, and after the neighborhood supervisor has spoken with him, the district supervisor will get involved––supervisors at all levels will get in touch with the problem rider. In the end, nobody will like him anymore.
This can put incredible mental pressure on riders. Zhu Dahe, the rider who crashed along with an order of mala xiangguo, told Renwu he has dealt with depression every day of the past few months that he has been working as a rider. Zhu came from a rural area and was not familiar with roads in Beijing, let alone the massive flows of cars and people. He anxiously obeyed each and every traffic rule, and every day his pay would be docked because his deliveries were late. This made him feel incompetent––isn’t it true that every deliver rider makes more than 10,000 yuan a month? Isn’t anyone able to be a delivery rider? Why couldn’t he do it well? He said it seemed like he wasn’t delivery rider material.
Later, he became more comfortable riding the scooter and the roads became more familiar. As he transformed from a new rider to an expert navigator, that feeling of incompetency slowly went away, his late delivery rate went down, and driving against the flow of traffic no longer bothered him so much. He said that when he and his fellow riders are all going the wrong way at once, he is even able to feel at ease. Nowadays, Zhu Dahe rarely makes a late delivery, but extreme weather is a curse he cannot escape. At those times, the out-of-control system will wrap him up alongside everyone else––under the weight of the heavy order volume, he completely loses the ability to control his delivery times and still faces the penalty for late deliveries, without the option of taking a break to catch up or asking for the day off.
A rider running deliveries in the heavy rain.
When Typhoon Lekima hit Shanghai in August 2019, an Ele.me rider was accidentally electrocuted in the heavy rain. Soon after, screenshots from a delivery station’s WeChat group chat were trending on social media. In the screenshots, the station supervisor told everyone, no one is allowed to take leave for the next three days… anyone who doesn’t show up for work will receive a double penalty for absenteeism. Under the message sent by the station supervisor was a long string of replies from riders, who indicated they had received the message by sending “1”.
This screenshot stirred up a huge controversy. Some netizens asked why Hema (a grocery delivery company), KFC, McDonalds, and other restaurants with their own delivery services were all able to stop deliveries during a typhoon, but the delivery platforms could not?
Meituan station supervisor Jin Zhuangzhuang was helpless to respond. Every time the weather turns bad, riders will ask him for leave, claiming that they have a flat tire, or that they fell, or they have a family problem––all kinds of reasons. But in order to preserve the station’s numbers in the face of a huge influx of orders, he must rigorously uphold regulations. Except for birth, death, illness, or death, riders cannot ask leave on bad weather days, and taking leave will directly result in a fine.
Stormy days are also the most tiring days for Jin Zhuangzhuang. He must stay in front of the station’s computer, constantly monitoring every rider’s position, taking responsibility for every order and the timing of every delivery. In his delivery station, Meituan’s regulations dictate that every rider can take 12 orders at a time at most. If a rider has more than 12 orders, the system will stop dispatching new orders. However, during bad weather or important holidays, when there is no chance of handling the sheer number of orders coming in, the system is most prone to collapse: there are some riders with multiple orders, some with almost none; there are some riders who receive orders at the same time going in opposite directions; the delivery time for nearby orders is longer than the orders that are far away…
Under these conditions, Jin Zhuangzhunag must play another role: manual scheduling.5 In this role, he can enter the system directly and transfer orders from Rider A to Rider B in order to balance the capacity. Even though the system cuts off at 12 orders per rider, manual scheduling does not have these limits: as long as a person assigns the orders, the number of orders that a rider is responsible for can reach an overwhelming number. Each rider can handle 26 orders at most; one station can have a maximum of 30 riders, meaning that in three hours a single station can handle 1,000 orders. One rider responsible for running orders in a smaller city of 500,000 people reported being assigned 16 orders at a time during peak hours.
As an Ele.me station supervisor told Renwu, this kind of manual intervention is not done on behalf of the workers, but rather in order to force every rider to operate at the limits of their speed and ability. If pushing his riders to their limits is still not sufficient to handle the orders, Jin Zhuangzhuang can deliver orders himself. The most he can handle at one time is 15 orders (a full complement). First he will let the riders handle the wave of orders by themselves, but if they still cannot handle it, his only option is to ask Meituan to limit the orders. “After 2018, our station was not allowed to ask for a limit on orders. Even if the order numbers were overwhelming, we still had to deliver them,” he said, “When there was an overwhelming number of orders, after finishing delivery everyone was numb. Everyone was running on instinct, without a human emotional response.”
Last year, Jin Zhuangzhuang left the industry because of a family illness. He said that personally he cannot go back. Recently he had some friends that wanted to run a delivery station, and he also persuaded them that this industry suppresses any human sense of time, and stresses data over people to a level you can’t believe without experiencing. During this summer’s heavy rains across south China, Jin Zhuangzhuang was glad that he had gotten away, but at the same time he couldn’t fully rest easy. He did not know how many stations were yet again overwhelmed with orders, or how many riders were working desperately to get their delivery numbers back up to standards.
Delivery rider wading through a flood from heavy rain
Navigation
In her academic research, Sun Ping has contacted nearly one hundred delivery riders in the past four years. Many of these riders complained about the routes that the system gave them for delivering orders.
In order to allow riders to more efficiently deliver food, this intelligent system will replace the human brain to the greatest extent possible––by helping riders determine the best sequence for delivering food and giving directions for each delivery route, the riders do not need to use their own brains, they just have to completely follow the system’s directions. But at the same time, the riders run the risk of being led astray.
At times, the navigation system will show a direct route, [without regard for actual roads or traffic conditions]. A rider angrily told Sun Ping: “It (the algorithm) gives it predictions for time and distance as the crow flies. But when we try to deliver food, we cannot follow that route, we have to make detours and wait for red lights… Yesterday, when I was delivering an order, the system said the dropoff was five kilometers away, but in the end I drove seven kilometers. The system thinks we are helicopters, but we are not.” At times, the navigation will instruct the riders to go against traffic.
In October 2019, Xiao Dao, a delivery rider in Guizhou, posted on Zhihu about an experience with Meituan guiding riders against traffic. In conversation with Renwu he said, “I had been a rider for about half a year and had already been told by the navigation system to go against traffic many times. One time when I was delivering food to a hospital, I had to make a U-turn, but the route on Meituan navigation told me to drive against traffic once I crossed the road.” According to the screenshot he provided, the system told him to drive against traffic for nearly two kilometers.
“Even more impressive,” Xiao Dao said, “There are some places where there is no shoulder or sidewalk where I can drive against traffic. If there is an overpass, the navigation system will direct me to go over the overpass, even if it is an overpass that does not allow electric scooters. If there is a wall, it will tell you to go directly through the wall.”
In Beijing, the popular video blogger Caodao also experienced the same thing. In order to experience the industry from the inside, she worked as a Meituan rider for less than a week. What surprised her was that after she delivered an order, the directions from Meituan’s navigation were actually walking directions––walking directions do not distinguish the flow of traffic. Furthermore, the estimated time given by the system was calculated based on the shortest route, even if the majority of the route went in the opposite direction of traffic.
As Xiao Dao sees it, it does not matter if it is a route “as the crow flies” or against the flow of traffic – ultimately, the system has still achieved its objective, calculating the shortest and quickest route for the smallest delivery fee. If the route is short and the delivery time is fast, the system will have not only retained more customers on its platform, but also reduced the overall cost of delivery.
At the end of 2017, in an article introducing optimizations and upgrades to the platform’s intelligent delivery system, Meituan’s technology team also mentioned cost. The article explains that algorithm optimization reduces the platform’s capacity loss by 19 percent: Delivery volumes that previously needed five riders can now use only four. Finally, cost appears in the conclusion of the article: efficiency, experience, and cost are the platform’s three indices for optimization. Meituan gets significant real-world benefits from this approach.
According to public company data, the number of Meituan delivery orders reached 2.5 billion in the third quarter of 2019. The revenue for every order increased by 0.04 yuan year-on-year, and at the same time the cost for every order went down by 0.12 yuan from the third quarter of 2018––this also helped Meituan’s third quarter earnings in 2019, which in total were 400 million yuan.
Behind the substantial increase in the platform’s profits is a decrease in riders’ salaries. Xiao Dao said every time that the system’s navigation told him to go against the flow of traffic, he faces a dilemma from which there is no escape. If he rejects the navigation’s instructions to go against the flow of traffic, he has to take a longer route and runs the risk of a late delivery. If he follows the navigation, he puts himself at risk. No matter what choice he makes, the money he makes will decrease.
Every rider must balance the trade-offs between safety and pay. As a temporary participant observer, Caodao pinpointed the plight of riders: all delivery platforms strive to maximize profits, and in the end they will shift the risk to those with the least ability to negotiate: the delivery riders.
A screenshot of the navigation system on Xiao Dao’s phone: the path for delivery cuts across the median.
In conversations with Renwu, many riders repeated the same thing: There will always be someone willing to take the delivery. If you were not willing to run the delivery, then someone else will.
Before working as a Meituan rider, A Fei was a delivery rider for KFC. At most, he could deliver 600 to 700 orders in a month because of the limits of the store. The brand could only give the delivery company 12 or 13 yuan per order at most. Because of this, the commission for delivery workers was always 9 yuan. He characterizes that job as “standard”: that is, the pay did not rise, and every month the most he could make was 5,000 yuan. Finally, inspired by the rumors that delivery riders could make more than 10,000 yuan a month, he decided to leave KFC and work as a rider for delivery platforms.
At Meituan and Ele.me, riders are divided into two types: direct hires and gig workers. Direct hires are full-time workers attached to a specific delivery station with a minimum pay and fixed shifts. They receive orders arranged by the system and are assessed based on their rate of positive reviews and on-time deliveries. Gig workers are part-time riders with very low barriers to entry––a rider only needs a vehicle and an app. After successfully registering, a rider can start work immediately. These gig workers do not have a minimum pay and they can choose their own orders and reject orders that the system assigns them. However, if riders reject orders too often, the number of orders they can select will be limited. Gig riders are not impacted by negative reviews and complaints, but late deliveries come with a more harsh consequence: If deliveries are late by even a minute, the delivery commission is cut in half. Regardless of whether the rider is a direct hire or a gig worker, the rider and the platform do not have a formal employment relationship.
A Fei ultimately decided to join Meituan as a gig worker. Before 2017, he worked for roughly nine hours a day, specializing in long-distance deliveries. Every month his pay was about 10,000 yuan. The most he made in a month was 15,000 yuan. Low barriers to entry and high pay were the main reason that platforms were assured of a supply of workers.
According to sociologists, riders’ pay surpassed 10,000 yuan because of the special conditions at the start-up phase of delivery platforms. After a long-term investigation of the labor conditions of delivery workers in Wuhan, Zheng Guanghuai’s team at Huazhong Normal University’s Institute of Sociology found that with the end of platform subsidies, more and more riders entered the profession, and monthly salaries of 10,000 yuan became little more than a dream.
