I keep thinking about the phrase “new employment groups.” That is what Beijing calls them now. Delivery riders, livestreamers, ride-hail drivers. People who work through apps but not exactly for anyone. The Central Committee and the State Council issued a comprehensive policy framework in late April, and the target is to standardize labor practices by 2027. Standardized contracts. Fair pay. Stronger protections. It sounds like the kind of language that gets drafted in conference rooms and then sits in filing cabinets.
But something else happened first. In February, JD announced it would start paying social insurance for its delivery riders. Meituan followed. Ele.me said it had been running pilot programs since 2023. By December 2025, Meituan’s pension subsidy had reached riders in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, even remote places like Inner Mongolia. A rider in Guangzhou named Pang Huihong, who had been delivering for seven years, told reporters she finally felt like this was a job she could plan around. “I want to work until I have paid into the system for fifteen years,” she said. The platform covers half the premium. The government guides. The worker opts in. It is a strange three-way handshake, and it took years to figure out how to do it.
The math is exhausting if you look at it too long. Meituan has something like a million riders. Industry estimates put the annual social insurance cost at around 7.7 billion yuan if every rider were fully covered. Meituan’s own projections are lower, maybe 2 billion yuan in new costs for 2025. That is still real money. The company also eliminated late-delivery penalties and rolled out fatigue-prevention algorithms that force riders offline after too many hours. I do not know whether that is kindness or cost control. Probably both.
What strikes me is the timing. This is happening at the same moment that white-collar tech workers are being forced to leave the office. DJI locks its doors at 9 p.m. Midea requires departure by 6:20 p.m. Tencent’s gaming division has had mandatory early-leave rules since 2021. The 996 culture is not gone, but it is no longer the public face of Chinese ambition. Regulators are enforcing a 44-hour legal workweek that has been on the books for decades. The difference is that now they mean it.
There is a pattern here. Platform pricing rules released in December 2025 will take effect in April 2026. They ban big-data price discrimination and force disclosure of automatic renewal schemes. Livestream commerce regulations drafted in June 2025 target fake marketing and shoddy goods. Everywhere you look, the state is drawing lines. Not killing the platforms. Just fencing them in.
I watched a rider check his app outside a mall in Shenzhen last winter. He was staring at a map covered in colored zones, bonus multipliers, weather alerts. The app told him where to stand to get the next order. It told him how fast to ride. It docked his pay if he was late. Now the same app shows a pension contribution. A small green badge. I do not know if that changes anything about the loneliness of the job, or the rain, or the traffic. But it is something. The state and the platforms have spent five years arguing about who owes what to a worker who does not technically have an employer. They have settled on a compromise that looks like employment but is not quite. The rider still owns nothing. The platform still owns the route. The difference is that now there is a record.
Two hundred million people in China do flexible work of some kind. Eighty-four million are in platform jobs. Most of them will not see a pension for decades, if ever. The opt-in rates for these new schemes are still unclear. Some riders will take the cash instead. Some will switch platforms. Some will leave the industry before they qualify for anything. But the framework is there now. It has a deadline. 2027. That is the year by which labor practices are supposed to be broadly standardized. I wonder what standardized means when your office is a scooter and your boss is an algorithm.