Platformed distinction work: Rethinking the migration and integration of food delivery workers in China

Introduction

On 8 September 2020, Renwu, one of the leading news magazines in China, published an article titled ‘Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System’, which went viral on Chinese social media. The report ignited heated discussions on the work conditions of online platform workers, with more than 10 million hits within a short span of time. Providing detailed documentation and explanations of delivery workers’ (couriers) labour experiences, the report investigated and reflected on how couriers are controlled, alienated and overshadowed by the algorithm-mediated systems of the platform. As indicated by the report, delivery workers are trapped in a system in which surveillance, inequality and social risks permeate. Couriers have become a new digital underclass in urbanised China. According to China's State Information Centre, 78 million people participated in platform work in 2019, of which only 6.23 million were regular employees. What about the remaining 72 million? They were predominantly migrant workers. According to research by China's Ele.me and Meituan platforms ¹ , approximately 77% and 75% of their delivery workers are from rural backgrounds, respectively. Migrant workers have played an important role in China's rapid urbanisation and economic growth (Mohabir et al., 2017). A possible inference here is that the question of platform labour in the Chinese context is largely a question of migration.

However, despite abundant research on platform and gig workers, studies examining the intersection between migration and platforms remain scarce. The encounter of the migrant worker with the platform economy complicates China's digitalisation as it reshapes the migration issue anew. Migration within China's platformisation not only engages with the age-old question of the rural–urban divide, such as issues of the Hukou system (Han, 2020) and suzhi discourse (Kipnis, 2007) ² , but also interrogates new issues such as governance mechanisms (Vallas and Schor, 2020), technology-mediated labour processes (Sun, 2019) and the spatial and temporal dimensions that characterise platform-mediated work (Chen and Sun, 2020). With platforms permeating lower-tier cities and more migrant workers diving into the gig economy, a new platform-driven digital order has begun to mediate, recalibrate and reshape rural–urban relations and migrant work experience. In this case, there is a need for both empirical research and theoretical reflection on the social consequences of migration against the backdrop of a platform economy.

Although food delivery, ride-hailing and home cleaning platforms have rapidly expanded in China during the last decade, their embedded consequences in terms of social interaction and integration have been largely ignored, and the voices of migrant workers are seldom heard. What role do platforms play in migrants’ urban work? How do workers make sense of platform work? Is the platform a way of social integration or social distinction, and why is that the case? Based on migrant workers’ discourses and labour practices on food delivery platforms, this study examines how migration is understood, managed, and negotiated in urban China's digital economy. Extending prior literature, we propose the concept of platformed distinction work to frame the intersectional relations between migration and the platform economy against the profound, platformed migrant employment in China. Platformed distinction work explicates and interrogates the dual processes of the platform to enhance the pragmatic economic integration of migrants while also placing them in a disadvantageous position of distinction work. Platform work refers to both a new lifestyle and digital order for migrant workers, as it simultaneously indicates a social process of integration and distinction when considering their specific, embodied labour process. Our ethnographic fieldwork indicates that as a digital infrastructure, platforms tend to generate a distinct order in which structural and sociocultural inequalities are reconstructed and maintained.

The coexistence of social integration and the distinction of platformed migrant workers problematises ‘a simple rural/urban dichotomy’ (Ma and Cheng, 2005: 307). Migrants have developed a complicated perception of platform work in the rapidly globalising and pluralistic discourse on the gig economy. Focusing on the workers’ case in urban centres exposes and crystallises both ends of the ‘equation’: better understanding of the consequences of the platform economy, and insight into the nature of migration for specific rural populations. This paper is structured as follows: Section 2 reviews migration, platform, and distinction work; Section 3 elaborates on how we conducted the fieldwork and collected data; and Section 4 analyses how the food delivery platform becomes a digital order that complicates the migrant's social integration by imposing a distinction of work through perceptual, spatial, infrastructural, and cultural dimensions. The implications for the platformed integration of migrant workers in China are discussed in the conclusion (Section 5).

Rural migration and integration in China

Social integration has long been a global urban sociological focus and policy concern. As a contested concept, social integration has diverse dimensions. The key dimensions identified include socio-economic, cultural, psychological, and social relation integration (see, e.g. Gordon, 1964; Portes and Zhou, 1993; Chen and Wang, 2015). Generally, economic factors such as employment, command and acceptance of local cultures, a sense of belonging and satisfaction, and the frequency and scale of local social ties are all critical reflections of an open-ended integration process. Since the market-oriented reforms of the late 1970s, China has witnessed the massive internal migration of nearly 300 million rural migrant workers, and their corresponding social integration into cities has evolved into a significant problem (Han, 2020). Rural migrants provide flexible and cheap labour for millions of jobs in urban construction, manufacturing and services that locals eschew (Yue et al., 2013). However, these labour contributions do not reward workers with equal treatment and mobility rights. Instead, migrant workers have long faced structural discrimination in the labour market and daily life. Not only is their pay much lower than that of local urban workers (Knight and Song, 2005), but the Labour Law is more often violated than observed (Jacka, 2006: 100). One of the central debates involves the effects of labour conditions and management, occupational association, career and so on, on workers’ social integration.

