Bridging the East-West Gap

03/29/2021

03/20/2021

03/19/2021

Weekend of 3.20-21, 27-28, 2021 Around the US

For more updates:
https://act.1point3acres.com/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1idgmh2xs-gBi7Fgr7EDEPwcodv-78J4VUFuDuFxOOxY/htmlview

There will be rally and march against racial discrimination in several cities in the U.S. this coming weekend and the weekend after, you can join in solidarity if you have time! (Be sure to bring a mask and practice social distancing to protect yourself and others), or donate to organizations of your choice.

Livestream https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiJbmfvdn7Q
Zoom meeting ID: 88954270078 passcode: 2021 (Mar. 20. SAT 8-10 PM ET / 5-7 PM PT)

(Time are all in local timezone, this post does not represent any organization, it simply summarized several social media posts and will be updated accordingly if any change shall happen.)

Atlanta:
March & Rally, Come together to grieve, heal, and support
Mar. 20. SAT. 1PM
Liberty Plaza, 218 Capitol Ave SW.

New York:

*Show up in a white or black top
Mar. 21. SUN. 10AM.
Union Square

Boston (multi events):
, community rally by the roadside
Mar. 20. SAT. 1:30 PM
Hopkinton Common, 6 Hayden Rowe Street, Hopkinton 01748
Mar. 20. SAT. 2:30 PM
Southborough Library parking lot
Mar. 21. SUN. 2:30PM
Southborough Library parking lot

Pittsburgh:
, community rally
Mar. 20. SAT. 2PM
Forbes & Oakland

Seattle:
, Rally Walk & Candlelight Vigil
Mar. 20. SAT. 5 PM
Bellevue Downtown Park
Website: https://seattler.thousandjourney.com/thread-6270.htm

Spokane
, Rally Walk & Candlelight Vigil
Mar. 20. SAT 4:30 PM
Sister City Gardens Riverfront Park

San Francisco (multi events):
, Community Rally Against Asian Hate.
Mar. 20. SAT. 12:00 PM
UN Plaza
Mar. 22. MON. 9:00 AM
Hall of Justice, 850 Bryant and 7th street

San Jose:
, community rally, show up in black top
Mar. 21. SUN 1-2 PM
San Jose City Hall, 200 East Santa Clara Street, San Jose, CA 95113
Website: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/stop-asian-hate-community-rally-tickets-147029024771?aff=ebdssbdestsearch

Chicago (multi events):
, community rally
Mar 20. SAT. 2PM
Logan Square Monument, Chicago IL
Website: http://fb.me/e/U1sdqZH3
Mar. 27. SAT. 2PM
2100 S WentWorth Ave, Chicago

Washington D.C.:
, community rally
Mar. 21. SUN. 1PM
McPherson Square

Denver
, community rally
Mar. 20. SAT. 6PM
20th St & Blake St.

Houston
, community rally
Mar. 20. SAT. 5PM
Discovery Green

Cincinnati
, community rally
Mar. 21. SUN. 5:30 PM
National Underground Railroad Freedom Center

Los Angeles
, community rally
Mar. 27. SAT. 12PM
LA City Hall

Background about recent racial hate crimes:

ATLANTA (AP) — A white gunman was charged Wednesday with killing eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors in an attack that sent terror through the Asian American community, which has increasingly been targeted during the coronavirus pandemic.

A day after the shootings, investigators were trying to unravel what might have compelled 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long to commit the worst mass killing in the U.S. in almost two years.

Long told police that Tuesday’s attack was “not racially motivated”. He claimed to have a “s*x addiction,” and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation. But those statements spurred outrage and widespread skepticism given the locations and that six of the eight victims were women of Asian descent.

Above was from news on March 17, Wednesday 2021.

Police currently have no evidence of illegal s*xual services at the location of the crime. Mayor Keisha Bottoms also said that the businesses in question had no previous convictions and were "legitimate businesses".

Recently, social media revealed that one of the tragic victims, Xiaojie Tan, English name is Emily, is a licensed professional massage therapist, she runs her massage business to support her daughter’s study, who has recently graduated from the University of Georgia.

March 17, the day after the shooting, was Tan's 50th birthday, and she had always told her daughter that her dream was to travel around the world.

Tan's daughter woke up the morning after her mother was killed and found her mother’s closet hanging new clothes for her birthday, even with the price tags on, but her mother could never wear them now.

