Chinese Delivery Workers on Short Video Platforms: From Everyday Self-Media to Alternative Video Activism

This article is based on videos posted online by food delivery couriers who are also content creators on short-video platforms and aims to analyse the strategies of video activism they employ to defend their rights in China. Platform capitalism in China has pushed food delivery couriers into an employment and labour grey zone, where their legal rights have never been clearly defined. This new labour regime, characterised by exploitation and control, has generated dissatisfaction among couriers. However, in a context of tightening political conditions and intensified censorship, collective resistance is difficult to organise in physical spaces. Against this backdrop, some couriers have turned to the internet, using short-video social media platforms to articulate claims and express their views.

Drawing on a case study, this article adopts a digital ethnographic approach, supplemented by interviews, to collect data and to examine how video accounts created by couriers have evolved from personal spaces for “recording everyday life” into public spaces for “collective expression,” with the aim of advancing understanding of new forms and characteristics of labour resistance among platform workers in China. The study shows that, in a context where citizen journalism has little room to survive and where alternative media such as independent television channels do not exist, the internet has developed from a tool of labour resistance in earlier periods into a space of resistance itself. However, courier-bloggers must simultaneously navigate the implicit rules of both video platforms and the Chinese political environment, conveying information and expressing opinions while avoiding potential risks, such as content censorship, account suspension, or official warnings and sanctions against individuals. These courier-bloggers primarily draw on the shared experience of exploitation within the courier community to reconstruct a sense of collective labour identity and to enact a form of alternative video activism. This activism operates between individual and collective action, targets economic actors as the object of contention, and advances claims framed in terms of interests rather than rights; for this reason, it can be characterised as depoliticised. At the same time, this form of alternative video activism proves effective, enabling the defence of the concrete interests of individual couriers on a case-by-case basis. Based on this effectiveness, these courier-bloggers occupy a central position within the courier community. By leveraging the affordances of video platforms, they construct dialogic spaces that transcend geographical boundaries; these spaces, in turn, become a condition for the continuous updating of their accounts and for attracting other couriers to participate.