Specialist Lawyer Explains the Differences Between JD’s and Meituan’s Social Insurance Schemes

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JD and Meituan are locked in fierce competition across the food-delivery market, and nothing has grabbed more attention than the battle over riders’ social insurance. On 19 February 2025, JD was the first to announce that it would pay the “five insurances and one fund” — China’s full suite of social insurances plus the housing provident fund — for its full-time riders, with Meituan and Ele.me subsequently announcing that they too would provide social insurance for their riders. On 21 April, JD published a post with thinly veiled jibes at Meituan over issues such as “non-payment of social insurance,” “forcing riders to choose one platform,” “phantom restaurants” and “algorithmic exploitation”; Meituan hit back the same day: “Rather than spreading rumours to drive traffic, why not deliver on your promises?” On 13 May, the State Administration for Market Regulation and four other government departments jointly summoned JD, Meituan, Ele.me and other platform companies for talks over pressing issues in food-delivery industry competition.

● JD and Meituan have been actively trading jibes on their respective publicity channels, drawing spectators into the drama. Source: WeChat Official Account screenshot
With the two giants squaring off, both sides tore off the mask in an open slanging match; the government stepped in as mediator, and workers, naturally, have been relishing the spectacle. Yet even as public opinion and corporate PR spin reached a fever pitch, two riders who were brothers-in-law — married to sisters — working at a food-delivery station in Zaozhuang, Shandong, died one after the other from overwork. Such a tragedy once again compels us to look beyond the drama and engage in more serious discussion about the urgent issues that truly determine riders’ livelihoods.

I. JD vs Meituan: Social Insurance Schemes Worlds Apart

JD’s plan is — “pay the five insurances and one fund for full-time JD Food Delivery riders, and provide accident and health medical insurance for part-time riders” — while also absorbing the rider’s individual contribution portion of the social insurance premiums. Meituan’s plan is — to subsidise riders’ flexible-employment insurance: “For riders whose monthly income reaches the contribution base floor set by the locality of employment, and who have met that condition in at least three of the preceding six months, Meituan will subsidise 50% of the contribution, calculated on that contribution base.”

● The Meituan social insurance pilot currently covers two urban districts: Quanzhou in Fujian and Nantong in Jiangsu. Source: Meituan Official WeChat Account

So what are the key differences?

First and foremost: whether an employment relationship is recognised. JD’s plan recognises that full-time riders have an employment relationship with the platform; Meituan’s plan sidesteps the issue entirely — supporting full-time riders in enrolling for flexible-employment insurance effectively denies any employment relationship between the rider and the platform.

Do not underestimate the significance of an employment relationship. Having one means riders are entitled to considerably more — severance pay upon termination, paid annual leave, double penalties for delayed wage payments, continued payment of wages during a workplace shutdown, housing provident fund withdrawals to supplement income, unemployment benefits…

Second, the two plans cover different numbers of insurance types, and therefore offer different levels of protection. JD’s “five insurances and one fund” covers pension, medical (including maternity), unemployment, work-injury insurance and the housing provident fund. Meituan’s subsidised flexible-employment insurance covers only the basics — pension and medical.

Third, the cost borne by the rider differs. In practice, social insurance contributions paid under flexible employment are no less expensive than those paid by regular employees. Take Quanzhou, Fujian, where Meituan has launched its pilot: using a contribution base of RMB 5,000, the individual costs faced by a rider earning a monthly wage of RMB 5,000 — as a regular employee versus as a flexible-employment worker — are as follows:

As the table above shows, under the stated assumptions, the rider’s cost for the “five insurances and one fund” under JD’s plan is only RMB 775; and given that the housing provident fund can be withdrawn as personal income, the rider’s effective monthly social insurance cost is just RMB 525. Under Meituan’s plan, however, a full-time rider would face a monthly cost of RMB 1,500 for pension and medical insurance alone.

Finally, there is the question of benefits.

First, it is clear that JD’s employee social insurance plan covers more insurance types, so riders receive additional work-injury and unemployment benefits that Meituan’s plan does not provide.

Second, pension benefits could differ by tens of times. Under JD’s plan, riders’ individual burden is lighter, making them far more likely to maintain contributions over the long term and ultimately receive urban employee pension benefits. Under Meituan’s plan, the individual burden is heavy, making it very difficult to sustain contributions for the requisite 15 years; riders are more likely to stop paying or let their contributions lapse, eventually transitioning into urban and rural resident insurance.

