This article analyses how China’s labour platforms have developed in response to the institutional form of wage-labour relations. In other words, how is the labour platform economy embedded in the Chinese institutional labour system? At the methodological level, this article eschews a generalised discourse on platform capitalism that samples European and American platforms. It offers a way of understanding this new form of capitalism from a Global South perspective that emphasises its heterogeneity in different times and spaces.

Using the Chinese food delivery platform Meituan as a case, based on material obtained from corporate sources, policy documents, in situ fieldwork in China and online ethnography on Chinese social media platforms (completed between 2020 and 2023), this article aims to trace the configuration and evolution of wage-labour relations in Chinese labour platforms. Compared to other platforms, Meituan’s visibility in Chinese society and its share of the meal delivery market is unrivalled, making it the best incarnation of a Chinese labour platform. As the world’s largest food delivery platform, it shares many common features with similar platforms in different countries. Still, by a regional and historical research approach (Zhang & Chen, 2022), this article attempts to sketch Chinese labour platforms’ idiosyncratic characteristics of the wage-labour relations that have been shaped in the context of China’s institutional labour system.

This article argues that Meituan, a Chinese labour platform economy, uses wage-labour relations as a key factor to prosper by exploiting the vacuum in the national institutional labour system, competing with the existing labour system while creating a “grey zone” of employment (Dieuaide, 2018, 2022; Dieuaide & Azaïs, 2020) that involves workers in a space that is both political and social. Unlike labour platforms in the West, which tend to make workers independent contractors, Chinese platforms avoid liability through complex subcontracting networks while constructing a de facto subordination relationship between the platform and the worker. The grey zone is an undetermined area in which Chinese couriers are located and cannot be easily identified as self-employed or employees under Chinese labour laws, making the protection of their rights the subject of controversy. The growing incoherence between Chinese platform rules and the established institutional logic that accompanies the deterioration of workers’ labour conditions suggests that the grey zone of employment is becoming a zone of tension involving different stakeholders in China: on the one hand, the Chinese governments at all levels have bumbled the regulation of labour platforms; and on the other hand, there is a growing number of protest actions by the platform workers.

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