Lai Youxuan, “Delivery Drivers, Stuck in the System”

Lai Youxuan, “Delivery Drivers, Stuck in the System”[1]
 
Introduction and Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
The journalistic text translated here was a major hit when it was published in September, 2020, in the magazine Renwu (People), which aims to be the leading provider of non-fiction stories in China.  Its subject is the drivers for the food delivery platforms, a ubiquitous fact of life in urban China. Delivery services—particularly but not exclusively food delivery services—touch virtually everyone:  producers, consumers, delivery drivers, drivers of other vehicles, pedestrians…Immediately after its publication, the article went viral on WeChat Moments, a platform where people can share thoughts and pictures, and comment on both.  Everyone had something to say.
 
Food delivery is a concern of Chinese young people for a number of reasons.  First, delivery drivers are virtually all young, and the vast majority are young men.  Second, younger Chinese just entering the work force, exhausted by the demands of the “996” rhythm of Chinese capitalism —i.e., work from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. six days a week—have little time to shop or cook, and frequently have their meals delivered.  Finally, many Chinese young people are deeply concerned about issues of social justice, even if they would like for their food to be delivered on time!  This text, which is an excellent example of the kind of responsible, critical journalism that remains possible—and welcome—in China, reveals the workings of China’s high-speed model of capitalism in a way that recalls the social anthropologist Xiang Biao’s discussion of China’s “gyro-economy” elsewhere on this site. 
 
The journalists’ concerns may have begun with the often sad and difficult lives of the delivery drivers (most of which are on electric scooters; maybe delivery “riders” would be more accurate) which are simply omnipresent in Chinese cities, and the team interviewed many of them.  In addition, however, the journalists seek to understand the inner logic of the system, looking at the way the two biggest delivery platforms in China—Ele.me and Meituan—integrate the algorithms of artificial intelligence with a cut-throat exploitation of the labor force to make enormous profits even as they direct consumer complaints to the drivers, and not the platforms.  This is of course China’s version of the gig economy, and the platforms convince the drivers to sign on with Uber-like claims that “it’s great to be your own boss!”  The journalists back up their claims with interviews with Chinese social scientists who are studying the same questions.
 
Translator Freya Ge, herself a frequent user of delivery services, found that the article resonated with her experience.  She recounts being frustrated by late deliveries and by drivers who leave her food on the corner and call with tearful apologies, pleading that she hit the “received” button on her cellphone so their pay won’t be docked, but also hesitating to give them bad reviews because, well, who knows what they are going through? 
 
Freya also took the initiative to carry out brief interviews with delivery drivers in her neighborhood.  One of these told her, in a text message, that “Being a delivery driver is not so bad for people like us without a lot of education!  After all, you get back what you put into it, even if at the end of the day the platform’s rules are what decide everything.  It is also really hard, and if there were stable jobs with the same income, no one would be a delivery driver, because there is a lot of pressure.”  Another said that he worked 13 to 16 hours a day to earn between 500 and 700 RMB a day (between 75 and 100 $US), “because I get to come into contact with a lot of people, and with different kinds of people,” which sounds like the kind of answer you hear from someone who has no choice but to be nice to people he doesn’t know.
 
Freya also notes that drivers are starting to have enough.  During this year’s Spring Festival, many drivers in Beijing stayed in the capital instead of returning home to see their families.  The platform Ele.me promised special “rewards” to drivers to delivered the most orders and thus “served the people best,” but then manipulated the data to avoid paying out the rewards.  Xiong Yan (perhaps an alias), the leader of the Beijing Delivery Drivers Federation, was arrested after he repeatedly spoke out for the rights of food delivery drivers and threatened to strike.
 
This article should be an eye-opener for those Americans who worry that Chinese socialism is taking over the world.  They might worry more about…Chinese capitalism, which is presented here as a system that ruthlessly seeks to save time and cut costs, without worrying about the “externalities” suffered by the workers who deliver the merchandise.  Strangely, one of the few heart-warming aspects of the story are the traffic cops (surely despised everywhere), who often deliver the orders for the drivers whom they stop for violations, out of sympathy for their plight.  They know that the drivers don’t want to drive against traffic or on the sidewalk, but if they don’t they’ll never make the delivery targets set by the system.
 
For a similar tale of life and work in China, check out Chinarrative, another translation site, whose most recent story is entitled “I Don’t Have to Work Tomorrow” (subscription required).  For a more scholarly, focused study of many of the issues raised in this piece, click here.

Update:  As of late April, 2021, authorities in China have taken action against the sort of abuses described in this text by levying fines on Meituan, after an official posed as a delivery driver, as did reporters for this piece.  The activists who got in trouble for demanding changes, however, remain in trouble.
 
Translation by Freya Ge and David Ownby
 
For Delivery Drivers, the System is the Problem
 
Statistics released by the traffic police reveal a topic worthy of discussion:  "delivery drivers are in a high-risk profession.”  Why is that an industry that creates great value in one area is also a creator of social problems? To answer this question, the Renwu team conducted nearly half a year of research, talked to dozens of delivery drivers, to participants in every link of the delivery chain, and to sociologists across the country. The answer emerged gradually.  The resulting article is very long, and through a detailed interpretation of a system, we hope to make more people reflect on a question that concerns us all:   in the era of the digital economy, what role should algorithms play?
 
“Order Accepted”
 
The system had eaten another two minutes.
 
Delivery driver Zhu Dahe, who worked for the Ele.me[2] food delivery service, remembers clearly the day in October 2019, when he got an order from the system, and his hands on the handlebars broke out in sweat: “Two kilometers, delivery within 30 minutes.”  He had been delivering food in Beijing for two years, and up to that point, the shortest delivery time for the same distance had been 32 minutes, but two minutes disappeared on that day in October.  At about the same time, Meituan[3] drivers experienced similar "time disappearance incidents." One driver specializing in long-distance takeout in Chongqing found that the delivery time for orders within the same distance decreased from 50 minutes to 35 minutes. His roommate, who was in the same business, found that the maximum delivery time for orders within 3 kilometers had been reduced to 30 minutes.
 
This wasn't the first time that time had disappeared into the system.
 
Jin Zhuangzhuang has been the head of a Meituan distribution station for three years, and he clearly remembers receiving three “acceleration” notices from the Meituan platform between 2016 and 2019: in 2016, the longest delivery time for an order within 3 kilometer was one hour; in 2017, it became 45 minutes; in 2018, it shrank again by 7 minutes to become 38 minutes.  The data tell us that, in 2019, industry-wide takeout orders throughout China take 10 minutes less to deliver than they did three years ago.
 
The system's ability to continuously "eat" time is a laudable advance for its creators, a demonstration of the strong learning capabilities of AI's intelligent algorithms, a "real-time intelligent delivery system" known at Meituan as "super brain" and Ele.me as "the ark." Wang Xing, founder of Meituan, said in a media interview in November 2016 that "Our slogan is ‘Meituan delivers everything fast 美团外卖，送啥都快', and the average arrival time is 28 minutes." "It's a great technological achievement," he said.  But for the drivers putting this "technological progress" into practice, it can be "wild" and even "deadly."
 
In the system’s parameters, delivery time is the most important indicator, and being late is not allowed. Being late leads to bad reviews, reduced income, or even the loss of a job.  "Delivering food is racing against death, fighting with the traffic cops, and making friends with the red lights," wrote one driver on Baidu Tieba[4], a popular Internet forum for drivers.  A driver in Jiangsu province has changed his avatar on social media to "I Hate Late [lit. “late is dog head 超时是狗头”][5]" in order to keep himself alert. One Shanghai driver, who lives in Songjiang, said he goes against the traffic on almost every ride, and he has calculated that he saves five minutes each time. Another Ele.me driver in Shanghai has made a rough calculation that if he does not violate the traffic rules, the number of orders he can deliver in a day will be reduced by half.
 
"Drivers can never fight system delivery times on their own, all we can do is exceed the speed limit to make up for it." One Meituan delivery man told Renwu that his "craziest ride" ever was only one kilometer long, but he had only twenty minutes to get to the restaurant, wait for the food to be prepared, and then deliver the order .  He drove so fast that his "butt bounced off the seat a couple of times” that day.
 
Speeding, running red lights, driving against traffic... For Sun Ping, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, these drivers' decisions to contravene traffic regulations constitute an “inverse algorithm,” which is a necessary labor practice created by the drivers who have been under the control and discipline of the system algorithm for a long time, and a direct consequence of this kind of "inverse algorithm" is that drivers have suffered a sharp rise in the number of traffic accidents.  Sun, who has been researching the digital labor relationship between the delivery algorithms and drivers since 2017, spoke to Renwu about "shorter delivery times" and "more traffic accidents," saying that there is ”definitely a strong correlation."
 