A small business owner, who is working hard to make a living to support her family, the same as anyone else would be, but by the murderer's definition, becomes the so-called s*x addiction vent, why Asian women have to die for this?

Take a thousand step back, even if there are s*x worker in some massage parlors, that should never justify the brutal killing. The murderer is the one who should be blamed!

When Asians were targeted and attacked around the US in recent incidents, many minorities who had a history of being racially discriminated against came out in solidarity, including, but not limited to, Black Communities, Jewish Communities and many more. Perhaps they have all put themselves in each other's shoes, and perhaps in their hearts, they all believe that progress towards true equality cannot be achieved without the help of one to another.

Reference:
https://apnews.com/article/georgia-massage-parlor-shootings-leave-8-dead-f3841a8e0215d3ab3d1f23d489b7af81

https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/t6sUFRnEbkFC8azreOh7PA

02/19/2021

Happy Spring Festival / Lunar New Year! It is 2021 the year of OX.
新春快乐！ 2021年农历辛丑牛年大吉！
हैप्पी स्प्रिंग फेस्टिवल / चंद्र नव वर्ष! यह 2021 OX का वर्ष है।

01/09/2021

Delivery Rider, Trapped in the System – part 2
Original Author Renwu Magazine

… … [more in part 1 https://www.facebook.com/BridgingTheEastWestGap/posts/236566591316175]

Different delivery time on the customer’s and the rider’s app
Jingjing lives in Shanghai and he admits that he has been “spoiled”. He works a lot and doesn’t know how to cook, so it’s take-out food delivery that saves him from starvation. He often orders food from a restaurant nearby, and by his recollection the delivery used to take 45 minutes, and he would watch an episode of a TV show that was about 45 minutes’ long to kill time. Recently the food he ordered got delivered in 26 minutes, and not long ago, it took a rider more than 30 minutes to deliver his salad, he got impatient and called 5 times to push the rider.

In 2017, French research firm Ipsos conducted an "impatience" survey among 12 provinces and cities in China. The result shows that the development of mobile technology has made customers more and more impatient in all aspects, especially in developed areas and among younger groups, Beijing in particular.
When customers are getting impatient, delivery riders have no choice but try their best to comfort them.

Regarding this issue, Bing Wang also got a bunch of stories to tell—when the delivery time for all the orders he got was close, he would deliver the expensive ones first, because it was easy for those customers who ordered expensive food to get pi**ed off. “They won’t listen to anything you say, they are just angry and insist on canceling the order. I don’t have the money to pay for their food, their food cost more than 100 yuan!”

Delivery riders also have to do some favors the customers have asked, like grabbing a pack of ci******es or a bottle of water, or “bringing a razor to the club”. Peppa Pig was popular on TikTok for a while and there were always some customers that would ask Bing Wang to draw a Peppa Pig or he’d get a negative rating. Bing Wang felt angry, but he couldn’t say no, “I got a piece of paper, drew a Peppa Pig on it, and I wrote, are you stupid or something?”

“Food delivery is a customer-centered social performance.” Ping Sun wrote in her research report. She regards the riders’ attempts to please the customers in hopes of 5-star ratings as “emotional and sentimental labor”, which, in her point of view, is often overlooked but wears out the riders more greatly than physical labor.

During her interview with Renwu Magazine, Ping Sun mentioned the rider she remembers the most, “His scooter got stolen twice in three days, and the battery was stolen 3 times. He burst into tears when we were talking. He said, he was required to say “have a good meal” to the customers, but he didn’t know anyone, he was a farmer before. He was too embarrassed to say that, and to ask for a 5-star. He was just too embarrassed to do all these.”
When interviewed by the press about the SKP incident, Yang Shen, an associate professor of Public Economics and Social Policy Department at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said that although delivery riders might earn more than 10,000 yuan a month, they still suffer class inequality, “they have sacrificed their time and health to make more money. They workload is much more intensive, both physically and emotionally, to get paid more.”