A Fei told Renwu that after working delivery in Beijing for a short time, he went to Chongqing for personal reasons, and his pay decreased, especially after the pandemic, when more and more people joined the profession. He even had a difficult time getting orders to deliver. One month, his pay did not even reach 7,000 yuan. According to the Meituan research institute’s “Employment Report on Meituan Riders During the 2019 to 2020 Pandemic,” 336,000 new riders registered with Meituan’s platform during the pandemic. The top source for new riders was factory workers, followed by salespeople. According to A Fei, riders can usually make the most money when it is particularly hot or cold. Most people are unwilling to make deliveries under those conditions.
Elevators
According to public statements by the delivery platforms, elevator wait time is a key factor in the system’s estimation of delivery times. In an interview with tech media platform 36Kr, Meituan’s delivery algorithm team lead He Renqing emphasized elevators’ role in delivery time: Meituan’s delivery algorithm specifically accounts for the time riders take to arrive at a certain floor, even to the point of investigating the speeds at which riders can go up and down elevators in tall buildings.
However, real-world complexity far outstrips the AI’s predictive ability. As A Fei, the rider who has been unable to make a monthly income of more than 10,000 yuan, says, “Waiting for elevators is one of the most painful parts of our job––extremely painful.”
In many riders’ eyes, waiting for hospital elevators is the most difficult. For A Fei, who has worked as a rider for four years, the worst experience was the wait for an elevator in Beijing University’s No. 3 hospital. That time, carrying seven or eight orders at a time to the surgery department of the No. 3 hospital during the peak of the lunch hour was a terrifying scene. “I remember it so clearly,” he says, “At the elevator doors, delivery riders were packed in together with doctors, patients, and their families. It didn’t look too good. I waited as the elevator came and went several times, and when I was finally able to push my way inside, everyone was packed together so tightly that I couldn’t breathe.” That day, after delivering one order to the hospital, the next six orders A Fei delivered were marked late.
Later, when he moved to Chongqing, elevators were just as much a problem as before. The Hong Ding International building, a 48-story commercial building that became famous among online youth, is a maze of thirty or forty small workshops and businesses crammed together on each floor. Imagine your panic at sending a delivery to one specific stall – although the building itself has seven or eight elevators, at peak hours tourists waiting to get into the building and delivery workers sending or picking up food line up together, and it takes about a half hour just to get in the door.
There is also the Chongqing Global Financial Center. This structure is 74 stories tall, but the whole building only has one service elevator open to delivery workers. Elevator resources are already strained during meal times to begin with. Another issue is the result of attempts to maintain the office building’s image. As A Fei explains, “We can only wait by the elevator for the people inside to make their way out, and the people outside to pack the elevator again. Waiting for the elevator takes ten or fifteen minutes, and coming down after the delivery is another fifteen minutes. One order takes so long, how can you avoid being late?”
Office buildings don’t allow delivery riders into staff elevators, delivery riders from Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, and Hunan told Renwu. This situation is extremely common. On July 11, 2020, a popular Weibo user named Caodao published a video based on her experience as a temporary delivery rider. One moment in the video, when Beijing’s SKP mall didn’t allow her to enter, became a trending topic online, and sparked a broad-based online discussion about occupational discrimination. As Caodao sees it, however, the SKP incident is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to discrimination against workers in the delivery industry. In that short video, another moment which received much less public scrutiny centered on elevators.
“This made a deep impression on me,” Caodao says, “I go into a building to pick up an order, and inside, there are a ton of shops, and they’re all the kind that depend mostly on delivery. The building had another elevator, but the security guard didn’t let me on. He only let me use one elevator that was specifically designated for delivery workers.” As a new worker, just finding this elevator took quite a while for her––and then, she had to wait in line for the elevator with dozens of other delivery workers. The riders spontaneously formed two lines, leaving the middle empty for the riders coming out of the elevator. Caodao spent ten or fifteen minutes just waiting for elevators.
Weibo blogger @曹导 (@Caodao) tries out work as a delivery rider, and is forbidden from entering a mall to pick up food.
Besides office buildings, some high-end residential compounds are another kind of elevator-minefield for delivery riders. In these buildings, getting on the elevator requires a keycard, but customers are mostly unwilling to come down from their apartments. What they do instead is to have us stand in an elevator, and then call an elevator from their floor––but there is no guarantee that the elevator you’re in will be the one that they called. According to A Fei, many riders will climb more than twenty stories of stairs just to avoid a bad review from this kind of customer. A Fei, on the other hand, works on the crowdsourced side of the industry and doesn’t have to worry as much about the results of poor review scores. As a result, A Fei’s solution is: “If the customer lives on the 14th floor and I think it’s not worth it, what we come down to is, I’ll climb seven flights of stairs, they come down seven stories, and we meet in the middle. This way, it at least makes a little more sense.”
A Fei says that he’s seen innumerable delivery riders on the brink of emotional collapse at the doors to an elevator, sobbing or fighting, because there are too many people waiting and they can’t complete the final step of delivering an order. If you can cram yourself into the elevator, you’ve made it, but in reality, all you can do is stand by the door and wait. There’s nothing to do––all you can do is wait.
In order not to be late, some riders will mark orders as delivered while they’re waiting for the elevator. However, this is against the rules of the system, and riders can be fined 500 yuan if the customer complains, a Gansu-based rider tells us.
On this particular point, Ele.me is slightly more humane than Meituan, says a Guizhou rider, who explains that Ele.me’s system has a “report” function. If the rider reaches the destination but has to wait a minute or two for the elevator, he or she can hit the “report” function to make a note that you arrived on time before completing the delivery, exiting the building, and hitting the final “complete order” button.
Zhang Hu, a rider from Zhengzhou, has worked for Ele.me delivery as well as Meituan’s crowdsourced platform. Comparing his work experience under these two platforms, he says that Meituan really is more ruthless: Meituan’s delivery riders are nothing but a group of robots running orders to customers. But the number of orders isn’t that large for Ele.me, which doesn’t have a large market share in the area, and as a result riders can be a bit gentler and more polite.
Objective data also support his judgment. According to internet monitoring platform Trustdata, in the first half of 2019 Meituan controlled 64.6% of the delivery market. Based on order numbers, Meituan riders deliver 20 more orders per day than riders working for Ele.me.
Regardless of how hard riders work, however, the platform doesn’t consider it fast enough. Complain as he might about Meituan, Zhang Hu eventually decided to leave Ele.me and join Meituan because the platform was able to offer him a delivery volume that would have been unimaginable with Ele.me.
This is also why A Fei eventually decided to work with Meituan. Although his wages did decrease during the pandemic, he never felt too bad: Under epidemic prevention guidelines, many compounds didn’t allow riders to enter, and office buildings prohibited riders from entering. The result was that he no longer had to struggle for the elevator. However, following the reduction in epidemic prevention measures, more and more compounds and office buildings are lifting their prohibition on deliveries, and elevators have once again become a point of pain for riders.
As the new round of battles over elevator space was beginning, Caodao was completing the final cut of her video on her experience trying out life as a rider. In the final version, Caodao added a scene of herself waiting for the elevator and, in mid-July, told Renwu that the experience of waiting for an elevator made her feel like an ant.
Delivery riders waiting at an elevator door. (Still captured from Caodao’s video blog.
Gatekeepers
In 2019, Li Lei, who lives in Zhengzhou, switched from Ele.me to Meituan, and transferred his role from delivery station chief to business development, where his primary role was to expand business partnerships with his delivery station. In order to bring more trendy shops under the jurisdiction of his delivery station, he would often go door-to-door, building and maintaining relationships with specific shops. At weekend peak delivery times, he would even set out stools at stores’ doorsteps. However, this had nothing to do with building relationships. Instead, it was in order to encourage shopkeepers to get food out faster.
Compared with the wait for elevators, the wait to pick up orders from shopkeepers is an even more painful bottleneck for riders.
The system continually improves itself in the name of “intelligence,” repeatedly shrinking the time allotted for food pickups––but shopkeepers’ slow pace in getting food out the door has always been an issue. In a public article, Meituan’s senior algorithm expert Wang Shengyao explains that even after analyzing the history of completed orders it is still very difficult to accurately predict how long it will take a shop to prepare an order. As long as the predicted preparation time is not correct, the food delivery ecosystem will continue to contain a random variable.
However, faced with the fixed nature of the required delivery time, those who bear the burden of mitigating this variable are the riders.
According to accounts by riders, there are many reasons why businesses are slow at preparing orders. Some shops are very popular, and at peak times can’t even keep up with dine-in orders, but managers are still unwilling to temporarily reject delivery orders. On the other hand, some proprietors of smaller businesses in less-popular areas are a bit more relaxed and lack a sense of urgency: Riders rushing to pick up an order arrive only to find the shopkeeper walking into their shop with ingredients they have just purchased. Some shops, particularly those selling noodles, will wait to start preparation until the rider arrives, in order to ensure that their products are as fresh as possible.
These difficulties are all compounded for the three most difficult types of food delivery: roast fish, stews, and barbecue. A rider tells Renwu: “The last time I accepted an order for soup, I got to the restaurant, but they hadn’t even started to stew it. I waited there while they simmered the soup for 40 minutes.” Another rider talked about a time he was so anxious that he lost it and started shouting at the older men manning the stove, thinking all the while, “Guys, get to cooking!” But the cooks were as methodical as always, completely unworried. After all, the money was paid when he received the order, and if the order was late, the cooks wouldn’t be charged.
The problem of slow preparation is unsolvable, says former Meituan delivery station chief Jin Zhuangzhuang. Through the evaluation functions built into the system, shopkeepers can submit low scores or complaints about riders, but riders have no way of evaluating shopkeepers. Sometimes, riders are forced to carry water for shopkeepers: Complaints that food is too hot, not salty enough, or that an order was missing vinegar, which ought to be directed toward shopkeepers, often end up in riders’ inboxes. Many riders have petitioned for these negative ratings to be removed from the system, but none of these appeals have ever been approved.
Resolving this problem ultimately falls on the backs of riders. In Jin Zhuangzhuang’s experience, riders have to go often and develop a relationship with small restaurants that are often slow to complete orders, sharing cigarettes or telling jokes to the shopkeepers in order to get their orders bumped up the queue. In larger restaurants, it’s generally worthwhile to build relationships with hostesses or staff who prep to-go orders, who can bump your order up via their intercom to the kitchen.
However, this can’t solve the root problem, and conflicts between riders and shopkeepers continue to take place. Because of problems with order preparation, a rider in Jinan got into a fistfight with staff at a Hi-Tea franchise, and in Wuhan, a delivery rider stabbed a clerk during a dispute, and the clerk later died of his injuries.
Store employee stabbed by a delivery rider in Wuhan.
The problem of waiting for orders leads to significant conflicts, some that have even led to the police being called. When asked how to solve this problem, one delivery rider put forward a simple solution: Extend the delivery time. With sufficient time, everyone wouldn’t have to be so anxious.