The issue of social integration in China – which maintains the world's largest internal migration – is largely a consequence of the rural–urban disparity. Previous research has attributed the poor social integration of migrant workers to institutional barriers, such as the hukou system, residential segregation, and dis-embeddedness within local communities, as well as individual factors, such as education level, vocational skills and social capital (see, e.g. Liu et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2020). Although hukou control in certain large cities began to relax around the 2000s, the new ‘city people’ are often comprised of well-off urban migrants, such as white-collar workers, researchers, and entrepreneurs (Zhang et al., 2019). In contrast, rural migrants, including new-generation rural migrants with relatively higher education born after 1980, still find it difficult to integrate into mainstream urban society (Liu et al., 2018). In most cases, workers do not have the guarantee of a stable job or regular accommodation in the most desirable metros, such as Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, not to mention urban housing purchases, investments, and professional qualifications that are highly valued for local hukou conversion (Colas and Ge, 2019).

Swider (2011: 138) estimated that most, if not all, migrant workers worked informally and constituted the largest proportion of precarious workers in China. As the gig economy expanded rapidly in the last decade, many people simultaneously uprooted themselves from traditional industries and flooded into gig work. Although considerable research has documented platform work practices and their social effects (e.g. Rosenblat and Stark, 2016), migration perspectives and their associated social consequences for migrants are seldom discussed (van Doorn et al., 2020). As the on-demand service industry increasingly absorbs Chinese rural migrants, the particular role played by platforms with regard to workers’ access to work, labour process management and other sociocultural experiences must be considered.

Platform work as distinction work: A dialectic process

According to Bourdieu (1984), distinction represents the salient differentiation of practices that regenerate and legitimise hierarchical economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital. In his empirical work, Bourdieu critically showcases how members of an elite social group signify their status through embodied cultural capital in the form of subtle ‘gestures or the apparently most insignificant techniques of the body—ways of walking or blowing one's nose, ways of eating or talking’ (Bauder, 2008: 318). As research regarding distinction expands, the conceptual meaning of distinction has also extended from purely class-aesthetic dispositions to a broader range of social forces that sustain a divide between inclusion and exclusion and lower and upper classes. These forces include not only class saliency but also dimensions of inequality, such as social differentiation, social division and symbolic boundaries (Ollivier, 2008).

The service industry has been demonstrated to be a key battlefield in terms of social distinction performance. Hanser (2007) developed the concept of distinction work to describe how the interaction between salesclerks and customers in China becomes a key site for recognising their class and social distinction. Based on his ethnographic studies in Harbin – a city in northeast China – Hanser (2007: 417) explained how service interaction became ‘a “doing” of social difference’, in which demands for differences became ‘acts of power that both enact and constitute relations of inequality’. As Hanser (2007: 417) argued, service work ‘can be organized around the production and consumption of class meanings’. Following a similar line of thought, Lan (2006) discussed the concept of boundary work in gendered domestic labour. By tracking the international migration of female workers from the Philippines, Lan examined how distinctions and boundaries were created in the domestic sphere between Taiwan's newly rich employers and migrant domestic workers, through their daily use of space and time. Through the labour process of female domestic workers, Lan demonstrates that distinction is bound with and reinforced by specific habitus and social capital formation regarding one's class, gender, and racial position.

Previous studies have provided important and interesting cases to make sense of distinction work. However, in the extended research of Bourdieu (1984) and other scholars, distinction has been regarded as a consequence of outer structural forces. This implies a one-dimensional mechanism, in which one particular group of people seeks to differentiate themselves from others through certain social interactions. However, in the context of Chinese platformisation and urbanisation, distinction work forms a landscape of tension and complexity as digital platforms’ acceptance of migrant workers into cities conflicts with the nation's traditional governance system that reflects the rural–urban division. In the 1950s, people in China were separated into rural and urban residents based on the enforced hukou system, in which urbanites were provided with an ‘iron rice bowl’ of lifetime employment and social welfare, while rural residents were organised under collectivism and enjoyed less health and employment opportunities (Park, 2008). Since the opening up policy in 1978, massive surplus labour from rural areas flocked to cities to make a living. The rise of the platform economy in the last decade has further accelerated this workforce flow. Migrant workers’ easy access to platform work and urban life, to some extent, contrasted the social differences discourse between rural and urban areas, thus forming a dialectic trajectory in terms of migrant workers’ social integration.

