China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2025/09/18/chinas-200m-gig-workers-are-a-warning-for-the-world

by miohtama • 10 months ago

111 241 10 months ago

economist.com

Igrom• 10 months ago

https://archive.ph/Jxlp3

HPsquared• 10 months ago

They really are going all-in on the capitalism over there.

billy99k2• 10 months ago

China has ownership in all major companies and influences all major decisions. This isn't really capitalism.

In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.

femiagbabiaka• 10 months ago

I struggle to distinguish between what you’ve described as not really capitalism and the currently existing state of the U.S.

conception• 10 months ago

This assumes that the Chinese have not been skilling up during that time of stolen IP. They have been.

delusional• 10 months ago

In addition to this, the economy is built on stolen intellectual property. This can only go so far.

I think it's at least a little interesting that "Intellectual property", like property in general, isn't a natural phenomenon. The very concept of property is a social construct we enforce on each other, supposedly for our shared benefit. This also means its existence has to live within the governmental system, and therefore be subject to sovereignty claims. "Intellectual Property" can therefore only be said to be "stolen" within a nation, by that nations own laws, or between nations following bilateral sovereign nation agreements.

What I'm basically saying is that I'm not sure China has agreed to uphold American style "Intellectual Property", and as such, I'm not sure you can actually claim them to have "stolen" any "Intellectual Property".

Der_Einzige3• 10 months ago

All intellectual property is stolen because all ideas are related.

Similar principal to "All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers" - (That quote is from a french archbishop, not a communist)

A "bleeding heart" world that took such statements seriously would be infinitely better than what we have today. But we can't have that because book-burners, luddites and related ilk hate the fact that "information wants to be free"

bryanlarsen3• 10 months ago

IP is only copied, not stolen. It goes both ways -- Tesla learned how to efficiently build and operate their factories from the Chinese. And as Elon always says, manufacturing is 1000x as hard as design and prototyping.

inglor_cz5• 10 months ago

It is a society where power is strictly organized into a clear pyramid. This model predates capitalism by a lot. If anything, true capitalism is more chaotic and probably churns the layers of the society more. This is more akin to a feudalism with capitalist characteristics, with the Party instead of the bluebloods.

markus_zhang2• 10 months ago

Actually the idea is to assimilate as many elites as possible into the party and then allow certain infighting. The rest of the people are simply Human Resources.

Ironically, not too different from the US.

Ericson23149• 10 months ago

Gig work is actually totally fine with an adequate welfare state and reduced work week.

Too bad China has neither of those things!

JKCalhoun2• 10 months ago

Thinking lately how it mirrors "piece work" that, I think, countries like Japan used to have (still have?).

analog31• 10 months ago

Piece work was one of the driving forces behind labor union movements.

pessimizer• 10 months ago

"Piece work" is an English phrase because it was common in the UK and America.

stevenwoo2• 10 months ago

From this podcast - all clothing that is mass produced is still made this way - even in the USA.

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/11/1255526971/garment-workers-cl...

John238323• 10 months ago

You had me at the first sentence. My fingers were itching to comment.

skrebbel3• 10 months ago

I know little about China, but every so often I meet someone who's rather fond of it (usually a passionate hardcore leftie¹), and says stuff like "in China nobody is unemployed, in China nobody is homeless" because apparently somehow the state provides (bad, but existing) work and housing for everyone. This seems to directly oppose your comment that China has no welfare state. Who is right?

¹) for context, here in NL "America good China bad" is a bit less clear-cut than in the US, where I assume most people read this comment from. That said at least the "China bad" part is still the majority opinion by far.

Ericson23149• 10 months ago

As a "softcare leftie", my understanding is that China does in fact have a weak welfare state.

I think it's better for pensioners than working-age poor — typical gerontocracy. I think some healthcare stuff exists on paper but it sucks.

inglor_cz5• 10 months ago

During the rule of the Communist party in Czechoslovakia, not working was a crime, so "nobody is unemployed, nobody is homeless" was trivially ensured by chucking such people into prison.

OTOH you had a lot of state-sponsored jobs where you just had to show up, but not necessarily work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_parasitism_(offense)

The Czech offence was called "Příživnictví", which is just "Parasitism".