But in reality, delivery times have become shorter and shorter, and among the voices pressuring riders, shopkeepers––one of the major consumers of riders’ time––often raise the loudest complaints.
When discussing collaborative arrangements with restaurants, Li Lei discovered that what received the most attention from shopkeepers was how fast riders could arrive. If the speed at which riders arrived to pick up orders didn’t meet the shopkeeper’s expectations, they would point it out to Li Lei, switch delivery stations, or end their relationship. There are often two delivery stations for the same platform near a popular business district, and restaurant staff can choose which station to work with. As Li Lei says, the considerations for these arrangements are simple: First is the delivery capacity of the station, and the second is the speed at which riders can arrive at the restaurant.
In order to keep relationships with restaurants that send out a large quantity of orders, Li Lei urges the workers at the delivery station to work faster and faster. On the other hand, if the business owner is slow at preparing orders and causes riders to be late, this influences the metrics for the station––but all that Li Lei can do is go and talk it over with the owners, or go himself to try to speed things up. However, going into a restaurant and speeding up preparation isn’t something that just anyone can do––it also has to do with whether or not the station staff has built a strong relationship with the restaurant.
Sitting at the door of the restaurant, Li Lei stares fixedly at the screen of the point of sale system that prints delivery order slips, unwilling to be distracted even for a second. Ding, an order pops up, but restaurant staff hear his voice at the same time: “Meituan’s here, we’ve got a Meituan order here.” As he says, you have to beat your opponent by starting from the very first second.
A delivery rider picking up an order
Coca-Cola and Peppa Pig
As a result of a conflict with a customer, Meituan rider Xiao Lin discovered a secret hidden within the system: The delivery time displayed on the customer’s end is different from that shown on the rider’s side.
At that time, he had just started working for Meituan through their crowdsourced model. He accepted an order and rushed to the shop to pick it up, but just as he had the order in hand, the customer’s bald-faced question arrived in his inbox: “Why aren’t you here yet? You’re late already!” Xiao Lin thought that the customer had no reason to be angry, because at that point, his own phone showed that he had about ten minutes to complete the order. When he made the drop-off, the customer started arguing about the time once again, and when the two of them both took out their phones to compare times, the customer’s phone showed an expected delivery time that was a full ten minutes faster than that displayed on the riders’ side.
After discovering this secret, Xiao Lin would call Meituan’s customer service hotline monthly. It has been four years, and although he talks to a different customer service agent each time, their suggestions are always the same: Explain to the customer that the time displayed in their app is nothing more than an expected delivery time.
This is by no means a problem unique to Xiao Lin: Many riders told Renwu that they had the same issue. As they see it, this is a way by which the system tries to curry favor with customers and generate a stable client base––but at the same time, it is a major cause of conflict between customers and riders.
In the face of this consumer influence, food delivery platforms that are hyper-focused on customer base and order statistics use algorithms to construct a power hierarchy. In this structure, customers are of paramount importance, and have an unparalleled level of power.
“Customers can make mistakes. Customers sometimes… I can’t even say it.” Wang Bing, delivery rider from Gansu, has a mouthful for customers. “Many people don’t even know where their own address is: They obviously live at number 804 but write down 801. It’s clear that they live at the south gate, but then they write in ‘north gate.’ Some customers order dinner but then somehow forget, and when you call them, nobody picks up, until they call you the next day asking, ‘What happened to my meal?’ … When ordering food, some people obviously don’t look at the address. In just a glance, I can tell, this address is wrong, it’s in another province… The thing is, customers don’t have to pay the price for their mistakes. If the delivery is late, the rider is the one who is punished.”
Sun Ping, who has spent a long time researching the difficulties of the delivery industry, has also discussed the extreme power that customers hold. In the delivery process, the customer knows almost everything about the rider––his or her real name, phone number, on-time percentage, how many times he or she has been tipped, when an order was picked up, what route the rider is taking to deliver the order, and how long until delivery. As the order progresses, the customer still has the right to cancel the order.
“They can see everything, the whole process, but we don’t know who they are. What’s more, if there’s a problem, we can’t cancel the order the same way they can,” a rider complained to Sun Ping. That same rider also shared a story of what happened when his order was cancelled.
“I had two orders in hand. One was 1.5km away, with 45 minutes remaining, and the other was 3km away, with 20 minutes left. I delivered the order that was further away first, but the customer with the closer order got mad because he saw my GPS location pass by his house without delivering the order. He got really pissed, cancelled the order, and put in a complaint with the platform.”
In Renwu’s investigation, some riders told similar stories: “Then, the customer turned around and asked the rider, “Aren’t you just delivering my order?”
As delivery times get faster and faster, the rating system for riders gets completely skewed. As the system grows increasingly rotten, customers have also gotten more and more impatient.
A screenshot showing the discrepancy between the “expected delivery time” (19:12) and the delivery time limit for the rider (19:45).
Jing Jing, who lives in Shanghai, admits that he has been spoiled. He is usually busy with work, does not know how to cook, and relies almost entirely on takeout food. He often orders food at cafes and small restaurants not far from his home. As he remembers it, it used to take about 45 minutes from placing an order to eating the first tomato in a Caesar salad. Generally to pass the time he would watch a 45-minute TV series while waiting. More recently, the wait time has been a steady 26 minutes, but on one occasion, the rider took more than 30 minutes to get there. This wait was unbearable for Jing Jing, who called the rider five times to remind him.
In 2017, a survey by the French research institution Ipsos investigated impatience among consumers in 12 Chinese cities. The results indicate that the development of mobile technology has allowed consumers to become increasingly impatient in multiple aspects of their lives. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in economically developed areas, and among younger consumers; overall, consumers in Beijing were the most impatient in the survey.
Faced with increasingly impatient customers, delivery riders have to find all kinds of methods to appease them. On this point, Wang Bing also has a lot to say: When he has a series of orders in hand, all with comparable delivery times, he will deliver the most valuable order first, because customers who order high-priced delivery are more likely to get mad and less likely to listen to any explanation the rider can offer. “They’ll just go off all of a sudden, and say they won’t accept the order. If it’s a 100 yuan delivery, where am I going to get the money to refund it when they cancel?”
What’s more, riders have to try their best to fulfill customers’ particular demands about their delivery, such as purchasing water or cigarettes on the way to drop food off, or bringing shaving equipment to an internet cafe. There was a period of time when, following a Douyin (TikTok) trend, customers would often request Wang Bing to draw Peppa Pig on the delivery receipt, and give poor reviews if he didn’t. Wang Bing was quite angry about this, but had no choice other than to draw the picture, so he bought a sheet of butcher paper, drew a Peppa Pig cartoon, and wrote the tagline for another show – “Are you dumb?”
Delivery is a performance that puts the customer at the center. As Sun Ping wrote in a research report, ingratiating oneself with customers and striving for five-star ratings becomes a form of emotional labor. As she sees it, this emotional labor is often overlooked, but the effort it requires from riders and the damage it inflicts is far greater than that of physical labor.
When discussing the topic with Renwu, Sun Ping brought up one rider who had a deep impact on her: He had two scooters stolen from him in three days, and his scooter battery had been stolen three times. As she was interviewing him, he burst into tears: “The platform requires us to say ‘Enjoy your meal’ when we deliver an order. What nobody realizes is, I came from the countryside. Before this, I used to work the land. Saying ‘Enjoy your meal’ like this is really embarrassing––and then I have to ask for a five-star review. Me, a grown man, how am I going to say that?”
Just after the SKP incident, Shen Yang, associate professor in the Department of Public Economics and Social Policy at Shanghai Jiaotong University told an interviewer from news platform Jiemian that although some delivery riders can earn a monthly pay of over 10,000 yuan (about $1400), they still exist in an unequal class position, sacrificing their time and health in order to earn a bit more money. It is only by doing work that is more physically and emotionally difficult that riders can earn a higher pay.
Wang Bing is still continuing to develop new moves to appease customers. In the summer, many customers order a Coca-Cola to go with their meal, served in a cup. This year, with the heavy rain and the pressure to deliver fast, Wang Bing crashed his scooter relatively often – and even with the smallest crash, there was no way to save the cups of Coke. If he had to go back to the mall to pick up a new one, not only would he have to pay for it himself, but the order would definitely be late. In order to avoid angering the customer, he would always keep a bottle of Coke in his delivery box: If the customer’s cup spilled, he would simply find somewhere no one would see him, pour the new Coke into the spilled paper cup, and put the lid back on, leaving no trace behind. He figures that this is a great way to avoid issues.
At the same time, on a few legal counseling websites, a few anxious customers have posted questions: “If I call to speed up a delivery rider, who then gets into an accident as a result, do I bear the legal responsibility for the accident?” The lawyer’s response appears beneath the question: “You bear no responsibility.”
Peppa Pig, drawn by a delivery rider to satisfy a customer’s request. Image from online sources.
Games
Ele.me and Meituan recently published their financial reports for the second quarter of 2020. In the quarter, Ele.me managed to make a profit on every order, and Meituan was able to make a profit of 2.2 billion RMB, a year-on-year increase of 95.5%. During this period, delivery services were Meituan’s most profitable segment.
On August 24, 2020, Meituan’s stock price also reached a new high, with a market capitalization of over 200 billion US dollars, making it the fifth-most valuable company on the Hong Kong stock exchange. However, in the course of our half-year investigation, the 30 delivery riders Renwu met with were more interested in talking about nickels and dimes.
A Meituan rider in Hunan said, “If your on-time delivery rate dips below 98%, then you’re fined one mao (100 mao is equal to one yuan, with each mao worth less than a penny), and if your rate goes below 97%, you’re fined two mao. “Isn’t this more pressure on riders to speed up? Anyway, a penny per order really adds up for us.”
A rider for Ele.me in Shanghai said Ele.me’s lowest rate per order is 4.5 yuan, and the more orders you run, the higher the rate. Sometimes the extra penny feels really important––“when you’re looking at 4.9 yuan or 5 yuan, they really don’t feel that similar.” To keep that one cent, riders don’t just drive faster – they also drive more and more orders. This is an explicit goal of the system, and within it, there is another, hidden secret: a ranking game.
Meituan and Ele.me’s platforms both have a points system for riders. The more orders you deliver, the higher your on-time percentage, the higher your customer satisfaction, and the more points the system will award you. The higher your points, the higher your bonus income will be. The system has even packaged this ranking system in something like a role-playing game: Riders on different levels are given different rankings and names. For example, Meituan gives riders rankings of Normal, Bronze, Silver, Gold, Diamond, and King.
A Meituan gig rider who works in a southeastern city described the specifics of the ranking system: Within one week, delivering 140 valid orders with an on-time rate of 97% is enough to become a Silver ranked rider, which will earn you a weekly bonus of 140 yuan. If you are able to complete 200 orders with an on-time rate of 97%, you can reach a Gold ranking, and earn a weekly bonus of 220 yuan. For Ele.me, your order count is directly tied to your pay rate per order: If your monthly order total is under 500, you will earn 5 yuan per order; from 500 to 800, you earn 5.5 yuan; from 800 to 1000 orders a month, you will earn 6 yuan; and so on. Under the rules of the game, points are cleared and reset to zero every week for Meituan or every month for Ele.me.
