Delivery riders’ plight and middle-class anxiety: who can save whom?
The suffering of this person shocks me, for it was unnecessary.
— Bertolt Brecht
Within these debates, two starkly opposing viewpoints have emerged. Proponents argue that the basic fact that director Xu Zheng chose to focus on the authentic lives of delivery riders, when he could have easily filmed any number of other subjects, is in itself commendable.
Critics, however, believe that the film is essentially a commodification of the suffering of the underclass. At its best, it is nothing more than a form of hypocritical, cheap sympathy. At its worst, by praising the diligence, resilience, optimism, and mutual support displayed by riders in the face of adversity, the film masks the true structural pressures they endure. For the audience, the more they lean back in their cinema seats, viewing these lives from a distance—lives they can effectively ‘shut out’—the more a private sense of security grows within them.
Compared to workers in traditional sectors such as coal mining, automotive, chemical, catering, or sanitation, the reason food delivery riders receive such widespread social attention today is not merely due to a cheap sympathy for the underclass, but stems from a more pervasive social psychology.
Under this spotlight, delivery riders have indeed been ‘seen’ in the film, but judging by the box office performance and reviews since its release, the audience hasn’t bought into it. The reason lies in the way the riders’ lives have been framed, leaving blind spots that cannot be overlooked.
I. The Middle Class Hiding in Their Shells
In a metropolis like Shanghai, many people are enclosed within such shells, enjoying a sense of security and privacy. While the shell allows one to block out the outside world, it cannot, in reality, exist independently of the social systems that sustain it.For instance, obtaining information via a smartphone requires telecommunications infrastructure; spending a peaceful afternoon in a café means enjoying coffee beans transported from afar and the service of a staff member. People still need to depend on one another to obtain the resources necessary for survival, yet people typically only perceive their own “consumption”, remaining blind to the arduous labour involved in the intermediary stages. Most café customers are likely unaware of the struggles of Ugandan coffee farmers, just as smartphone users may not know that certain minerals required for their devices are mined by enslaved Congolese child labourers. Consequently, consumers feel no guilt over the appalling working conditions of those outside their shell.
The British Marxist Raymond Williams described this state of existence as “mobile privatisations”, a condition that has been further intensified today by digital technology. From the outset, the film continuously presents images of a digitised society: the beep of scanning QR codes, commuters with heads bowed over their phones in the metro, algorithms assessing employee performance, mobile livestreams where people “talk to themselves” into their phones anywhere and everywhere, and university students who make a living playing online games with headphones on all day. Yet, these images do not evoke the once-popular utopian visions of a digital society. On the contrary, the overall tone they create is one of oppression, where society is in a state of high fluidity: information flows, people flow, goods flow, but the human condition becomes increasingly enclosed, lonely, and urgent.
Food delivery platforms emerged within such a fluid society; they set food in motion, allowing people to obtain meals simply by waiting at home. But this time, the presence of the delivery rider cannot be ignored. When they use their fluid physical bodies as conduits to transport food resources, their labour process becomes one of the most conspicuous parts of the urban daily experience.Those living in shells, especially the middle class, still hold an imagination of the city as glamorous, stable, and affluent, yet they are inevitably intruded upon by images of the rider’s panting after climbing the stairs, the silhouette racing down the road, and expressions of anxious helplessness.
Because it is impossible to avoid them, people always feel the need to say something about the existence of delivery riders to achieve a sense of cognitive balance. The film first addresses and responds to this general social psychology regarding riders, and only then to the riders themselves.Therefore, although approximately 60% of delivery riders come from rural areas, the film chooses a middle-class protagonist undergoing “proletarianisation” to tell the story of the riders.
Calling a high-earning programmer like Gao Zhilei “middle class” is not strictly accurate, as they do not own any means of production. Although the salaries of technicians and managers far exceed those of bottom-tier workers like delivery riders, making them appear to belong to different classes, both groups are essentially wage earners with no control over their own destinies. A P2P lending crash, a round of layoffs, or a serious illness can leave the shell Gao Zhilei relies upon precarious, unable to sustain its previous quality of life.
This is, therefore, the part of the film that seeks to resonate with the audience. Gao Zhilei’s plight may be a microcosm of the real-life experiences of many cinema-goers—facing total family pressure, even a graduate of a prestigious university cannot simply sit back and plan for the long term, but must instead search frantically for ways to make money, making the decision to become a delivery rider entirely rational.
II. What choice is there besides surviving?
Two main threads run through the film: one follows how Gao Zhilei and his family struggle to maintain their precarious middle-class life after he is laid off by the Big Tech firm; the other follows the suffering the delivery riders endure in their work and lives.