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C5%99%C3%AD%C5%BEivnictv%C3%...

markus_zhang2• 10 months ago

China has very little to do with left except in the names maybe.

prewett• 10 months ago

The Chinese State hasn't provided jobs and housing for decades. Their own statistics shows youth unemployment at 19% (August 2025). The struggles of migrants in the cities is well-known. I personally witnessed homeless people in Beijing. Your leftish interlocutors haven't updated their information since Mao Zedong died; Deng Xiaoping starting undoing Communism in 1979 [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_relations_in_China

legacynl2• 10 months ago

I consider myself on the left, and I don't think any of those things. Not everybody on the right or left think all alike. YOu can't just assume somebody who is right or left thinks exactly the same as those few interactions you personally had with people from a certain group.

To be clear China certainly has homeless people. There actually is some form of welfare state, but often it is not sufficient, especially if you're not party related, and you can only get it in your assigned city/home town. If it's not enough to pay for housing and there aren't any jobs available in your region you're shit out of luck.

seanmcdirmid6• 10 months ago

I’m a moderate American who lived in China for 9 years. China is a mixed bag, they do some things right (their transit build out, their investments in green energy/tech, healthcare, employment) and some things bad (real estate bubble that makes 1980s Japan blush, environment was in tatters until recently, autocratic, youth job opportunities kind of suck right now, 996, welfare doesn’t really exist).

As far as the simplistic “X good Y bad”, those are never right anyways.

ThomPete• 10 months ago

What revenue is that welfare state based on?

Ericson23149• 10 months ago

Labor income, just as before?

mytailorisrich3• 10 months ago

If you are self-employed and paid by the job/hour "reduced work week" is not really viable. This applies in Europe, too.

Ericson23149• 10 months ago

Where in an equilibrium where gig wages are too low, because the precarity means the gig worker is desperate.

With enough welfare state, the gig worker wouldn't be so desperate, and gig rates would go up. Of course they would push some employers back to permenant employment, but this is fine. It would be like spot market vs longer term deals for everything else.

I'm convinced the length of the workweek is totally exogenous. I don't think there is a feedback mechanism within capitalism to adjust it. This is actually a bummer.

aeonfox• 10 months ago

Doesn't gig work sidestep the mandated work week and other hard won employer obligations like holiday pay, health insurance, workers' safety, retirement benefits, etc? Or is your point that with adequate welfare there would be no gig workers?

avdelazeri• 10 months ago

If someone is working but still needs welfare then the state is just subsiding company payrolls by indirect means. Strongly disagree that gig work is fine as long as there is welfare.

rendang• 10 months ago

If a given person's labor is of poor enough quality such that its value is not enough to provide whatever is considered a reasonable quality of life in a given circumstance, adding a UBI or other welfare payment is not just subsidizing employers

alephnerd8• 10 months ago

Tl;dr -

1. Mass employment via light and low skilled manufacturing will not help provide mass prosperity in 2025. Automation is the name of the game (can confirm in Vietnamese and Indian high value manufacturing as well as Chinese)

2. Work to build a social safety net that complements gig work. An export driven economy is increasingly tenuous in the current climate. Expanding a domestic consumer market by ensuring prosperity reaches the bottom half is what will allow you to build a resilient economy.

----------

I've ranted about this for over a decade now. Concentrating only on export and industry development while ignoring the need to expand a domestic consumer market either by leveraging higher incomes (highly unlikely) OR a stronger social safety net is the solution to over-production in most cases.

It's an increasingly mainstream view in Chinese economic academia as well, but the Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism" ("福利主义典范国家，中产塌陷、贫富分化、社会撕裂、民粹喧嚣，这不乏警示— 防止落入“福利主义”养懒汉陷阱"*) [0].

Li Keqiang was a major proponent of expanding the social safety net due to his early experiences in childhood, but he sadly passed away.

Countries like Vietnam are following a similar approach, and it is not going to end well.

[0] http://theory.people.com.cn/n1/2021/1116/c40531-32283350.htm...