Bing Wang continues to develop new tricks to please his customers—in the summer, many people would order a cup of coke, but this summer it rained too much, and he fell off his scooter a lot when delivering food. And the coke would all spill when he fell. But there was not enough time to refill the cup at the restaurant, for which he would also need to pay. To make sure his customers were all happy, he always kept a bottle of coke in his food box. When he spilled the customer’s coke, he would fill the cup with the coke from the bottle and then wiped the cup. He felt he was such a genius to come up with this idea.
In the meantime, on some legal consulting website, there were some anxious customers, asking “if a delivery rider got in a traffic accident because I kept calling and pushing him, would I be held legally responsible?” and some lawyers replied, “No.”

The Peppa Pig a delivery rider drew to please the customer

[Game]

Recently, Meituan and Ele.me made public the financial report of the second quarter of 2020. That quarter, Ele.me made positive profit per order, and Meituan made a net profit of 2.2 billion Chinese yuan, increased by 95.5% year-on-year, with the take-out food delivery business as the major contributor to Meituan’s success.

On August 24, 2020, Meituan's stock price also hit history high, and its market value exceeded 200 billion USD, which made Meituan the fifth largest company listed in Hong Kong Exchange.
In this half-year-long survey, Renwu Magazine contacted nearly 30 delivery riders, they kept mentioning one word, 10 cents.
A rider in Hunan province said, “We get paid 10 cents less per order if our on-time rate is lower than 98%, and 20 cents less if lower than 97%. This leaves us no choice but to speed up, because 10 cents per order is a lot of money to us.”

An Eleme rider in Shanghai said, “The minimum delivery fee per order is 4.5 yuan, and the more orders you have delivered the higher the fee. Sometimes 10 cents more make me happy, 4.9 yuan and 5 yuan are essentially different.

To keep the 10 cents, delivery riders have to go faster and take more orders.

That’s also what the system wants to see, because there’s another secret hidden in the system—a “game” about levels.
In either Meituan’s or Ele.me’s system, riders are expected to earn more points by taking more orders, being on time, getting good ratings, and with all the points, they can level up and make more money—the system has sugarcoated this evaluation as a game of killing monsters and getting EXP to level up. Riders at different levels have different titles. Taking Meituan as an example, these titles are ordinary, silver, gold, diamond and challenger, from low to high.

A Meituan crowdsourced rider explained more specifically about this level system: You become a silver rider by completing 140 valid orders in a week, with 97% on-time rate, and that gives you 140 yuan bonus every week. And gold rider by completing 200 orders in a week with 97% on-time rate, the bonus goes up to 200 yuan. In Ele.me, the number of orders determines the delivery fee, if you complete less than 500 orders, you get paid 5 yuan per order, and 5.5 yuan for 500 to 800 orders, 6 yuan for 800 to 1000 orders, so on and so forth. And by the rule, the points will be reset on a weekly or monthly basis.

In the study, Order and Labor: Exploration of Algorithm and Labor in the Economic Perspective of Chinese Food Delivery Platforms, Ping Sun said that besides punishment for being late, the system utilizes this gamified evaluation to get most riders into an unstoppable cycle. “They want us to work day and night.” a rider told Ping Sun, but they can’t get out, “I was a black gold rider last month, if I want to keep this title, I need 832 more points, which is a lot of work to do.”

“Riders at higher levels are facing greater pressure of maintaining their levels.” How Ping Sun sees it is that this gamified evaluation is not only addicting but also combining the riders’ self-actualization with capital management, and the gamified sugarcoat just “provides a universal, internalized and rationalized reasoning for the exploitation by algorithm”.

A rider passed out on the street

According to “Delivery Rider Employment Report for the First Half of 2020” published by Meituan, the total number of Meituan delivery riders has reached 2,952,000, and the Ele.me website shows they have 3 million delivery riders. Regarding these 6 million delivery riders’ systematic survival, Guanghuai Zheng, a sociologist from Central China Normal University, has put forward the concept of “downloading labor”.

In their research report “Group Survey on Delivery Workers in Wuhan: Platform Workers and ‘Downloading Labor’”, Zheng’s team has further explained this concept.

Delivery riders work with an app they have “downloaded”. Apparently, the app assists their work as a production tool, but in fact, what the riders have downloaded is a sophisticated model of labor control. In this model, “delivery riders’ subjectivity has been fully reshaped and even replaced”. It seems like they can work with more freedom, but they are “suffering more powerful control” in the meantime.

“The platforms have created ‘platform workers’ through downloading labor” written by Zheng’s team, the characteristics of this labor model are strong attraction, weakened contract, strict regulation and few resistances.