According to academic research, the average monthly pension received by urban enterprise employees in China is 30.23 times that of urban and rural residents. For example, in 2017, urban and rural residents received an average monthly pension of around RMB 120, which would equate to roughly RMB 3,627.60 per month for urban employees.

So, overall, compared with Meituan’s plan, JD’s plan recognises the employment relationship, carries lower contribution costs, covers more insurance types, and the housing provident fund withdrawal can supplement riders’ income — offering far better value for money.

When compared side by side, for full-time riders the difference between JD’s and Meituan’s plans is truly worlds apart!

II. What Do Riders Think About Paying Social Insurance?

Even before JD’s and Meituan’s social insurance plans had been carefully scrutinised, a certain “voice of the riders” had already emerged online claiming that food-delivery riders simply do not want to pay social insurance. It is true that the social insurance debate should not become a weapon in either side’s business war, and riders’ own voices deserve to be heard. But their genuine views on paying social insurance, and the reasons behind those views, are in fact very specific and complex.

● A reporter interviews food-delivery riders on the street. Some worry that “the wool always comes off the sheep’s back” — that paying social insurance would reduce their take-home pay; others feel that contributing to social insurance makes the job more secure; still others think that at the very least, accessing medical care would become more convenient than before. Source: screenshot from the programme A Dose of Financial Flair

“It’s a safety net — of course you’d want it.” That was Xiao Bao’s response upon learning that JD would cover the five insurances and one fund for riders free of charge. He is 18 years old and has been doing crowd-sourced delivery for Meituan for just half a year. He thinks that if social insurance means paying several hundred yuan of his own money each month, he would need to compare the wages on offer at the two platforms. “If they’re paying social insurance and the wages are about the same, I’ll work for JD.” But he quickly followed up: “I might not be doing this long-term anyway — would the contributions even be useful to me later on?” Having not even finished senior high school, he does not fully understand the specifics of social insurance policy.

Xiao Li, 35, has been delivering food in Beijing since 2018 and is now a dedicated rider for Meituan. He ranks among the top in terms of orders and earns a relatively high income. But since 2019, the per-order rate has dropped sharply; to maintain his high income now, he barely takes a single day off a month and has to be on the road at least 12 hours a day. He does not oppose paying social insurance — he thinks it is a good thing — but his station has yet to receive any news about it.

Lao Jia, 45, is also a dedicated rider for Meituan and has been on the job for just a year. He is well-travelled and full of insight. He once worked his way up from the shop floor to workshop supervisor at a state-owned enterprise factory, only to be laid off. After that, he took a job as an SF Express courier but was dismissed for a mistake. “When we’re old and can’t work any more, we can only rely on our pension. The social insurance JD pays might not match what public institutions offer in pension benefits, but without paying in, there’s no protection at all.” He understands that social insurance is a form of protection for himself, so whether or not a job includes it is something he must consider. Then why did he sign up with Meituan? “I was scammed!” he laughed helplessly. “The online job ad said riders could get social insurance, but you had to work three months first — and in the end they never paid a penny.” For now, the rider’s income is at least tolerable; Lao Jia and his wife are both working in Beijing, scraping by, and they can only keep things going this way for the time being.

“Those workers with proper job security, who get sick leave or rest breaks — for us, that’s something you wouldn’t even dare dream of. It’s a luxury. Not just for survival, but for living well — that’s a luxury.” Lao Li, a 59-year-old rider for Ele.me, sighed. “JD’s ‘five insurances and one fund’ is even more of a luxury. At my age, almost 60, I wouldn’t even qualify to join that team. It would be wonderful if everyone had access to it — for people like us, that would be far too kind, far too wonderful.”