In the research report “Orders and Labor: Investigating Algorithms and Labor in China’s Delivery Platform Economy,” Sun Ping shows that, besides creating an incentive system for on-time delivery targets, the system also uses gamified performance ranking measures to involve riders in a repetitive game that they have neither the time nor the ability to stop playing. “They want us to work day and night,” a rider told her. “But they [riders] have no way to get out: Last month, I hit “Black Gold” status, and if I want to keep that ranking, I still need 832 points––I’ve got a lot of work to do still.”
The higher your ranking, the more pressure a rider feels to maintain their ranking. As Sun Ping sees it, this kind of gamified packaging is not only a possible route to addiction for riders, it’s also a clever way to unite riders’ understanding of their self-worth with capitalist management techniques. The gilding of gamification generalizes algorithmic exploitation, internalizing it and giving it a rationalized explanation.
An exhausted rider by the side of the road.
According to Meituan’s “Delivery Employment Report, First Half of 2020,” Meituan currently has nearly three million riders. Ele.me’s “Hummingbird” portal on its official website currently indicates that the company has 3 million riders. Faced with the existence of a system that now includes nearly 6 million riders, Central China Normal University sociologist Zheng Guanghuai put forward the concept of “downloaded labor.”
In an investigation report “Wuhan Delivery Rider Group Survey: Platform Workers and Downloaded Labor”, Zheng Guanghuai’s team of researchers expound upon the concept. Riders begin work by downloading an app. On the surface, the app is just a production tool for assisting their work, but in reality the riders are downloading a sophisticated labor control system. In this system, workers’ original subjectivity is comprehensively shaped and even replaced. Although platform workers may seem more independent on the surface, they are in fact faced with even deeper methods of control.
The platform is created through downloading labor: “Platform Workers”. As Zheng Guanghuai writes, “This type of labor is characterized by: strong attraction and weak contracts; high levels of management and low levels of resistance. The intermediary assisting the system in this downloaded labor is the workers’ own phones, which then become platform workers’ most important work tool. In their public reports, delivery platforms are always working hard to help delivery riders get rid of their phones.
“We worry that accidents will happen will happen while riders are on the road,” Meituan delivery management team leader He Renqing specifically mentioned during an April 2018 interview with 36Kr. For Meituan, the trickiest question is how to ensure that riders do not use their phones while driving. To this end, Meituan spent 7 months developing a Bluetooth headset with a built-in smart voice system. According to He Renqing, these Bluetooth headphones are windproof, waterproof, and noise-cancelling. While riders are wearing them, they can use voice commands to complete operational tasks, ensuring that they do not look at their phones while delivering food.
But in reality, none of the riders that we spoke with had received or used this smart Bluetooth headset, nor were they able to put down their phones. Although she only experienced the life of a delivery rider for a few days, Caodao still has a lingering fear of being controlled by her phone. “While the phone gives navigation advice, the system is always to one side, giving you reminders: ‘There are new orders in the Meituan gig app, please confirm immediately.’ These reminders are mixed in with the directions given by the navigation system. Then your delivery is late again, and maybe the customer calls you asking you where you are––then you might have to navigate and take orders and answer calls to explain why an order is late all at the same time…” Cao Dao told us that this kind of feeling forced her to think that every minute was very important, and every day was a harried flight from pursuit: You can only go faster, ever faster.
“We must never waste time on the road – that’s where time goes the quickest,” one Ele.me rider told Renwu. “An order is in your own hands just during the short time when you are on the road. Whenever there are a lot of orders, every rider wants to be able to take off flying––unless there is a traffic officer following right on your tail, saying ‘Don’t speed, don’t speed.’ He paused, and added: even flying is not quick enough.
At those times [when there are a lot of orders to run] the only help a rider can turn to is his or her electric scooter. Before starting to work for a platform, riders have to get a scooter. Usually, the delivery station will have a long-term contract with a second-hand company to provide riders with leases on electric scooters. In order to cut costs, most riders will choose to rent a scooter for a few hundred yuan a month. These vehicles are mostly in bad shape––some don’t have rearview mirrors, and some are only held together by tape, wrapped seven or eight times around the body of the scooter. One rider told us, “After starting to work in the delivery industry, I became an expert in electric scooter repair.”
If riders do not want to rent, some stations will ask to pay off the cost of their delivery vehicle in installments. One Meituan rider in Chengdu was required by his delivery station to purchase an unbranded vehicle at 1000 yuan over market price. Another rider said he spent several thousand yuan to buy an electric scooter through the delivery station, but the battery broke just two days later.
Compared to riders who were cheated out of their money, Meituan rider Wang Fugui feels lucky. Not only did he and the battery of his electric scooter both go flying on his first day of being a rider, his head got stuck in the guardrail alongside the road. The scooter itself was rented through the station for 200 yuan a month, and was basically stuck together from spare parts, with no lights and worn brake pads. Sometimes when he stepped on the brake, the scooter would just keep going, and when he tried to step on the gas, it would go backward. Still, none of these qualified as a problem. On the second day after his crash, he spent 10 yuan of his own money for a foot brake. When working at night, he would put a flashlight in his mouth to serve as headlight or glue it to the front of his scooter. “After all,” Wang said, “This scooter has its advantages. It was super fast––65 kilometers per hour at the fastest.”
According to 2018 data from the Ministry of Public Security, from 2013 to 2017 there were more than 5.62 million accidents involving electric scooters that resulted in injury or death, resulting in 8,431 deaths and 111 million yuan in property damage. In order to improve standards on the use of electric scooters, the country officially implemented new standards in April 2019, requiring scooters to be limited to speeds of 25 kilometers per hour. Any electric scooter that meets these new regulations will cost at least 1000 yuan.
Still, in Renwu’s investigation involving more than 30 riders, none of the riders had a scooter that met the new national standards, regardless of whether they worked for Meituan or Ele.me. Their scooters’ top speeds were typically around 40 kilometers per hour, far faster than the speed limit. Still, it’s easy to find discussions on how to refit newly purchased electric scooters to go faster than the speed limit in riders’ online discussion groups and message boards.
After he had worked as a rider for over a year, Wang Fugui’s broken-down scooter stopped working – went on strike – more and more frequently, and once or twice, Wang had no choice but to take a taxi to make his deliveries. Luckily, since he was in a small Northwestern city, when his scooter finally quit on him for good he was able to simply take a taxi to avoid late deliveries, spending 50 RMB to smoothly deliver ten or fifteen meals. Afterwards, in order to run orders faster, he gritted his teeth and spent his own money to buy a new scooter – as for his first, broken-down vehicle, no one can say how many parts were pulled off of it, or how many other rental scooters they were installed on.
Both on his old scooter and the new one he bought, Wang Fugui’s performance was always ranked in the top five, or even the top three, riders in the delivery area. However, after working for a short time, he eventually resigned because the platform’s new requirements were unbearable. “In order to expand its business, Meituan made us go out on the streets to pull in new customers. Every day we had to get two people who had never used Meituan’s app to register a new account. At the beginning, I was able to keep it up for a few days, but in the end, I decided I really couldn’t stand it, so I just left.”
Smiling Action
When the news that delivery driving was the most dangerous profession became a trending topic, the system was already making great efforts to counter the issue.
In the early days of the platforms, both Meituan and Ele.me provided safety training for riders, with a focus on the entry phase. Both professional and gig riders had to pass a simple safety and knowledge test in order to begin work.
Station managers often remind riders about safety issues. A Meituan station manager told Renwu that every time he did a safety training, he would make his own special compilation of electric scooter accidents for the more than 300 riders he managed to gather; after watching the video, he would reinforce the main messages: “I know you are all under pressure, and going against the flow of traffic is unavoidable, but please keep your eyes on the road.” This is also what an Ele.me station manager told us that he had reiterated many times. “Riders all put time first, rather than safety. There are times when they do not even value their own lives – in the end, what they fear most of all is being late.
Following the increasing rate of incidents involving delivery riders, the delivery platforms thought up a few solutions to increase riders’ safety awareness. For example, they invited traffic officers to give lectures at delivery stations, or organized teams of riders to go take exams with traffic officer teams. Meituan also designed yellow kangaroo ears for riders [to wear on their helmets] that had slogans about speed and safety written on them. Most of the kangaroo ears bore a slogan on the front: “No matter how busy, don’t forget about safety.” On the back was: “Meituan: Send anything fast” But in reality, it’s difficult to have both [safety and speed]. Many riders weren’t unwilling to wear the ears because they were too much trouble. One rider told Renwu, “As soon as I pick up a bit of speed, the ears will be blown off by the wind.”
Meituan’s yellow kangaroo ears
For safety, the system added a new feature––after riders set out on their route, the system would show a safety education video at random intervals. Often, while riders were in the midst of hurrying to make their deliveries, they would be forced to stop their vehicle and watch the video. Only after the video ended would the system for accepting orders go back to normal. A Dou, a Meituan rider from Hunan said that he was once forced to stop on the side of the road to watch a safety education video that suddenly appeared during a peak delivery time. Because he stopped his scooter, he was hit by a speeding bicycle, spraining his ankle and forcing him to take time off work.
Living every day in fear of being late, while simultaneously having to stop and watch safety education videos regardless of whether or not they were in the middle of a delivery, most riders were pretty unhappy. Still, there were times when they felt like it was lucky they it was only a safety education video that popped up on their phones, rather than a more horrible surprise – the Smiling Action.
Around June 2017, Meituan implemented their first smiling action. This was a spot-check measure by the system. Like the safety videos, it appeared at random intervals and selected random riders. Riders who are selected must also stop their vehicle within five minutes and take a picture from chest up, with the face clearly visible, and showing their helmet, work clothes, and badge. If riders do not take the photo in time, or if something within the photo is not up to standards, then the system will mark the rider as failing the spotcheck. Riders who fail the spotcheck face a fine between 300 and 1000 yuan, or even the possibility of three-day or permanent suspension.
Since the “smiling action” went online, it has become something like a higher power looking down on them. When asked about what times the activity has appeared, every Meituan rider had a different answer––when climbing the stairs, when getting on the elevator, when waiting for an order to be prepared, when orders are flooding in… A Dou’s most unforgettable “smiling activity” was when he got the notification when it was pouring rain and he was flooded with orders. That day, he was wearing a raincoat and it was raining so hard that he could barely see the road, but he still had to stop by the side of the road, take off his raincoat, reveal his badge and uniform, and take a picture. Another rider at the same station did not hear the notification because his phone was in his pocket, and was fined 400 yuan.
On an equally rainy day in February 2020, a rider with cerebral palsy in Nanchang, Jiangxi did not take the picture in time, leading to his account being shut down. Luckily, a video about the incident went viral on Douyin, and after receiving countless comments from netizens, Meituan officials quickly unlocked his account.
