China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world
45 comments
·September 20, 2025Herring
legacynl
Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).
inglor_cz
I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved.
(I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)
bryanlarsen
The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.
christkv
Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra.
Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control.
I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.
mallowdram
The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981).
The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate.
The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.
christkv
You are to captured by your ideology. It does not really matter what you personally think about. The thing is that the EU has completely failed as a union to provide the economic growth we need and has no plan on how to address this. We are completely export dependent (about 50% of GDP, meaning any world economic crisis will cause massive unemployment and fiscal crisis) and our internal market has withered and the purchasing power is plummeting.
China is going to do what China does but it's economy is in tatters something you would probably know if you actually looked at what is happening with their economy. Combine that with the same demographic crisis as EU and you have another country that might have already hit it's economical peak. The leadership is showing no ability to create an internal market and is busy stomping out any dissent internally as economical reality sets in and people loose jobs and their future. Unless their turn their economy around creating an internal market any international economic crisis will collapse their export oriented economy.
Der_Einzige
Americans will beat out China again in 20 years due to GLP-1 drugs fixing the colossal nerfing to our public health that widespread obesity cause.
Of course, China has another chance to beat us out when that happens if they do something about how common smoking is there!
YinglingHeavy
I envy the simplicity of your worldview, it must be so efficient to invoke.
Der_Einzige
You're a "simple person" if you think that bringing GLP-1 to the masses or smoking cessation won't have monumental impacts on public health - of course thinking is something that non P zombies do...
Serious, qualified doctors are already calling for nearly everyone to take GLP-1s. It's hard to find things that GLP-1 doesn't positively impact in regards to longevity.
Ericson2314
Gig work is actually totally fine with an adequate welfare state and reduced work week.
Too bad China has neither of those things!
skrebbel
I know little about China, but every so often I meet someone who's rather fond of it (usually a passionate hardcore leftie¹), and says stuff like "in China nobody is unemployed, in China nobody is homeless" because apparently somehow the state provides (bad, but existing) work and housing for everyone. This seems to directly oppose your comment that China has no welfare state. Who is right?
¹) for context, here in NL "America good China bad" is a bit less clear-cut than in the US, where I assume most people read this comment from. That said at least the "China bad" part is still the majority opinion by far.
legacynl
I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. YOu can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.
To be clear China certainly has homeless people. There actually is some form of welfare state, but often it is not sufficient, especially if you're not party related, and you can only get it in your assigned city/home town. If it's not enough to pay for housing and there aren't any jobs available in your region you're shit out of luck.
Ericson2314
As a "softcare leftie", my understanding is that China does in fact have a weak welfare state.
I think it's better for pensioners than working-age poor — typical gerontocracy. I think some healthcare stuff exists on paper but it sucks.
Fade_Dance
They also have the hukou system, and migrant workers often do not have the same benefits as native residents.
I think that much of the misunderstanding comes from the perception that China has a highly centralized authoritarian government which is all powerful within the state, which is true to some degree, but the regional governments are what effectively "run" most of the state, including things like infrastructure initiatives that most people would assume are state controlled. The big bold State planning also is in fact implemented in different ways by different provinces.
Then people put that framework into a western context of states and national government, which isn't right either. There is a lot of power balancing and interplay between the provincial and national governments, and the binding force is the CCP itself which doesn't have a clear western parallel either.
skrebbel
Appreciate your response, thanks for the clarity. I think whoever downvoted me thought I was being insincere but I really wasn't - it's not a weird idea to expect a country that calls itself communist to have something resembling a welfare state!
markus_zhang
China has very little to do with left except in the names maybe.
prewett
The Chinese State hasn't provided jobs and housing for decades. Their own statistics shows youth unemployment at 19% (August 2025). The struggles of migrants in the cities is well-known. I personally witnessed homeless people in Beijing. Your leftish interlocutors haven't updated their information since Mao Zedong died; Deng Xiaoping starting undoing Communism in 1979 [1].
inglor_cz
During the rule of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia, not working was a crime, so "nobody is unemployed, nobody is homeless" was trivially ensured by chucking such people into prison.
OTOH you had a lot of state-sponsored jobs where you just had to show up, but not necessarily work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)
The Czech offence was called "Příživnictví", which is just "Parasitism".
https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C5%99%C3%AD%C5%BEivnictv%C3%...
JKCalhoun
Thinking lately how it mirrors "piece work" that, I think, countries like Japan used to have (still have?).
stevenwoo
From this podcast - all clothing that is mass produced is still made this way - even in the USA.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-cl...
analog31
Piece work was one of the driving forces behind labor union movements.
pessimizer
"Piece work" is an English phrase because it was common in the UK and America.
John23832
You had me at the first sentence. My fingers were itching to comment.
mytailorisrich
If you are self-employed and paid by the job/hour "reduced work week" is not really viable. This applies in Europe, too.
Ericson2314
Where in an equilibrium where gig wages are too low, because the precarity means the gig worker is desperate.
With enough welfare state, the gig worker wouldn't be so desperate, and gig rates would go up. Of course they would push some employers back to permenant employment, but this is fine. It would be like spot market vs longer term deals for everything else.
I'm convinced the length of the workweek is totally exogenous. I don't think there is a feedback mechanism within capitalism to adjust it. This is actually a bummer.
jmyeet
Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West.
In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically.
Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.
China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.
Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy.
China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough.
The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.
yocoda
> And though their algorithms can be cruel taskmasters, pushing drivers to drive recklessly fast, they are an improvement on gangmasters who used to match workers and employers.
> The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible
Is this author trolling or am I dumb?
esafak
You're reading The Economist.
tdeck
The sentiment reminds me of this old 19th century labor movement song "The Dollar Alarm Clock" (although in that song, they were making fun of it)
What a blessing it was when the thing was invented;
It beats the slave-driver who came with a stick;
It rests on the shelf in the shack that I rented;
It never gets hungry; it never gets sick.
atonse
I’ve not driven Uber Eats but a friend of mine had. The app doesn’t push you. YOU push yourself if you have a certain personality and want to maximize earnings.
alephnerd
Tl;dr -
1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese)
2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy.
----------
I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases.
It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0].
Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away.
Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well.
[0] - http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm...
* - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."
HPsquared
They really are going all-in on the capitalism over there.
inglor_cz
It is a society where power is strictly organized into a clear pyramid. This model predates capitalism by a lot. If anything, true capitalism is more chaotic and probably churns the layers of the society more. This is more akin to a feudalism with capitalist characteristics, with the Party instead of the bluebloods.
billy99k
China has ownership in all major companies and influences all major decisions. This isn't really capitalism.
In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
conception
This assumes that the Chinese have not been skilling up during that time of stolen IP. They have been.
bryanlarsen
IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.
delusional
> In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.
I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.
What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".
femiagbabiaka
I struggle to distinguish between what you’ve described as not really capitalism and the currently existing state of the U.S.
Der_Einzige
All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.
Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)
A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"
China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again.
I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)
https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart
Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.