University Grads Flock to Food Delivery as China's Job Market Dries Up
Issue 60
Greetings from Chinarrative!
In this issue, we’re looking at the job market in China.
After the country lifted pandemic restrictions in late 2022, the economy did not pick up as expected, and the unemployment rate of young people between the ages of 16 and 24 surpassed 20% in April 2023.
That rate stayed constant for three consecutive months.
Later in the summer, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) ceased publishing the unemployment rate for all age groups, triggering a fierce reaction on the internet.
This piece, which first appeared on the Chinese nonfiction platform The Living, profiles several food-delivery workers to illustrate the tough employment situation they face.
In China, food delivery is considered a low-threshold, flexible employment option that usually appeals to migrant workers with few education qualifications.
However, from 2022 until now, more and more university graduates have entered the field—a reflection of the dire employment and economic situation in today’s China.
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The ‘Involution’ of China’s Food-Delivery Service
By The Living
At the beginning of September, Xing Bin, a lecturer at a university in Linyi went viral after he wrote about his experience as a food-delivery worker.
He said he “decided to live like a lower class in society,” riding a scooter 210 kilometers a day, climbing 110 floors, and delivering 2,000 takeout orders in a month, earning about 7,000 yuan (around $980).
He wrote about the rules of food-delivery platforms, the workflow and his observations about the industry. He described the work experience of a food-delivery worker as “very tough.”
Unlike Xing, who took the job to experience a different life, more people enter the industry because they need the money to survive.
Since last year, many highly educated college graduates and unemployed people who lost their jobs in the latest wave of layoffs have started working as food-delivery workers.
The food-delivery industry has become the latest to succumb to “involution,” or “neijuan” in Chinese. (The New Yorker cites anthropologist Xiang Biao as explaining the term “the experience of being locked in a competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless.”)
It’s a Living
In a dormitory at a food delivery station in the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou, Li Kai lays on his bed to finally get some rest after 10 hours of work.
He is 23 years old and from Jiangxi province. In 2022, he graduated from a university in Zhejiang province. He did not find a job after graduation, so he turned to the low-threshold, high-income, time-flexible delivery industry and became a food-delivery worker.
But reality soon rained on his parade. In 2023, the number of food-delivery workers continues to increase, far more than the growth of market needs. This has forced every practitioner in this industry to “involute.”
Yang Haodong, 34, Li’s roommate who had previously worked as a programmer in the education industry, lost his job as a result of the industry’s reorganization and the pandemic.
With a child to support and a mortgage to pay, under the current grim economic environment, he had no choice but to become a food-delivery worker.
The other two people in Li’s dormitory used to be cooks and convenience store workers—one graduated from a vocational school and the other from a community college.
The main reason for them to become deliverers is that they couldn’t find a better job. Some people who struggled to find posts have considered becoming drivers for the car-hailing firm Didi this year, but the current situation in that industry is also quite pessimistic. Too many people are offering more labor than the market requires.
Li’s dormitory is in an old neighborhood, about 50 square meters, with a mix of old and new food-delivery workers living there. Learning of Li’s undergraduate degree, his roommates were surprised and wondered why a highly educated college graduate would want to work as a food-delivery worker.
Li said that at that moment, he saw himself and his roommates as the same—they were all unemployed people trying to find a way to survive.
It is hard to be a food-delivery worker nowadays.
At a morning meeting with other food-delivery workers, Li was called on by the station manager to introduce himself, and halfway through his words, a voice emerged from the crowd: “Another newcomer to steal the job—and a college graduate.”
Interrupting Li was a full-time veteran delivery worker who had been in the business for five years. His name is Xu Yi, 43 years old and from Sichuan province. A high-school diploma holder, he has rough skin and speaks with a strong accent.
Xu has a “hostile” attitude toward new food-delivery workers. He said, we “feel like we’re being robbed of our jobs.”
In April this year, the number of full-time food-delivery workers at the Hangzhou delivery station rose from 60 to 100, including many college and master’s degree holders.