The riders’ own cell phones, as the most important tools, are the very media that help the system fulfill this “downloading labor” model, the take-out food platforms have been trying to help delivery riders get rid of their phones in work.

“We are worried that some riders might get in an accident if they look at their phones on their way to deliver food.” In April 2018, in the interview with 36 Kr, Renqing He, head of algorithm for Meituan delivery department mentioned that, “The biggest challenge for Meituan is how to make sure riders wouldn’t look at their phones when they are riding.”

To solve this problem, Meituan invested 7 months in developing a Bluetooth headset with a built-in intelligent voice interaction system. Renqing He said, this headset is windproof, waterproof, noise-free and intelligent. With it on, the riders won’t need to look at their phones and tap any button, but just by talking they can do all the work.

But in reality, none of the riders interviewed with Renwu Magazine has received this headset, and no riders can actually get rid of their phones when they are delivering food.

Although Caodao had only experienced the life as a delivery rider for few days, she is still traumatized with how the phone had dominated her. “When you were using the navigation and trying to deliver food, the system would keep reminding you that new order came in please check ASAP, and then the voice from the navigation took over telling you were being late, and then the customer’s call joined, asking where you were at. You’d have to take orders, with navigation on, and answer the customer’s call, explaining why you were being late.” Caodao said, that felt like every minute mattered and she was pushed all the time, “I just gotta be faster, much faster.

A delivery rider dominated by his phone

[Scooters]

“We have never wasted any time on the way, we are very fast when we are riding.” an Ele.me rider told Renwu Magazine. And a Meituan rider said, the only thing they can control about delivering an order is the part when they are on the road. “Unless you got a police officer behind you, telling you not to speed, or we would want to fly when there were too many orders.” then he added, “it might not be fast enough even if we could fly.”
When on the road, their scooters are their only help.

Before getting started, riders have to get their own scooters. Usually the distribution site rents scooters from a long-term partnership third-party company. Most riders would choose scooters that only cost few hundred yuan to rent, and these scooters are usually in not quite good conditions—some don’t have rearview mirrors, some are duct taped many rounds, and a rider said he had become a master of repairing scooters.
If the riders don’t want to rent, they can purchase one with installment payment, as it’s recommended by the distribution site.

A delivery rider from Chengdu city got a scooter of an unknown brand at a price that was 1000 yuan higher than other regular scooters, because it was required by the distribution site. And a rider said although he spent few thousand yuan on a scooter and only rode it for two days, the battery broke.

Compared with those peers who spent too much money in vain, Meituan rider Fugui Wang feels very lucky, he just flew off the scooter, along with the battery, and his head got stuck in the middle of the guardrail, on his first day as a rider. The scooter was rented for 200 yuan a month, “it was basically a bunch of parts put together”, no lights, the brake pads had worn out. And sometimes it would start when you tapped the brake and go backwards when you tapped the gas.

It was no big deal. The day after he fell off, he bought a foot brake pad, and when he was running night shift, he would bite on a flashlight, or tape it onto the scooter. After all there was one good thing about this scooter, “it’s fast, it can run up to 65 kilometers per hour” Fugui Wang said.

According to the data released by Police Department in 2018, between 2013 and 2017, there were 56,200 traffic accidents by scooters, which caused 8431 deaths and 111 million yuan in direct property damage. To further regulate scooters, since April 2019, the new national standard for electronic scooters has been officially implemented, under which, scooters can’t run faster than 25 kilometers per hour. And a scooter that meets the new standard costs at least 1000 yuan.

However, among all 30 riders Renwu Magazine had interviewed, no matter for Meituan or Ele.me, none of their scooters meets the new standard, as they can run up to 40 kilometers per hour, far exceeding the speed limit. And in the riders’ groupchat and their online communities, a lot of people have shared how to modify the scooters and lift the speed limit.

After year as a rider, Fugui Wang’s scooter kept breaking, so sometimes he even had to take a cab to deliver food. Fortunately, the town where he’s working is not very big, the cab wouldn’t cost him too much. Rather than running late for every order on his trashy scooter, Fugui Wang could easily finish a dozen order on a cab, which only cost him 50 yuan.

And he eventually bought a new scooter to deliver more orders, and the trashy scooter was probably taken apart into many pieces that would be used on other scooters for renting.