In the first half of 2017, data from the Traffic Police Corps of the Shanghai Public Security Bureau showed that on average, one delivery driver was killed or injured every 2.5 days in Shanghai. In the same year, 12 drivers were killed or injured over three months in Shenzhen. In 2018, Chengdu traffic police investigated and dealt with nearly 10,000 violations by delivery drivers in seven months, including 196 accidents and 155 casualties, with an average of one dead or injured driver every day. In September 2018, Guangzhou traffic police investigated and dealt with nearly 2,000 traffic violations by delivery drivers, half of which were Meituan, followed by Ele.me.  The hashtag #delivery driver, one of the most dangerous jobs, has been seen trending on Weibo[6] more than once.
 
In published reports, specific cases are far more frightening than the statistics.
 
In February 2018, an Ele.me rider was speeding in a lane not meant for motor vehicles in order make time, and accidentally hit Li Muqiu, one of the founders of the emergency medicine department of Ruijin Hospital and Huashan Hospital in Shanghai. Li died a month later, despite all efforts to save him. In May 2019, a delivery driver in Jiangxi Province crashed into a pedestrian while hurrying to make a delivery, leaving the victim in a vegetative state.  A month later, a delivery man in Chengdu crashed into a Porsche while running a red light, losing his right leg on the spot. In the same month, a driver in Xuchang, Henan, who was traveling the wrong way on a highway, was hit and flipped into the air, spinning twice and falling to the ground, suffering multiple fractures.
 
Zhu Dahe, whose palms broke out in sweat because the new delivery time scared him, has also had accidents. While driving in a non-motorized vehicle lane, he crashed his speeding electric scooter to avoid hitting a bicycle, and the hot pot he was delivering flew off the scooter.  The thought, "Oh no, I’m going to be late" reached his brain before the physical pain. To avoid being late and having bad reviews, he called the customer and asked him to cancel the order and bought the hot pot himself. "It was too expensive, more than 80 RMB (12 US$)," he said, "but it tasted good and I ate too much." It still rankles him, because he was new to the business and inexperienced at the time, and it would have been more rational for him to pay the customer for the hot pot and ask him to order another one. That way, "at least I could have gotten paid for the delivery," he said, “Six and a half RMB (1 US$), I remember it clearly.”
 
"Accidents happen all the time, and it doesn't matter how bad you’re hurt as long as you don't spill the food." Zhu says he has seen many fellow drivers in traffic accidents when he is delivering, but he "doesn't usually stop" because "I’ll be late myself."  The experience of Meituan driver Wei Lai bears this out.  At noon one day this spring, Wei and a driver in the same uniform were waiting at a red light. The other driver was in a hurry and jumped the light by a few seconds, and was hit by a car travelling at high speed. "The driver and the bike flew in the air, and he died on the spot.”  Wei Lai said that he did not stop when he saw his colleague lying in the middle of the road, a puddle of flesh and blood. "I was running late on my own order." At that very moment, a new order came in, the familiar female voice singing out: "Delivery order. From XX to XX, please respond after the beep.”
 
Heavy Rain
 
The system is set to start as soon as the driver clicks “received” on his smart phone.  At the Global Architect Summit in 2019, Wang Shengyao, senior algorithm expert on the Meituan distribution technology team, presented the basic operation of this intelligent system.  “From the moment a customer orders, the system will begin to determine which driver should take the order by considering the locations of different drivers and the directions in which they are moving. An order has two task points, namely pick-up and delivery. If a rider has five orders and ten task points, in a matter of seconds, the system will solve for ‘ten thousand orders to ten thousand people,’ producing the optimal distribution scheme within the range of the 110,000-route planning possibilities.”
 
But in the reality, all it takes is a heavy rain to shatter this "optimality."  Delivery drivers have an ambivalent attitude toward rain. On the one hand, they like rain because people order more food on rainy days, but if it rains too much, the system will easily "overload" and drivers are more likely to have accidents. Gengzi, a Meituan delivery driver in Hunan, was working during a scary rainy night. The rain had poured down all day, orders flooded in like crazy, and the system overloaded. Each driver in the station was carrying a dozen orders at a time, their storage containers were full and orders were piled up on their handlebars.  Gengzi remembers that his feet were barely touching the outside of his foot pegs, and as he drove he kept looking at the boxes jammed between his calves and the scooter.
 
The road was so slippery that he had several minor accidents, but he picked himself up and continued making deliveries until 2:30 a.m., when he finally called it a night. A few days later, he received his pay slip for the month. The figure was much lower than usual——for the simple reason that many of the orders he delivered on the day of the heavy rain were late, and as a result, his salary was reduced.  Gengzi was not the only one to be docked; the same thing happened to the head of the distribution station.  Jin Zhuangzhuang, the head of a Meituan distribution station, describes himself as “living on data.” For a distribution station, the most important data include:  the number of orders received, the number of late deliveries, the number of bad reviews, and the number of complaints, among which, late deliveries are the most important, because an important reason for many bad reviews and complaints is late delivery.
 
As a general rule, a driver’s percentage of late deliveries must not exceed 3%, otherwise, the site itself will be downgraded, and the unit price paid for each delivery will also decrease. The income of the station director, human resources personnel, quality controller, etc.; anyone related to the site will be affected.  At the end of each year, the site will also be evaluated by Meituan or Ele.me, and the distribution stations ranked  in the lower 10% in each region face the risk of elimination.
 
Under the system’s evaluation, "being late" not only costs drivers money, but also causes them secondary mental harm.  "The late driver is a thorn in the side of the team,” says Sun Ping, "Somebody who is late all the time costs himself and everybody else money, , and then there is the issue of group honor. He is holding everyone back, and the station director will be on his back, as will the bosses all the way up the line.. Nobody likes the guy who is always late."
 
This can put a lot of stress on drivers. Zhu Dahe, who fell on the road with the hot pot, told Renwu that in the first few months of his career as a driver, he was depressed every day.  He came from a small town and was not familiar with Beijing roads, not to mention the huge amount of traffic. He followed the traffic rules religiously and lost money every day for late deliveries, which made him feel very incompetent. "Aren’t drivers supposed to make more than 10,000 RMB (1,575 $US)per month? Isn’t everyone supposed to be able to be a driver? I don’t seem cut out to be a delivery man," he said.
 
Later, as he mastered his scooter and got more familiar with the roads, he turned from a greenhorn to a master time-cutter, and he gradually lost his feeling of incompetence. "Compared to being late, going against the traffic is nothing," he said. He even said that that he experienced a "sense of freedom" when he and his buddies went against the traffic together.  So now, under normal circumstances, Zhu Dahe is rarely late, but extreme weather is still a curse that he cannot escape. At such times, the out-of-control system takes over, and there he is with too many orders, no way to control delivery time, facing late penalties, and unable to ask for time off.
 
In August 2019, typhoon Lekima hit Shanghai, and a Ele.me driver was electrocuted and died while delivering in the rain. Later, a screenshot of a WeChat group chat at the delivery station was uploaded to the Web. In the screenshot, we read the station-master’s message to all of his drivers:  “No days off for the next three days... Anybody who takes off work in the next three days will pay double penalties for absenteeism. Press one to acknowledge receipt.”  Under the station-master’s message was a long string of ones.  The screenshot sparked a huge public debate, with some netizens saying, "During the typhoon, why can Hema (Alibaba’s app-based delivery service), KFC and McDonald's all suspend delivery, but not this platform?"
 
Jin Zhuangzhuang, the Meituan station-master, had nothing to say about this. Every time there was a rainstorm, drivers would come to him and ask for leave, using all sorts of excuses-- a flat tire, a bike wreck, a family emergency, anything. But given the huge influx of orders, he could only follow the data and enforce the rules:  "With the exception of a birth or a death in the family, drivers cannot ask for leave in bad weather, and they will be fined for doing so."  Stormy days are also hard on Jin. He must sit in front of the computer in the station, monitoring the position of each delivery driver, the number of orders and the time of delivery. In his station, Meituan regulations are that each driver can take at most 12 orders at a time. If there are more than 12 orders, the system will stop adding new ones. However, during bad weather or on major holidays, this is too few to handle the huge volume of orders that comes in. And this is when the system is most likely to break down: some drivers carry multiple orders, some drivers have almost no orders; some drivers receive orders that send them in the opposite direction; the delivery time for the orders is all messed up...
 
When this happens, Jin has to switch gears and go into "manual scheduling" mode. In this mode, he can enter the system and move driver A's orders to driver B in order to balance the load. And in manual mode, the system cap of 12 disappears.   In this mode, the number of orders per driver can get "scary big" -- a rider can carry 26 orders at the same time. Some 30 drivers at a distribution station once dealt with 1,000 orders within three hours. Another driver in a county with a population of 500,000 was assigned 16 orders at the height of the peak.  One Ele.me station-master told Renwu that manual intervention isn’t meant to help drivers, but to "get the maximum potential and speed out of every driver."
 