* - "In a welfare state, the middle class is collapsing, the rich and the poor are polarized, society is torn apart, and populism is clamoring. This is a warning to avoid falling into the trap of "welfarism" that breeds laziness."

oezi2• 10 months ago

As Germany and Japan can attest, export-led growth works great until it doesn't, because you are stuck to suppress wages across the economy to maintain your export edge. You need to also build the internal market and carefully manage the housing market as the central instrument for wealth accumulation of your citizens.

I think the US is unique to realize that they can achieve more by being a consumer spending economy and using run-away housing prices to inflate their citizens wealth (using immigration to increase demand).

t_mann• 10 months ago

I can see the point re internal market vs export orientation. But why make the housing market the focal point of wealth creation? Wouldn't the stock market be a much more overall beneficial place to let your population accumulate wealth (which the US also does quite successfully, through 401k, cheap and trustworthy financial products like ETFs, a strong SEC,...)?

Pushing house prices ever higher comes with so many societal problems, and also with serious financial risks. The start of Japan's lost decades, which you mentioned, wasn't weak domestic demand. It was a housing price bubble so extreme that small areas of central Tokio were worth more than all of California. Domestic demand was actually very strong in Japan up until that bubble burst. The biggest financial crisis in the US in recent memory (2008) was also due to the housing market, its consequences eclipsing that of the dotcom bubble or the 1987 crash. That being said, stock market bubbles are no fun either - the Great Depression of the 1930's was caused by a stock market crash. But at least stocks don't tend to push people into homelessness already while they're booming.

nanliu• 10 months ago

The US can do this because the dollar's global reserve currency status. This works on a longer cycle but will be far more painful and difficult to address when it reaches a tipping point.

araes3• 10 months ago

I like his cake comparison. Obvious Portal joke.

分蛋糕和做蛋糕哪个更重要呢？表面上来看，分蛋糕直接关涉公平，但从根本上来看，分蛋糕和做蛋糕并不是二者取其一，做大蛋糕是前提，公平分配蛋糕是结果，发展则是前提和关键，任何分配制度必须首先建立在做大蛋糕、有蛋糕可分的基础上。(...) 另一方面，分好蛋糕，搞好分配制度改革是为了推进经济社会发展，而不只是为了完成消费。

Trans. by Firefox (w/ a little bit of G. Translate edits): "Which is more important: dividing the cake or making the cake? On the surface, the cake is directly related to fairness, but fundamentally speaking, the cake and making the cake are not one of the two, making the cake is the premise, the fair distribution of the cake is the result, the development is the premise and the key, any distribution system must first be based on the big cake, the cake can be divided." ... "On the other hand, dividing the cake well and carrying out distribution system reform is to promote economic and social development, not just to complete consumption."

It works, and its a reasonable comparison, it's also just amusing to read some some Chinese position paper and then he starts wandering into cake discussions after a bunch of very formal propaganda stuff "superiority of socialism is ultimately to be reflected in its development of productive forces", ect...

alephnerd8• 10 months ago

Honestly, it's sad and frustrating. It's literally a "let them eat cake" kind of statement.

China is at the point where a social safety net is needed to ensure long term prosperity, and concentrating on an export first model isn't going to cut it long term, because high value industries are heavily automated and skilled, and simply don't demand or need that many employees.

China has reached a point where the mean years of education amongst working age people (~8 years) has caught up with countries that used to be much richer than China 15 years ago like Brazil, Thailand, Turkiye, and Malaysia and it's mean life expectancy has outpaced all those countries except Turkiye and Thailand, which it is for all intents and purposes tied [0]. This is a MASSIVE win for global poverty eradication.

Yet the median age is significantly higher than all of them except Thailand [1], and median disposable household income remains around $400/mo [2] - lower than Thailand [3], Malaysia [4], or Türkiye's [5] despite having a GDP per capita (~13.3k in 2024) that is comparable to the latter 2 and above Thailand's.

Now is the time for China to expand its welfare system in order to make that leap into being a truly developed country, just like South Korea did in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Expanding the welfare state would help hundreds of millions of Chinese gain the ability to purchase higher value goods thus reducing the specter of "overproduction" leading to the current global trade war, while truly ensuring common prosperity.

