Why a PKU Professor's Remarks Enraged the Chinese Internet

A controversy over gig workers reveals China's Polanyi-style countermovement

Recently, an interview with Professor Zhang Dandan, Deputy Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, has sparked heated debate in China’s public opinion sphere.

Some background: Professor Zhang is an economist focusing on the labour economy. In a talk show, when asked what social security gig workers have, she said (to avoid ambiguity, I am quoting her original words here):

Let us explore this further. It is generally believed that those of us in formal employment tend to think that people in informal employment or gig work have no security. But from the perspective of labour economics, their flexibility is itself a form of welfare. They are flexible, unlike those of us working nine to five. You go to work every day, and your social security benefits are very good. You may have the state’s five insurances and one housing fund and so on, but you sacrificed your freedom in exchange for that social security. So when it comes to flexible employment, it is meant to be flexible. What they want is freedom; what they want is to maximise the part of their lives they manage themselves, but at the same time their social security will certainly be relatively weak. You manage yourself, so why should there be an employer to pay your social security, or why should the state or the government pay so much for you? On the other hand, regular workers have already handed over their time and freedom, so the government or the employer must guarantee certain benefits for them. So I think we should not imagine flexible employment as having nothing at all.

This kind of statement quickly stirred up an uproar on the Chinese internet. The well-known media figure Hu Xijin胡锡进 said her brain had “short-circuited.” Most other criticisms accused her of being out of touch and saying things like “ Let them eat cake.”I haven't seen much defended her point.

Frankely speaking, I do not want to criticise her too much. I’ve translated some of her pieces into English. Also, as a longtime reader of hers, I know that Professor Zhang has worked deeply in the field of labour economics for years; she conducted a lot of research on China’s gig economy, repeatedly calling for stronger labour protections for these flexible workers, and even proposing that the beneficiaries of AI and the government should jointly bear responsibility for the livelihoods of workers affected. She is certainly not among the “cold-hearted elites” that many people imagine her to be.

At the same time, however, I simply do not agree with her opinion this time. I believe social security and freedom should not be understood as an either-or choice.

In her remarks, regular workers trade their time, freedom, and organisational obedience for social security, healthcare, and pensions, while flexible workers gain greater autonomy and must therefore accept relatively weak social security. The problem, as she said later in the program, is that most simply don’t have sufficient alternatives at the very beginning.

For different kinds of gig workers, flexibility can’t be understood as equal. For those at the top of the pyramid. They can compare different jobs and are therefore willing to trade some income and security for autonomy over their time. But for most gig workers, so-called flexible employment often means flexibility they are forced to accept. They lack stable job opportunities and can sustain their income only by taking orders and part-time work, becoming involuntary recipients of transferred risk.

I previously translated a podcast episode featuring Sun Zhongwei, Deputy Dean of the School of Politics and Public Administration at South China Normal University, who has long studied the transformation of Chinese manufacturing. Over the past decade, Chinese manufacturing has undergone large-scale automation upgrades, but automation did not immediately bring about mass layoffs. One reason is that many factories gradually reduced their workforce through natural attrition, halted new hiring, and reassigned workers internally. Another important factor is that many workers who left the factories didn't just leave the workforce; they moved into courier services, food delivery, ride-hailing, catering, and other service industries.

For many, this was essentially a shift from one kind of low-wage, high-intensity, highly repetitive manufacturing job to another kind of service job that is relatively free but equally insecure. Leaving the factory does not mean regaining autonomy. Platform dispatching, rating, and reward mechanisms assign more orders to riders who log on consistently. Ride-hailing platforms also frequently set completing a certain number of orders as the threshold for rewards. At best, this is nothing more than the freedom to arrange one’s time in a purely formal sense.

Another interesting finding in research by Sun Zhongwei and his collaborators is that migrant workers without local household registration, who have long been mobile, are often less worried about being replaced by automation than local workers. This is because they were already accustomed to high mobility and instability, and many of them did not have many existing benefits to lose in the first place. In their view, if one job disappears, the worst case is simply finding the next one. In a sense, this shows that not worrying about losing a job does not necessarily mean a person is freer. It may also mean that the person has long had little left to lose. I believe a healthy society should not describe forced flexibility as welfare, but should instead fill this protection gap and bring gig workers into the social security network. Only then is there a chance of achieving genuinely decent work.

Of course, if we step outside this debate, Professor Zhang’s remarks provoked such a strong reaction because of where Chinese society stands today.

In periods of sustained economic growth, flexible employment is more easily understood as opportunity. In 1998, Liu Huan wrote the song “Start Over from the Beginning.”从头再来 became popular under the social backdrop of the Asian financial crisis and state enterprises' layoffs. Many had lost their jobs, but everyone believed there were still plenty of opportunities, and even if you lost your job, you could start over. In that environment, expectations of growth easily obscured social security's inadequacy.

But many young people today face fiercer competition and increasingly uncertain career prospects, driven by AI. So when people hear that freedom and social security can only be an either-or choice, what many of them actually hear is this: the risk you bear is the result of your own personal choices. This also explains why so many workers react with such strong revulsion to statements like this.

On a higher level, I believe this is part of a Polanyi-style transformation that China is undergoing. What Polanyi called the “countermovement” refers to the phenomenon in which, as the market continuously expands and pulls ever more spheres of life into competition and exchange, society generates a force demanding its own protection, attempting to re-embed the economy within social relations. In China, however, this countermovement is led less by society itself than by the state: the protective force more often manifests as government-led macroeconomic regulation, industrial policy, antitrust measures, curbs on the disorderly expansion of capital, and the building of social security, all of which attempt to re-embed economic activity within society and political objectives.(no doubt that they need to pour more resources into areas like constructing social security for gig workers)

The past fourty-plus years of reform have essentially been a process of continuous market expansion. The market unleashed enormous efficiency and created unprecedented wealth and opportunities for social mobility. At the same time, however, it rapidly eroded part of the protective functions previously carried by state-owned enterprises and the work-unit system. The market wants workers to be more mobile and flexible, yet it tends to shift the risks that come with this flexibility onto individuals as much as possible.

After entering the 2010s, as China completed industrialisation and gradually bid farewell to the “economy of scarcity,” the mobility brought by marketisation began to replace the stability of the work-unit system, but no new form of protection matching it was provided in time. Workers are asked to bear nearly all the risk, yet in the course of their work they are subject to management and control resembling that of employees. They have lost the stability of the work-unit system, yet they have not truly gained the corresponding professional autonomy.

It is precisely in this sense that the series of social currents that gradually emerged after 2018, including growing attention to labour rights, reflection on 996（Working from 9 am to 9 pm, six days a week.） and excessive involution, young people attempting to withdraw from competition, and society’s pursuit of stable positions in state-owned enterprises and the civil service, can all be understood as expressions of a demand for social protection. Or, to put it in terms of my favourite first law of political science: where there is oppression, there is resistance.

These phenomena do not mean that market reforms should be rejected, or that we should return to the planned economy. Rather, they show that more and more people are beginning to refuse to bear alone all the risks the market creates. What they truly demand is not a choice between freedom and security, but a social security system that matches modern forms of labour while preserving mobility and room for choice. Workers should be able to switch platforms, switch careers, or even temporarily stop working, without losing healthcare, pensions, and basic livelihood protection because of a single spell of unemployment. This is not a backlash against marketisation, but more like countermovement in which society demands that the market accept public constraints, and Professor Zhang’s remarks unfortunately landed squarely on a raw nerve in Chinese society.