When the drivers are stretched to the maximum, Jin himself will deliver whatever still needs be delivered; the most he ever took on was fifteen orders at one time. "When we are overloaded, we first let the drivers suffer, but when they can’t take it any more, then we ask Meituan to narrow the distribution range. After 2018, our station was no longer allowed to ask for this, so no matter how many orders there are, we just keep delivering." He says that when they are overloaded, drivers deliver until they are completely numb, focusing all their energy on delivering, to the point that "they have no more human emotional response."
 
Last year, Jin left the business because of a family illness. He said he will not go back, and when a friend recently tried to buy a delivery station, he talked him out of it. "The time and data pressure in that business is unimaginable." This summer, when there were heavy rains in the south, Jin was glad to have escaped, but he also worried about all of those stations and drivers out there fighting against the data.
 
Route Navigation
 
In the course of her research, Sun Ping contacted nearly one hundred delivery drivers over the past four years, many of whom complained about the system's delivery routes.  In order to allow drivers to concentrate more on delivering food, the intelligent system will replace the human brain as much as possible——helping drivers to plan the order in which to pick up and deliver food for multiple orders, and providing delivery routes for each order, so that drivers don't have to think on their own, they just have to follow the system's instructions even while they assume the risk of being "led astray".
 
Sometimes, the navigation route will indicate a straight line. A delivery driver once said angrily to Sun Ping that: “The system calculates routes and time by straight-line distance. But that is not how we deliver food: we have to make detours and wait for traffic lights……Yesterday, for one of my orders, the system gave a distance of five kilometers, but I drove seven. The system thinks we're helicopters, but we're not.”  Sometimes, the navigation will also indicate sections of the road requiring that drivers go against the traffic.  In October 2019, a Guizhou driver, Xiao Dao, posted on Zhihu that Meituan tells its drivers to go against the traffic. In an interview with Renwu, he said that this has already happened to him several times, although he has only been a driver for six months. One time he was delivering to a hospital, and the normal route would have required a U-turn, while Meituan told him to cross the road and go against the traffic for a distance of nearly two kilometers, according to the screenshots he provided.
 
“And there are even worse things,” Xiao Dao said.  “Sometimes going against the traffic doesn’t work, so the system tells you to take an overpass, even if it’s the kind of overpass where vehicles are not allowed. The system can also tell you to go straight through a wall."  In Beijing, Cao Dao, a well-known Vlogger, found herself in a similar situation. As part of a story she was working on, she worked as a delivery driver for Meituan for a bit less than a week. To her surprise, the system sent delivery routes in “pedestrian mode” in cases when going against the traffic was not possible.  The system also calculated delivery times according to the shortest distance, which includes many instances where delivery drivers have to go against the traffic.
 
In Xiao Dao’s opinion, both straight-line navigation and going against the traffic achieve the goals of the system, because the system pays the delivery fee according to the distance and time calculated by navigation algorithm. Shorter distances and times will not only attract more users to the takeout platform, but will also reduce delivery costs.
 
At the end of 2017, the Meituan technical team also mentioned "cost" in an article introducing the optimization and upgrading of the intelligent distribution system. The article pointed out that the optimization algorithm has reduced transport costs by 19%, with four drivers now delivering meals that used to be delivered by five. "Cost" appears again in the conclusion to the article: "efficiency, experience, and cost will be the core indicators pursued by the platform."  In fact, Meituan also gained huge benefits from this.  According to data released by Meituan, in the third quarter of 2019, it made 2.5 billion deliveries, increasing revenue per order by 0.04 RMB (.0062 US$)over the same period in 2018, while at the same time reducing costs per order by 0.12 RMB (.0186 US$)——which helped Meituan make an extra 400 million RMB (61.6 million US$) in the third quarter of 2019.
 
But behind the platform's huge profits, drivers' personal income has declined. Xiao Dao said that whenever the system tells him to go against the traffic, he winds up in a no-win dilemma——either he decides not to go against the traffic, taking a longer route and facing the risk of being late, or he follows the route given by the system and puts his safety at risk, but either way, "I lose money [because he is paid by the system’s calculations, not by what he does in real life]."  "Each driver has to decide between safety and income." As an "outsider" who joined in for only a few days, the Vlogger Cao Dao highlighted the plight of the drivers, noting that "All delivery platforms are chasing profit maximization. In the end, they all shift the risk to the drivers, who have the least bargaining power."
 
In their exchanges with Renwu, several drivers said the same thing: “The platforms don’t have to worry about not finding people to deliver food. Even if you quit, there are plenty of people out there who are willing to take your place.”  Before becoming a Meituan delivery driver, A Fei used to work for KFC, “where a driver could at most deliver six or seven hundred orders per month, because the company has limits, and the brand set the maximum price for the delivery company at 12 or 13 RMB (roughly 2 US$), which meant that the delivery fee stayed at 9 RMB (1.40 US$)." He described this job as "the most standardized", but the income was not great, and "each month I earned at most 5,000 RMB (775 US$)." Finally, he decided to leave KFC to deliver food somewhere else after being inspired by the idea that “a delivery man can make more than 10,000 RMB (1575 US$).”
 
In Meituan and Ele.me, drivers are divided into two categories——specialized and crowd-sourced.  "Specialized drivers" are full-time drivers attached to the distribution station, who have a basic salary, follow a set work schedule, and accept the system's delivery orders. The evaluation criteria are the customer appreciation rate and the punctuality rate. "Crowd-sourced drivers" are part-time drivers with a very low entry threshold. Anybody with a vehicle and an app on his cellphone can start to work immediately once they sign up. They have no basic salary and are free to compete for orders. Crowd-sourced drivers are not affected by bad comments and complaints, but they face a heavier penalty for late deliveries. If they are a second late, half of their delivery fee is automatically deducted. None of them has a labor-employment relationship with the delivery platform.
 
A Fei finally chose to join Meituan and become a crowd-sourced driver. It was around 2017, he worked about 9 hours a day, specializing in long-distance delivery, and earned about 10,000 RMB (1575 US$) per month, sometimes even 15,000 RMB (2325 US$).  Low entry requirement and high income are considered to be important reasons that the takeout platforms "do not worry about a lack of workers.”  Yet sociologists have found that, “drivers earning over 10,000 RMB per month" only occurs during the initial phase of their work with the platform.  After carrying out a long-term research project on delivery drivers in Wuhan, Zheng Guanghuai's team from the School of Sociology at Central China Normal University found that as platform subsidies end and more drivers join, "earning more than 10,000 RMB" is becoming a fantasy.
 
According to the research report released by the team, only 2.15 percent of delivery drivers earn more than 10,000 RMB a month, while 53.18 percent of respondents say their current income cannot meet their family expenses.  A Fei told Renwu that after delivering food in Beijing for a period of time, he went to Chongqing for personal reasons. His income went down, especially after the pandemic, when more and more people took up delivery service, and sometimes there were no orders at all. On occasion, his monthly income fell below 7,000 RMB (1085 US$).  According to the Meituan Research Institute's employment report covering the period of the pandemic in 2019 and 2020, 336,000 people signed up to deliver food.   Among those signing up, factory workers ranked first, followed by retail workers.
 
Asked "When do you make the most money now?" A Fei answered, "Only when it's really cold or really hot, because that’s when people don’t want to go out".
 
Elevators
 
According to public statements issued by the delivery platform, the time drivers spend waiting for elevators will be considered as an important factor in the system's estimation of how long a delivery should take.
 
In an interview with 36Kr[7], He Renqing, the head of Meituan’s distribution algorithm team, also brought up elevators:  “Meituan's delivery system pays special attention to the amount of time drivers spend going up and coming down elevators, and even specifically studies different times and speeds drivers need to go to lower or higher floors.” However, reality is far more complex than what AI can predict. "Waiting for the elevator is a real pain for us.  You have no idea," said the driver A Fei, who has been unable to reach the ten thousand RMB per month threshold.
 
In the impression of many drivers, hospital elevators are the worst.  As a driver for four years, the most terrifying elevator A Fei has encountered is the one at Peking University Third Hospital. It was the middle of the lunch rush hour, and A Fei was carrying seven or eight orders into to the surgical building of the Peking University Third Hospital, “I was scared to death,” he said, “I remember it like it was yesterday.  Drivers, patients, doctors, and family members were all crowded around the elevator door. It was a madhouse. After several elevators had come and gone, I finally squeezed onto the elevator, and everyone was glued together, unable to breathe at all.” After delivering this order, A Fei was late for all of the other six.
 