Otherwise, it will flounder like Malaysia and Thailand did, both of which used to be South Korea's peer until the Asian Financial Crisis, or Turkiye after it's peak in 2014.

People mention "course correction" but what course correction can you do when disdain for a welfare system is so engrained in the upper echelons of leadership.

This is not a statement on the "collapse of China" (that's dumb), but if this problem around domestic consumption and a lack of a safety net is not nipped in the bud in the next 3-5 years, it will be much harder for China to take full advantage of the capabilities it has and ensure common prosperity.

[0] https://globaldatalab.org/shdi/table/2022/lifexp+msch/BRA+CH...

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age?tab=discrete-b...

[2] https://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202501/t202501...

[3] https://www.nso.go.th/nsoweb/storage/survey_detail/2023/2023...

[4] https://ekonomi.gov.my/sites/default/files/2023-12/Jadual4-P...

[5] https://data.tuik.gov.tr/Bulten/Index?p=Gelir-Dagilimi-Istat...

eunos• 10 months ago

Xi admin remains petulantly opposed to what it derisively terms as "Welfarism"

The joke I heard that Xi welfare mindset is much closer to Reagan than other welfare states. However I say it's not entirely wrong. Freebies and welfare including very generous pension is really addictive policy and no electorates would be willing to sap them out much less going cold turkey.

The chicken will come home to roost when it's time to upgrade your tech, industry or infrastructure but you don't have adequate capital to do that.

alephnerd8• 10 months ago

While there are issues with populism induced freebies, China's social welfare spent is anemic for the size of economy it is.

Almost all social welfare has been devolved to the state level, but state level spend and incentives are overwhelmingly spent on large capex projects that align with larger initiatives (eg. the EV price wars with dozens of SoEs jumping into the fray despite the overwhelming majority of the Chinese EV industry being won over by private sector BYD).

That's tens of billions of dollars of capex per province just on one initiative that has turned into a price war that is forcing central level intervention. It's the same misaligned incentive structures that lead to the construction boom and bust in during the 2015-20 period, the overzealous Zero COVID enforcement, and the subsequently haphazard end to Zero COVID.

Most provinces are heavily indebted and lack a robust enough capital market to raise from in the way you can get local and state bonds in the US, or municipal bonds in much of the EU.

The Xi admin's policies is the equivalent of America having Reaganism during the 1950s-80s. Reaganism was bad for the US, but at least the US had a higher human capital by the 1980s thanks to New Deal (1930s-1950s) and Great Deal (1960s-70s) policies for a generation.

The kinds of people who had sympathy for solving spatial inequality in China are no longer represented after Li's passing, and this kind of petulant opposition to welfare expansion with no data to show otherwise is what will trip up China longterm if something does not change in the next 3-5 years.

The kinds of policies being pushed by the Xi admin currently are similar to those from a decade ago, yet China is a much older society than it was 10 years ago, and as I pointed out elsewhere, a society where the median household is much poorer than it's peers at GDP per capita (and even significantly below in the case of Thailand).

This is the same point the Economist article is getting at - a country where 10-20 million people are earning European and American level salaries but with almost half a billion people with Indian or Vietnamese levels of household incomes is an underperforming society if spending cannot be unlocked because the bottom half of society is saving heavily for a rainy day due to a limited to nonexistent social safety net.

And now that most of China is at Thailand level ages, there just isn't much room for convergent development using an export model.

If a social safety net expansion comparable to the Great Deal isn't initiated by 2029-30, I truly cannot see how a 4-5% GDP growth rate can be sustained over a long enough time period to converge with a Japan, Korea, or Western Europe, let alone the US.

yocoda• 10 months ago

And though their algorithms can be cruel taskmasters, pushing drivers to drive recklessly fast, they are an improvement on gangmasters who used to match workers and employers.
The final lesson, therefore, is that governments should rethink the social contract to make gig work as beneficial as possible

Is this author trolling or am I dumb?

esafak• 10 months ago

You're reading The Economist.

atonse• 10 months ago

I’ve not driven Uber Eats but a friend of mine had. The app doesn’t push you. YOU push yourself if you have a certain personality and want to maximize earnings.

fifteen1506• 10 months ago

You are both the exploited and the exploiter.

maeln• 10 months ago

Back in the day, and it is still true to this day in many places in the world, one way to keep worker "motivated" was to have an abysmal low wage, with barely possible targets to reach to unlock a bonus that would make it possible to eat at the end of the month.