The Nanchang rider who did not complete the smiling activity in time. (Caption: “Meituan blocked my account.”)
But not every rider can get this kind of special treatment. In Meituan rider groups and message boards, the same topic is brought up every day. As one Meituan rider put it: “My photo obviously met the requirements, but the system decided that it failed the spotcheck. The response from customer service was: the system made the decision and there is no way to unblock the account. Our voices will never reach the top rungs [of the company],” one Meituan rider complained.
At the same time, many photos that obviously did not meet the requirements passed the spotcheck. A rider in Shenzhen revealed that after his own account had been blocked, he used his wife’s account to work delivery – but his own picture was accepted without a hitch by the smiling activity spotcheck. There are also some riders who will save someone else’s selfie in advance and use it for the spotcheck. This kind of photo also passes the spotcheck without a problem.
After the pandemic began, wearing a mask has also become a required part of the smiling activity. One Hubei rider said that because their mask was soaked by the rain and they did not have time to change to another one, the system marked them as failing the spotcheck, and their account could no longer accept orders. Another rider located in Guangdong took a photo covering their mouth with their hand [instead of a mask] and passed without a problem.
Last winter in Hailar, Inner Mongolia a Meituan rider was selected to take a photo while delivering food. The outside temperature was -30 degrees C, but he had to stop by the side of the road, take off his winter clothing, reveal his Meituan uniform and helmet, and take and upload a photo within five minutes. During Renwu’s interviews with Meituan riders, the most common criticism that riders had of the “smiling activity” was that it was horrible, heartless, and a waste of effort.
Ele.me also has a similar spotcheck activity named “Blue Storm.” The difference is, Blue Storm gives riders 15 minutes to complete the activity and the fines for non-compliance are relatively light––mostly between 5 and 30 yuan. While Renwu was doing its investigation, there were not nearly as many Ele.me riders who complained about this spotcheck.
Still, good times never last long, and according to the most recent disclosures from Ele.me riders, the company’s time limit for Blue Storm has been reduced from 15 minutes to 5 minutes, in order to completely catch up with Meituan in every metric.
@CrosstalkComedian: That smiling activity is really annoying. @CrosstalkComedian: It suddenly popped up when I was in the elevator. @Bubbles: The smiling activity always pops up on elevators, it seems like the system knows when you get in the elevator. @Bubbles: It’s like that for me too, every time I get on the elevator [that’s when I get a notification].
Five Star Ratings
Following the rising rate of traffic violations and accidents, traffic police have also been conscripted into the service of the system.
Xiong Chongjun is a traffic officer in Shenzhen. For nearly ten years, he has worked as the host of a traffic program. After many law enforcement videos went viral online, he became a traffic officer influencer, with the profile name “Shenzhen Officer Xiong.” Last summer, he went viral again after making two two Meituan riders write self-criticisms and read them aloud in punishment for going against traffic, posting the video under the hashtag #If Your Rider Hasn’t Arrived They Might Be Writing an Apology#. Some netizens criticized his actions, saying Officer Xiong was too soft and the punishment was too light.
Actually, in the past two years, Traffic Control Departments across the country have put forward all kinds of new policies to punish delivery riders. In Shanghai’s Pudong district, the Traffic Police Department has required riders to wear an electronic vest with their personal identification number. At the same time, each rider must have their own “Delivery Rider Civilized Driving” Score Card. A card costs 36 yuan. On-duty traffic officers and surveillance systems simultaneously enforce the law: Failure to wear a vest is 12 points, driving an unregistered scooter is 12 points, running a red light is 6 points, going against traffic flow is 3 points, driving in the motorway is 3 points, driving on the sidewalk is 3 points… after receiving 36 points in deductions, a rider faces permanent loss of registration or firing by their company. Pudong is the first area to implement a policy requiring riders to wear an electronic vest.
Xingtai, Hebei, Shenzhen, Guangdong, and other areas are adapting Shanghai’s policies, and have implemented a “Civilized” point system; Qingdao is developing a “blacklist” for dangerous delivery riders, and in Jiangsu, if riders violate the law they are not allowed to work for a day; Nanjing’s Traffic Management Department will require riders who violate the law twice to partake in a “study day”.
Police officers explain how to use the DS rider scoring app to a rider
However, given the great pressure riders are under not to make late deliveries, these measures have little effect. Renwu went to the Lujiazui area of Shanghai’s Pudong district in December 2019 and May 2020 to observe the impact of the electronic vest policy firsthand. Renwu kept a count of the number of riders who went through Shijie Avenue each hour: During the day, when more traffic police are on duty, the number of riders wearing an electronic vest could reach more than 70 percent. However, even though they were wearing the vests, there were still riders who chose to violate the law. This indicates that riders meticulously considered the outcome. In the daytime, when there are many police officers, riders can easily be stopped if they are not wearing a vest, with one stop costing 12 points. However, if a rider violates the law while wearing a vest, each instance of running a red light and going against the flow of traffic will be recorded, with a corresponding deduction of points––although these individual infractions will cost fewer points than those deducted for not wearing a vest. After the sun sets, the number of riders wearing vests drops dramatically. The reason is simple: the traffic officers’ shift is over.
Working as an enforcer comes with complicated feelings for many traffic officers, including Officer Xiong. They see with their own eyes that delivery riders are the ones who violate traffic laws the most often, but they also understand the riders’ situation. Officer Xiong told Renwu that officers are often called to the scene of accidents involving delivery riders: scooters are flipped over, or have run into cars or pedestrians, or are themselves run over… In Officer Xiong’s experience, delivery riders’ most common reaction to an accident is to quickly pick themselves up and see whether or not their food has spilled. Then, they will call the customer to explain the situation, never taking time to worry about themselves.
Seeing this, officer Xiong says he understands the difficulty of being a rider. As he told us, he often talks with delivery riders, and found out that their thinking is very simple––they just do not want to be late, or to receive bad reviews from customers. They don’t think about themselves, and their personal safety is never of first importance. Instead, they think about how to deliver the food to the customer on time––that’s all that is important to them.
As a frontline traffic officer, Officer Xiong thinks that what caused all this is the fierce competition between delivery platforms. At the same time, this situation has also demonstrated that non-motorized vehicle lanes in many cities are insufficient. The competition between delivery companies results in a competition based on delivery times, causing more and more anxiety for delivery riders. On one hand is a late delivery, but on the other is a traffic violation – they can only choose one option.
Therefore, when they encounter delivery riders violating the law, some traffic officers will be understanding in their enforcement. On the day he punished riders by making them write an apology, Officer Xiong told the riders to write in the shade instead of staying in the hot sun, and many traffic officers have helped riders make their deliveries.
News reports about incidents like these are too common to count. On March 25 of this year, a rider in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province was stopped by a traffic officer because he went against the flow of traffic and was punished by being made to help the traffic officer direct traffic. However, he told the traffic officer that he had just received an order and still hadn’t picked it up – if the delivery was late, he would be fined. In the end, the police officer had another police rider take the delivery rider’s scooter and deliver the order. On the way there, the electric scooter stalled three times; when the officer finally arrived at the customer’s house and looked down, the food had all spilled.
The good thing is that these circumstances are pretty unusual. Most traffic police are able to deliver food without a problem. On April 16, a Meituan rider in Nanchang, Jiangxi province violated traffic laws three times while rushing to complete an order, and was stopped and punished by traffic officers each time. In early June, an Ele.me rider in Wenzhou, Zhejiang was driving a motorcycle that was not allowed within city limits, and had his vehicle seized. On June 29, traffic officers in Dongguan, Guangdong confiscated a Meituan rider’s motorcycle because it did not have a license plate. All these riders were unable to complete their orders, but traffic police helped them deliver the food.
After delivering these orders, almost all of the officers who helped make the delivery would do the same thing––they would tell the customer who had ordered the food, “I hope you enjoy your food, please give a five star rating.”
Traffic police help a rider complete his delivery. Source: Sohu Video.
The Final Safety Net
Among all of the riders Renwu spoke with, Shi Shen’s experience is perhaps the most unique. Because he would rather lose money than put his life on the line, he has never run a red light or gone against the flow of traffic in his year working as a rider. Every day he works, he wears his uniform and his helmet in good order.
But even Shi Shen has been involved in an accident. One night in July 2019, he was hit by a small passenger van, fracturing his right ankle. When the traffic police arrived, they determined that the other party was responsible, and he was sent to the hospital, where the rider of the other vehicle bore all the expenses, including the surgery. As a professional rider, the station takes out a 106 yuan insurance fee from Shi Shen’s pay every month. This includes accident insurance, and under normal circumstances, Shi Shen could get a payout. However, when he contacted his station supervisor following his trip to the hospital, he found that his rider account had already been deleted.The station’s explanation was that, because Shi Shen was in the hospital for a long time due to the surgery and could not run orders, the amount of time he was available for work did not meet standards, and the system deleted his account. Because his account disappeared, he also lost access to the insurance claim log-in located inside the account. Without the log-in, he had no way to claim a settlement from the insurance company. In order to get the log-in back, he attempted to communicate with Meituan by way of his association with the delivery station, but found that he had been kicked out of the station’s group chat.
Among delivery riders, Shi Shen’s horrible experience is not an isolated case––in the system, the insurance policy is riders’ first and final safety net. However, in our investigation Renwu found that the majority of riders have no way to file a claim after experiencing a traffic accident. Delivery platforms’ frameworks are set up so that professional riders’ insurance is deducted from their monthly pay by the station, with the specific amount also set by the station. Meanwhile, gig riders’ insurance is deducted from their daily pay in the amount of three yuan per day, with a day beginning with from the riders’ first order and ending at midnight. If the rider is still delivering food at midnight, then insurance coverance can be extended by 1.5 hours.
According to sociologist Zheng Guanghuai, this type of labor insurance system is actually a transfer of responsibility from the delivery platforms to individuals. During a May 1 Labor Day interview with a culture reporter for the news platform Jiemian, Zheng Guanghuai said that “delivery platforms act as hands-off leaders. The platforms are delivery service contracting companies, and have dissolved their employment relationship [with workers].” When this kind of responsibility is transferred to the workers, the blurring of the labor relationship can also make it more difficult for workers to protect their rights and interests.
Sun Ping’s investigation also found that, in the event of a small cut or a small scratch, most of the riders that she talked to will just deal with the matter themselves. “Many of the riders told me that the application process is very complicated and has a lot of red tape. They would rather bear it themselves and are unwilling to go through that complicated process.”
A delivery rider describes accidents he has experienced on a riders’ forum
That is to say, if an accident goes beyond the scope of small cuts and scrapes, Shi Shenan’s experience will likely be repeated. One Ele.me temporary rider told Renwu that, when he had had an accident and collided with a pedestrian, the insurance company went over a year without compensating the victims, and in the end he was forced to take out an online loan to pay for their medical treatment. One rider in Suqian (northern Jiangsu) said that, when he was hired by Meituan, his station supervisor made him sign a voluntary waiver relinquishing any insurance protection. He felt puzzled, and the station supervisor told him: Delivery is the most dangerous job there is, and each day might be your last – so no-one is willing to insure us.