Later, he moved to Chongqing, but elevators remained a pain in the neck.  Hongding International, a building which is famous on the internet for its entertainment facilities, “was really magical. The building has 48 floors, all full of small individual studios, maybe 30 or 40 studios on each floor, you can imagine what a pain this is. " Although there are seven or eight elevators in the building, the line for the elevator at peak dining hours is "no different from the line to get see some beauty spot" and it takes about half an hour.  The situation is similar in the Chongqing World Financial Center. The building has 74 floors, and the whole building has only one freight elevator that drivers can use. “First of all, during peak meal time, one elevator is not enough, and second, it may also has something to do with the shape of the building.” A Fei said. "We can only wait outside the elevator while people stumble out and more people stumble in.  Going up takes at least ten minutes, then ten more to deliver the food.  You only get a certain amount of time for each order, so there is no way not to be late.”
 
Some office buildings do not allow drivers to use the elevators; drivers in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing, Hunan and other places have told Renwu that this situation is extremely common.  On July 11, 2020, Vlogger Cao Dao posted a video of her professional experience as a driver, in which the topic of the Beijing SKP store's refusal to allow drivers to enter became a hot topic on the Internet, sparking a discussion on occupational discrimination. In Cao's view, SKP is just the tip of the iceberg in the systematic discrimination directed at delivery personnel.
 
"I remember it clearly," Cao said. "When I went to get food, there were a lot of shops in the building that relied mainly on delivery. There were other elevators in the building, but the security guards wouldn't let drivers use them. Only one elevator was available for delivery drivers.” As a novice, she spent a lot of time just finding the elevators, then lined up with dozens of drivers. "All the delivery people automatically formed two lines, leaving the middle open for the drivers who came out of the elevator," she said. That day, she spent more than ten minutes just waiting for the elevator.
 
In addition to office buildings, some upscale residential areas are also "elevator minefields" in the minds of drivers. Here, people need to swipe a card to get on the elevator, and most customers don't want to go down. "They'll make us stand in the elevator and they'll press the button, but it doesn't always work," he says. A Fei said that many drivers will take the stairs and climb 20 floors or more to avoid a bad review, but A Fei, as a crowdsourced driver who is not afraid of such reviews, came up with a solution:   “The customer was on the 14th floor and asked me to climb the stairs, and I refused. Finally we agreed that I would climb up 7 floors and he would climb down 7 floors, which was more reasonable."
 
At the elevator doors, A Fei has seen countless drivers having emotional breakdowns, crying and fighting all the time, because "you’re only one step away, and if you squeeze in, you can deliver the food on time." But in reality, drivers can only stand at the elevator door. "All you can do is wait."
 
In order to avoid being late, some drivers try to click "delivered" early, while waiting for the elevator, but this is not allowed by the system. "If a customer complains about this, the driver is fined 500 RMB (77.50 US$)," a Meituan driver from Gansu province told Renwu.  "Ele.me is be a little more humane on this front," said a driver from Guizhou. According to him, in the Ele.me system, there is an "arrived" function, so that when the driver arrives on the ground floor, with only a minute or two left to make his delivery, he can click “arrived,” which notes his entry into the building, and then click “delivered” after he has completed the delivery and come back down.
 
Zhang Hu, a Zhengzhou driver, has been both an Ele.me specialized driver and Meituan crowd-sourced driver. Comparing his working experience with the two platforms, he thinks Meituan is crueler. “Meituan drivers are a group of order-delivering machines. Ele.me's local market share is not so large, so it is relatively humane.”  His judgment is also backed up by actual data.  According to a survey by Trustdata, a mobile Internet data monitoring platform, Meituan accounted for 64.6% of the national delivery market share in the first half of 2019. To be more specific, Meituan drivers delivered about 20 more orders per day than Ele.me drivers.
 
"No matter how hard the drivers try to boost their speed, the platform doesn't think they are fast enough." Zhang Hu couldn't help complaining about Meituan, but he finally chose to leave Ele.me and join the crueler competitor, because in Zhengzhou, Meituan can give him an unbelievable number of orders.  That's also why A Fei finally chose Meituan. Although his income declined somewhat during the pandemic, he was still in a good mood; during that period, many communities and office buildings were closed, and he did not have to fight with the elevators. However, as the epidemic eased, more and more communities and office buildings opened back up, and the pain of the elevators returned.
 
As another round of the elevator wars loomed, Vlogger Cao Dao also finished the final cut of her video, and spliced the scene of waiting for the elevator into the final version. When she talked about that scene to Renwu again in mid-July, she said that she felt "like a worker ant."
 
Guarding the Door
 
In 2019, Li Lei, whose home is in Zhengzhou, moved from Ele.me to Meituan, becoming a business developer instead of a station-master, mainly responsible for finding more companies to work with the distribution station. In order to get more popular restaurants to cooperate with his distribution station, he often walks the streets, maintaining relationships with each restaurant individually. On weekends, during meal rush hours, he will pull up a chair in front of the door of one of “his” restaurants——not to promote cooperation, but to get them to push the food out the door.
 
Restaurants that are slow in preparing orders is an even greater pain for the drivers than waiting for the elevator.  The system is constantly optimized and upgraded in the name of "intelligence" and the delivery time shortened again and again, but the problem of "slow restaurant preparation" is still a long-standing obstacle.  Wang Shengyao, a senior algorithm expert at Meituan, said in a public text that it is difficult to arrive at an accurate estimate of food preparation time at a restaurant even by analyzing past data. And as long as food preparation time is uncertain, a certain random variable will remain. However, facing the fixed quantity of "delivery time," it is the drivers who have to bear the brunt of this variable.
 
According to the drivers, there are many reasons for slow restaurant preparation. Some restaurants are so popular and famous that they can barely manage to serve sitting guests in the restaurant at peak hours, but they are still reluctant to suspend delivery orders. In some small local restaurants, the owners are more casual and have no sense of time. Sometimes the driver has sped to the store to pick up the food, only to see the owner coming back with the food he just bought at the market.  And some restaurants, especially noodle restaurants, will wait for the drivers to arrive before making the food, in order to vouch for its taste.
 
"The three big headaches are grilled fish, stews, and kebabs," a driver told Renwu.  “The last time I got an order for stew, when I got there they hadn’t even started.   I just stood there and watched it simmer for 40 minutes. " Another driver simply shouted "Grandpa [a polite way to refer to the older cook]." " I was freaking out, and all I could think was: Grandpa, please just cook!" The restaurants still take their time, "They are really not worried about the delivery time. Anyway, they get their money and they won’t pay the late fees."
 
"There is no solution to the problem of slow restaurant preparation," the former Meituan station-master Jin Zhuangzhuang said. In the evaluation system set up by the delivery system, restaurant owners can make bad comments and complaints to drivers, but drivers have no right to evaluate the restaurants. Sometimes, drivers have to take the blame for the restaurants, and complaints about the food, like "too spicy", "not enough salt", "forgot the vinegar” often appear in the drivers’ comments section. Many drivers have appealed to the system, but none has been successful.  Drivers have only themselves to rely on to solve these problems. Jin Zhuangzhuang's experience is: “For those small restaurants that work slowly and have a lot of orders, the drivers need to try to establish good relationships with the owner: offer him a cigarette, tell him a joke, and maybe they will let you cut line and take your order first. In the big restaurants, drivers need to get on well with the front desk staff or packing staff. If they have a good rapport with them, they will use the interphone to tell the kitchen to hurry up, which always helps.”
 
But this does not solve the fundamental problem, and drivers and restaurant staff fight a lot. A delivery driver in Jinan once got into a fight with a clerk at Xicha milk tea store over a delivery problem, while a driver in Wuhan stabbed a clerk in an argument, and the clerk later died after resuscitation efforts failed.  Drivers have seen all too many cases where drivers clashed with clerks and even called the police. As for how to solve the problem, a driver said, "increase the delivery time, because once there is enough time, people will not be in such a hurry."  But in reality, the delivery time is getting shorter and shorter, and among all the hassles the drivers face, the restaurants, who waste the biggest portion of their time, is an important one.
 
In trying to improve relations with the restaurants, Li Lei found that what the restaurants mentioned most often was the speed of the driver. If the speed does not measure up, restaurant owners would ask Li Lei to replace the driver or terminate the partnership.  Usually, there are two distribution stations on the same platform near any popular shopping district, and restaurant owners can choose which one to work with. As for the conditions of cooperation, Li Lei said, "It's very simple: the delivery capacity of the distribution station and the speed of drivers serving the restaurant."
 
In order to win over restaurants that receive a lot of orders, Li Lei will go to his distribution station and urge his drivers to go faster, but if the drivers are late because of the slow preparation by restaurants, and this impacts the site data, then all he can do is discuss it with the restaurants and try to get them to work faster. But not everyone can do this, "Whether you can put pressure on the restaurants also depends on personal relationships."  Sitting in front of the store, Li Lei stares unblinkingly at the incoming orders screen As soon as an order comes in, he sings out "Meituan is coming. Our order is coming." "If you want to win, you can’t waste a second," he said.
 