● Young or old, food-delivery riders shuttle through the city each day, busy with their work. Some have neither the time nor the opportunity to learn about the “fiddly” details of social insurance policy; others, even knowing how important it is, can only muddle through under the pressure of reality. Photography: Zhou Pinglang
Yet for all that they call such protections a luxury, are they not what countless delivery riders long for? After looking more closely, we found that the factors fuelling riders’ anxieties fall into two broad categories: one is policies that exist on paper but are poorly communicated. Take, for example, the transfer of social insurance records or the conditions for claiming benefits — the state has clear mechanisms in place for both. Riders’ worries stem not from actual gaps but from a lack of clear guidance from government departments and the enterprises through which they enrol. The other category concerns genuine shortcomings within the system itself: the way individual contributions are structured does cut into a worker’s base salary and imposes a heavy burden, and the disparity in pension outcomes remains an unresolved problem. Nevertheless, the right response to these flaws is not to abandon the system because it is imperfect, but to promote open discussion, reform entrenched ills, and ensure that all workers can enjoy fairer social insurance coverage.

We must not forget the very essence of social security — that it exists to replace individual risk-bearing with collective provision. The modern social insurance system was born out of the suffering of workers in the early days of industrialisation, crushed by workplace injuries, unemployment, illness and old age, unable to earn a living. It was first enshrined in statute in Germany, where the labour movement was strongest. On 10 June 1907, U.S. President Roosevelt told an audience that work giving rise to accidents is “done for the employer, and therefore ultimately also for the public; to make the employed worker and his wife and children bear the entire loss is an intolerable injustice.” That conviction set American law on a new course, replacing the common law of the nineteenth century with a government-mandated insurance regime.

The Constitution of the People’s Republic of China provides that “citizens of the People’s Republic of China have the right to material assistance from the state and society when they are old, ill, or have lost their capacity to work.” In other words, workers who have devoted a lifetime to building society — or who have been left disabled by that work — are entitled, when they can no longer earn a living, to the basic material means of survival and rehabilitation provided by society.

III. Does Paying Social Insurance for Riders Mean Meituan Loses Money?

In modern society, the rationale behind social insurance should be hard to dispute — yet Meituan has made it normal for enterprises not to enrol their workers. Even in the debate sparked by JD over social insurance, several articles have argued that Meituan’s non-payment is “reasonable” because the company simply cannot bear the cost. The figure most widely cited by the media runs as follows: Meituan’s (03690.HK) financial statements show that in 2023, revenue from delivery services was RMB 82.19 billion — 40 per cent of total Core Local Commerce revenue — while delivery-related costs reached RMB 90.74 billion. With 21.9 billion instant-delivery transactions in 2023, that amounts to a loss of RMB 0.39 on every single order delivered.

The grievance Meituan wants the public to hear is this: I am already in the red without paying social insurance — wouldn’t paying it drive me to bankruptcy? But is that really the case?

Scrutinise Meituan’s financial statements more closely and we find that the delivery service revenue Meituan cites is not the same as the total revenue of its food-delivery business. In other words, the food-delivery segment earns far more than RMB 82.19 billion.

The reason is that delivery service revenue is made up primarily of the delivery fee paid jointly by the consumer and the merchant on each order. But on the merchant side, what the restaurant pays Meituan goes well beyond the “fulfilment service fee” (the merchant’s share of the delivery charge). Merchants must also pay a “commission” to the platform as a condition of operating their food-delivery business.

● Meituan’s full-year 2023 revenue, costs and profit by business segment. Source: screenshot from the Meituan 2023 Annual Report

In fact, prior to 2021, Meituan grouped both the “fulfilment service fee” and the “commission” under a single label — the “platform service fee” — which meant that Meituan itself implicitly acknowledged both fees as revenue generated by the food-delivery business.

● A comparison of Meituan’s merchant service-fee collection model before and after the 2021 fee rate reform. Source: Meituan’s official website
In what appeared to be a response to public criticism that Meituan’s commission rate charged to restaurants was too high, the company carried out a fee rate reform in 2021. It narrowed the definition of “commission” from the total fee collected from merchants to only the “technology service fee,” while the “delivery fee” was carved out as a separate line item. The effect was that the headline commission rate was magically slashed, almost overnight, from more than twenty per cent to just over six per cent. This sleight of hand also, inadvertently, cast a smokescreen over the media and the public: by conflating delivery revenue with the entirety of food-delivery income and overlooking commission altogether, the business could be recast as a “loss-making” venture. But if commission is factored in — along with the additional fees some merchants pay to buy higher search-ranking placement to boost visibility (which form part of Meituan’s “online marketing services” revenue) — Meituan’s overall food-delivery business is clearly profitable. And that is before we account for the powerful user stickiness and traffic the food-delivery segment generates for the platform as a whole: gains that simply cannot be reduced to delivery revenue alone.