Of course, this is not the case. Jin Zhuangzhuang, a former Meituan station manager, stated that gig riders’ insurance is directly contributed through the app. Insurance is a requirement, and professional riders’ insurance is paid by the station. However, many stations feel that the necessary process is too much of a hassle, and simply do not enroll riders in the insurance plan.
While going home last April, Lin Wei was hit by a Meituan rider, breaking his left leg. The accident occurred on the rider’s first day of work, and the person in charge of the station said that they hadn’t signed him up for the insurance plan, stating that “this has nothing to do with our delivery station – we just asked the rider to run deliveries, but we never told him to run into anyone.”
After communicating with the station several times, the station’s eventual position on handling the case was to help convince the rider to pay for medical fees in installments. In the end, resolving the situation relied on relationships––Lin Wei’s boss knew a high-level staff member at Meituan, who was able to pressure the station to finally agree to pay Lin Wei’s medical fees.
On social media platforms, a netizen responded to a post by a Meituan rider activist, saying: Riders have helped Meituan to dramatically increase both the number of orders they handle, and their overall market value. But Meituan, a company that has relied entirely on its delivery service to become a large company, will never provide formal employment contracts to any of its delivery riders.
One year after his accident, Shi Shen’s rider account still has not been restored. Nor has he received any insurance compensation. He told Renwu, “I decided to leave this industry and not return. But for those riders who are still fighting against time on the road, all I can do is to pray quietly for them in my heart.” Wei Lai, the Meituan rider who saw his colleague die instantly, wrote in his own online journal: “I wish that all riders can come home safely.”
Infinite Game
When Caodao’s vlog about her experience as a delivery rider went live, she was driving across China shooting footage for new posts. Cao spoke with Renwu while on the road in an uninhabited part of Tibet, but when we asked her to recall her few days working as a rider, she still felt suffocated.
Based on her short experience working under the system, Caodao suggested that all product managers and algorithm designers should all have to work as a rider for a month. This is the only real way they could understand the severity of the system’s of oppression of riders.
In a report on Meituian’s reduction of delivery times to 28 minutes, one rider gave a similar suggestion: Why don’t you all come to the front line and give it a try for a few days? Let’s see how you manage to complete a delivery in 28 minutes without running red lights, without going against traffic, without going crazy. To a certain extent, this advice parallels suggestions by Nick Seaver, an anthropologist of technology.
Seaver, who coined the concept of algorithms as culture, argues that algorithms are not formed through rational processes, but are instead shaped by institutions, people, intersecting environments, and the rough, ready-made understandings of popular culture and everyday life. In short, he believes that algorithms are formed by our collective practices as humans, and suggests researchers should use an anthropological approach to explore algorithms.
From a scholarly perspective, Sun Ping completely agrees with Seaver’s viewpoint, but stresses that in reality the algorithms are still primarily built on digital logic. Strengthening training and values guidance for programmers is very important, but in the mainland, most programmers think in a very linear, engineering style, and it is rare for programmers’ thinking to be influenced by social science. As a result, they often have weak conceptions of problems related to fairness and values. In her research, Sun Ping also corresponded with algorithm developers, and discovered that while these programmers had their own logical frameworks, and could consider all kinds of contingent situations, in the end the programmers are just implementers, not rulemakers. The rulemakers are the platform, while the programmers are just one more tool that carries out the platform’s decisions.
In our investigation, Renwu attempted to contact the platforms’ algorithm development teams, but the companies refused to discuss the topic. As one Meituan algorithm engineer stated, this information is a trade secret. In response, Sun Ping argues that the one-sided right to expression is the biggest problem with the algorithm. This was also one of the most incomprehensible parts of the system – that the forces pushing riders ever faster include their own data.
Following the announcement that Meituan’s market value had topped $200 billion, some commentators mentioned CEO Wang Xing’s fascination with speed and the book that had great influence on him––Finite and Infinite Games. In this book, New York University professor of religious history James Carter categorizes the world’s games into two types: finite and infinite games. The goal of finite games is to win, while the players in infinite games want to let the game go on forever.
The system is still running, the game is still continuing, but riders still have next to no knowledge about the role they play in this boundless game. They are still just flying down the road in search of the possibility of a better life.
References
1. 文森特·莫斯可《数字劳工与下一代互联网》
1. Vincent Mosco, “Digital Labour and the Next Internet.”
Chen Long, “Games, Power Distribution and Technology: Research on the Management Strategy of Platform Enterprises: Taking the Rider Management of a Food Delivery Platform as an Example.”
Meituan Research Institute, “Report on the Development of China’s Food Delivery Industry in 2019 and the First Half of 2020.” https://about.meituan.com/news/institute.
30. 雷锋网 AI 研习社《专访美团点评 AI 技术团队负责人何仁清：全球规模最大的智能配送调度系统是如何建成的》
Lei Feng.com and AI Research Institute, “Interview with He Renqing, the head of the AI technical team of Meituan Dianping: How the world’s largest intelligent distribution dispatch system was built.” https://cloud.tencent.com/developer/article/1166246.
Translators’ Notes
Over the past two weeks, the US has seen some of the largest, most militant protests and riots in decades. The now nationwide movement began in Minneapolis following the police murder of George Floyd. The anger that followed led to mass demonstrations, confrontations with the police, arson and looting, mourning and rebellion that spread across the country within a matter of hours. The Minneapolis Third Precinct station house, where the murderers had worked, was burned to the ground, and police cars were set aflame from New York to LA in the most widespread damage to the punitive edifices of the US state seen in this century, fueled by decades of anger at racist policing and the ceaseless stream of police murders of Black people. Now, even the reform-oriented electoral left is seriously discussing a softened version of police abolition on a national level, re-imagined as “defunding,” and the Minneapolis City Council has pledged to “disband” the city’s police department. Not long ago, such a demand would have been considered utopian.
As the movement against police brutality and the institution of the police itself rapidly unfolds across the US, we have already seen in it the marks of other riots and mass struggles that emerged across the globe in the past year, from Chile to France, Lebanon, Iraq, Ecuador and Catalonia, to name but a few. Here, any broad analysis of the rebellion in the US would be premature, as the fires of the riots are literally still burning in cities across the country. Instead we would like to offer a few brief observations regarding thestrugglesinHongKong, which we’ve done our best to follow closely, focusing on one particular tactical innovation that we feel might be a helpful contribution to ongoing protests in the US and beyond. We have already seen people in the streets adopting scattered lessons from Hong Kong and other hotspots in past year’s global cycle of rebellions: an arguably Hong Kong-style barricade of Target carts outside the embattled third precinct building in Minneapolis, techniques for extinguishing tear gas in Portland, reports of lasers dazzling police cameras and visors in severalcities, umbrellas held up against pepper spray at protests in Columbus and Seattle, and graffiti shout-outs to Hong Kongers on boarded-up or looted storefronts in multiple cities. The similarities were so striking, in fact, that it led the paranoid editor-in-chief of Chinese state media tabloid The Global Times, Hu Xijin, to conclude that “Hong Kong rioters have infiltrated the United States” and “masterminded” the attacks.
“You see people very effectively deploying Hong Kong tactics here, deploying Hong Kong tactics here, to stop these tear gas from gassing protesters and vehicles”
We can do little to guide the way this movement unfolds (nor would we want to), but we hope that some of the tools and tactics employed by our friends and comrades in Hong Kong might be of use to those in the streets of other cities.1 In particular, we offer for your consideration the evolution of the “frontline” role in the Hong Kong movement, in hopes that it might be helpful in bridging gaps between militants and peaceful participants in the streets elsewhere.
As in past movements, there have already been significant disagreements about how to engage with the forces of the state in the US. As with other movements since Ferguson and before, some (but not all) formal activist organizations have begun to engage with the “soft” wing of the local repressive apparatus, springing into action to tamp down the militancy of the initial uprising: “Community leaders” collaborate with the police, walking crowds into ambushes and kettles, and literally point out “violent” protestors in the crowd. Meanwhile, local governments nationwide claim that those initiating property destruction or fighting the police are “outside agitators,” with the mayor of Seattle tweeting that “much of the violence and destruction, both here and across the country, has been instigated and perpetuated by white men.” But it is abundantly clear that pent-up rage against the police is extremely widespread, and on the streets a broad consensus has emerged that they must be opposed.
Hong Kong may offer one path that escapes the seeming inevitability of conflicts over violence, nonviolence, and how to engage with the forces of the state. For those who are looking for a new way to bridge gaps between militant and peaceful forms of participation, we think one of the city’s most important contributions to the new era of struggles has been the development of particular roles and formations to be deployed on the streets, as well the structures behind them that helped to better link those willing to fight the cops with others in the movement. In particular, we want to highlight the concept of Hong Kong’s “frontliners,” who not only developed many successful techniques for confronting the police, but also established a new kind of relationship between the militant and nonviolent elements of street actions through many months of experimentation.
more umbrellas on the front line here in seattle. we are about five minutes past curfew and so far it’s still really peaceful. if you want to watch the live dm me for the link pic.twitter.com/ZyKMoGe0PL
What does it mean to be “on the front line?” The term has become incredibly popular the past few months across languages and social domains, especially in reference to medical workers and others who are particularly vulnerable to the ongoing pandemic. This has obscured the original surge in popularity of the term in mainstreammediacoverage last year, where it referred to protesters in various parts of the world. The official adulations for workers coming off shift in Wuhan and New York strike us strange, state-orchestrated echoes of the cheer “¡vivan lxs de la primera línea!” that had greeted protesters returning from battles with the police in Chile last fall. What allowed for the versatile, and seemingly opposed, mobilizations of this term was precisely its ability to integrate otherwise divided activities in an effective way, proposing a unity defined not by homogeneity but by support for the overall struggle, symbolized by those at the “frontline.” Now, with the return of riots to the US, it seems possible that the use of the term may again turn to those facing off against the police: In Connecticut, a line of black-clad protesters faces the police wearing masks that must have first been intended to prevent the spread of the virus, and in a blurry screenshot of the moment, a woman holds a sign that reads, “the only allies are the ones on the frontlines.”
The basic idea allowing the concept of the frontline to integrate the movement beyond the old divides between violence and non-violence, or “diversity of tactics,” is that those on the frontlines take personal risks to protect those around them, ideally with (but often without) distinctive protective gear, and that these risks help to push forward the entire movement. This is also why the concept extended so easily to pandemic response, because the basic logic of personal risk in support of the struggle is more or less identical. But in those cases, the state had a clear interest in mobilizing the term to co-opt popular responses or disguise its own incompetence, all with the ultimate goal still being to suppress the pandemic. Now, however, the state has no such interest, since it does not share the same goal as the protestors invoking the concept of the frontline. Instead, it will pose “community leaders,” and maybe even portray them as having been “on the frontlines” of the movement in some fashion, but there is no necessity to even pretend to support those actually in conflict with the police. This means that the term has the ability to return to the meaning it gained in Hong Kong, defined through risks taken in defense of everyone or the act of putting one’s life on the line to keep everyone else safe and simultaneously push the struggle forward.