No matter riding the new or old scooter, Fugui Wang was always the top 5 or top 3 in his region, but not after long he still quitted this job, because he couldn’t stand the new reference policy. “To expand business, Meituan asked us to get new customers on the street, we were expected to get two new users downloading the Meituan app, I did it for few days and I just couldn’t stand that anymore so I quitted.”

A delivery rider and his scooter

[Smiling Operation]

Since the trending topic “food delivery has become the most dangerous profession” went viral, the system has made some efforts.

In the beginning stage of Meituan and Ele.me, they had safety training for riders and the riders had to pass a safety exam to start delivering food.

For the contracted riders, the distribution site managers always remind them of safety. A Meituan site manager told Renwu Magazine, every time after the training, he would play a video he made, all about accidents involving scooters. He got all 300 riders watching it, and when they were finished, he would give a speech, “I know you are always in a hurry, and sometimes you have to go against the traffic, but please be more careful.” That’s also what an Ele.me site manager wants to tell his riders, “no matter how many times I’ve told them, the riders’ top priority is still time, sometimes they care too little about their own safety, because they are afraid they’ll be late.”

Afterwards, as the accidents involving delivery riders keep happening, to further enhance riders’ safety awareness, Meituan and Ele.me have tried something like inviting traffic police officers to give some lectures, or have the riders take traffic exams. Meituan even designed a kind of helmet with a pair of yellow kangaroo (the company’s mascot) ears, on which safety slogans are written. The most common slogan is “no matter how fast, safety matters the most” on the front of the ears, and “Meituan can deliver anything very fast” on the back of the ears. But in reality, fast and safe can’t be achieved together, most riders are unwilling to wear this kind of helmets, because “it’s too inconvenient”. A rider told Renwu Magazine, “if we ride too fast, the ears will fall off.”

Meituan Kangaroo ears

For safety, a new feature has been built into the system, randomly popped-up safety videos when riders are online.
“When I was on the way, I always got a notification that I couldn’t take any more orders unless I pulled over and finished watching.” a rider in Hunan province named Adou said, one time during peak hour when he was delivering, the system popped up a safety video and forced him to pull over and watch, and then he got hit by a bike and hurt his ankle, so he had no choice but to take that day off.

Most riders live in the fear of running late and getting forced to watch safety videos while on the road, so they are not quite happy with this, but sometimes they feel lucky that they get popped up videos instead of some more “deadly surprise”—smiling operation.

Around June 2017, Meituan started this “Smiling Operation”, a systematic inspection on the riders, and it’s also as random as the videos. When selected by the operation, riders have to pull over and take a selfie showing head and chest, and make sure the face, uniform, badge and helmet are all clear and eligible. And it has to be done within 5 minutes, if the riders fail to do so, they will be fined 300 to 1000 yuan, and their riders’ accounts will be blocked by the system for three days or even permanently.

Ever since “smiling operation” went online, it has become an unpredictable nightmare for all riders.

It can happen any time, some riders get selected when running the stairs, or waiting for elevators, waiting for food at the restaurant, when overloaded with orders.

The worst experience about “smiling operation” for Adou was on a raining day, he got overloaded with orders, he was in a raincoat, could barely see the road, and he had to pull over, take off the raincoat, show his uniform and badge, then take a picture. His peer got fined 400 yuan because he didn’t hear the notification from his phone in his pocket.

On a raining day too, a rider with cerebral palsy in Nanchang, Jiangxi province got his rider’s account blocked by the system because he didn’t get to take the picture. His experience was filmed on TikTok and caught tremendous attention. After receiving many people’s feedbacks, Meituan unblocked his rider’s account right away.

The Nanchang rider who missed the “smiling operation”
But not every rider would be treated like this.

In the Meituan riders’ groupchat and their online communities, one thing keeps getting discussed every day—my picture meets the requirements but the system determines it unqualified, and I call the customer service but they say my account can’t be unblocked due to system issue. “Our voice will never be heard by those in charge.” a Meituan rider complained.

In the meantime, some unqualified pictures have passed the inspection. A rider in Shenzhen revealed that after his account got blocked he has been using his wife’s account, and his picture can pass the inspection of “smiling operation”. Some rider would even save other people’s picture in advance and they have also passed the inspection.