The same situation is true in many parts of the country.
During the university graduation season, Li submitted his resume widely but did not receive any response. He said that at least 40% of the students in the same year were in the same situation as him.
He said he wanted to find a job as a temporary stopover in his life, considering the “harsh” employment environment.
On the other hand, his parents always call him and suggest he go back to his hometown to find a more stable job. However, Li feels that Hangzhou is a big city full of opportunities. The income is higher, and life is much more convenient. So, it’s worth the effort to try to stay there.
Eventually, he had to lie to his parents and say he got an offer to run a pharmaceutical company. In reality, he started looking for part-time jobs to pay his bills while looking for proper full-time jobs.
“Delivering takeout, working at a convenience store, or a bookstore are some ways to make a living in a first-tier city,” he said.
He came across a food-delivery recruitment advertisement on social media. The poster proclaimed that food-delivery workers were “well-paid” and that it was simple and easy to earn more than 10,000 yuan a month.
He wrote down the contact information on the poster and reached out to a food delivery station in Hangzhou.
The station manager greeted the newcomer very warmly. The recruitment process was fast. There are no special requirements, as long as the applicant is physically healthy and can ride a scooter.
On his first day, Li spent about 600 yuan on a delivery uniform and on renting a second-hand scooter with a back container for food. After receiving his health certificate, he got an employee account and officially started his career as a food-delivery worker.
Like Li, Wang Dan also received advanced education, and he graduated from his master’s program in 2021. He has been preparing for the civil service exams since graduating.
He failed at the first attempt, and in order to earn the living expenses to continue his preparation for the exams, he chose to do food delivery part-time.
During his time off, Wang Dan would always observe other food-delivery workers.
He found that there seemed to be two distinct groups of them: the older ones, who usually gather in the outdoor area to smoke and chat during their breaks, preferring to discuss topics about going to the sauna or other entertainment places after work.
And the younger ones, who can be found in the bookstores.
A food-delivery worker checks orders on his cell phone in the winter. Courtesy: The Living
A delivery station manager in Hangzhou said that July 2022 was the time when college graduates started flocking to the delivery business.
In one food delivery station in Hangzhou, 20 undergraduate and master’s degree students became food-delivery workers around that time.
“They usually stay for less than six months, seizing orders to make money during peak business times and finding bookstores to read books the rest of the time,” the station manager said.
Another time when the number of highly educated food-delivery workers surged was after the 2023 Spring Festival holiday.
Zhang Yu, the station manager of a delivery station in Changsha, Hunan province, said labor agencies introduced more than 100 undergraduate and master’s degree students to his station during that time.
Li often felt a “social status mismatch”—he studied foreign trade and felt that it seemed more reasonable for him to sit in front of a computer and do white-collar work. No one knew he was delivering food except for his best friend in college.
He said it was humiliating for a college graduate to deliver food. “How did I end up in such a condition?” he asked.
When he contacted his classmates who had found jobs, he always lied, saying that he was back in his hometown. Those who knew he was in Hangzhou wanted to invite him to dinner. He always excused himself and said he was “too busy to go.”
In addition to college students, other people who struggle to find a job also flock to food-delivery work.
Yang was once a white-collar employee, working day and night in office buildings. He was a software engineer in the education and training industry. And he relied on food delivery to order his lunch and dinner.
“I never properly looked at the face of a food-delivery worker, and I never thought I would be doing the service one day,” he said.
At the end of 2021, a wave of layoffs hit his industry, and Yang was unfortunately one of those let go.
In his thirties and with a college degree, he was constantly turned down for jobs.
Eventually, he turned to the food-delivery industry, first working part-time while looking for employment.
Later, he found that his income was still good, reaching about 9,000 per month, so he devoted all his time and became a full-time food-delivery worker.
Wang Li, 33 years old, used to do sales for a gym. He has a high-school diploma. Since the pandemic hit the market in 2022, the number of gymgoers has decreased sharply.
It became harder to make money by earning commissions. Forced to make a living, Wang Li also began to do food delivery part-time.