The gig economy is just an extension of this, but instead of low wage, you now have no wage.

From a capitalist point of view, it is very efficient for low-skill job. Almost anyone can join, increasing the supply of worker and therefor lowering the amount you have to pay them, until the point where you just can't make a living out of the gig. The perfect "balance point". It also get rid of the unproductive (old, handicapped, injured, or just people who have a family to take care of) worker rapidly and with no fuss (no costly firing procedure), and only keep the ones who can make the required grind to be able to live.

It is truly the end goal of capitalism, finally turning human into just another resource to be used and discarded when it has been used.

tdeck• 10 months ago

The sentiment reminds me of this old 19th century labor movement song "The Dollar Alarm Clock" (although in that song, they were making fun of it)

    What a blessing it was when the thing was invented;
    It beats the slave-driver who came with a stick;
    It rests on the shelf in the shack that I rented;
    It never gets hungry; it never gets sick.

https://politicalfolkmusic.org/blog/john-healy/dollar-alarm-...

beefnugs• 10 months ago

I think the problem is the middleman'ness of it. There has to be a better way where the software in the middle is more of a cheap service fee just connecting negotiating parties, instead of extracting as much value as possible from both sides.

Sadly this world has no concept of open source altruistic software to fix big problems like this. Linux is amazing, but nothing like it may ever happen again on its scale, and as its oldest and beardiest die off... it will fall

Herring2• 10 months ago

China has course-corrected many times before. They’ll do it again.

I think the US should be more worried. Their govt makes it incredibly hard to course-correct (filibuster, gerrymandering, fptp, electoral college, supreme court etc)

https://data.worldhappiness.report/chart

Trends look better for China. Life expectancy already caught up.

inglor_cz5• 10 months ago

I would argue that with the exception of the American Civil War, internal course corrections of the US during the last 250 years were a lot less violent than those of China. The Taiping Rebellion, the White Lotus Rebellion, the Boxer Rebellion, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution - lots of deaths and chaos involved.

(I omitted the civil war between CCP and the Kuomintag, which I consider roughly equivalent to the ACW.)

bryanlarsen3• 10 months ago

The past is the past. Sometimes it is a good predictor of the future, other times people learn the lessons of mistakes, making the past anti-correlated.

grafmax9• 10 months ago

Almost as if countries were closed systems and imperialism never existed. As if the US has not acted a neo-imperialist superpower post-WW2.

Surely a country’s positionality in the global system contributes to how much violence occurs within their borders?

Der_Einzige3• 10 months ago

Americans will beat out China again in 20 years due to GLP-1 drugs fixing the colossal nerfing to our public health that widespread obesity cause.

Of course, China has another chance to beat us out when that happens if they do something about how common smoking is there!

YinglingHeavy• 10 months ago

[flagged]

dragonelite• 10 months ago

The US problem is they are going from a global brutal empire to a shrinking empire. But the debt and lifestyle of the US is still that of a global empire. That is what has broken many past empires and will break the US empire.

christkv3• 10 months ago

Compared to Europe the US has turbo speed of self-correction. EU is not doing well and it will do worse over the next decade and there seems to be no political will to put the economy back on course. Just add more regulations, costs and spending and hope for the best seems the current mantra.

Right now corporate bonds are sold at lower rates and have better credit than the public bonds for a country like France. Combination of no faith in political stability and no faith in the ability to get spending under control.

I think a lot of EU countries are going to just keep stumbling into a financial crisis that will force cuts in pensions and wealth-fare at a scale not seen post ww2. The pyramid scheme is coming due.

mallowdram3• 10 months ago

The US doesn't course-correct, it barrels through when the outcome is appalling (1933) and when the leadership takes advantage of a break in the pattern (1964/1981).