During the COVID-19 epidemic, mask has become an item the “smiling operation” inspects. A rider in Hubei province said his mask got wet in the rain and he hadn’t got to put on a new one, the system failed his inspection and blocked his rider’s account, and he couldn’t take any orders. And a rider in Guangdong province took a picture of him with his hand covering his face, and it passed.

Last winter, in Hailar, Inner Mongolia, a Meituan rider got selected on his way to deliver food, he had to pull over and take off his coat, at minus 30 degrees Celsius (about -22 degrees Fahrenheit), and take a picture. The comments about “smiling operation” from the riders that Renwu Magazine has interviewed are mostly “scary”, “inhumane” and “time-wasting”.

Ele.me has been running similar inspection called “Blue Storm”. Different than Meituan’s “smiling operation, it would give riders 15 minutes, and the fine was from 5 to 30 yuan. So none of the Ele.me riders complained about it during the survey Renwu Magazine conducted in 2019.

But it didn’t last long, the latest news according to Ele.me riders was that to thoroughly catch up with Meituan, the inspection time of “blue storm” has gone down to 5 minutes starting this year.

Discussion about “smiling operation” in the riders’ groupchat

[Five-star rating]

With more and more accidents and violations by delivery riders, traffic police have become an involved group from an outsider.
Chongjun Xiong is a traffic policeman in Shenzhen, he has also been the on-site host for a traffic TV show and got famous for some clips that went viral on the internet. People call him Officer Xiong in Shenzhen. Last summer, Officer Xiong had two Meituan riders that violated traffic rules write letters of self-criticism and read them out loud. This became a trending topic delivery rider might be late for writing self-criticism letter. Some people said, Officer Xiong is too gentle to punish them hard.

In fact, within the past two years, traffic department has issued all kinds of policies for delivery riders.

In Pudong district, Shanghai, delivery riders are required by traffic police to wear electronic vests and each rider gets a “delivery rider traffic violation card” with 36 points. Traffic police on duty and surveillance cameras enforce traffic rules together, if a delivery rider doesn’t have the vest on, or rides unregistered scooter, 12 points will be taken, 6 points for running red lights, 3 points for going against the traffic and riding on fast lane or sidewalk. When all 36 points are taken, the rider will be blocked or even fired. Pudong district is the first place to implement the policy of electronic vests.

Xingtai, Hebei province and Shenzhen, Guangdong province followed Shanghai and introduced the traffic violation card. Qingdao, Shandong province started black list of delivery riders who violate traffic rules. In Jiangsu province, every time delivery riders that violate traffic rules they will be suspended for a day, in Nanjing city, delivery riders with multiple violations need to study traffic rules.

Police officers explaining to a rider how to use the DS riders’ point mini-app
But these initiatives are not as effective as expected, when it’s the riders that have to face the punishment of being late.
In December 2019 and May 2020, Renwu Magazine went to the Lujiazui CBD in Shanghai twice, and observed delivery riders with electronic vests. By counting the number of delivery riders passing Century Avenue, during the day 70% of them had electronic vests on, because of all the traffic police on duty, but even with it on, some riders would still break the rules.

That’s the “precise calculation” the delivery riders made. During the day there are more traffic police on duty, so it’s easier to get caught if they don’t wear the vests, but if caught violating traffic rules with the vests on, “only few points will be taken, and it’s nothing”. Then at night, a lot of riders will take off the vests, simply because “the traffic police are off duty”.

As law enforcement, many traffic police officers, including Officer Xiong, have mixed feelings, they have witnessed too many delivery riders in accidents, and they understand what those riders have been through.

Officer Xiong told Renwu Magazine, among all the accidents he handled, all the riders’ first reaction after an accident is get up and check if the food is okay, and then call the customer and explain why they’ll be late. They don’t care about their own well-beings.

So this made Officer Xiong understand more about the riders’ struggles. Officier Xiong said, by chatting with delivery riders he’s found that this group of people is actually very simple, they don’t care about anything else but how not to be late, how not to get negative ratings, they don’t care about themselves, “safety is never their priority, how to deliver the food on time is.”

As a frontline traffic police officer, Officer Xiong figures the whole situation is the result of intensive competition between take-out food platforms, as well as that there aren’t enough lanes on the roads. “The delivery time keeps getting shortened because of the competition between companies, and it’s riders that are getting pushed harder, so they have to choose between being late and violating the rules.”