Peppa Pig[8] and Coke 
 
Due to a run-in with a customer, Lin, a Meituan driver, discovered a "secret" hidden in the system:  the delivery time the system sends to the customer is not the same as the time sent to the driver.  At the time, he had just started to work for Meituan as a crowd-sourced driver. One time, he got an irate message from the customer just as he arrived at the restaurant to pick up the order, saying “Why aren’t you here yet? You’re way late!” Lin felt the customer was being unreasonable because according to his phone, he still had ten minutes.  Later, when he delivered the food, they argued again, and when they pulled out their phones it turned out that the "expected delivery time" for the customer was 10 minutes earlier than the "required delivery time" for the driver.
 
Since discovering this "secret," Lin has called Meituan customer service every month, for almost four years now, and each time he talks to someone different, but they always say the same thing: "explain to the customer that it is only an expected delivery time."  This is not merely Lin’s individual misfortune, as several drivers mentioned the issue to Renwu. In their view, this is a way for the system to please the customer and keep them coming back, but it is also one of the important sources of conflict between the customers and the drivers.
 
The scholar Lu Taihong pointed out in his book Consumer Behavior: Consumer Insight in China that the convenience of the digital age has made consumers more and more picky. They pay ever more attention to service quality and product experience, but have less loyalty to products and brands. Therefore, “They have more influence and control over the market than they did before.”  In the face of this consumer influence, the delivery platform, which focuses on the number of users and orders, constructs its own power structure with its algorithms, and in this system, customers have pride of place and exercise the greatest power.
 
Customers can make mistakes. On this topic, Gansu driver Wang Bing has a lot to say: “Customers can be really unbelievable sometimes. Many people don't know their address. They live at 804 but they put 801. They obviously live at the south gate but put north gate. There are also customers who forget that they have ordered the meal and don’t answer the phone when you arrive. The next day they remember and call me to ask where their food is. Some people don’t even look at the address when they place the order. Once I picked up an order and it was in another province.”  However, the customer does not have to pay for his mistakes. If the order is late, it’s still the driver who is penalized.
 
Sun Ping, a sociologist who has long studied the professional dilemma of delivery drivers, also talked about this "supreme power of the customer" in a research paper. During delivery, customers can learn everything about the driver--his real name, phone number, punctuality rate, how many tips he has received, the pick-up time, the delivery route and the time needed for delivering. The customer also has the right to cancel the order while it is in progress.  “They can see everything, the whole process, while we don’t know who they are. And if something goes wrong, we can't cancel the order the way they can.” A driver complained to Sun, and he also shared his experience when an order was canceled, “At the time I was delivering two orders. One was 1.5 kilometers away and I had 45 minutes, while the other was 3 kilometers away and I had 20 minutes. The customer 1.5 kilometers away got angry because he saw my GPS go by his house without delivering his order. He was furious, cancelled the order and complained to the platform about me.”  A driver in Renwu’s survey told a similar story about a day when a customer, after receiving a meal, asked the him, "Is this all you’ve got for me?"
 
With faster delivery speed and a completely biased evaluation system, customers are losing patience with a system that already pampers them.  Jing, who lives in Shanghai, admits he has been "spoiled." He is usually busy with work and does not know how to cook, so he almost always has food delivered to fill his stomach. In the past, he would watch a 45-minute episode of a TV show to pass the time between ordering and eating the first cherry tomato in his Caesar salad, which he often ordered at a nearby snack bar, he remembers. Recently, the wait time has stabilized at 26 minutes, but on one recent occasion, when the driver's delivery time exceeded 30 minutes, he couldn’t stand it and called five times asking about his order.
 
In 2017, the French research institution Ipsos conducted a survey of consumers in 12 provinces and cities across China, and the results show that the development of mobile technology has made consumers increasingly impatient in all aspects, especially in economically developed areas and among young people. "Consumers in Beijing are the most impatient," they found.  Faced with increasingly impatient customers, the drivers have to do everything they can to appease them.
 
Wang Bing also has a lot to say about this.  If he has multiple orders with the same delivery time, he will deliver the most expensive ones first, because those are the customers that are more likely to lose their temper, "They wouldn’t listen to my explanation anyway. They just get mad and cancel. This one order might be more than a hundred RMB.  I can’t pay that back every day.”  Moreover, drivers are expected to try to satisfy customers' demands for things other than food, such as cigarettes or water, or "I’m at the Internet café and I need a razor."  For a time, when Peppa Pig was big on Tik Tok, there were customers asking Wang to draw a picture of the pig when he delivered their food, or they would give a him bad review. Wang Bing was very angry, but still had to draw it:, "I bought a piece of brown paper and drew Peppa Pig, but I also added a sentence:  ‘Are you a moron?’"
 
"Delivery is a customer-centered social performance." Sun wrote in her research report that she calls drivers' efforts to please customers and earn five-star reviews "emotional labor," which she says is often overlooked, but compared with physical labor, it is far more damaging and draining for the drivers.  In her conversation with Renwu, she remembered the driver who left the deepest impression on her: "In three days his motorcycle was stolen twice and his battery three times, and as he talked about this he started to cry, and said that ‘the platform makes us say, "I hope you enjoy your dinner," but we don’t even know one another. I come from the countryside and used to do farm work, and I find it embarrassing to say this and to ask for five stars.  How can a real man say things like this?’"
 
In an interview with Interface[9] about the "SKP incident," Shen Yang, an associate professor in the Department of Public Economy and Social Policy at Shanghai Jiaotong University, said that although delivery drivers might earn more than 10,000 RMB a month, they are still facing class inequality: “They make more money at the expense of their time and health, and they are paid higher for more intensive work—both physically and emotionally.”  Wang Bing continues to come up with new ways to appease his customers:  in the summer, many people order an extra Coke with their meals, but this summer it rained so much that he often wrecked his bike trying to deliver orders, which of course spills the Coke. If he goes back to the restaurant to get another one, not only will he have to spend his own money, but the delivery will almost certainly be late. To keep customers from getting angry, he keeps a bottle of Coke in his basket at all times. If a customer’s Coke is spilled, he will find a safe place to pour the spare Coke into the original paper cup and polish the top of the cup several times until there is no mark. This, he thinks, is a great idea.
 
At the same, we see nervous customers legal advice websites asking: "Am I liable if I hassle a driver and cause a traffic accident?" To which a lawyer replied: "You are not liable."
 
The Game
 
Recently, Meituan and Ele.me released their financial statements for the second quarter of 2020. In this quarter, Ele.me made a profit on each order, a positive development, while Meituan earned a net profit of 2.2 billion RMB (339 million US$), up 95.5% year on year. The delivery business is the biggest contributor to Meituan's profitability.  On August 24, 2020, the stock price of Meituan also hit a new high, and the market value exceeded $200 billion (30.7 billion US$), becoming the fifth largest company in Hong Kong in terms of market value.
 
In a six-month survey of nearly 30 delivery drivers that Renwu spoke with, one word that came up frequently was “mao”—ten cents.  A Meituan driver in Hunan said, "If our on-time rate is less than 98 percent, they take off ten cents per order, and if it falls below 97 percent, they take off twenty cents. Isn't this forcing drivers to speed up? After all, ten cents per order means a lot to us."  An Ele.me driver in Shanghai said, “The minimum price we get paid for an order is 4.50 RMB (.69 US$). The more you deliver, the higher the price. Sometimes ten cents means a lot.  When you get to 4.90 or 5 RMB (.75 US$), it’s a huge difference.”  To hold onto these same “ten cents”, delivery drivers not only need to go fast, they also have to deliver more.  This is what the system wants to see, because there is another secret in the system--a "game" of levels.
 
Both Meituan and Ele.me set up hierarchical credit systems for drivers——the more orders they take, the higher their on-time rate, and the better the customers’ reviews, the more credits the drivers receive. As they accumulate credits, they mount to higher levels, thus producing greater income and rewards.  The system also packaged this credit system as a progressively difficult game of killing monsters, with drivers of different levels having different titles, such as ordinary, bronze, silver, gold, diamond and king, from low to high.  A Meituan crowd-sourced driver in a southeastern city described these levels in detail:  In one week, if you make 140 validated deliveries and your on-time rate reaches 97%, you become a "Silver Driver" and you get an extra bonus of 140 RMB (22 US$) per week. If you complete 200 orders and your on-time rate reaches 97%, you become a "Gold Driver" and you get an extra bonus of 220 RMB (34 US$) per week. In Ele.me, the order is directly linked to the delivery fee. If the number of orders delivered per month is less than 500, then each order is worth 5 RMB (.77 US$); between 500 and 800, 5.5o RMB (.85 US$); between 800 and 1000, 6 RMB (.93 US$)...and so on. According to the rules of the game, points will be cleared on a weekly or monthly basis.
 
