4 The Rise of the Gig Economy and the Restructuring of Migrant Precarity in China
Before analysing specific modes of differentiation and how they link to platform workers’ precarity and solidarity, I first briefly sketch the organization of the two sectors China, and provide the context of their rise and expansion. Specifically, I mainly contextualize their rise and expansion within the macro-level economic crisis since 2008 and state-led efforts to pull China out of it, highlighting key industrial policies, employment policies and changes in the ideological sphere. I also point to changes in social policies, especially those related to migration, as they play important role in channelling workers to gig platforms and fix them in precarity. These, I hope, can provide the larger context for the analysis to follow.
The development of platform-based gig economy gained momentum in China amid entrenched domestic contradictions and the recent global financial crisis in 2008. By the late 2000s, the old export-oriented growth regime increasingly faced a profitability crisis, while social, labour and environmental unrest abound (Li, 2015). In response, from the early 2010s, the Chinese state pursued a new economic restructuring strategy that centres around digital and high technologies, to reorient the growth regime to one of capital and innovation-intensive and domestic consumption-driven, and rebalance the economy along sectoral, regional and rural–urban lines (Lei, 2023; Naughton, 2018).
In this recent round of economic restructuring, two central policies include Made in China 2025 and Internet+ . Made in China 2025 aims to upgrade China’s manufacturing capabilities through technological innovation, automation and informatization. And Internet+ seeks to restructure selected areas of the economy through digital platforms to improve efficiency and productivity, including ride-hailing and food delivery sectors that this chapter focuses on. While, to use Lei (2023)’s framing, creating these new birds, the state was also careful to deal with the old birds, especially the labour-intensive manufacturing sectors. On the one hand, the supply-side reform was carried out to reduce overcapacity, especially in low-efficiency state-owned sectors. On the other hand, inland government, especially those in underdeveloped central and western regions, actively seized the opportunity to take on the transfer of labour-intensive manufacturing sectors from the industrial heartland to boost local manufacturing and service sectors. In rural areas, a state-led campaign is leveraged to establish modern agricultural systems. All these contribute to the state’s overall goal to promote economic growth by accelerating urbanization and boosting consumption.
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Y. ZHOU