Therefore, when handling cases involving delivery riders, some traffic police officers will be quite understanding. The day Officer Xiong had two riders write self-criticism letters, he let them write in the shade. And many officers would even help riders deliver food.

There are more incidents like these reported in the news.

On March 25 this year, a delivery rider in Tongxiang, Zhejiang province got pulled over for going against the traffic, and traffic police had him help direct the traffic as a punishment. The rider told the officer that he just got an order and hadn’t picked up the food yet, if he was late he’d be fined. After all the officer asked an auxiliary police officer to ride the rider’s scooter and deliver the food. On the way, the scooter broke three times and when the officer finally arrived, he spilled the food at the door.

Fortunately this doesn’t happen in every case, most of the police managed to deliver the food.

On April 16, in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, a Meituan delivery rider violated traffic rules three times in a row, got pulled over; in early June, in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province, an Ele.me rider got pulled over by traffic police; on June 29th, a Meituan rider in Dongguan, Guangdong province got pulled over for riding a scooter without a license plate, his scooter got confiscated. All the orders that these riders couldn’t deliver, were all taken care of by traffic police officers.

After delivering the food, almost all the officers would do one same thing, telling the customers “Have a nice meal and please give a 5-star rating.”

Traffic police officers helping a rider deliver food

[The Last Protection]

Among all the delivery riders interviewed with Renwu Magazine, Chen Shi is a very unique rider, because “he’d rather get fined, than risk his life”. He claims that during his one-year career, he had never run a red light or gone against the traffic, every day he worked in his uniform and with a helmet on.

But he still ended up in an accident. One night in July 2019, he was hit by a minibus when delivering food, and his right ankle got fractured. The traffic police determined the bus driver fully responsible for the accident, and after Chen Shi was sent to a hospital, the bus driver covered all the cost, including the surgery.

The distribution site Chen Shi worked for would deduct 106 yuan every month from Chen Shi’s salary as insurance fee, which should cover accidents. Normally, Chen Shi should be covered and get the money. But after he had recovered and left the hospital, he tried to contact the distribution site, only to find that his rider’s account had been deleted.

Regarding this, the distribution site’s response was that Chen Shi couldn’t work when in hospital and his performance didn’t meet the requirement, so the system deleted him, along with his insurance record. Without the record, Chen Shi couldn’t get a dime from the insurance company. And when he tried to contact the site, he found that he was kicked out of the site groupchat.
Chen Shi is not the only rider that experienced this. In the system, the insurance is the only and last protection for riders, but based on the research Renwu Magazine conducted, most riders wouldn’t be able to get covered after getting in accidents.
For contracted riders, the insurance fee is deducted by their distribution sites every month, and for crowdsourced riders it’s deducted on a daily basis and they are covered starting that day when they take the first order till 12 AM, if the rider is still delivering, then the insurance time will extend one hour and half.
In sociologist Guanghuai Zheng’s perspective, this labor security system, in fact, is a clever way that the take-out food platforms shift the risk of their own responsibilities.

When interviewed with Interface Culture this Labor Day, Guanghuai Zheng called the take-out food platforms “responsibility-free bosses”, “those take-out food platforms have outsourced the delivery business to delivery companies, to avoid any direct employment (with the delivery riders). Delivery riders need to pay for their own insurance and when accidents happen, it’s the delivery companies that are responsible rather than the food take-out platforms.” Guanghuai Zheng said, in this risk-shifting, “the vague labor relationship makes it harder for the delivery riders to defend their own rights.”

Ping Sun has also discovered that if the accident wasn’t too serious, like just a scratch on the scooters, most riders would just keep it to themselves, “a lot of them told me that there’s an accident report process but it’s too complicated and too much trouble, so they’d rather take it themselves instead of going through the whole exhausting process.”

Riders talking about their accidents in riders’ community
However, once the accident is beyond just a scratch, what happened to Chen Shi will just keep happening.

An Ele.me crowdsourced rider told Renwu Magazine, he hit a pedestrian when delivering food, the insurance company didn’t cover him at all for the whole year, and eventually he had to borrow money from internet loaning, to pay for all the medical expenses.

