Wang Jibing

3.51075 learners

As a meal delivery rider navigating China’s bustling cities, Wang Jibing lives a life defined by the ticking clock—every order is a race, every minute a battle against late fees and customer impatience. His days blur into a cycle of rushing through streets, enduring cold winds, and hiding physical pain (a severed tendon in his finger leaves him with a permanent hook). But beneath the chaos lies a quiet rebellion: he writes poetry. Scrawled between deliveries, on his scooter seat, or in his tiny rental room, his verses are a lifeline—they pull him back to his rural hometown, to the memory of his beloved parents, and to the man he was before the city reduced him to a nameless “next rider.” This collection weaves raw, intimate stories of daily struggle, grief over his parents’ passing, longing for home, and quiet acts of kindness toward fellow gig workers and strangers. It’s a vivid portrait of a man clinging to his identity while running against time, proving that even in the harshest circumstances, art can be a refuge.

Sun Ping

3.8520 learners

For over a decade, China’s platform economy has exploded, turning food delivery riders from a niche gig into the face of digital precarious work. While U.S. platforms like Grubhub kicked off the global food delivery boom in 2004, China’s market has since grown into the world’s largest, amplifying labor tensions that resonate across gig economies worldwide. *Transitional Labor* dives into the paradox of these riders: most join seeing their jobs as temporary stepping stones to better opportunities, yet many end up trapped in this "permanent transition" for years. Drawing on six years of on-the-ground fieldwork across Beijing, Shanghai, and other cities, Sun Ping unpacks how platform algorithms, layered outsourcing models, and capital logic create a system where riders have the illusion of freedom but are tightly controlled. The book explores riders’ hidden resistance strategies (like outsmarting algorithms), the unique struggles of female riders balancing work and family, and challenges the binary "control vs. resistance" framework in gig work research—highlighting riders’ digital resilience and the urgent need for fairer labor policies.