Previous studies have argued that migration status is a key mechanism that generates distinction (De Regt, 2008; Raghuram et al., 2010). Scholars have found that migrant workers and their families confront various distinctions in urban cities in education (Yan et al., 2021), citizenship (Bauder, 2008), fair employment (De Regt, 2008) and social networks (Raghuram et al., 2010). In the context of China, rural–urban differences account for a large share of distinction work in the platform economy. A considerable amount of research has documented rural migrant workers’ labour and struggles within urban cities through urbanisation (see, e.g. Lee, 1998; Qiu, 2009). Migrant workers are known to constitute the majority of those engaged in platform work, including ride-hailing, food delivery, domestic services and online gig work (Chen and Sun, 2020). Researchers have demonstrated that on-demand service work is a gendered, classed and racialised ‘distribution of opportunities and vulnerabilities’ (van Doorn, 2017: 898) undertaken within the logic of platform capitalism. Platform work in China manifests strong orientations to demarcate boundaries between customers and couriers, and servers and those served, through sets of algorithmic-mediated labour regimes and managing policies. To expand their market share and maintain competitiveness in the service industry, platform companies publicly proclaim their customer-oriented ideology with high-quality service while ignoring the perceptions and hardships of migrant workers (Sun, 2019).

Extending Bourdieu's (1984) idea of distinction, this study proposes distinction as relational and processual social practices that construct, valorise and sustain social differences and inequality. Instead of defining social distinction as practices that are performed by and belonging to social elites, this study conceptualises it as individual practices and agentic experiences that one uses to recognise and signify their social identity. We develop a framework of ‘platformed distinction work’ to investigate how individual experiences of platform work serve as key sites for migrant workers’ recognition and performance of distinction through China's platformisation. Instead of focusing only on the upper class who distinguish themselves from the lower class (Bourdieu, 1984), we employ a bottom-up perspective to address how distinction work has been constructed in a transactional and interactive context. To some extent, rural migrants’ distinction work on platforms can be regarded as a continuum mechanism that underlies rural–urban differences in China. However, as we will show, platformisation also plays an important mediating role in reconfiguring rural migrant workers’ sense-making of distinction. It has been demonstrated that distinction is constructed dialectically. First, the digital order imposed by platform work generates social differences and social boundaries between workers and customers. Platform work has become a pragmatic strategy for migrants’ economic integration, while its asymmetrical power relationship also hinders their further integration into urban life. Second, migrant workers in urban cities are agentic actors who have carved spaces for their own networks and communities in the context of spatial and cultural segregation. In that sense, platformed distinction work is portrayed not only as a mechanism of social distinction in which an asymmetrical digital order has been established, but also as collective agentic practices, performed by migrant workers to counterbalance the subordinate work conditions they have experienced in urban cities. This study asks the following questions: How is distinction work constructed and mobilised within the platform economy? How do rural workers make sense of platform labour and go beyond the constraints of distinction work in their daily work practice?

Methods

This study draws upon 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Beijing, a megacity with the largest number of delivery workers in China. We employed a mixed-methods approach for data collection, using participant observation, interviews and surveys. As one of the authors is based in Beijing, she built her field sites and recruited interviewees in several districts of the city in 2017, including Chaoyang, Haidian, Fangshan and Daxing. After building a rapport with migrant delivery workers, the two authors frequented the workers’ work stations (also called zhandian, 站点), their meeting places and restaurants where some frequently gathered. During the 4 years of ethnographic fieldwork, the authors visited delivery workers’ gathering places more than 30 times to observe how they deliver food, communicate with customers and interact with each other. As the researchers befriended some of them, they allowed the researchers to deliver food alongside them. The researchers could then converse with them in a more casual and relaxed manner, and these conversations became important fieldwork data to double-check the validity of the interviews that were conducted. The research team completed fieldwork notes of 150,000 words (in Chinese). To understand how migrant delivery workers build networks and communities, the two authors recruited more migrant workers by visiting small restaurants and shops in some urban villages – especially in Feijiacun (费家村) and Yinmajing (饮马井) – where many migrant workers live. Feijiacun, an urban village, is located on the outskirts of north-eastern Beijing; Yinmajing, in downtown Beijing, is surrounded by high-end condos and skyscrapers. During the last 4 years, a few of the workers we befriended went back and forth between their rural hometowns and these urban centres. Their shared stories and personal narratives constitute important data in our analysis.

