China Follows U.S. Into Gig-Job Decay
Reuters reports:
The China New Employment Forms Research Center, a think tank [in Beijing], estimates the number of people in flexible employment – without a permanent full-time contract – rising to 320 million this year from 280 million in 2025, about 44% of China’s workforce.
China’s gig economy has become a crucial employment buffer as the property crisis wipes out construction jobs and manufacturers shed workers through automation and overcapacity. Increasingly, it hires educated youth and white-collar workers.
Yang Zhan, a cultural anthropology expert at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, said, “It’s no longer limited to rural migrants and has spread to the middle class and university graduates. Many industries that used to absorb large numbers of workers are being phased out.”
China’s unemployment rate has hovered around 5%-6% for a decade. Gig work has helped keep those numbers in check because anyone working even one hour a week is considered employed. (Reuters, July 6, 2026)
Chinese capitalism has run into the same contradiction that hit U.S. capitalism fifty years ago. After completing basic industrialization, capitalist accumulation no longer generates large numbers of jobs. The nationwide growth nicknamed “Detroit” in the early twentieth century collapses, replaced by elite prosperity in a few “Silicon Valley” cities now. Capitalism enters its final phase. This happens because of a change in how the productive forces develop, which in turn breaks the connection between investment and the need for labor power. Oh, there are new jobs – junk jobs at low wages with no path to a better life.
Shallow “left” publicists for Chinese capitalism rush to do damage control. For example, one Immanuel Ness tells us, “Market socialism is transforming China from a rural to an urban economy, posing significant challenges to China’s trade union federation (ACFTU). The labor federation has skilfully reshaped its organizing strategies to respond to workers’ new material realities.” (Publisher’s blurb for a book by Ness)
Ha! “Market socialism” is capitalism wearing a red coat. Corporations are still run for profits, only redistributing some of them after the fact. The history of market socialism from Yugoslavia after World War Two to the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain is a history of dividing the employees into a few bosses and ranks of exploited workers. As for China’s labor federation, it jumps into action…whenever workers wildcat on their own. Then the ACFTU and the police show up and do a typical good cop-bad cop routine to suppress the strike. (The Chinese constitution had guaranteed the freedom to strike (1975, article 28), but this clause was removed in 1982.)
Capitalism descends into barbarism all over the world. The way out is to overthrow it, then rebuild the economy and society for the prosperity and security of all. This is the socialist-communist path.