In the course of escalating street clashes throughout 2019, Hong Kong protesters produced rapid-fire innovations, including the invention of new gear and distinct formations with specific tactical positions to be filled within the body of the protest. The frontliner emerged in this context as a recognizable role for those who, with armor and tear-gas mitigation strategies, positioned themselves directly against the police, backed up by comrades in second and third lines.
Translation of slogans between Hong Kong and Chilean protests: “We cannot return to normal, because normality was the problem.”
This tactical innovation spread rapidly, first to Chile and then to other Latin American contexts. The first jump from Hong Kong to Chile was likely translated through riot porn uploaded to YouTube or simply transmitted through the heady air of the 2019 cycle of revolt. One participant in a Chilean frontline “clan” makes it clear that the tactics his group uses were adopted from Hong Kong. Soon enough, other local rioters were gearing up remarkably similar tactics, including shields, slogans, inventive construction of barricades, and the widespread adaptation of high-powered laser pointers as tools for disrupting police cameras and vision (as well as, in one memorable case, the destruction of a police drone). Beyond these specific adaptations, the structure of the Chilean movement was also organized along recognizable lines: Following a period of demonstrations against an increase in public transportation prices, including widespread organized fare evasions and large marches, a police crackdown then sparked massive demonstrations and riots that are widely referred to in Chile as a “social explosion.” In video of a protest in Plaza Italia, Santiago, Chile, one man on a building overlooking the square remarks excitedly that the demonstration “is only possible because of a group of kids”, who have organized “to stop the repressive forces.”
Through the following period, as a state of emergency was declared in cities across the country, space for peaceful demonstration was defended by a frontline of protesters willing to fight the police. As in Hong Kong, these frontliners were organized primarily by role: shield-bearers, rock throwers, medics, “miners” (producing projectiles), protesters in the back line with lasers to disrupt police vision or cameras, and barricaders to block advances. Unlike later developments in the Hong Kong “be water” strategy that emphasized wearing police out through constant movement, the Chilean movement started with frontliners setting up and defending specific lines around the “zero zone” or “red zone” to keep the cops from entering areas where other protesters were gathered. As repression increased, however, the daily clashes became essentially street by street battles between organized frontliners and the police. Still, however, the importance of the frontline as a tool to make protest possible was widely recognized by those inside the movement and out, with “representatives of the frontlines” being cheered wildly when invited to participate on talk shows. As in Hong Kong, frontliners who formed autonomous groups to defend the movement were supported by outside participants, both anonymously and as groups, as some right-wing media complained.
Similar tactics were also adopted in Colombia via Chile and Hong Kong, as groups organizing on Facebook recognized that there was a need to protect demonstrators in the student-driven movement there from police violence. However, the early members of the most prominent frontline groups declared that they would act in purely “defensive” ways rather than attacking the police directly. However, as the broader popular movement died down, opinions on these groups (characterized by their media-friendly blue shields) started to shift. Frontliners consciously adopted Hong Kong’s “be water” strategy, but this was perceived by many in the student movements as a physical abandonment of the student movement, which had not made the same tactical choices. More broadly, frontliners in the Colombian student protests were perceived as opportunistic, attempting to make media-friendly spectacle, and trying to lead marches away from agreed-upon routes. Ultimately, this type of highly inorganic “frontline” became alienated from the support they first received from the rest of the movement.
Love for the frontline in Chilean protest graffiti
Across these different contexts, the development of the role of the frontliner has marked a significant advancement in tactics for street confrontation with the police. Such tactics must, of course, change to suit particular situations, but we can learn from the continually growing global knowledge of struggle. In the decade or so following the decline of the alter-globalization movement, discussion over tactics for fighting the police largely congealed into debates over the “black bloc.” Originating in 1980s Germany, black bloc refers to the tactic of wearing matching, all-black protest gear, which prevents police from picking any individual out from a crowd. Partly because of its practical success, black-bloc actions in the US and much of Europe have been subject to endless debates that ultimately come down to the role militant action should play in street protests. In the US, the ultimate result was a détente in which protestors who supported militancy and those who could only support non-confrontational action went so far as to divide up areas of cities to prevent interaction between groups. Assertions that the black bloc protects nonviolent demonstrators (either directly or by drawing police repression and resources elsewhere) have been common points of contention, but never reached a consensus. At best, there is advocacy for a “diversity of tactics,” maybe the single best phrase to describe this fragile détente.
Early on in such movements, diversity of tactics allows for a tenuous coexistence of both militant and peaceful protest, since there are many participants and multiple marches, allowing people to distribute themselves into those locales where their preferred brand prevails. The term effectively imagines entirely different spheres in which “diverse tactics” can take place. But this is often not the case. As state repression increases and the early momentum slows, the two spheres are forced to merge. It is precisely at this point that more aggressive tactics are needed to defend the movement as a whole against the police, and to continue pushing things forward as participants’ energy wanes. On the one hand, this is when the state’s repressive function is activated, as local police are resupplied and receive backup from higher levels of government. Yet on the other, this is also the moment when the state mobilizes its apparatus of soft control in the form of community leaders, non-profits and “progressive” politicians, all of whom play an essential role in severing the tenuous tactical alliance that existed in the early days. These are, after all, the people most successful in pushing the myth of the “outside agitator,” deriding the “white anarchist” destruction of property and often literally stepping in to prevent attacks on police or even de-arrests of other protestors, after the fact encouraging people to turn over snitch videos showing who threw bottles at the police line, and flooding social media with posts claiming that cops or even white nationalists were the ones who broke the first windows.
In the 2019 protests in Hong Kong and Chile, however, in different ways and at different speeds, the assertion that the bloc protects others was turned into a clear and undeniable piece of common knowledge. This was possible partly through an erasure of any previous meanings attached to black bloc protesting and its replacement with the role of the frontliner: that protester who, by subjecting herself to grave danger and ever-present tear gas, was acting in no other capacity than the defense of everyone else in the protest from the police. This represents a shift: there is no longer a large geographic separation into two bodies of protesters (one zone for peaceful protest and another for confrontation), but instead a single body coalesced, protected at the frontline by those who have made it their role to be there. In an even broader sense, and perhaps even more importantly, the Hong Kong and Chilean protests totally reconfigured the role of black-clad, masked, and militant protesters willing to fight the police. Unlike the situation in the US, where it is often possible for media and police to collaborate in isolating militants, portraying them as separate from the main body of “good protesters” and even further distanced from the body politic at large, frontliners also came to be widely (if not completely) understood as acting in defense of everyone else, protesters and non-protesters alike, by making it possible to resist an untenable status quo.
The construction of effective solidarity between “brave militants” (勇武) and adherents to “peaceful, rational nonviolence” (和理非) was not the automatic result of the rising movement in 2019 Hong Kong, nor did it happen overnight. As is the case in the US, previous movements in Hong Kong were divided along ideological lines of militancy and nonviolence, as well as between those on the street and the “controlled opposition” of Pan-Democratic parties in the Legislative Council (LegCo).2 We must recall that the 2019 protests came after years of experimentation, including the emergence and failure of the 2014 Umbrella Movement: an equally massive and largely “peaceful” protest that checked all the boxes advocated by liberal proponents of non-violence.
When that movement was so decisively defeated, the youth of Hong Kong began to agitate in new ways—at first in much smaller scale street actions, such as the odd and still controversial “Fishball Riots” of 2016. In these actions, we saw something like the frontline severed from its basis in a mass demonstration. Young people still reeling from the abject failure of 2014’s “peace, love and nonviolence” instead jumped into direct confrontation, declaring war on the cops, stacking and throwing bricks, and then piloting the “be water” strategy of refusing to hold space. At the same time, they didn’t wait to be joined by other protestors, and they made no effort to recruit. The result was that the frontlines in the Fishball Riots, such as they were, had none of the connotations of defending others that they hold now. This instance of rioting is still controversial among Hong Kongers within the protest movement because its isolated character made it into a kind of risky adventurism (not to mention the role played by far-right localists in the riots). Now, however, we see very similar tactics re-deployed and polished, but in a strikingly different context. It is as if the tactics piloted in both the (relatively) peaceful actions of 2014 and the (relatively) violent confrontations with police of 2016 were finally forced to combine in an effective synthesis.
The roots of this synthesis might be best seen near the end of the Umbrella Movement, which took shape through sometimes conflictual interactions between formal organizations and tens of thousands of autonomous participants. During the occupations of Central and, later, Mong Kok, some elements of the movement were organized centrally, with occupations focused around a “big stage” (大台) that was essentially controlled by large political organizations, particularly the two student groups: the HK Federation of Student Unions and Scholarism (a group founded by high school students), as well as the main electoral parties of the Pan-Democratic camp and a slew of established NGO activists. While these occupations could never have begun––much less sustained themselves—without huge amounts of autonomous work and action, formal organizations attempted to maintain some control over the shape the movement, and in some cases attempted to call off specific actions, some of which went on anyway without their support. Still, those in leadership positions were the groups that eventually entered into negotiations with the government. As in many western contexts, these organizations were largely oriented towards so-called “rational nonviolence.” However, tensions between radicals and those who controlled the stage rose throughout the course of the movement, reaching a peak following an attack by protesters on the LegCo building, after which nonviolent protesters and organizers labelled all militants as secret agents of Beijing or “wreckers.” On the other side, some protesters began circulating slogans calling for the main stage (and the power center it represented) to be dismantled (拆大台), and for pickets that had attempted to halt attacks on LegCo to be disbanded (散纠察).
In the wake of the failure of the Umbrella Movement and the clearance of occupations, the first period of the 2019 Anti-Extradition Movement—roughly from the proposal of the law in March 2019 to the two million person march on June 16—still saw rational nonviolence as the dominant tactic. However, following the government’s unwillingness to retract the law in the face of the mass nonviolent movement, and following increasingly violent police repression, a rough consensus emerged around a few basic principles: Learning from the failures of the Umbrella Movement, the new protests should not be organized around a central body and would not attempt to take and hold space. This organizational form was specifically understood in reference to the main stages of the Umbrella Movement, with “decentralization” as a slogan and organizational principle rendered in Cantonese as “without a big stage” (无大台).3
At the same time, experiences of the violence of police repression created an atmosphere of solidarity among protesters. Based on unified demands—first for the retraction of the extradition bill, and then for an inquiry into police brutality, an end to classifications of protesters as rioters, amnesty for arrestees, and universal suffrage—participants achieved a broad consensus that success would require a level of unity between militants and peaceful protesters: “no divisions, no renunciations, no betrayals” (不分化、不割席、不督灰) or, more positively, “each fighting in our own way, we climb the mountain together” (兄弟爬山，各自努力) and “the peaceful and the brave are indivisible, we rise and fall together” (和勇不分、齐上齐落). Polls of movement participants taken on the ground in early June showed that 38% of respondents believed that “radical tactics” were useful in making the state listen to protesters’ demands, but by September, 62% agreed. When asked if radical tactics were understandable in the face of state intransigence, nearly 70% already agreed in June, and by July, this percentage had risen to 90%. By September, only 2.5% of poll respondents stated that the use of radical tactics by protesters was not understandable. From the same polling, by September, over 90% of participants agreed with the statement that “Bringing peaceful and militant actions together is the most effective way to get results.”4 A similar tipping point may be emerging in the US, as nearly 80% of respondents to a nationwide poll asking whether the anger leading to the current wave of protests is “justified” respond affirmatively, and 54% state that the response to the death of George Floyd, including burning a police precinct building, is justified.