The research team conducted 50 interviews – including 22 online during the COVID-19 lockdown – with migrant food delivery workers in Beijing. The average age of those interviewed was 26.4 years; among them, 45 were male and 5 were female. Most came from rural areas in the provinces surrounding Beijing. Among them, 33 were married and 17 were single. Informed consent was obtained from all interviewees. All sessions were audio-recorded for data analysis purposes, with anonymity ensured by the de-identification of participants in the verbatim transcription process using an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered voice recorder. Three research assistants were trained to check the accuracy of the AI-obtained transcriptions. The research team conducted follow-up interviews whenever the initial interview was interrupted by a delivery assignment. Each interview began with one of the researchers introducing the project and, after obtaining consent, questions were posed regarding their migration status, reason for migrating to urban centres, and what they thought about platformed delivery work. Interviews were conducted in Chinese and translated into English when needed. Interviews and fieldwork data were coded based on workers’ migration experience, platformed working practices, living conditions, and their sense-making of urban life. The research team also conducted a round of survey research on delivery workers in Beijing (N = 1209) in June 2021, and some of the survey data are used here as supplementary material.

Learning to serve: From ‘vulgar rural people’ to ‘refined platform worker’

Migrant workers first experience distinction when they confront platform work. Most delivery workers in China are young male migrants who either just graduated from vocational schools or came from industries such as construction and garment, and becoming a delivery worker is a novel experience, as they are required to learn how to serve customers. Before joining delivery work, many migrant workers had no experience in the service industry or in serving others. In rural families, they were usually the ones being served. Despite rapid development over the last several decades, China's rural areas are still dominated by patriarchal mechanisms that prioritise males over females (Santos and Harrell, 2017). As sons, they are spoilt by parents and grandparents, and as husbands, they are obeyed and cared for by their wives. When food delivery gained momentum in 2016, migrant workers were attracted by the higher income and flooded into the industry, where they confronted a serious conflict; as a service industry, food delivery necessitates a finer skill of service that they need to learn from scratch. For instance, in Baidu's Rider Delivery Guide, detailed requirements are listed regarding how to obtain customer recognition through phone calls and face-to-face communication, and how to offer explanations when customers get upset. It even includes a guide on workers’ gestures and facial expression management. Wang was a full-time courier at Meituan. As a migrant who worked at construction sites and in manufacturing, he had trouble understanding the refined service work required by these platforms.

[The] regulations (by the platforms) are too detailed. There is a whole set of complicated procedures. For example, after delivery, we are required to tell the customer, ‘Thank you for ordering the food. Please comment on my service’. Some couriers ask customers for good reviews. I cannot do that; I [would] feel embarrassed.

During the interview, Wang kept referring to himself as part of the ‘vulgar rural people’ (dalaocu, 大老粗), while referring to his customers as ‘white collar’. Based on his experience, he found ‘white collar’ customers to be demanding and picky, and prone to complain whenever questioned. Once, Wang was given a negative rating from a customer. He was confused. After making an appeal, he was told that this was because he ‘was too loud on the phone’.

I had six orders and was running desperately on the road! I did not realise I was too loud! She could just tell me! … When there is a problem, people do not trust each other; they only trust the system!

Wang said this angrily. Migrant workers experience a strong transition in work ethics in platform labour. The tradition-informed work ethic that ascribes work with the values of interpersonal trust and tolerance has disappeared; it has been replaced with neoliberal capitalist notions that prioritise professionalism and rationality (Heelas, 2002). Throughout platform work, migrant workers are required to give up previously trusted guanxi (or relations) in rural society (Fei, 1939), while referring to a new kind of cultural norm arising within the platform in which affective labour and courtesy cultivation are emphasised and employed (Sun et al., 2021). The new ethics imposed by platform work, however, imply not only top-down re-disciplines of the rural vulgar class, but also clear class demarcations between rural migrants and urban customers.

In addition, the strong customer orientation employed by the platform exacerbates migrants’ sense of distinction work. Algorithms used by platform apps have made the work a realm of distinction in which asymmetrical information and rights are conveyed (Rosenblat and Stark, 2016). Technological designers are exhorted to take every precaution to please customers and avoid offending them. It is not until workers pick up the food that they receive the customer's mobile number and address. Until then, they are clueless about where and to whom they will deliver. Conversely, customers can access information regarding the assigned worker as soon as the order is accepted. Specific information such as the courier's photograph, total deliveries completed, on-time rating, and customer comments are listed in the background system. Meanwhile, customers can also monitor the delivery in real time, thanks to the GPS tracking system employed by applications. This causes workers discomfort, as they may face complaints from customers if their delivery routes differ from customer expectations. ‘If I get one order that is about to exceed the delivery time, I have to go for it. Other customers are not happy when they see me passing through their places and not going in’.

