By Xixi Jiang
They are easy to spot in their bright yellow or blue heavy-duty jackets; they deftly weave through rush hour traffic on their quiet electric bikes; they are an indispensable part of Chinese urban life today. They are food delivery riders, most likely working for one of China’s two biggest competing online food delivery service platforms, Meituan (美团外卖) and Ele.me (饿了么). This relatively new branch of the service sector has seen a tremendous expansion in market size over the past decade, from 21.68 billion yuan (3.31 billion USD) in 2011 to an estimated 664.62 billion yuan (101 billion USD) in 2020.[1] Following the industry boom, there has also been an increase in attention devoted to the working conditions of delivery riders, who are the backbone of this lucrative business. In this essay, I will consider the public perception of food delivery workers, which range from friendly strangers to civilian heroes; these glorified images, produced consciously and unconsciously by corporations and consumers alike, have come to mask the dangerous conditions of their work and, more importantly, to supplant real benefits in wages and protection for the workers. The construction of public personas is certainly not the entire cause of their present predicament, but studying it may give way to larger investigations into the positive stigmatization of certain kinds of work, and call for more direct ways of being in solidarity with workers.