Migration, Precarity and Solidarity Among Migrant Platform Workers in China’s Food Delivery and Ride-Hailing Sectors

This chapter examines the relationship between migration and precarity in the gig economy in the non-Western context of China. Experiences of China’s gig workers promise rich insights into this relationship because most of them were rural-to-urban migrant factory and service workers before they ‘migrate’ to platform-based gig work. In this chapter, I draw on migration scholar Stephen Castle’s (2015) concept of modes of differentiation to chart the specificities of precarity experienced by gig workers in China’s food delivery and ride-hailing sectors. It sees migrant precarity as relational, context and history dependent, contested by the state, capital and migrant workers themselves, and mediated by certain modes of differentiation (Munck 2013; Schierup & Jørgensen, 2016). This therefore requires us to not only look at how workers are trapped in the platform due to their migration status and the institutional and sociocultural arrangements associated with it, but also forms of workers’ migration-related agency to negotiate—if not subvert—that precarity. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, this chapter argues that migrant gig workers in China are trapped in the platform by China’s state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring project, through a new mode of migrant labour differentiation comprising three factors, including changes in the labour market, hegemonic gender norms and the reformed hukou system. Yet in the meantime, being migrants also contributes to what Fantasia (1989) called cultures of solidarity they develop among themselves, which provides the micro-foundation of solidarity for frequent yet often small-scale collective actions. The nature and strengths of this culture of solidarity will be examined, so do its potential to forge cross-city/region solidarity and for institutionalization.