As servers, couriers are required to not only follow a precise delivery process – from accepting orders, collecting food packets, and delivering to receiving feedback – but are also required to stay on call for customers’ changing and immediate requirements. For example, some customers change the order destination later, and others ask workers to buy other things not originally included in the order. As feedback ratings from customers constitute a major factor in a worker's unit price and level upgrades, migrant workers usually choose to do what customers expect, even against their own wishes. Some delivery workers complained about the unfair treatment from their customers:

One time I arrived [at the customer's location], [and] nobody answered. I made a call, and he asked me to wait for another 10 minutes. I had several orders there. I could not wait. He seemed unhappy and complained about this through the system.

Sometimes, their recognition of distinction work is enhanced by infrastructural and spatial segregation. Couriers in Beijing confront obstacles in accessing many private residential areas, office buildings and luxury shopping malls. Being recognised as low-end labour, many couriers are declined entry at places that highlight performative social class and economic status. Some elevators, for example, cannot be accessed by delivery workers. Couriers must then climb the stairs, even in high-rise buildings. Boundary work manifests social distinctions by empowering people with a hierarchical right to use space. Lan's (2006) study on domestic workers detailed how the boundary between workers and employers is maintained and negotiated in the household space. For delivery workers, these negotiations usually occur between them and security staff at various places. Owing to the COVID-19 restrictions, quarrels often occur between these two social groups. Security guards must demand the health code (jiankangma，健康码) ³ of entrants and check their temperature; delivery workers are generally in a hurry and may skip some of the processes required by security guards. In some sense, permission to enter has become a scene of tension between delivery workers and security guards. Couriers complained that they were stopped because they were labelled as delivery couriers, who were stereotyped as ‘under-classed people’. Huang said, ‘The customer wants me to deliver it to her office, but the security guy does not allow me to enter. They [the security staff] do not like us. Many times, I am stuck in the middle and do not know what to do’.

Consumption has been identified as a key factor in the performance of class (Bourdieu, 1984). Throughout the delivery, interactions between couriers and customers are exemplified by a lack of reciprocity (Hanser, 2007). Workers are trained and disciplined to become obedient platform labourers who always avoid making customers feel uncomfortable, while the customer is regarded as ‘God’ who maintains real-time monitoring and questions workers’ labouring. Zhao was a manager of a delivery station, and he taught his couriers to avoid problems with customers. ‘Control your temper and you won’t regret it [tuiyibu haikuo tiankong]! Do I not know that it is unfair? You can lose your temper in many other things but not to customers. You had better not’. Zhao then gave examples of couriers whose application accounts were permanently shut down because of their disrespect towards customers. Zhao also tried to convince couriers in his station that the distinction work they recognised was buttressed by ‘real-world differences’ between migrants and urban citizens in terms of income, social capital and consumption patterns. ‘They could spend hundreds of thousands for one meal, they have relations [guanxi] in cities, what do you have?’

Through food delivery, migrants are implanted with the notion that there is a clear demarcation between workers and customers. The distinction is made not only through algorithmic management or platform policies but also through many more institutional, cultural, and infrastructural dimensions in terms of the rural–urban division, social class, and social identity. The platform reconfigures migrant workers’ consciousness of polite and attentive service by cultivating a new type of work ethic. Through their daily interaction with platformed delivery work, migrants not only learn various kinds of requirements and rules of the platform service industry, but also unwillingly pick up a service notion with ‘pronounced urban-rural status distinctions’ (Hanser, 2007: 424). This service labour discipline affects migrant workers’ self-esteem and social identification (Bærenholdt and Jensen, 2009) and hinders their social integration into urban cities.

Sticky labour and remote family: Competing demands

As soon as workers become accustomed to delivery work, they increasingly become ‘stuck’ with the platform (Sun et al., 2021). This trend is amply evident in how migrant workers seek to maintain a decent living wage for their children's education, medical expenses for the elderly, costs of sustaining guanxi relations and other family responsibilities. Cai, a part-time Ele.me courier, went through a shift in employment relations and continued working on the platform for more than 3 years. As he explained:

A delivery job enjoys a higher income than working in my previous electronics factory, at least an extra 2000 RMB per month. This income covers my wife and two younger children's daily expenses back home. My family cannot make ends meet only by farming, so my father now also works in the city, and we live together to save rent costs.

This relatively competitive situation provides a viable means of economic integration for rural workers. Our 2021 survey found that nearly half of the respondents were satisfied with their high incomes. Quite a few interlocutors revealed that 5000 RMB or more could be saved every month. However, this is increasingly only possible with extended working hours and lower unit prices (Sun et al., 2021). The proportion of couriers, regardless of work type, who worked for 8–10 h and 10–12 h a day, together constituted 62% of those surveyed. Wu and Zheng (2020: 4) also discussed the return of ‘piece wage’ associated with the emerging crowd-sourced segment that ‘nowadays occupies 60% of the total delivery employment’. This functional arrangement shifts the economic burden onto workers who bear the costs of operation and social security (De Stefano, 2015), and potentially hindering their long-term prospects for settlement in cities. In fact, it has long been suggested that the delivery industry exploits structural barriers and rural workers’ inferior socio-economic status, as ‘they are known and expected to be willing to endure harsh working conditions, long hours, low pay, and poor work-based benefits’ (Wang and Fan, 2012: 735).