Wang Li tried for 10 days and came to a fine reckoning: deducting all kinds of costs, a part-time deliverer earns less than 200 yuan a day.
In order to increase his income, Wang Li also tried to work as a Didi driver. He rented a car with his friends and took different shifts. For each car-hailing order, he earns at least 12 yuan.
But orders are unstable, and coupled with the increasing platform commission, the driver’s share of the profit is shrinking.
His two part-time jobs bring him an average daily income of 500 yuan, which gives him a sense of security against the pressure of a 4,000-yuan monthly rent and a four-year-old child to raise.
The increased supply of labor has caused food-delivery workers’ salaries to fall.
Before he became a food-delivery worker, Xu was a cement worker. In late 2019, after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic and the suspension of work at his construction site, he began to deliver takeout.
Starting in 2020, the platform set a high delivery fee for food-delivery workers which could reach up to 20 yuan per order. He was able to save 200,000 yuan in a year.
By 2021, Xu’s monthly income had slipped to about 9,000 yuan. That year, he had already taken out a loan to build a house in his hometown. Originally, he planned to work for another five years in Hangzhou to pay off the debt, but now it will take him at least eight years to be freed from the burden.
Things have gotten worse since April this year. The average number of daily orders from one delivery station remained unchanged (about 1,500 orders per day). However, the number of food-delivery workers rose to over 100. Xu’s monthly income fell to between 5,000 and 7,000 yuan.
Rating System
Delivery platforms set a “rating” system for food-delivery workers. The food-delivery workers with high rates get better pay per order, and new joiners need to constantly “upgrade” their ratings to get more money.
For new food-delivery workers like Li who are unskilled, the delivery fee per order is usually lower than 10 yuan.
Deducting the monthly rent of 800 yuan, a 10-yuan electric car battery rental fee per day, 30 yuan for food, and the cost of the second-hand electric scooter and other delivery equipment, as well as overtime and traffic fines, Li earned a total of 7,000 yuan in the first month.
“To pick up the food and ride a total distance of 7.5 kilometers, the delivery fee is only 2.7 yuan. The average delivery fee per kilometer is 0.36 yuan,” he said.
For long-distance orders, Li said that food-delivery workers can only take two an hour at an hourly wage of about 5 yuan.
But even this kind of poorly paid order will be taken within 30 seconds. “No matter what the order is, there is always someone who will take it.”
Food-delivery workers wait at a traffic crossing. Courtesy: The Living.
In addition, the disciplinary mechanism for full-time food-delivery workers and platform subsidies has changed. The fine for a bad review has increased from 200 yuan to a maximum of 500 yuan.
Li received a bad review from the customer—he was asked to help buy a pack of cigarettes and beer on the way, but he didn’t buy them because he thought he would run out of time to deliver the food. He received a bad review and was fined 300 yuan.
Li also noticed that delivery fees and rewards have been declining; he earned about 300 yuan a day in March, but the daily rate fell to around 200 yuan in April. In his delivery area, the inclement-weather grant was canceled.
With more people starting to work as food-delivery workers, the requirements for these workers are higher. For example, they can’t work overtime more than 10 times a month, or they will be advised to leave for taking too much overtime.
The number of full-time food-delivery workers is saturated. It’s exceeding market needs, so revenues are dropping, and platforms are beginning to redistribute orders.
All major platforms are tightening their part-time access.
Many part-time food-delivery workers have been forced to quit or turn into full-time ones. Li saw that in groups on the messaging app WeChat for food-delivery workers, many people try to sell their scooters and other food-delivery gear.
Those who quit usually have two options: change platforms or go back to their hometowns.
Station manager Zhang mentioned that normally many delivery workers quit before and after the Spring Festival. An average of three out of 10 people would leave their jobs during this period of time.
But the same period in 2023 saw a different situation—only a few full-time food-delivery workers chose to quit among 100 full-timers.