As these two threads converge towards the end, the values the film wishes to convey finally come to light. The suffering Gao Zhilei experiences and witnesses among the riders, and their optimistic, resilient attitudes in the face of that suffering, lead to a significant change in his family’s values: they are no longer bound by an externally imposed consumerist ideology, and they abandon the belief held for decades that social mobility can be achieved through individual effort. Facing a cruel social reality, they choose to discard the superficial to find the essence, rebuilding an understanding of a good life starting from the human being. Ultimately, Gao Zhilei’s family gives up the markers of the middle class—a larger house, better education, and a more prestigious lifestyle—to alleviate the pressures and anxieties of life.
The film attempts to express an imagination of an alternative life through the stories of delivery riders, but this results in the first narrative thread overshadowing the second. Indeed, the suffering of the riders teaches the middle class that life should be approached by “retreating to move forward”, but they do not consider what choices riders must make when they have nowhere left to retreat.
Following the logic of “everything for survival”, the film carefully selects and edits real-life rider stories, suggesting that surviving requires silent endurance. Da Hei, a bachelor, endures severe stomach pain every day, racing through heavy traffic in a life-or-death struggle to compensate a colleague disabled in a car accident he caused; Xiao Min, a single mother, has no choice but to take her son on her electric bike every night to deliver meals; Lao Kou, even after being knocked down by a car and bleeding from leg injuries, resolutely refuses to go to the hospital for dressing, instead saving the compensation money to pay for his son’s leukaemia surgery.
Initially, Gao Zhilei could not accept the logic that one “must endure everything just to survive”, and he attempted to resist. When stopped by a security guard, he insisted that as a consumer, he once had the freedom to enter and exit luxury shopping centres; when a customer insulted him to his face, he tried to fight back; after a customer cancelled an order due to a delay, he angrily smashed the flowers in his hand against the wall; when a customer casually handed him their rubbish, he responded with a contemptuous smile; and when delivering coffee to former colleagues, he chose to avoid them. However, the consequences of these actions were complaints, bad reviews, and fines.
Faced with the pressure of a 15,000-yuan monthly mortgage, Gao Zhilei eventually chose to compromise, just as everyone living in hardship does. Through this, the film’s protagonist enters a stage of personal growth. He decides to throw himself wholeheartedly into his delivery work, learning delivery techniques and the optimistic, resilient qualities of other riders. He also learns to enjoy the process of collaborating with merchants to complete deliveries—a sense of satisfaction that only comes when one truly integrates into a new job. This part of the film faithfully reproduces many details of the riders’ labour, capturing both the hardships and the moments of joy found within them. The work of a rider is grueling, yet they all have family and friends to support and look out for one another.
But the other side of this positive growth is accompanied by cold, ruthless discipline. It is one thing for a rider to exert labour to deliver a hot meal from a merchant to a residential building; it is quite another to be driven to overwork or suffer traffic accidents under the oppression of platform capital and algorithms. When Gao Zhilei faints on the roadside due to low blood sugar, he still forces himself up to verify the “Smile Project” for fear of being fined, yet he cannot bring himself to smile. To survive, you must endure, accept the conditioning, erode your own life, and even discard your human dignity. The film constantly attempts to find a balance between hardship and joy, and between the positive and negative implications of the idea that “everything is for the sake of survival”.
However, the film fails to show another path existing in reality: the struggle. Struggle, too, is “for the sake of survival”, and specifically for the sake of living a better life. Outside the confines of the movie, struggles initiated by delivery riders are actually happening.
When dignity is trampled time and again, riders may choose resistance over endurance. On 12 August, just three days after the film’s release, a delivery rider at the Xixi Century Centre in Hangzhou knelt after being fined by property security. This sparked collective discontent among the local riders, who gathered to demand an apology from the property management and security. Even earlier, in April 2023, a collective service refusal occurred in Shanwei, Guangzhou, after a delivery platform fined riders who refused to work in severe weather. The platform had to deploy riders from other regions to maintain service, and the dispute eventually ended after negotiations resulted in an extra one yuan per order. In May 2021, a delivery rider in Weinan, Shaanxi, burned his uniform and delivery box in the street. Nor do we forget the organiser of a certain rider alliance who used the internet to speak out for riders and helped many resolve labour disputes. Meanwhile, hundreds of rider protests occur across the country every year, though most go unnoticed due to their small scale.