Therefore, as the long, fixed schedule absorbs much of their time, rural couriers are left with little choice but to sacrifice the attention paid to self- and family reproduction. On one hand, frugality in one's personal life is largely favoured. In our interviews, ‘no time to spend money’, ‘generally do not take days off’, ‘no need to care about food nor clothes’, and ‘too tired to go out’ were oft-cited phrases. Consequently, platform work continuously threatens to destabilise rural workers’ basic needs, such as rest, and compromise their social capacities that are necessary to sustain personal happiness and growth in the city. According to our 2021 survey, 36.5% of couriers reported not having a day off per month and 51.1% reported taking only 1–3 days off per month. Even during menstrual periods, most of our female interviewees confirmed that they did not ask for leave but rather stayed on to work.

Contrastingly, these concerns and practices are not equally valued in urban systems, even though some urban residents currently occupy the same job. Wang, a native Beijing resident, was a part-time courier for both Meituan and Ele.me, and recalled his rural colleagues as follows:

‘I know a ‘little fattie’ who comes from a rural background. He would run for nearly 20 hours a day to earn and maintain the highest level with the highest amount of bonus. He barely rests. That is insanely hard work! He only rents a bed for around 600RMB per month. Imagine how much money he can save! However, he came to Beijing to make money, while our Beijing people, though not being lazy, feel it is okay to earn just enough.

Although Wang's account expresses empathy and appreciation, he still recategorises urban Beijing deliverymen and rural non-Beijing deliverymen (see also Doshi, 2021). This suggests that workers categorise their rural colleagues as a distinct group and point out the exception in their labour characteristics as opposed to urban preferences regarding work and lifestyle (Funnell, 2008). This situation suggests that platform service work is unable to fully detach from the classed and rural–urban order of worth despite the claimed advantages of a non-classed, post-racial and gender-neutral opportunity that combines good pay with a flexible schedule (van Doorn, 2017: 907). In other words, the array of leisurely, social and consumptive activities now occurring in cities rarely pertains to rural deliverymen. They seem to ‘self-select’ a self-exploitative way of living (Zhan, 2015), which is distinctive from the previous generation of migrant workers who were then more eager to find comfort and excitement in urban entertainment centres, disco dancing and consumption of popular programmes (Ma and Cheng, 2005).

On the other hand, rural workers experience a relationship of salient conflict or disarticulation between being platform service providers and caring for members of their families. For instance, those left-behind children mostly rely on the grandparents for care. This ‘inter-generational outsourced’ arrangement is a forced individual solution to cope with reproductive labour burdens. As Yang, a female full-time courier, complained:

“The job has the greatest impact on accompanying my child because you have to deliver every day, no rest, or the system requires you to complete at least 10 orders before you can take a break. However, 10 orders also consume almost half a day. Thus, I have to leave my son with my mother-in-law, and I now do not have much patience in disciplining him. Even with his homework, I just glance over it and that is it.

Therefore, despite the vastly expanded commodification and institutionalisation of reproductive services (Braverman, 1998), much reproduction remains organised at the household level (Glenn, 1992: 6). This is particularly true for rural couriers. Instead of being alienated from kinship circles, neighbours and traditional communities, rural couriers remain prone to relying upon family support and resources. For example, sending their children back to grandparents to receive middle school education is quite common (Zhou and Cheung, 2017) because proper residential status is still denied in their adopted cities. Participating in platform work does not grant couriers more negotiable spaces.

In other cases, grandparents undertake both income-earning and caring activities to improve the entire family wage. Li, a part-time Meituan courier, told us about her own parents and in-laws:

“My father has been gone for around six, [or] seven years. My mom and my parents-in-law are still in good health, and they take turns looking after the grandchildren. Though my husband and I pay for the children's tuition, the daily living expenses are on the grandparents because they all still work, like my father-in-law does odd jobs in the nearby town, while my mother-in-law takes care of the land. In addition, we only buy some clothes, food, toys, and domestic appliances sometimes.

