The shifting forms of livelihood strategies of platform workers in China

Empirical research has found that platform workers have adopted both collective actions and informal practices to address unfavorable working conditions. However, the “small-scale geographies” of platform work as well as the inter-linkage of shifting forms of resistance is under-explored. This paper aims to broaden and deepen our understanding of resistance from platform workers, through a case study of app-based delivery drivers in Shanghai, China. As responses to precarity, drivers have resorted to both open, collective actions and more hidden everyday practices. Because of surveillance by the Chinese state and the close managerial control of workers, collective protests have been rarely seen and of limited effectiveness; more individual and quiet practices such as dissimulating data are favored by drivers in their everyday resistance. We argue that the intention to resist on the part of drivers echoes and expands Bayat’s observations on the survival techniques of the urban poor, and differs from the “political act” argued by Scott. It is hard to conclude that the drivers’ everyday resistance can provoke dramatic confrontation in China as Scott’s arguments would lead us to suppose. Our study contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the platform economy by highlighting the unique modalities and strategies of delivery drivers in China, which differs significantly from those in Western contexts that are often addressed in the existing literature. It sheds light on the specific forms of struggle against the asymmetric power of platforms and provides new insights into the mechanisms of resistance.