Cultures of Solidarity among Platform Workers at China’s Industrial Periphery

What does economic platformization mean for labour politics in post-socialist China? This study complicates the emerging consensus of weakened collective energy by shifting the focus from industrial heartlands to the peripheries. Drawing on in-depth interviews with food riders and local officials, I identify a resilient form of ‘collective action without collective forms’ among riders that can effectively pressure government and management concessions. As I will show, the particular form, strength, and resilience of local riders’ collective power derive from a culture of solidarity embedded in food platforms’ labour process arrangement, labour market changes amid economic restructuring, as much as riders’ accumulated consciousness and experiences of action derived from their labouring experiences in post-socialist China. These action’s lack of collective form both enhances their resilience while risks compromising the overall strength when the state intervenes. This study thus underscores the need to see platforms as an assemblage of multiple forms of labour embedded in variegated local political economies when evaluating the tendencies and shifts in labour activism under economic platformization, while calling for greater attention to industrial peripheries, the emerging dispersed form of action, as well as various sources of workers’ agential power in understanding evolving labour struggles in post-socialist China.