To claim, then, that Meituan’s food-delivery business is loss-making is a distortion of the facts and cannot serve as a justification for refusing to pay social insurance.

Moreover, Southern Weekend once worked through the arithmetic in a report: if Meituan were to enrol ten million riders in social insurance, the additional cost would be RMB 21.6 billion, against Meituan’s full-year 2023 profit of RMB 23.25 billion — suggesting that Meituan’s reluctance to pay social insurance still has a “legitimate” economic basis.

But read the financial statements closely and another picture emerges: a substantial share of Meituan’s overall profit flows into investment in the New Initiatives segment — Xiaoxiang Supermarket, Meituan Instashopping, Meituan Youxuan and others — all aimed at further market expansion. In 2021, 2022 and 2023, New Initiatives posted losses of RMB 38.4 billion, RMB 28.4 billion and RMB 20.2 billion respectively. Despite mounting losses, Meituan never slowed its expansion. By 2024, the New Initiatives deficit had narrowed to RMB 7.3 billion, and the growth strategy was beginning to pay off.

R&D investment in drones, autonomous delivery vehicles and other new technologies is another major area of capital outlay: in 2024, Meituan’s R&D spending reached RMB 21.1 billion.

Those figures alone should be more than enough to cover the RMB 21.6 billion in social insurance costs. In reality, they do the opposite — they serve as proof of an uncomfortable truth: Meituan’s “commerce-and-technology” empire is being built on the sacrifice of riders’ legitimate social security rights.

IV. Will Paying Social Insurance for Riders Become the Norm?

On 24 February 2025, faced with the widespread concern among riders that enrolling in social insurance would cut their pay, JD made another official announcement: it would bear the entire cost of the five insurances and one fund for food-delivery riders. On the surface, this looks like a gesture of goodwill that goes beyond what the law requires. But Marx long ago set out the principle in his Critique of the Gotha Programme: in a future society, funds set aside “to cover misfortunes, natural disasters and the like” and “a fund for those who have lost the capacity to work” should be drawn from the total social surplus product — in other words, from enterprise profits. Put plainly, the cost of social insurance for all workers in society should be funded entirely from enterprise profits, not deducted from employees’ wages.

● Source: screenshot from the National Laws and Regulations Database website
China’s Labour Insurance Regulations of the People’s Republic of China, promulgated in 1951, already put this principle into practice. A system built on this design could well resolve riders’ single greatest worry about social insurance — that enrolling means less take-home pay. If JD truly follows through and absorbs the full social insurance cost for full-time riders, the scheme itself is certainly worthy of encouragement. But the question we must ask is whether this is a temporary state brought about by inter-enterprise competition breaking an industry monopoly, or something that can be sustained as a lasting norm?

Several business analyses have observed that it is precisely the relentless expansion of the Meituan and JD empires that has made their operations increasingly intertwined in the instant-retail market. It is against this competitive backdrop that the issue of riders’ social insurance has seen new developments.

A Bilibili content creator who is himself an Ele.me rider, known as “Zhongbaozai Xiaoyu,” has noticed that ever since JD Food Delivery entered the fray, riders’ terms have visibly improved. More incentive campaigns have appeared; in bad weather, riders not only receive subsidies but are also given extended delivery windows — something that had “never happened before.”

Yet we must not forget that back in 2015, when Baidu Waimai, Koubei Waimai and Ele.me were still locked in fierce competition with Meituan, per-order rates and subsidy packages for delivery riders were far more generous than they are today. Those improvements vanished with Meituan’s monopoly.

Will history repeat itself? We need to watch the current changes closely and cautiously. At the very least, they have already shattered the “normal” assumption that platforms need not pay social insurance for riders, and we might seize this moment to ask what kind of social insurance model riders — and workers more broadly — truly need.