The immobility of the US political system indicates it is ready to be broken in half, the reality of corporatocracy is that it is an endgame to itself in arbitrariness. Whereas all China has to do is exert its state economy leverage once the West's corporations/bonds evaporate.

The Chinese see resonance, interdependence, relationships. It's baked into their language. We see attributes, objects, units, individuals. We imposed these onto their businesses for the last 30 years, but don't think for a second we've dominated their culture. They are now far more able to use their language's inherent forms as guides to the economy.

ben_w4• 10 months ago

Unclear why Europe's capabilities are a relevant come-back to a comparison between the US and China.

May be correct, the EU as an organisation isn't very powerful compared to member states, may be false, EU member states are much more diverse than American states.

legacynl2• 10 months ago

Lol, advocating for an autocratic system because they can pivot fast. If a less fortunate Chinese citizen would be allowed to speak their mind I'm pretty sure they would have a way less favourable opinion, even if the CCP would have 'great stats' in the international press (which at least partly is based on data they provide).

John238323• 10 months ago

Civil liberties isn't the point being made, it's whether you scan steer a huge ship. Which, to the credit of the original commenter, China has proven they can do.

ben_w4• 10 months ago

The value of free speech, democracy, capitalism, *is* making pivoting faster.

The first world didn't win the cold war despite doing these things, but because those things actually helped us (all of us, not just the US) course-correct in ways the USSR didn't.

If China has a different way to be flexible, or if the USA looses its flexibility, the USA will fail to keep up with China in the same way and for the same reason the USSR couldn't keep up with the USA.

nradov10• 10 months ago

The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.

That's not to say that data reported by other countries is completely accurate or free of political manipulation. But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.

bdangubic• 10 months ago

there isn’t, especially not in america (though you said democratic… :) )

monero-xmr3• 10 months ago

There is a bizarre reverence and worship for China I have observed with some Americans. Yes, you can build things faster and have smooth 5% YoY growth if you don’t have property rights and manipulate the statistics

hearsathought3• 10 months ago

The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.

If that's the case, then you should be able to provide tons of evidence. It's difficult to "hide" or "manipulate" data in a country the size of china that is tied to the global trading system.

But there's a enormous difference between China and democratic countries.

"Democratic countries". Like russia? Or venezuela? Oh, let me guess, democratic countries you don't like are not "democratic countries". Right.

You are just repeating the standard anti-china propaganda. It's the same of nonsense over and over again.

"None of china's data can be trusted. They are lying and they are about to collapse". Followed by, "Oh my god china is an existential threat. They are going to overtake us. Deep seek, rare earth minerals blah blah blah".

Make up your mind.

throw4f324ty• 10 months ago

The "official" data reported by China can't be attempted to be believed. Most of it is highly manipulated. Attempts at independent verification are punished, or blocked by making the raw data a state secret.

This has not been really true for at least a decade.

Well they might attempt to play with statistics, there are definitely foreign investigative reports that are able to verify most numbers, especially when it comes to exports.

And most of those foreign numbers are very close to what China reports.

fakedang2• 10 months ago

China doesn't report false numbers the way some democracies like India and the US are trying to do (upheaving the statistical agencies), or most autocracies do (outright fraud about the numbers). What they do is a different kind of reporting that I've seen typical for similar countries. Language twisting, different interpretation, different naming even. Slowing GDP growth? They'll take the GDP PPP and use that for news bites. Construction bust and crash? Nah, splendid increase in affordable housing supply. Korean War? LoL no, War of American Aggression in the Korean Peninsula.

nextworddev• 10 months ago

Is this a LLM posting?

Herring2• 10 months ago

Negative, I am a meat popsicle.

megraf• 10 months ago

保管国家机密。你的社交信用评分下降了。

frm88• 10 months ago

By 2023, most private social credit initiatives had been shut down by the People's Bank of China, and regulations had cracked down on most local scoring pilot programs.[16]: 12

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

paulddraper• 10 months ago

As opposed to…dictatorship?

That’s your point?