Moreover, debt becomes one of the key driving forces for couriers to endure hardship at the expense of reproductive time and duties. The 2021 survey findings showed that nearly 63% of the couriers surveyed reported ‘being in debt’, and ‘purchasing houses and cars’ (48.2%) was the number one cause. This finding was echoed by the personal experiences of many interlocutors. According to our interviews, the average cost per square meter of a town-level property has a market value ranging from 5000 to 8000 RMB. Given that the monthly pay cheque of most jobs in a town is generally less than 5000 RMB, a pattern of ‘working in the city, consuming in hometowns’ has become quite common. The aforementioned practices of remitting tuition fees and purchasing gifts for the entire family also fall into this category. As a result, this consumption pattern, especially home ownership, intensifies their experience as ‘sticky labour’ on the platform, as well as of ‘being stuck and in-between’ (Zhan, 2015: 408).

In another sense, however, this unique way of labouring and living is more a deliberate and self-selected distinction. It is a transitional or bridging process in which rural couriers are aware of the economic, social and cultural distribution of integrating opportunities and vulnerabilities associated with platform work in big cities. In fact, some couriers have developed corresponding economic, social and cultural arrangements to later smoothly settle down in town-level cities near their home villages. Notwithstanding, this ‘descending’ urban integration seems illusory, considering that many of the workers do not have clear plans to return to their home villages any time soon. It could be regarded as a strategic and possible route to the fruits of urbanisation.

Spatial ‘deliberations’: The making of urban villages and online communities

Food delivery is a form of mobility work that closely intersects urban spatial dimensions. In our ethnographic investigation, Feijiacun (费家村) and Yinmajing (饮马井) were two urban villages where migrant platform workers cluster, residing mostly in multistorey buildings. In each storey, there were approximately 20 small apartments, with most workers sharing washrooms and kitchens. Low rent and proximity to the workplace are the principal reasons why migrant workers reside in these buildings. Delivery bikes and charging boxes line the main entry road to Yinmajing. During off-peak times, workers park their e-bikes on the side of the street and rest at home. Because physical space is scarce, village streets are narrow, crowded and filled with small restaurants and stores.

Chinese migrant workers maintain distinctive spatial choices of housing and socialisation compared to urban citizens (Lin and Gaubatz, 2017). Our fieldwork found that, although delivery work is service-oriented and requires constant communication and social networking, rural couriers, like the previous generation of migrant workers (Yue et al., 2013), seldom build long-term personal relationships with urban citizens. A few of those we interviewed have been working at one station for several years, and have become familiar with several customers; however, as Huang, a Shansong courier residing in Yinmajing, said, ‘We do not talk. They are Beijing citizens, and we are rural migrants. Nothing to talk [between us]’. Rather than being incorporated into city life, migrant settlements in Beijing seem rather independent and marginalised.

Huang likes Yinmajing and believes it to be a good place for migrant workers: ‘[Yinmajing is] very convenient. Rent is cheap. I also find that many villagers live here’. Indeed, this social bond with people who share the same place of origin still often determines where rural migrants live and what kind of work they will take up (Zhan, 2018). The survey indicated that more than 70% of the rural couriers surveyed were referred by ‘relatives, friends, or acquaintances’. There were also quite a few cases in which husbands started doing the job and later recommended it to their wives.

This initial connection to platform labour has enabled rural couriers to navigate the intricacies of a big city and a new type of work, as described by Juan, an experienced full-time courier:

Our station has seven or eight delivery women, and one of them are my relatives. Our family has several relatives in Beijing, and quite a few are engaged in platform delivery. Hence, we would find time to hang out, like making dumplings together. We will also complain to each other about the nasty things happening during delivery, or gossip about mutual relatives and family matters..

Juan confessed that such a relationship, in a way, helped her compensate for the loss of family companionship and was crucial to her feeling of belonging to the urban village. Evidently, Juan's experiences demonstrate how this spatial setting could promote a safety net, especially for newcomers, to establish a foothold in the city and even in the industry.

Except for spatial ‘deliberation’, urban distinction is also manifested by the cultural practices associated with delivery work. Workers’ social media use and community building are noteworthy. In addition to the basic delivery application use, some workers also attempt to utilise WeChat, Weibo, TikTok or Kuaishou – popular social media and short video platforms – to experience the city or make their voices heard. Feng, for example, is active in both producing safety warning videos and joining public events:

I have had this thought [to make online safety warning clips] for a long time. I do not simply focus on earning more money; I just want to help cultivate some positive values, you know, recording and producing something that can make all couriers learn and have a growth mindset.

Feng was also once engaged in shooting a documentary on platform workers ⁴ . Such activities enable him to connect with fellow workers and the surrounding city, arising out of their unique working and living conditions that make this possible (Spurr, 1983: 105).

In addition to social media use, rural couriers are keen to organise into communities. For example, using WeChat groups, they frequently exchange news and information regarding how to cope with numerous emerging obstacles, such as obtaining motorcycle driving licences after motorbikes with temporary orange-colour licences were no longer permitted to enter Beijing ring roads, applying for health certificates during the COVID-19 pandemic, or reimbursing insurance when accidents occur. The spontaneous organisation of online groups provides a means to seek help that is inconvenient or inaccessible through offline public institutions, native citizens and other channels. These digital interactions are, therefore, a practical adjustment by which the workers’ position in the city is expressed (Bourdieu, 1984: 6). It demonstrates an interrupted, constrained, and fragile state with technological skills and policy awareness, as well as the allocation of city resources.

