Like those in low-end manufacturing, also having to confront threats of skill-based displacement and exclusion are migrant workers/entrepreneurs in the informal service sector, for example, street vendors, end-ofnetwork distributors for small brands. As Swider (2017) shows, these small businesses often required minimal investment and operated on a small-profits-quick-returns model. If migrant entrepreneurship as such could previously generate sufficient profit to support migrant workers’ livelihood and family, the opportunities they could offer to migrant workers were increasingly undermined, in both industrial heartlands and small cities at the periphery, thanks to the rapid penetration of ecommerce as well as the swift expansion of logistics networks and related services. Both e-commerce—in various guises like shopping website, livestreaming e-commerce new retail, and more recently, internet-based local life service—and logistics are strategic areas in STER, as the Chinese government increasingly resorted to improving its logistics and circulation systems to boost productivity and domestic consumption. E-commerce, for example, has since expanded quickly. In 2019, China’s national online retail reached 1.063 billion yuan, accounting for 20.7% of the national total (Qian, 2020; Wei, 2019). These have in turn significantly squeeze the space of locally based, community business of small scales.
A 46-year-old A’xiong was the owner of a cloth shop in Shenzhen’s industrial town of Guanlan. He and his wife sourced from local manufacturers and sold at a slightly higher price. Before 2015, they could earn a good 15.000 yuan per month. However, the fast expansion of ecommerce not only undercut his business but rendered his business model obsolete: ‘young people are ICTs-savvy … we are no match… We don’t even know photoshop and livestreaming …’. Without even the basic skills required to survive e-commerce, A’xiong and his wife downsized their store in 2017. Now his wife ran the store, and he took up Didi as the main source of family income. While A’xiong still tried to carve out a life in Shenzhen, A’li, who was in his 30 s worked as a sales representative in a 4S store, opted for returning to his hometown Shaoguan, and became a food courier, citing reasons of marriage and taking care of the family. When asked his experience of seeking skill upgrade, he told me that he was not eligible for any skill training programmes offered by Shenzhen’s Bureau of Human Resources and Social Security (HRSS), simply because he did not have a local hukou and had not paid enough for a local social welfare account that is too expensive for him.
8 MIGRATION, PRECARITY AND SOLIDARITY AMONG
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