In his research report, entitled “Delivery Orders and Labor: Algorithms and Labor from the Economic Perspective of Chinese Food Delivery Platform,” Sun Ping noted that in addition to punishments for being late, the system also uses this game-life evaluation to trap drivers in an endless loop. “They want us to work around the clock,” a driver said to her, which means that there is no way out. “I was a Black Gold Driver last month, and if I want to keep this title, I need 832 extra points, so there’s a lot of work to do."
 
"The higher their level, the more pressure drivers face to stay where they are." In Sun Ping's opinion, this kind of gamified packaging not only risks addiction, but also skillfully combines the drivers’ realization of self-value with the goals of company management, while the game-like packaging "provides a universal, internalized, and reasonable explanation for the exploitation the algorithms are carrying out".
 
The total number of Meituan drivers now stands at 2.952 million, according to Meituan's Driver Employment Report for the first half of 2020. The website of Ele.me, Hummingbird, shows the number of drivers at 3 million. Studying the “systematized” survival of nearly 6 million drivers, Zheng Guanghuai, a sociologist at Central China Normal University, came up with the concept of "downloaded labor".  In their research report, entitled “Survey of Couriers and Delivery Drivers in Wuhan: Platform Workers and “Downloadable Labor,” Zheng Guanghuai's team gave an in-depth explanation of this concept.
 
Delivery drivers work by "downloading" an app. On the surface, this app is only a tool to help them work, but in fact, what the drivers “download” is a precision form of labor control. In this way, “The original subjectivity of workers has been completely reshaped or even replaced,” and while they seem to be working in a freer way, in fact they are “suffering from deeper control.”  "The platform creates ‘platform workers’ by downloading labor." This model of labor, Zheng's team writes, is characterized by strong attraction, weak contract, high supervision, and low resistance.
 
The medium that helps the system to succeed in "downloading labor" is the drivers’ smart phones.  In public statements, the delivery platforms claim that they are trying to help drivers get rid of their phones, their most important labor tool.  “We are afraid that the drivers will have traffic accidents when they take out their phones and click to accept their orders.” In April 2018, in an interview with 36Kr, He Renqing, head of Meituan's delivery algorithm team, specifically mentioned that "the most difficult problem for Meituan is how to get drivers not to look at their phones while driving." Meituan spent seven months developing a Bluetooth headset with an intelligent voice interaction system to address this problem. According to He Renching, the headset is windproof, waterproof, noise-canceling, and smart. When drivers wear the headset, they can perform all operations by speaking, making sure that they do not have to use their phones during the delivery process.
 
But in reality, none of the Meituan driver with whom Renwu spoke has received or used the smart Bluetooth headset, and none of the drivers were able to dispense with their phones.  Although Vlogger Cao Dao only experienced the life of a delivery driver for a only few days, she nonetheless understands the fear of being dominated by her phone. “Even while you are following directions on your phone to make your delivery, the system keeps reminding you that there are new orders from Meituan, and asking you to accept them on time. These voices mix together with the navigation voice, and if you are running late, some customers call and ask where you are. So you have to follow the navigation directions while accepting new orders and explaining to the customer why you are late.” Cao said, it made her feel that every minute was important, that she was being chased every day, so "I had to go faster and faster."
 
Electric Scooters
 
“We can never lose time on the road; that’s our only moment to gain back time,” an Ele.me driver told Renwu. Another Meituan driver said the only time a driver can really control is when they’re on the road. “Unless there's a traffic cop on your ass, saying ’don’t speed, don’t speed,’ all the drivers wish they could fly when there are too many orders," he said. And then he added, “even if we fly we still won’t make it on time.”  The only thing that can help them on this point is their electric scooter.
 
Before they start to work as drivers, they have to solve the scooter problem themselves. Usually, the delivery station has a long-term relationship with a third-party company that rents scooters to drivers. In order to cut down on costs, most the drivers will choose to rent a vehicle for a few hundred RMB, but the condition of many of the scooters is often beyond belief:  some do not have a rearview mirror, some of the pedals and the front panel of the scooter are wrapped in seven or eight layers of duct tape…One driver said that after he started delivering food, he became an “ace scooter repairman”.
 
If they don't want to rent a bike, some sites will also direct drivers to buy one on an installment plan.  A Meituan driver in Chengdu was asked by his station to buy an electric scooter of an unknown brand for 1,000 RMB above market price. Another driver said that the battery of his scooter , which he bought through the station for several thousand RMB, gave out after only two days.  Compared to his colleagues who spent too much unproductive money, Meituan driver Wang Fugui considers himself lucky. All that happened to him was that, on his first day, delivering, both he and the battery flew off the scooter, and his head got stuck in a guard rail in the median.  The scooter, which he had rented through the station for 200 RMB a month, was “basically a bunch of bits and pieces put together” with no headlights and worn brake pads.  The scooter sometimes kept moving forward when he pressed the brakes, and went backwards when he accelerated.
 
But none of this was a problem. The day after the crash, he spent 10 RMB to install his own foot brake. On night deliveries, he would hold a small flashlight in his mouth or glue it to the front of the scooter with tape to use as a headlight. After all, the scooter also had its advantages, "It is extremely fast, and can go up to 65 kilometers an hour." Wang Fugui said.
 
According to data released by the Ministry of Public Security in 2018, there were 56,200 traffic accidents involving electric scooters in China between 2013 and 2017, resulting in 8,431 deaths and a direct property loss of 111 million RMB. In order to further regulate the use of electric scooters, China officially implemented a new national standard for the vehicles in April of 2019. According to the new regulations, the top speed for scooters cannot exceed 25 km per hour, and an electric scooter that meets the new national standard must be sold for at least 1,000 RMB.  But none of the scooters of the almost 30 Meituan or Ele.me drivers Renwu contacted during their research met the new national standard, and their scooter typically maxed out at around 40 kilometers per hour, well above the new speed limit. In drivers' WeChat groups and Tieba exchange platforms, there were also a lot of people exchanging ideas about how the new scooters could be modified to increase their speed.
 
After delivering for more than a year, Wang Fugui’s broken-down scooter went on strike more and more often, and he wound up having to take a taxi to make his deliveries—fortunately, he is located in a small county town in the Northwest.  Instead of driving his constantly broken-down scooter and being late every time, taking a taxi is more affordable, easily delivering a dozen orders for 50 RMB.  Later, in order to save time, he bit the bullet and purchased a scooter with his own money. The old scooter became many parts that went into any number of scooters for rent.
 
Regardless of which scooter he was driving, Wang Fugui’s performance is always ranked in the region's top five or even the top three. But after awhile, he quit because he was couldn’t stand the platform's demands for new customers, “In order to grow the business, Meituan asked us to go out in the street and find new customers. Every day, we had to ask two people who had never used the Meituan app to sign up. I put up with it for a few days, but then I couldn't stand it anymore and quit."
 
“Say Cheese”
 
After "delivery drivers have become the most high-risk job" became a hot topic, the system also made an effort to improve things.  In the early days of the establishment of the platform, both Meituan and Ele.me had safety training courses for drivers, but most of them were focused on the entry stage. Both the specialized and crowd-sourced drivers needed to go through a simple safety knowledge test before they could start delivering.  For specialized delivery drivers, station-masters also often reminded them of safety issues. A Meituan station-master told Renwu that every time he conducted a safety training class, he would show a video he made himself, full of highlights of scooter accidents, and would have his more than 300 drivers crowd around to watch. After watching, he would also give a long talk, saying “I know you are in a hurry, and going against traffic is inevitable, but please look at the road." An Ele.me Station-master said the same thing:, "I tell them over and over, but drivers still always put time considerations first. Sometimes they do not take care of themselves, because they are still afraid of being late.”
 
Later, as the rate of traffic incidents continued to rise, in order to further enhance the safety awareness of drivers, the delivery platform also came up with further measures, such as inviting the traffic police to give lectures at the station, or organizing the drivers to take examinations given by the traffic police. The drivers also have a hat with yellow kangaroo ears that they wear over their helmet, and the ears have rhyming slogans on them.  One is  “Safety first, no matter how busy! 送餐再忙，安全不忘” and the other is "Meituan delivers everything fast 美团外卖，送啥都快." But in reality, most of the drivers don’t want to wear the ears, because "it’s a pain." One driver told Renwu that “If I go fast, the ears blow off.”
 
For safety’s sake, a new feature has also been built into the system—a safety education video will pop up at random intervals after drivers go online.  "I kept delivering orders instead of watching the video, so the system limited my orders, and eventually I had to stop immediately to watch the video, or the system would not go back to normal." A Meituan driver in Hunan said he had to stop by the side of the road during rush hour to watch the pop-up safety education video. He was hit by a speeding scooter, sprained his ankle and was forced to take time off.
 
