Research: 53M+ people in China worked as food delivery or ridesharing drivers as of 2025, up 10M in two years, amid accelerating automation in manufacturing

As construction slumps and manufacturing automates, 53mn Chinese now work for low wages in food delivery and ride-hailing.

Financial Times 2026-08-13

Context & Ripple Effects

China’s delivery market had already expanded sharply by 2023, with Meituan and Ele.me employing more than 10 million gig workers combined in the earlier food-delivery market expansion. The reported 53 million food-delivery and ride-hailing workers show that app-based driving has become a far broader destination for labor as construction weakens and manufacturing automates.

The workforce increase also arrives after couriers had reported algorithmic pressure to work faster and developed informal collective responses, documented in couriers’ resistance to platform management. The sector is therefore absorbing more workers into a labor model already associated with low pay and intensive operational control.

First-order effects

Food-delivery and ride-hailing work is absorbing a larger share of Chinese workers displaced from weakening construction and increasingly automated manufacturing, while keeping wages low.
The enlarged driver base increases the number of workers exposed to the pace-setting algorithms and work conditions previously reported among delivery platforms.

Second-order effects

Meituan, Ele.me and ride-hailing platforms gain access to a deeper pool of drivers, intensifying competition for trips and deliveries rather than creating a scarcity-driven labor market.
Autonomous-vehicle deployment in transport and ride-hailing now bears on a larger workforce: the sector’s shift toward autonomous vehicles directly threatens the jobs into which displaced workers are moving.

Third-order effects

China’s labor transition is increasingly moving workers from construction and manufacturing into app-mediated transport and delivery, even as automation begins to reach that fallback sector.
If autonomous permits continue to expand, as seen in robotaxi and robobus testing, job-loss and safety concerns will be tied not only to factory automation but also to the viability of gig driving as a mass employment buffer.

The trend: China’s automation transition is pushing workers into platform driving while automation advances toward the transport jobs absorbing them.

Discussion

@kanthan2030 S.L. Kanthan on x
There's no economic paradise. In China, 320 million workers are stuck in gig, temp, freelance jobs — euphemistically called “flexible employment.” Of that, 53+ million are drivers for food delivery or ridesharing. If they work 10-12 hours a day, they make $1000 a month — before […
@kennedycsis Scott Kennedy on x
The biggest challenge to China's current growth model may not be debt or foreign governments, but a populace that has increasing difficulty making ends meet. https://www.ft.com/...
@davidheniguk David Henig on x
In the last few hours I've read more or less the same article about China, Morocco and the US. Same for UK. ‘Traditional’ jobs are declining in number, slack taken up by a gig economy often largely ignored by politicians and thinkers as somehow unnatural. https://www.ft.com/...
@producercities Jim Russell on x
China's great jobs squeeze: Another driver, in Shanghai, adds that before the Covid-19 pandemic, it was “people waiting for cars ...now it's cars waiting for people” https://www.ft.com/... [image]
Jonathan Eley Jonathan Eley on linkedin
Staggering factoid in this Thomas Hale and William Langley big read on China's labour market: 53mn Chinese - roughly equivalent to Myanmar's entire population …
Paul Cavey Paul Cavey on linkedin
It was fun to talk to Thomas Hale about China's labour market....even if my contribution was basically that the data are so poor in quality …
Ian Brinkley Ian Brinkley on linkedin
China and the gig economy — There is an interesting article in the FT this morning about the growth of the “gig economy” in China (https://lnkd.in/e3vmCavF). …
@frankpasquale Frank Pasquale on bluesky
“The anecdotal evidence suggests that gig worker incomes are trending towards subsistence levels, given the competition.” — www.ft.com/content/a380...

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