Occupational Injury Insurance Reform for Platform Workers in China: A Political Economy Analysis

The global expansion of the digital platform economy has generated a rapidly growing workforce that largely falls outside existing social insurance systems, which were designed for standard employment relationships. Extending social protection to platform workers has therefore emerged as a pressing policy challenge and a focus of significant scholarly debate. In response, China—a pioneer in the digital platform economy with the world's largest platform labor market—has initiated a pilot reform in recent years to establish occupational injury insurance for this group. By tracing the evolution of this policy reform, this study employs a political economy lens to analyze the structural drivers behind its initiation and the embedded tensions within its design. It examines the distinctive policy design of the occupational injury insurance scheme and critically assesses the limitations inherent in both the reform approach and its proposed framework. The paper argues that the reform reflects a state-mediated effort to reconcile capital accumulation in the digital economy with social stability yet remains constrained by institutional path dependence and the inherent tensions of regulating precarious labor. This research seeks to contribute to academic debates on social protection in the digital era and offers policy-relevant insights aimed at bridging the protection gap for platform workers in China and other developing economies.