In previous years, after the Spring Festival holiday, there would be new food-delivery workers recruited through various channels. The new joiners will use the spring, which is an off-season for food delivery, to familiarize themselves with streets and roads and become more experienced in food delivery in the summer peak season of delivery.
Zhang recalled that in 2022, the agency fee for recruiting a food-delivery worker was around 700 yuan. And it has dropped to between 300 and 500 yuan recently.
He said that the outbreak of the pandemic last year led to a huge increase in delivery orders, and the major platforms started a war to attract labor.
But after the need in the market fell back, the delivery platforms continued to hire more people. This, in effect, brings down the number of orders each worker gets, and as a result, their income declines.
However, for the platforms, with more and more new food-delivery workers joining, they force them to compete. The result is a significantly faster and more efficient delivery service.
“The surplus of food-delivery workers naturally raises the bar of working in this industry,” a staff member from a food delivery platform said.
They also revealed that, from the statistics gathered by this platform, the total number of orders from this year did not decrease compared to previous years. In short, in the view of delivery platforms, periodic influxes of people are nothing new.
The platforms usually take the opportunity to promote delivery quality and eliminate less qualified workers.
An industry report conducted by a food-delivery platform in 2022 (the Food-Delivery Workers’ Rights and Interests Social Responsibility Report put out by major platform Meituan) referred to the food-delivery industry as an “employment reservoir,” meaning that there is no threshold for entering the industry and practitioners are free to work longer to get more income.
The involution of the delivery industry is not a problem of the industry, but rather a reflection of other industries and the overall increase in the unemployment rate. What is essentially happening is that the market is not creating enough jobs for college students.
-Nie Riming, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law.
Now it seems that the “reservoir” is full.
A food-delivery worker takes an order for delivery from a cafe. Courtesy: The Living
Within a few days at the delivery station, Li finds new faces among his colleagues. He says he continues to meet “young and anxious losers” who used to work in various industries, such as hotpot restaurants, sales offices, assembly lines and construction sites.
“The involution of the delivery industry is not a problem of the industry but rather a reflection of other industries and the overall increase in the unemployment rate. What is essentially happening is that the market is not creating enough jobs for college students,” said Nie Riming, a researcher at the Shanghai Institute of Finance and Law.
Nie believes that the phenomenon of “involution” in the food-delivery sector is in fact a microcosm of China’s employment problems at this stage.
He believes that the support of colleges and universities is essential for the employment of college students. “Producers can’t produce the labor and then leave it there alone,” he said.
He suggested that colleges and universities should open career-development centers and organize job fairs and career counseling on a regular basis.
In particular, he pointed out that job hunting for graduate students relies heavily on social media, so it is important for universities to set up an interactive mechanism between the public and companies.
“Some foreign universities and universities in Hong Kong regularly track the status of their students after they graduate, and if the school doesn’t do it, salary survey organizations will do the work,” Nie said. “If you don’t serve your students well, the ranking of the schools will go down, and no one will apply for the school.”
“There is still room for improvement for Chinese universities at the moment,” he added.
In addition, to increase the employment rate of young people, it is also necessary to open up a larger job market. Strict restrictions over some industries may have a butterfly effect—it could cause people in the industries to lose their jobs and become a part of the “job reservoir,” accelerating the involution of the “reservoir.”
In mid-May 2023, after catching COVID for the second time, Li decided to quit as a food-delivery worker.
Xu is also preparing to leave, and he says that many veteran food-delivery workers who have been working for three to five years want to return to their hometowns and open small businesses to make a living, just like him.
On the last night of Li's food-delivery career, it was hot in Hangzhou.
After working for 11 hours, he rode his scooter slowly to his neighborhood. He parked it and sat on a bench not far away. He felt like he was suffering from heatstroke.
In the hallway of his rented apartment, he ordered some anti-heat stroke medicine from a food-delivery platform.
The delivery was a little slow to arrive. Not bothering to make eye contact with his peer, he took the bag containing his purchase straight from the delivery worker’s hand, said “thank you,” and closed the door to his room.