Moreover, when special occasions occur, bonding activities – fun, creative and playful interactions – are usually organised among close co-workers and relatives and performed in physical settings. During the Mid-Autumn Festival, Zhang, a Shansong courier, sent several short videos to us, recording a large group of couriers cooking, dining and partying together at one of their urban village residences. The clip showed a group of people, some of whom still wearing their delivery uniforms, sitting around a large table. There are nearly 20 dishes on offer, including fish, shrimp, a variety of meats, different kinds of vegetables and fruits. Zhang and his colleagues’ co-presence produced joyful experiences of having a life and being supported. At the very least, these activities or efforts are useful incentives to keep working and staying in the cities. However, there is another side to this bonding; as indicated in Juan's case, it may also hinder workers’ urban integration to the extent that they might disengage from the people met during delivery and the time spent on the platform. These instances of residential and media use and community building activities could instead be perceived as cultural ‘otherness’, and might lead to biased urban perceptions or even the institutionalisation of policies that entrench the constrained inclusion of migrant populations (see also Visser et al., 2017: 5).

Conclusion: Social integration versus social distinction?

Within the context of platformisation in China, the current study fills a gap by addressing the platforms’ dual function of integration and distinction for rural migrants in China. Our study shows that platform work is both an opportunity for and an obstacle to migrant workers’ social integration in urban China. The national discourse on boosting the digital economy and urbanisation sometimes offers rural migrant workers recognition of the possibility of social integration. The platform economy also provides easy, flexible access to rural migrants who have been excluded from the Internet boom during the last two decades (Oreglia, 2014). However, this study also shows migrant workers’ integration as functional and fragile, with the urban floating population being deeply aware of the digital order within the platform that deems their everyday labouring as distinct. The perceptions of serving others, the asymmetric balance between work and family, and the attempts to form urban villages and communities jointly contribute to this platformed distinction, giving migrants an amorphous identity in China's urbanisation (Figure 1). This finding echoes previous migration studies on ‘segmented assimilation’ (Portes and Zhou, 1993), where migrants follow distinct trajectories and diverse patterns in terms of social integration and assimilation. For rural migrant workers on China's food delivery platforms, the grand narratives on ‘participation-as-benefits’ (Chen, 2020) and engaging digital practices within the platform may provide some opportunities for work, visibility and recognition but also reinforce a system of labour inequality that divides rural migrants and urban citizens, the server and the served, and couriers and customers.

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

The dialectic process of platformed distinction work of delivery workers.

This dual process of migrant workers’ social integration and distinction through platform work reveals the multilayered and complicated relationship between migration and platformisation. As we have sought to show, platform work within China's continued urbanisation cannot be described in a straightforward manner. It is neither pure work fraught with precarity, nor perfect, welcoming, or respectful work. It grants migrant workers autonomy regarding when and where to work (van Doorn et al., 2020), while also limiting them to rigid technology-mediated management and discipline. Within these processes, it is important to see the tension and conflict between grand political narratives on development and the subtle, contextual, and distinctive delivery labour experienced by actual migrants. As argued by van Doorn et al. (2020), platform labour can simultaneously be a site of opportunity and degradation. Against the backdrop of China's urbanisation, platformed distinction work functions as an attempt to describe the binary roles platforms play, enhancing migrant workers’ social integration as well as social distinction. The platformed integration of migrant workers is neither a ‘one-size-fits-all’ sociopolitical celebration, nor a passive process of accepting the status quo. Rather, it is a ‘communicative integration’ that is in the process of negotiation and self-creation (Ma and Cheng, 2005).

As we have shown, platforms in China are taking the place of some of the government's management mechanisms by transferring migration regulations into digital, application-based corporate surveillance. These urban-oriented and pro-customer ideologies embedded in the platform economy highlight the prioritised position of urban citizens while failing to recognise the corresponding feelings and willingness of migrant workers. Platform work does not liberate rural migrant workers from a structural urban disparity that may affect their chances of long-term settlement in urban spaces and their efforts to become urban citizens. Instead, its ironic dual role seems to further justify rural workers’ in-betweenness resulting from an ‘always half-way-through’ type of integration, frequently observed in earlier generations of migrant workers (see, e.g. Ma and Cheng, 2005). To better understand the complex social consequences of platform work in the Chinese context, more research is required to examine its multiple actors and their entangled relationships with each other in a much more detailed and specific way.