Most drivers are unhappy about living in fear of being late and watching videos on safety education while delivering food. But sometimes they are glad that the safety education video pops up on their phones instead of another "even more deadly surprise:”  Say Cheese!  Around June of 2017, Meituan launched “Say Cheese.”  This is a systematic spot check occurring in an irregular and random pattern. The selected driver has to stop immediately and take a picture showing his chest to the top of his head, ensuring that his face is clearly visible, and displaying his helmet, work uniform and the work tag——all of which needs to be completed in 5 minutes. If the photo is not uploaded in time, or the photo content does not meet specifications, the system may rule the test a failure. Drivers will face a 300-1000 RMB (46.50-155 US$) fine and may get banned for three days or even permanently.
 
Since the launch of Say Cheese, it has become a mystery lodged in the heart of Meituan drivers.  Each Meituan driver has a different memory of when it appeared:  while climbing the stairs, waiting for the elevator, waiting for a meal, dealing with a bunch of orders...A Dou’s most unforgettable Say Cheese experience occurred during a heavy rain when orders were exploding. That day, he was wearing a raincoat and could not really see the road clearly, but he still had to park the scooter on the side of the road, take off the raincoat, expose the work tag and clothes, and take the picture. Another driver at the same station was fined 400 RMB because he didn’t hear the Say Cheese warning tone of because he kept his phone in his pocket.
 
Also on a rainy day, in February, a driver with cerebral palsy in Nanchang, Jiangxi, had his account suspended because he failed to take photos. But the video of the incident attracted wide attention on Tik Tok, and after receiving feedback from numerous netizens, Meituan officials quickly reactivated his account.
 
But not every driver gets such special treatment.  In the Meituan drivers’ WeChat group and Tieba board, drivers come back to the same topic every day——their photo clearly met the requirements, but it was ruled a failure. They appealed to customer service to be told that the file could not be unsealed due to system reasons. “Our voice never gets to the top level,” complained one driver.  At the same time, some photos that didn't meet the requirements were approved. A driver in Shenzhen revealed that he used his wife's account to log in to keep delivering after being banned, but his photos were still approved by Say Cheese. Other drivers have saved a selfie of someone else in advance, which also worked.
 
After the epidemic, wearing a face mask has also become a Say Cheese test item. A driver from Hubei province said that his mask got wet in the rain and he had no time to change it. He failed to pass the test and his account was suspended. Another driver from Guangdong, who took a picture with his hand over his mouth, made it through.  Last winter, in Hailaer, Inner Mongolia, a Meituan driver was selected for Say Cheese while on a delivery run. The temperature was minus 30 C, but all he could was park on the side of the road, and take off all his winter clothing, revealing his Meituan uniforms and helmet, take the pictures and upload them within 5 minutes—drivers who talked to Renwu, said Say Cheese is “terrible,” “unfeeling,” “a waste of time".
 
Ele.me runs a similar test called “Blue Storm”, but it gives drivers 15 minutes and imposes a relatively small fine, mostly between 5 and 30 RMB (.77 and 4.65 US$); no Ele.me drivers complained about the test when Renwu surveyed them in 2019.  However, this didn’t last long, the newest information is that in an effort to catch up with Meituan, the detection time for the Ele.me “Blue Storm” test has been cut from 15 minutes to 5 minutes this year, according to one driver.
 
Five-Star Review
 
As delivery drivers' traffic violations and accident rates have increased, the traffic police have gone from being outsiders to being connected to the system.  Xiong Chongjun is a traffic police officer in Shenzhen. He has been the on-location host of on-line traffic programs for nearly 10 years. He became a web celebrity as a traffic police officer, known as “Shenzhen Police Officer Xiong”, because many of his law enforcement videos became popular on the Internet. Last summer, after punishing two Meituan drivers who drove the wrong way by having them write a self-criticism and read it aloud, Officer Xiong created a viral hashtag #your delivery driver may be late because he is doing a self-criticism, with one netizen commenting, “Officer Xiong is too gentle and the punishment is too light."
 
In fact, in the past two years, traffic authorities across the country have introduced various traffic punishment policies targeting delivery drivers.  In Pudong, Shanghai, delivery drivers are required by the traffic police to wear electronic vests with personal identification numbers on them, together with a “traffic civilization scorecard”, which starts with 36 points. The traffic police and the surveillance cameras enforce the law at the same time. Drivers will lose 12 points for not wearing a vest, 12 points for driving an unregistered scooter, 6 points for running a red light, 3 points for going against the traffic, 3 points for driving in the motorized vehicles lane, and 3 points for driving on the sidewalk... After losing all 36 points, drivers will face a permanent ban or dismissal from the company; Shanghai's Pudong district was also the first in China to implement the policy.
 
Xingtai, in Hebei, Shenzhen, in Guangdong as well as other places have also imitated Shanghai and introduced the traffic civilization scorecard system. Qingdao has a blacklist system of drivers who violate legal rules. In Jiangsu, drivers will be suspended for one day if they violate traffic rules, and Nanjing traffic authorities will also impose a day of study on drivers who have violated traffic rules twice.  But these measures have had little effect under the enormous threat of being late.
 
In December 2019 and May 2020, the Renwu team went to Shanghai's Lujiazui area in Pudong to observe the electronic vests worn by delivery drivers. Based on the number of drivers travelling on Century Avenue in the space of one hour, the percentage of cyclists wearing electronic vests in the area reached more than 70 percent during the day due to the heavy traffic police presence. However, despite wearing a vest, some drivers still chose to violate the rules.  This is the result of the drivers’ “careful calculations.” During the day, there are many traffic police, and if drivers don't wear vests, they can easily be caught. One deduction for not wearing vests is 12 points, but if they are photographed in violation of regulations while wearing vests, “running a red light or driving against the traffic doesn’t cost much.” At night, however, the proportion of drivers wearing vests drops dramatically, for the simple reason that “the traffic police are off duty.”
 
As law enforcers, many traffic police officers, including Officer Xiong, have mixed feelings. They are the ones who have witnessed the most traffic violations committed by delivery drivers, but sometimes they also really understand the drivers' situation.  Officer Xiong tells Renwu that he has often been at the scene of delivery drivers' accidents, when they flip their scooters, crash into cars or people, and get hurt. He observed that all the drivers' first instinct after a fall was to get up, check on the food, and then call the customer to explain, "They don’t care about themselves."  This made him more understanding of the drivers' difficulties. Officer Xiong said that he often talked to the delivery drivers and found that the group had a simple mindset, thinking only of not being late and avoiding negative customer reviews, and not taking themselves too seriously. “Their personal safety is never their priority, which is instead to deliver the food to the customers on time," Officer Xiong said.
 
As a front-line traffic police officer, Officer Xiong believes that the fierce competition between food delivery platforms is the cause of all this, which also exposes the problem of insufficient non-motorized traffic lanes in many cities. “Competition between companies has led to shorter delivery times, and drivers are increasingly anxious. They have to choose between being late and breaking the law.”  For this reason, when drivers break the rules, some traffic police will also show understanding even while enforcing the law. On the day when he made the drivers write a self-criticism, Officer Xiong urged them to do it under the shade of a tree. Many traffic police also wind up helping the drivers deliver food.
 
There are numerous similar incidents in public news reports.  On March 25, 2020, a driver in Tongxiang, Zhejiang, was stopped by traffic police for going against the traffic and was required to stand at the intersection and listen to a lecture on proper traffic behavior. He told the traffic police that he had just accepted an order on his phone and had not picked up the food at the restaurant. If he did not pick it up, he would be fined. Finally, the police officer sent an auxiliary policeman to use the driver’s scooter to deliver the food, and on the way, the scooter died times, and when the policemen finally arrived at the door to the customer’s building, he found that the food had spilled out of the bag.  Happily, this is not a frequent occurrence, and most traffic police successfully complete the task of delivering the food.
 
On April 16, a Meituan delivery driver in a hurry to make his deliveries in Nanchang, Jiangxi province, was stopped by the traffic police for committing three violations one after the other. In early June, an Ele.me driver was arrested for illegally driving a motorcycle in Wenzhou, Zhejiang province. On June 29, traffic police in Dongguan, Guangdong province, found a Meituan driver's motorcycle without a license plate, and immediately seized the motorcycle on the spot.  The police delivered all of these drivers’ orders.  When they complete the delivery, almost all the police officers will do the same thing:  wish the customer a good meal and ask for a 5-star review. 
 
The Final Protection
 
Shi Chen is unique among all the delivery drivers interviewed by Renwu for this survey. Because he "would rather lose my money than risk my life", he insists that in more than a year of driving, he has never run a red light or driven against traffic, and he wears his uniform and helmet every day.  But he nonetheless had an accident. One night in July of 2019, he was run into by a minibus while delivering food, breaking his right ankle, and the traffic police assigned full responsibility to the minibus driver, which meant that the minibus owner paid for all of Shi’s the medical expenses, including an operation.
 