III.“Programmers Don’t Understand the Pain of Delivery Riders”
Programmers and delivery riders are perhaps the two most well-known categories of “digital labour” today, yet they are unable to truly see one another because they occupy different nodes of the digital industry’s value chain. The algorithms designed by programmers have instead become tools for platforms to control and exploit riders, leading to the colloquial saying that “programmers don’t understand the pain of delivery riders.” So, what happens when a programmer “falls” to the status of a delivery rider?
Through a violent clash between riders, the film illustrates the predicament of those under algorithmic control. Da Hei, the “Order King”, spends every day recording and studying the most efficient delivery routes in his “secret handbook”. On the road, he charges ahead recklessly as if the streets were empty. While this allows him to become the Order King, it also compresses delivery times to the absolute limit, making it vastly harder for other riders to complete their orders. This issue leads to a dispute between Da Hei and other riders, which eventually escalates into a physical fight.
The logic of the algorithm revealed here is crystal clear: when delivery riders speed, ride against traffic, or run red lights due to the pressure of survival and attendance records, the time saved by risking their lives is absorbed by the algorithm and reproduced as a new time standard. As this cycle continues, the required delivery time for every route is compressed to the extreme. In the film, the protagonist Gao Zhilei is involved in several traffic accidents. Despite his ability to write code, as a rider he can only submit to the algorithm’s control; after being violently knocked down by a car, he can only stagger and daze his way through the final order, urged on by the ticking countdown.
At the end of the film, Gao Zhilei develops an app called “Lu Lu Tong”. This app can identify and mark the locations of schools, shopping centres, and delivery lockers on routes, as well as minute details such as unit and building numbers within residential complexes, helping riders improve their efficiency. This represents the practical wisdom Gao Zhilei summarised through day after day of deliveries, merging with the painstaking effort Da Hei poured into his “secret handbook”.
However, it is foreseeable that if the existing logic of the algorithm remains unchanged, the time saved through “Lu Lu Tong” will ultimately lead to a further compression of delivery windows. Therefore, the fundamental issue remains the power dynamic between platform capital and digital labour behind the algorithm. Yet, at this moment, the film avoids a critique of the platform companies, placing its hope in the idea that programmers can help riders escape their predicament on a technical level.
Under different social conditions, programmers could certainly use their technical skills to carve out alternative paths for survival for delivery riders. In France, the CoopCycle movement developed an application that allows delivery riders in different regions to redevelop the app based on local needs and create their own bicycle delivery platform cooperatives; in Montreal, Canada, the delivery platform Radish is co-owned by riders, merchants, and consumers, who receive a share of the profits at the end of the year.
In today’s era of platform monopolies, committing to such an endeavour requires a critical reflection on platform enterprises and the courage to break out of one’s comfortable shell. However, Gao Zhilei, who chose to “retreat in order to advance”, has no motivation to make such a choice.
At the end of the film, the “Lu Lu Tong” solution is presented to the chairman of the delivery platform, and Gao Zhilei is offered his programmer position back, suggesting a happy ending. In this resolution, the experience of being a delivery rider allows Gao Zhilei to comprehend the warmth and coldness of human nature, leading to a transformation of his values; through “Lu Lu Tong”, he turns a misfortune into a blessing and returns to a Big Tech firm; the hardships faced by riders like Da Hei and Lao Kou are resolved, and “Lu Lu Tong” will help riders overcome the many difficulties and dilemmas they encounter during their work.
Let us imagine Gao Zhilei’s future life. If he treasures the interpersonal relationships and emotional bonds established during his time as a rider, how will he handle the contradiction when, as a programmer, he must develop algorithms every day—creating the very tools of oppression and exploitation used against his former “comrades-in-arms”? How will he act?
In his later works, the German playwright Bertolt Brecht consistently sought to prevent the depiction of lower-class suffering from becoming mere entertainment for the audience. In the final stages of his plays, by preserving rather than eliminating contradictions and tension within the text, he provoked the audience to continuously reflect on reality and guided the characters toward new life choices.
However, *Upstream* chooses to use an inconsistent ending to mask the contradictions and tensions inherent in the narrative, ultimately contradicting itself: if Gao Zhilei, having returned to his role as a programmer, can slide back into his safe, private shell and still face the platform’s oppression of riders with composure, then why should we believe that his experience as a delivery rider was poignant enough to cure his existence-based anxiety as a member of the middle class?
Leaving the cinema and seeing riders speeding down the road, the warm atmosphere created by the film feels like an illusion; what one feels is not the strength to move forward, but powerlessness. The film fails to inspire the audience to imagine how society should actually take action to help delivery riders truly escape their hardships. Life goes on, the suffering continues, and we see not a single ripple on the surface of reality.
Editor: Wang Hao