In Hong Kong, the decentralized nature of the movement, combined with the growing sense of a unified purpose shared between peaceful and militant protesters allowed for the formation and reproduction of recognizable roles in which participants could support each other in autonomously organized groups, coordinated anonymously through online tools like Telegram and forums like LIHK.org. These tools and organizational structures are worthy of a separate investigation or open-sourced protest guide in themselves: Telegram allows for the creation of extremely flexible structures while preserving anonymity, which allowed protesters and supporters to develop an entire digital ecosystem that was crucial to outmaneuvering and outwitting the police in real time. Telegram’s “Channels” feature allowed for the creation of both massive large-scale chatrooms similar to the comment feature on livestream software that protesters in the US are using. However, while these “public seas” (公海) were capable of providing some useful information, they were understood to be under police surveillance due to their public nature, and sensitive organizing was done in breakout channels with trusted friends.
Protesters also created other channels specifically for sharing police locations and escape routes, which eventually reached tens of thousands of protest participants. In these channels, posting is restricted to admins or specially designated bots, who relay verified information about the location and disposition of police forces, helping to undercut the phenomenon of runaway rumor common in any protest. This information is itself crowdsourced from individuals working as spotters on the fringes of protest marches, who send updates in designated channels according to a specific format, so that it can be easily standardized and passed on to data aggregators who monitor both scout channels and livestreams, publishing updates to announcement channels and real-time maps of police locations.
Beyond reporting functions, Telegram channels created for specific actions also allowed participants to relay information about needs (medics needed at this intersection, tear gas mitigation tools needed soon) and make collective decisions about responses in real time through voting functions. The latter allowed for quick choices such as which escape route to take to avoid a police attack. Importantly, these organizational methods drew in both militants and those who were unwilling, uninterested or (because of immigration status, disability, or other potential vulnerability to police violence) unable to participate on the frontlines: While frontliners faced off with police and their escalating violence, nonviolent supporters involved themselves in marches, as medics or by providing logistical support (moving barricade supplies, tools for dealing with tear gas, or clothes for black-clad frontliners to change into), as copwatch with video cameras, or as scouts feeding information to other supporters working as data aggregators.
Many of the ways that those “outside” the frontlines provided direct material support to frontliners on the streets: In some actions, protesters without gear would form human walls, sometimes using umbrellas, to protect frontliners while they took off the gear that would mark them for arrest on their way home. Others, while not directly participating as frontliners themselves, would facilitate property damage by using their umbrellas to shield those breaking windows from the view of cameras. Later in the movement, protesters outside the front lines would bring the individual components for molotov cocktails to actions, and formed human chains supplying frontliners with materials to rapidly resupply with bottles, gasoline, sugar and rags.
Beyond these specific support actions, simply remaining on the streets during bans on public gatherings was eventually understood as a means of supporting the movement: One friend tells the story of an anonymous older office worker on a smoke break who, having read on Telegram that a group of frontliners near his building needed to buy time before engaging with the police, walked directly up to the police line and tried to pick a fight with the cops, thinking that his identity as an older, well-dressed person might decrease his chance of getting arrested and provide more of an alibi if he did. However, this generalization of the struggle is also seen by some as one reason why the police eventually turned to the more recent strategy of kettling and mass arrest of everyone in a given area: Anyone on the streets can now be assumed to be a participant, or at least to hate the cops.
Image of protest roles from Hong Kong, translated anonymously and circulated during recent struggles
Early in the movement, however, prior to the scaling-up of police repression and arrests in the late summer and fall of 2019, the role of the frontliner was relatively clear-cut, with options for supporters to remain separate from direct police confrontation by constructing barricades, providing supplies to frontliners as they extinguished tear gas, or hiding frontliners from police while they changed out of gear. This divide was still somewhat problematic, however, as the acceptance of the frontline as a core segment of the movement gave those actually fighting the police a position of “higher merit” in some ways, with some peaceful protesters being accused of not being militant enough. But as acceptance of militant action grew alongside ever-more extreme police violence, these divisions began to break down. On the one hand, actions that were formerly understood as peaceful became associated with ever greater risk of detection and arrest.
For example, the creation and protection of “Lennon walls” of protest art and self-expression was originally understood as a completely “peaceful” mode of participation, but as the number of violent attacks on Lennon walls and arrests of the people working on them increased, it became difficult to continue participating without physical and mental preparation for violence. In the face of both police violence and the “white terror” of attacks on protesters by pro-Beijing thugs, any divide between those who were willing to put their bodies on the line and those who were committed to either lower-risk or ethically nonviolent participation became harder and harder to draw. This was particularly true as increasing numbers of protesters were arrested. For some friends, the decision to join the frontline was gradual and resulted from the gradual erosion of differences between frontline activities and other ways of supporting the movement. Other friends relayed difficult conversations they had with their elderly parents who, seeing the arrests of so many youth, resolved to join the frontline themselves to fill the gap.
— Snufkin #MaskUp #RentStrike (@Anon_Snufkin) May 29, 2020
While we have purposely focused on material tactics rather than political identity, it should be recognized that the five demands helping to provide a basis for admirable unity for protesters in Hong Kong also papered over significant political divisions. In particular, the fact that the movement was so broad-based meant that it included (and in some cases was driven by) right-wing localist sentiment. Unlike the Yellow Vests in France, which had a similarly broad base of participation, escalation of militant tactics to include property damage did not serve to drive right-wing elements out of the movement. Rather, in Hong Kong the situation was reversed, and some (but by no means all) leftists limited their participation in the movement, unwilling to chant slogans alongside nationalists calling for a revolution to “restore” Hong Kong, or to participate in marches with those waving flags of the US or colonial British regimes.
While the racial structure of US politics makes right-wing participation in the ongoing cycle of rebellion a near impossibility (despite politicians promoting lies to the contrary), the structure of the Hong Kong movement around a unifying set of five demands is also somewhat alien to the US context. While their very impossibility gave the movement room to grow, the use of even untenable demands has fallen out of fashion in the US. Following the failure of first the anti-war protests in the mid-2000s, the rise and fall of Occupy a few years later defined what would become the norm, in which an excess of demands led to the general inability to “agree upon” any at all. In the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests following the uprising in Ferguson in 2014, a similar phenomenon occurred: the “official” BLM non-profits made concrete demands for body cameras on cops and money for military equipment to be funneled into anti-racism and de-escalation trainings, but these were never the popularly endorsed demands of the streets. Instead, the movement cohered around not a demand, but an assertion: that Black Lives Matter.
It is this assertion that has returned as the cohering force of today’s uprising. At the same time, this may be changing somewhat. But there is still not yet a coherent set of demands that could unite peaceful and militant protesters rising up after the murder of George Floyd. If such demands were to arise, they would probably be basic and unlikely to be achieved without “dismantling the big stage” of business as usual in the US, much like the Five Demands from Hong Kong: general amnesty, abolition of the police, or reparations for centuries of state-sanctioned murder and forced labor. Calls to “defund the police” seem to have taken prominence now after being picked up by activist groups and local progressive politicians. But such a demand falls far short of the more popular call to abolish the police, and allows local leaders to claim that they are “defunding” police departments when in fact they are only conducting fractional budget cuts. In this sense, “defund the police” seems to be taking on a character similar to the demand for body cameras in 2014.
With or without such demands, we see the core innovation of the role of the frontliner as being embedded in the new relations that become possible: between the “frontline” and the second line, the third, and other supportive protesters. One similarity between the experiences of Hong Kong protesters and those in the streets of the US is that, while many have long experienced the ways that police repression functions, this is for many the first time (or at least one of the most severe moments) when police repression of peaceful protest is visible. In some sense, the evolving role of the frontliner was actually forced into existence by police action. Once repression of the movement in Hong Kong passed a certain point, two facts became apparent: First, police are fundamentally violent, and they will dispense that violence regardless of whether their targets are protesting peacefully or not. Second, it became apparent that if the movement was to continue, protesters would have to be able to defend themselves.
As police and National Guard reinforcements try to disperse protests in incredibly violent ways on the streets of almost every major city in the US, it seems possible that the country might see a similar tipping point in terms of the scale and intensity of repression. For those looking for ways forward—ways to support our friends and comrades, to work in solidarity, to mourn those killed by police, and to ensure that such systemic violence will end someday—one method of continuing the struggle might be found by recognizing that the role of the frontliner is to protect everyone else. So we say: welcome to the frontlines, and also to the second and third line, and to the medics and supply lines, everyone holding spaces, the illustrators and printers and distributors, the live-streamers and everyone tweeting information from police scanners. Maybe this time we can all be in it together.
“I’m happy to struggle with you” — “Me too, thanks, comrade”
A rear-end collision with a truck in Xi’an on July 28th led to the death of a delivery rider.
A rider running deliveries in the heavy rain.
Delivery rider wading through a flood from heavy rain
A screenshot of the navigation system on Xiao Dao’s phone: 
Weibo blogger @曹导 (@Caodao) tries out work as a delivery rider, and is forbidden from entering a mall to pick up food.
Delivery riders waiting at an elevator door. (Still captured from Caodao’s video blog.
Store employee stabbed by a delivery rider in Wuhan. 
A delivery rider picking up an order
A screenshot showing the discrepancy between the “expected delivery time” (19:12) and the delivery time limit for the rider (19:45).
Peppa Pig, drawn by a delivery rider to satisfy a customer’s request. Image from online sources.
An exhausted rider by the side of the road.
Meituan’s yellow kangaroo ears
The Nanchang rider who did not complete the smiling activity in time. (Caption: “Meituan blocked my account.”)
@CrosstalkComedian: That smiling activity is really annoying.
Police officers explain how to use the DS rider scoring app to a rider
Traffic police help a rider complete his delivery. Source: Sohu Video.
A delivery rider describes accidents he has experienced on a riders’ forum
(@Woppa1Woppa) 
Via 
Translation of slogans between Hong Kong and Chilean protests: “We cannot return to normal, because normality was the problem.”
Love for the frontline in Chilean protest graffiti
Image of protest roles from Hong Kong, translated anonymously and circulated during recent struggles
“I’m happy to struggle with you” — “Me too, thanks, comrade”