China’s Busy-Bee Economy One thing has puzzled me about China for a very long time: why doesn’t Beijing enforce its own labour laws? More than a decade ago, when I was running the Beijing Airport Logistics Zone, I frequently met with our tenants, mostly logistics companies employing thousands of relatively low-paid workers. Many were not providing benefits required by law. The unpaid benefits represented an enormous latent liability. If the government enforced the law and demanded years of delinquent social-insurance payments and other obligations, some companies could easily have been pushed into serious financial trouble, even bankruptcy. But everyone bit their lips and carried on. None of this was hidden. These were companies employing thousands of people. If Beijing wanted strict enforcement, it certainly had the administrative power to do it. Yet it didn’t. That was more than a decade ago. Today the same question exists on a vastly larger scale. China’s internet platforms now engage tens of millions of food-delivery riders, couriers, ride-hailing drivers and other workers. As the economy slows, these platforms are swallowing ever more surplus labour. And again I wonder: why are Beijing’s own employment laws not enforced? These are not small struggling businesses. Some are worth tens of billions of dollars. Surely they can afford greater worker protection. Beijing knows the problem exists. It has introduced rules on wages, algorithms and occupational injury. But it still doesn’t enforce the labour laws already on the books. Why? A new academic paper published in Population, Space and Place made me think about this differently. The researchers studied rural migrant food-delivery riders in Shanghai and asked why supposedly “flexible” workers end up working extremely long hours. Their answer is not simply that riders need money. Platforms build an algorithmic game around work, with workers constantly responding to performance scores, targets, incentives, changing prices and competition. The paper identifies three mechanisms: temporal fragmentation, where work is broken into endless small tasks and rewards; informational asymmetry, where the platform knows far more than the worker about demand and pricing; and hyper-individualisation, where risk and failure become the individual worker’s responsibility. The authors call the result “sticky labour.” You are supposedly free to work whenever you want, but once inside the system, it becomes remarkably difficult to stop. That reminded me of something I was once told in China about managing low-end workers. If you have nothing for them to do, tell them to move bricks from one end of the room to the other. When they finish, tell them to move them back. The point is not productivity. The point is to keep them occupied, because the belief was that if people at the bottom have nothing to do, sooner or later they will cause trouble. It was presented almost as management common sense. Reading this paper, I wondered whether something similar is now being deployed at national scale. Perhaps Beijing has discovered the political value of turning unemployed people into extraordinarily busy bees, even when their economic position barely improves. The platforms do solve one problem: they give people something to do. They do not necessarily solve the economic problem that put them there. And from Beijing’s perspective, perhaps that is exactly the point. China’s slowing economy is producing exactly the kind of surplus labour these platforms are exceptionally good at absorbing. Everybody keeps moving. Everybody stays occupied. And the political problem of large numbers of idle people becomes easier to manage. This may also explain what puzzled me all those years ago at Beijing Airport. Perhaps weak labour-law enforcement was never simply administrative failure. China has simply found a technologically sophisticated way of moving bricks from one end of the room to the other.