References
Notice of the Fujian Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security, the Fujian Provincial Department of Finance and the Fujian Provincial Tax Service of the State Taxation Administration on Adjusting the Upper and Lower Limits of the Contribution Base for Basic Pension Insurance for Employees in 2024 (Min Ren She Wen [2024] No. 76); Notice of the Fujian Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security, the Fujian Provincial Department of Finance and the Fujian Provincial Tax Service of the State Taxation Administration on Publishing the Benefit Calculation Base for Basic Pension Insurance for Urban Employees and Related Matters in 2024 (Min Ren She Wen [2024] No. 139); Notice of the Fujian Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security, the Fujian Provincial Department of Finance and the Fujian Provincial Tax Service of the State Taxation Administration on Adjusting the Lower Limit of the Contribution Base for Basic Pension Insurance for Enterprise Employees in 2024 (Min Ren She Wen [2023] No. 160); Notice of the Fujian Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security, the Fujian Provincial Department of Finance and the Fujian Provincial Tax Service of the State Taxation Administration on Adjusting the Upper and Lower Limits of the Contribution Base for Work-Injury Insurance in 2024 (Min Ren She Wen [2024] No. 81); Notice of the Fujian Provincial Healthcare Security Administration on Adjusting the Upper and Lower Limits of the Contribution Base for Employees’ Medical Insurance in 2024 (Min Yi Bao [2024] No. 53); Notice of the General Office of the Fujian Provincial People’s Government on Issuing the Comprehensive Work Plan for Reducing Social Insurance Contribution Rates in Fujian Province (Min Zheng Ban [2019] No. 29); Notice of the Fujian Provincial Healthcare Security Fund Centre on Adjusting the Maximum and Minimum Wage-Based Contribution Amounts and Related Matters for 2021 (Min Yi Bao Zhong Xin Wen [2021] No. 44)

Notice of the Fujian Provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security, the Fujian Provincial Department of Finance and the Fujian Provincial Tax Service of the State Taxation Administration on Matters Relating to Contribution Rate Policies for Unemployment Insurance and Work-Injury Insurance (Min Ren She Wen [2023] No. 48)

Notice on Adjusting Work-Injury Insurance Rate Policies (Ren She Bu Fa [2015] No. 71); Notice on Matters Relating to Contribution Rate Policies for Unemployment Insurance and Work-Injury Insurance (Min Ren She Wen [2023] No. 48); Implementation Opinions on Provincial-Level Coordinated Management of Work-Injury Insurance in Fujian Province. According to the records, the registration authority classifies online platform delivery riders under the resident services sector, with a work-injury insurance rate of 0.4 per cent.

Regulations on the Administration of Housing Provident Funds in Quanzhou City

Palmer, E., Wang, X. and Zhan, P., ‘China’s Urban–Rural Integrated Public Pension: Building a Virtuous Circle Between Employee Insurance and Resident Insurance’, Social Security Review, 15 January 2022, Vol. 6, No. 1.

Yang, Y. and Qiu, Y., ‘Forty Years of Reform and Opening-Up: From “Retirement Pension” to “Pension”‘, China Human Resources and Social Security, 2018, No. 12.

Witt, J. F., Accidental Republic: Crippled Workingmen, Destitute Widows, and the Remaking of American Law, translated by Tian Lei, 1st edition, March 2016, China University of Political Science and Law Press.

Yang, Y. and Qiu, Y., ‘Forty Years of Reform and Opening-Up: From “Retirement Pension” to “Pension”‘, China Human Resources and Social Security, 2018, No. 12.

Meituan (MEITUAN), ‘Meituan Subsidises Riders’ Pension Insurance; Pilot Launches Immediately’.

‘The benefit gap between public institutions and enterprises within the employee insurance system in China is 2.27 times.’ Palmer, E., Wang, X. and Zhan, P., ‘China’s Urban–Rural Integrated Public Pension: Building a Virtuous Circle Between Employee Insurance and Resident Insurance’, Social Security Review, 15 January 2022, Vol. 6, No. 1.

Meituan Annual Reports 2021–2024, https://www.meituan.com/investor/reports

What is the true commission rate for Meituan’s food-delivery business? https://www.meituan.com/news/NN241225051008799

How large is the overlap between Meituan and JD? | Zhaibo Weekly https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/tDlqxcDnBz9DVbnjemztdw

Foodthink Contributor
Hao Zhengxin
Lawyer at Beijing Guannan Law Firm, specialising in labour disputes. Previously represented workers in the Muyuan sudden-death case and has taken part in research on occupational injury protection for workers in new forms of employment.

 

 

Editor: Yuyang

 

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