As a specialized delivery driver, the site deducts an insurance premium of 106 RMB (16.43 US$)from Shi Chen's salary every month, which includes accident insurance. Under normal circumstances, Shi Chen should receive compensation from this policy, but when he contacted the station after leaving the hospital, he found that his driver account had been deleted.  By way of explanation, the site explained that Shi had been unable to work for a long time because of his surgery and hospital stay, and when his absences reached a certain point, the system deleted him, along with the information about his insurance.    Without these records, he couldn't locate the insurance company to settle his claim. In order to retrieve the record, he tried to communicate with Meituan through the station, but wound up getting kicked out of the station group.
 
Shi Chen's experience is not unique among drivers.  Insurance is the last and only form of protection available to drivers in the system, but Renwu's investigation found that a large number of drivers failed to get their claims paid after having had accidents.  According to the platform design, insurance for specialized drivers will be deducted by the site on a monthly basis, with the specific amount to be determined by the station. For crowdsourced drivers, insurance premiums are deducted day by day, at a price of 3 RMB (.47 US$) per day, and the insurance period begins from the moment the driver accepts his first order and extends through midnight of the same day. If the driver is still delivering food at this hour, the insurance period can be extended by up to one and a half hours.
 
Zheng Guanghuai, a sociologist, believes that this kind of labor security system is actually a clever transfer of responsibility by the food delivery platform.  In an interview with Interface during the Labor Day holiday this year, Zheng Guanghuai described the delivery platform as a bunch of “empty suits:” “The platform outsources the delivery business to an outside company, removing any direct employment relationship with the worker. The worker purchases accident insurance, so when the worker has an accident the platform sends him to the insurance company .” In this “buck passing”, Zheng said, “vague labor relations also make it more difficult for workers to safeguard their rights.”
 
Sun Ping also found in her survey that in case of minor accidents, most drivers would just grin and bear it. “A lot of them told me that the application process was so complicated and cumbersome that they would rather just take their lumps and let it go.”  But once the accident goes beyond “a few scrapes and bruises,” the story of Shi Chen will repeat itself.
 
One crowd-sourced Ele.me driver told Renwu that he had an accident in which he ran into a pedestrian, who then had to go to the hospital. His insurance company dragged its feet for a year, and he finally took out an online loan to pay for the medical bills.  When a driver in Suqian was just starting to work for Meituan, he was asked by the stationmaster to sign a “voluntary waiver of insurance contract guarantee”. He felt uneasy, and the stationmaster told him: being a driver is very risky, and every day may be your last. No one here will dare insure you.  Nor is this situation unique. Jin Zhuangzhuang, who used to be a Meituan station-master, said that insurance for crowd-sourced riders is paid directly through the app, which is required, while the insurance for dedicated riders is paid by the site.  “Many stations do not provide insurance for drivers because it’s a hassle.”
 
Pedestrians injured by delivery drivers are among those whose rights are not guaranteed.  In April of last year, a Meituan driver ran into Lin Wei on his way home, and his left leg was fractured. It was the driver's first day at work. The station manager said that they had not had time to purchase insurance, and that the incident had nothing to do with the station. “We only ask drivers to deliver food, not run into people,” the station manager said.  After several exchanges  between Lin and the station, the station came up with the solution that they would help persuade the driver to pay the medical fees on installment.
 
In the end, the matter was settled by a personal “relationship.”  Leaders at Lin Wei's company knew someone high up at Meituan, and under pressure from the senior officials, the station eventually agreed to pay the medical bills.  "The delivery drivers have helped Meituan generate orders and market value, but Meituan, a company that relies on the delivery business, will not provide any delivery driver with formal employment contracts," wrote a netizen under a post on a social media platform about the protection of Meituan drivers’ rights.
 
A year after the accident, Shi Chen's driver account has not been restored, and he has not been able to collect compensation from his accident insurance. “I decided to leave this industry and not come back,” he told Renwu. But those who are still fighting against time can only utter a silent prayer. Wei Lai, a Meituan driver who once witnessed his fellow driver die on the spot at an intersection, wrote in his online diary that "My only hope is that all the drivers can get home safely."
 
The Infinite Game
 
When she posted her video of her experience as a delivery driver, Vlogger Cao Dao was driving around China to shoot a new project. On her way to an uninhabited part of Tibet, she confessed to Renwu that she still felt suffocated from her days as a driver.  Cao suggested that all the product managers and algorithm engineers of the delivery platform should work as drivers for a month, a short-term experience that would let them feel what the system is like. “Only in this way can they know how severely the system oppresses people.”  In response to a report on how the Meituan system has cut delivery time to 28 minutes, one driver offered the same suggestion: “Why don't you come to the front line for a couple of days? See if you can make your deliveries within 28 minutes without running red lights, going against traffic, or speeding.”
 
To some extent, this advice echoes that of Nick Seaver, an anthropologist at Tufts University.  Sever has proposed the concept of “algorithmic culture.”  In his view, “algorithms are shaped not only by rational processes, but also by institutions, humans, crosscutting environments, and rough-and-ready understandings acquired in ordinary cultural life.” He argues that algorithms are “made up of the collective practice of human beings" and suggests that researchers should explore them anthropologically.  As a scholar, Sun Ping fully agrees with Sever's point of view, but insists that algorithms in the real world are still based more on numerical logic.
 
“It is important to strengthen the training and value-orientation of the programmers. However, the current situation in China is that most of the these programmers employ linear thinking drawn from science and engineering, and few pay attention to social science. Therefore, they are deficient in the concepts of fairness and value.”  In the process of her research, Sun Ping also communicated with some programmers who helped to construct algorithms. She found that programmers have their own logic, and tried to account for various emergencies, but they are just practitioners, not the rule-makers, “The rule-makers are the delivery platforms, and the programmers are only carrying out the platform’s decisions."
 
Renwu also made several attempts to contact the algorithm team at the food delivery platform during this investigation, but they all refused to discuss the system, citing “company rules.” “This is a trade secret,” a Meituan algorithm engineer said.  Sun Ping said that “unidirectional power” is the biggest problem with the current algorithm. The most confusing part of the system is that among those pushing to make the drivers go faster and faster are the drivers themselves.
 
This is a bigger and more invisible game.  “Whenever a driver delivers an order, that data goes into the platforms cloud data, becoming part of big data.” Sun Ping observes that the system requires the driver to deliver faster and faster, and the drivers, facing punishment for being late, will try their best to meet the requirements of the system. “Drivers work faster and faster, helping the system to cut time. Data is the basis of the algorithm, and constantly trains it . When the algorithm finds everyone is working faster and faster, it will speed up too.”
 
In Sun's view, there are questions about the ownership of the data generated by the drivers, but they are still running hard. In the first half of 2020, drivers in 2,800 counties and urban areas across the country "delivered food, vegetables, medicine and other daily necessities to more than 400 million users, day and night, despite the epidemic," according to Meituan's latest data.  After the news broke that the market value of Meituan exceeded $200 billion, amid all of the applause, someone once again mentioned Wang Xing’s love of speed, and the book that he mentioned as having been a “huge influence on him”--Finite and Infinite Game. In this book, James Carse, a professor of religious history at New York University, divided games throughout the world into two types: “finite” and “infinite” games:  the goal of the former is to win, while that of the latter is to make the game go on forever.
 
The system is still churning away, the game still continues, but drivers know little about their identities in this “infinite game”. They are still running for the possibility of a better life.
 
 (At the request of the interviewees, the drivers’ names in this article are all pseudonyms).
 
Notes

[1] “外卖骑手，困在系统里,” written by Lao Youxuan 赖祐萱, edited by Shi Jin 金石, published in 《人物》 on September 8, 2020, available online here.
 
[2] Ele.me, a transliteration of 饿了么? meaning “Are you hungry?”and is pronounced “eh-le-ma.”  The company, founded in 2008, is one of China's well-known online food delivery platforms, available in hundreds of Chinese cities in China, with tens of millions of users.

[3] Meituan 美团is China's largest food delivery platform.

[4] Baidu Tieba is an online communication platform for people to exchange opinions on topics of common interest.

[5] A self-deprecating way of saying that he will be like a lowly dog if he does not deliver the food on time.

[6] Weibo, a wide-used media platform in China, provide its users with instant information sharing, communication, and interaction.

[7] 36Kr was founded in December 2010, starting out as a technology venture capital media company. 36Kr solves the problems of "exposure difficulty, office difficulty and financing difficulty" for small, micro and technological innovation enterprises, and provides services including media exposure, office space and related supporting services, financing, etc.

[8] A British animated preschool television series which has become popular around the world, including in China.

[9] Interface(界面) is a financial and business news media project established by the Shanghai Press Group in September 2014.