Trapped in the platform? Migration, precarity and resistance in China’s platform-based gig economy
Zhou Yang
This
study looks at precarity among gig workers. It shifts the attention away from labour
process factors to explore the role of the wider social, cultural and institutional
environment in the precarisation of platform workers. Whereas existing
western-centred studies in this aspect argue that platforms reproduce
racialised and gendered hierarchies to leverage control over vulnerable
populations, this ethnographic study draws on the case of Didi to show how similar
factors and dynamics play out in non-western, Chinese context. The project
further explores how these social, cultural and institutional factors
paradoxically give rise to gig workers’ solidarity and resistance, especially
through the use of digital technologies.