It’s not like China has ranked choice voting.

mensetmanusman3• 10 months ago

Their course corrections can take centuries and many tens of millions of dead from killing birds and bugs.

jmyeet3• 10 months ago

Gig work is a warning sign but I honestly think China is far better equipped to deal with this than the West.

In the West, gig work is a symptom that people don't have a livable wage. They either have a day job and have to do gig work to survive. Or they can't find stable work so gig work is the best they can get. And there is an adversarial relationship with the likes of Uber who want to increase profits by stealing money from the drivers, basically.

Literally no government in the West is doing anything to tackle inequality. At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.

China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.

Likewise, China doesn't allow a private company to operate like Uber at just rent-seek from the economy.

China has thus far avoided creating a social safety net, particularly with retirement, forcing people to save for that. That's in direct opposition to create a consumption economy so they rely on exports. And exports are at risk as inequality in the West is a threat to demand and China just can't create new markets fast enough.

The real warning here is that rising inequality is a massive, unaddressed, global problem at the same time as we will likely see the first trillionaire in our lifetimes. War and revolution are the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution and blaming random marginalized groups for declining material conditions will only get you so far before the guillotines come out.

seanmcdirmid6• 10 months ago

Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen

This is very untrue. A lot of richer Chinese owners a bunch of apartments that they are holding for speculation, maybe they rent it out (and often not), but it’s still very much hoarding. You got a lot of sweetheart deals that happened 20+ years ago where many connected Chinese were able to acquire apartments, villas, and so on as opportunities.

Also, since the stock market is a hot mess, real estate acquisition was seen as the only real way to hold wealth in China.

China considers housing to be a public right, which it is

You have more options for substandard housing in the cities (like sub basement room rentals aka “the ant tribe” in Beijing), but I also have no idea where you got this from. Rural hukou have the right to their land, but because they can’t sell it they can’t use it as collaterals in loans and such, making their life even harder.

CorrectHorseBat2• 10 months ago

China is a command economy. There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen. China considers housing to be a public right, which it is.

How do you come to that conclusion? As far as I understand it it's the complete opposite, housing is basically the only way the Chinese can invest. Hoarding is rampant, those who got in early have several properties, the rest nothing.

jmyeet3• 10 months ago

Because China has a dual housing system to ensure availability of affordable housing, something almost nonexistent in the West (other than Vienna).

Yes people invest in housing. That's not the point. The point is China has a policy goal of making sure people have access to housing, something again almost nonexistent in the West.

jacknews• 10 months ago

This does not match my understanding of China. Do you live in China?

ta12432• 10 months ago

At the heart of that problem is housing unaffordability. High housing prices do nothing more than steal from the next generation and bring us closer to having a divide between landed and unlanded people.

I'd completely agree here. It's difficult to blame democratic governments for this though -- throughout the west nobody wants to build enough supply to deal with the problem.

Your second part of landed vs unlanded. Implement a land value tax and distribute it as a universal basic income, and that solves that problem. Nobody wants that either, they think they like it and then come out "oh of course $favoured_group shouldn't pay it"

jmyeet3• 10 months ago

You won't see a land value tax for the same reason there are constraints on housing supply: because existing homeowners are essentially single-issue voters when it comes to do with anything about housing. Aesthetically progressive people turn into raging fascists the second you propose building slightly higher density housing near a train station that they're nowhere near.

In my ideal world I would:

1. Massively hike property taxes on non-income generating housing;

2. Make anyone owning housing subject to state, local and federal taxes on their worldwide income;

3. Get rid of preferential property tax rates and caps on property tax increases (eg Prop 13 in California). If you want to not force old people to sell immediately, defer their property taxes until death. This is exactly what Texas does;

4. Build for transit; and

5. Have the government be a massive supplier of social housing.

rs186• 10 months ago

There are issues with housing in China but they're far less severe. Hoarding of property basically doesn't happen.

Even the most pro-China commentators don't make up such nonsense.

thr0waway001• 10 months ago

Chinese leaders also: "gee, why aren't our people having more babies anymore?"

throwaway1737383• 10 months ago

“Probably for the same reasons as Americans.”

toomuchtodo• 10 months ago

As my mother once said during her time as a hospice nurse, “We’re all dying, some just faster than others.”

charlie0• 10 months ago

The article came across as alarmist while completely failing to provide the bigger picture of whether this is actually a bad thing or not. We instantly assume it's bad because it would indeed be awful for us in the US to live like that.

