Labour and masculinities among platform delivery riders in China

This workshop examines how platform capitalism produces gendered subjects through infrastructural violence, the systematic rendering of masculine bodies as expendable sites of capital accumulation. Centring gender as the constitutive logic of organisation of platform food-delivery work, I argue that food-delivery platforms in China operate by mobilising ideologies of masculine endurance, risk-taking, and breadwinning sacrifice to naturalise injury and death as performances of working-class manhood rather than as structural violence.

Drawing on a 16-month multi-sited ethnography in China, including participant observation by working as a delivery rider alongside interviews with riders, legal professionals, platform company staffs and subcontractors, I demonstrate how platform infrastructure functions through gendered biopower that targets predominantly male, rural-to-urban migrant workers. Algorithmic management does not simply control labour. It manufactures masculine subjects through gendered regimes of competition, speed, and invincibility.

Riders internalise temporal pressure as tests of masculine capability, transforming bodily risk into demonstrations of provider masculinity and working-class male worth. This research then analyses state-capital relation as producing specifically gendered regimes of disposability. The state’s regulatory abstention enables platforms to construct legal frameworks that render male migrant bodies as non-workers, positioned outside employment protections precisely because their labour is naturalised as masculine hustle rather than formal work.

Zihao Zhang is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. His research, based on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork, examines labour, masculinities, and infrastructure in the platform food delivery industry in China. He was a recipient of Chinese Student Awards of Great Britain China Educational Trust and Travel and Study Grants of Universities’ China Committee in London. His research interests include labour, gender, technology, and China’s gig economy. He served as Internal Secretary (2024–25) of the Postgraduate Network affiliated with the British Association for Chinese Studies.

MCI’s PGR workshops are lunchtime seminars held in person at the Manchester China Institute. They seek to bring together students, faculty and staff who can best provide feedback as postgraduate researchers develop their ideas. Free lunch will be provided.

The MCI is a listed building and therefore does not have any lifts. Please note that you must use the stairs in order to access the venue and the toilets.

The organisers will be taking photos during this event. If you prefer not to be included in any photos, kindly inform the organisers before the event starts.