A rider in Suqian was asked to sign “Voluntary Waiver of Insurance Contract” before he could join Meituan. He felt confused and the site manager told him “Delivery rider is the most dangerous job, every day may be our last day, no insurance companies will insure us.” This case is very common, the former distribution site manager Zhuangzhuang Jin said, the crowdsourced riders are directly insured through the app, it’s mandatory, but contracted riders’ insurance is purchased by the distribution site, and “a lot of sites haven’t insured their riders because of all the work and the risk”.

It’s not only the riders’ rights are trampled but also those injured pedestrians’.

Last April, Wei Lin got hit by a delivery rider on his way home, his left leg got fractured, and that was the first day at work for that rider, so the site manager said he was not yet insured, and the site had nothing to do with it. “We want them to deliver food, not to hurt people.” said the site manager.

After several negotiations, the distribution site said they’d try to persuade the rider to pay Wei Lin for medical and nutrition expenses in installments.

In the end, the case was settled through “connection”. Wei Lin’s boss happened to know someone in Meituan’s management, and under that pressure, the site finally agreed to pay for all the expenses.

On social media, under a post about a rider defending his right, someone left a comment, “Delivery riders work so hard for Meituan to make all the profit but Meituan, a company that grows so fast and big for its delivery business, won’t offer a formal employment contract for any of its riders.”

A year after his accident, Chen Shi’s account still hasn’t got unblocked, and he never gets the money from the insurance company. He told Renwu Magazine, “I decided to leave this industry, and never come back.” And those delivery riders who are risking their lives on the road just to win a little time can only pray silently in their hearts, like what Lai Wei, the rider who watched his peer die from an accident, wrote in his online diary, “May all riders go home safely.”

[Infinite Game]

Before posting the video of her experience as a delivery rider, Caodao was driving around China to shoot new videos. On the way to Tibet, she recalled those days as rider, and she was still feeling suffocated.

As an experiencer of the system, Caodao suggested that all the product managers and algorithm engineers of the take-out food companies should work as riders for a month, “so that they’d understand how overwhelming and exploiting the system they’ve developed is.”

Under a report about how Meituan system has shortened the delivery time down to 28 minutes, a delivery rider proposed the same suggestion, “why don’t you all come deliver food for a couple of days, without running red lights, going against the traffic or speeding, in 28 minutes?”

To some extent, this suggestion coincides with the idea of data sociologist Nick Seaver.

Seaver proposed the concept of “algorithm culture”, in his perspective, “algorithms not only consist of rational programs, but also system, human beings, interacting environments, the rough-to-mature understanding acquired in normal cultural life.” He thinks algorithm is based on “collective human practices” and suggests that algorithm researchers should explore algorithm with anthropology perspective.

Ping Sun fully agrees with Seaver’s opinion, but in reality algorithms are mostly based on digital logics.

“It’s important to educate programmers more about value orientation, but so far the current situation is most programmers are thinking in a scientific linear way, lacking sociologic perspective. So it’s hard for them to consider fairness and value.”
During her research, Ping Sun communicated with some programmers working on algorithms. She’s found that they have their own logics and will consider all kinds of emergencies. But they are just executing orders from their bosses and they are not the decision-makers.”

Renwu magazine had also tried to contact the algorithm team of the take-out food platforms, but they refused to talk about the system because “their company wouldn’t allow”. “It’s confidential.” a Meituan algorithm engineer said.

This is a bigger and more invisible game— “the data of every order delivered by the rider will be uploaded to the platform’s cloud as part of the big data.” Ping Sun said, the system has been pushing riders, and riders have tried their best to catch up with the system in fear of the punishment of being late, “delivery riders are getting faster, creating more data of ‘short delivery time’. And the data is the basis of the algorithm, which can be trained by data. When algorithm observes that everyone is getting faster, it will speed up again.”

When Meituan amazed everyone as its market value has exceeded 200 billion USD, someone mentioned the founder of Meituan, Xing Wang’s obsession with speed and the book he mentioned that “had a great influence on him”—“Finite and Infinite Games”, in which James Carse, a professor from the Department of History and Literature of Religion at New York University, has sorted all the games in the world into two types, the “finite game” and the “infinite game”, the former will end with a winner, and the latter is all about keeping the game going forever.

The system is running, the game is still on, but it’s the riders that have no knowledge of who they are in this game. They are still running on the street, in hopes of better lives.

(As requested by the interviewees, all the riders’ names are aliases)

Reference
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