I'd be interested in knowing how these workers get by, is housing and other important things cheaper there?

Flexible employment is not a bad thing, in fact, it's great. What would be bad here is not being able to afford basic necessities in a system like that and this article completely ignore that side of the equation.

Stevvo• 10 months ago

Housing is cheaper, and pretty much everything else is cheaper also. For example the meals these workers deliver are very affordable. You will only pay more for imports.

decafninja• 10 months ago

I’m no fan of the CCP, but watching what’s going on over there vs. what’s going on over here (the US, but also Europe, and to some lesser degree, even other Western aligned Asian countries), I can’t help China is doing more things right than us in the goal of raw progress. Or at least, less things wrong.

Now, you can argue whether sacrificing various things for the sake of raw progress is worth it. But what if that question becomes no longer askable in the future in a planet dominated by China and the CCP system?

That day might come sooner for some of China’s neighbors. It may come later, or even not at all, for the US or Europe. But the age where the West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model, and by extension, arguably the general direction of the human race, may no longer be taken for granted.

What happens then to some of your precious “freedoms”?

mensetmanusman3• 10 months ago

There is no way to really watch what is going on over there with how amazingly effective the great firewall is.

woooooo3• 10 months ago

West dominated global policy via a more or less liberal democratic model

This model only ever applied to Europe. Fruit companies and oil companies were more important than democracy elsewhere. South Korea and Taiwan were both autocracies for decades while we sponsored them in the name of freedom.

What we did have was a foreign policy that mostly encouraged peace and prosperity via trade, which was nice while it lasted.

esbranson6• 10 months ago

If by progress do you mean rental housing, roads/bridges, computers, food, and gig work? Do we have a shortage of them? I keep hearing about everyday life we've had for generations like it's an earnings report.

bamboozled2• 10 months ago

I personally understand people wish they were better off, and I do understand the sentiment myself as a middle class, tax paying citizen with a family but in my opinion, people were just told America is bad and horrible and needs fixing, I don't think America is a bad place at all. Those who wanted to get elected just told a lot of people it was horrible and a lot of people bought it.

Whatever issues existed economically, I think the "rip the country apart and tear down the government" approach was the most stupid path we could've taken,,,and here we are.

The USA and other western countries have their issues, but to pretend like western countries are bad places to live... IDK anymore.

mikae1• 10 months ago

Žižek in 2011:

“I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either anglo-saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? I claim if we do nothing we will gradually approach a kind of a new type of authoritarian society. Here I see the world historical importance of what is happening today in China. Until now there was one good argument for capitalism: sooner or later it brought a demand for democracy … What I’m afraid of is, with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism much more efficient and dynamic than our western capitalism. But I don’t share the hope of my liberal friends – give them ten years [and there will be] another Tiananmen Square demonstration – no, the marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.”

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2011/11/11/slavoj-zizek-a...

mpalmer• 10 months ago

"you say China bad. but what if China win? how China bad then?"

Spoken like a true non-fan.

RoyBean• 10 months ago

Googl Guy Standing.

RandyOrion• 10 months ago

In China, we call "gig workers" "flexable workers" (灵活就业), which are very similar to the unemployed. The reason is that the low, zero, or even negative walfare imposed by the Chinese goverment on all tax payers makes neither of them a viable option for a living.

Want some evidence? "Marriage market" (婚恋市场) in China is a gruesme battlefield for at least 20 years. Chinese people can fake their political stance, financial stance, or even marriage status. However, when it comes to the standard of choosing partners for life, they cannot fake it because it means so much to them. Ask them what they think about both "gig workers" and "the umeployed", and try to find any difference, if any. The "chain of contempt" (歧视链) in the "Marriage market" is a relatively good measure of what people really think in China.

aurareturn• 10 months ago

What about "gig workers" and "the unemployed" elsewhere? Is there any difference?

China's 200M gig workers are a warning for the world

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