Riders’ Suffering, Middle-Class Anxiety: Who Can Save Whom?
This person’s suffering shakes me, because it need not have happened.
——Bertolt Brecht
Two sharply opposed viewpoints have emerged from this debate. Supporters argue that the very fact that director Xu Zheng, who could have chosen any other subject, was willing to turn his attention to the real lives of delivery riders is itself worthy of recognition.
Critics, on the other hand, contend that the film is essentially a consumption of suffering at the bottom of society. At best, it amounts to no more than a hypocritical, cheap sympathy. At worst, by affirming and praising the noble qualities—diligence, resilience, optimism and mutual aid—that riders display in adversity, the film obscures the genuine structural pressures bearing down upon them. And for audiences, the more they settle into their cinema seats, maintaining a comfortable distance from the lives of those at the bottom—lives they can simply shut out at the door—the more a sense of private security wells up within them.
Unlike workers in traditional industries such as coal, automotive, chemical, food service and sanitation, food delivery riders command far wider public attention today—not merely out of cheap sympathy for those at the bottom, but because of a more widespread social psychology.
Under the spotlight of this attention, delivery riders are indeed “seen” in the film, yet judging by box-office figures and reviews since its release, audiences have not bought into it. The reason lies in an irreducible blind spot in the way the film frames the riders’ lives.
I. The Middle Class Hiding in Its Shell
In a metropolis like Shanghai, countless people are enclosed within shells, enjoying a sense of security and privacy. Although a shell can block out the world beyond, it cannot truly detach itself from the social system that sustains it from the outside. To use a smartphone and access information, for instance, one must depend on telecommunications infrastructure; to spend a quiet afternoon in a café is in reality to enjoy coffee beans shipped from faraway lands and the service of a barista. People still rely on one another to obtain the resources necessary for survival, yet all they typically register is their own “consumption”, blind to the intermediate stages involving hard, invisible labour. Most patrons in a café are unlikely to perceive the struggles of coffee farmers in Uganda, and smartphone users will not know that a certain mineral required to make their device is mined by enslaved child labourers in Congo. Consumers feel no guilt, then, about the wretched conditions of those labouring beyond the shell.
The British Marxist Raymond Williams called this condition of existence “mobile privatization”, and today it is further reinforced by digital technology. From the opening, the film continually presents images of a digitalised society to its audience: the beep-beep of QR codes being scanned, office workers hunched over their phones on the Underground, algorithms appraising staff performance, mobile livestreamers talking to their phones “to themselves” wherever they may be, and university students wearing earphones day after day, earning a living by playing online games. Yet none of these images evoke the once-popular optimistic vision of a digitally connected society. Instead, the overall mood they create is oppressive; society is in a state of intense flux: information flows, people flow, goods flow, but people’s condition of existence grows ever more enclosed, lonely and urgent.
Food delivery platforms emerge within precisely such a fluid society, making food flow, allowing people to obtain a meal simply by waiting at home. Yet this time, the presence of the delivery rider cannot be ignored. When they use their moving bodies as conduits to deliver food resources, their labour becomes the most conspicuous part of everyday urban experience. Those who live within their shells — the middle class above all — still harbour an image of the city as gleaming, stable and prosperous, yet cannot help being intruded upon by the sight of a delivery rider arriving breathless up the stairwell, their back speeding down the road, their anxious, helpless expression.
Because the riders cannot be avoided, people feel compelled to say something about their existence in order to achieve cognitive equilibrium. What the film must first address and respond to is this widespread social psychology surrounding delivery riders, and only then the riders themselves. Thus, even though roughly 60 per cent of food delivery riders come from rural areas, the film chooses as its protagonist a middle-class man undergoing “proletarianisation” to tell the story of delivery riders.
To call a well-paid programmer like Gao Zhilei “middle class” is not strictly accurate, for he owns no means of production. Although the salaries of technical and managerial staff far exceed those of delivery riders and other workers at the bottom, making them appear to belong to different classes, the two groups are essentially the same: salaried employees who cannot control their own fate. A single P2P lending collapse, one round of layoffs, or a serious illness can leave the shell Gao Zhilei depends on tottering in the wind and rain, unable to maintain its former standard of living.
And so this is precisely the part the film tries to make resonate with its audience. Gao Zhilei’s plight is a microcosm of what many cinema-goers experience in their own lives — faced with the full weight of family obligations, even a graduate of an elite university cannot sit down and take a long view; instead, like an ant on a hot pan, he must scramble in every direction to find any means of earning money, and becoming a delivery rider is therefore the most reasonable decision one could make.
II. What Choice Is There Besides Staying Alive?
Two main storylines run throughout the entire film: one follows how Gao Zhilei and his family, after he is made redundant by his tech employer, struggle to hold together a middle-class existence that is crumbling; the other traces the hardship endured by delivery riders in their labour and daily lives.
As these two storylines begin to converge towards the conclusion, the film’s underlying values finally come to light. The suffering of delivery riders that Gao Zhilei experiences and witnesses, along with the optimistic, resilient attitude they maintain in the face of hardship, brings about a significant shift in the nuclear family’s values: they are no longer bound by the consumerist ideology imposed from outside, they discard the belief — held for decades — that personal striving can achieve social mobility, and in the face of a harsh social reality they choose to “strip away the false and keep the true”, rebuilding an understanding of the good life that begins with the human being itself. In the end, Gao Zhilei’s family relinquishes the markers of middle-class life: a larger home, a better education, a more respectable standard of living — in order to ease the pressure and anxiety of daily existence.
The film tries to express this vision of an alternative life through the riders’ story, but in doing so it causes the first storyline to subsume the second. It is true that the riders’ hardship teaches the middle class that life requires “advancing by retreating”, yet they never ask what riders themselves are supposed to choose when they have no retreat left.
The film carefully selects and edits real riders’ stories according to the logic of “everything for survival”, as though to stay alive one can only choose to endure in silence. Da Hei, the top rider, to compensate for the colleague who was disabled in a traffic accident he caused, performs a daily race against death through traffic while suppressing agonising stomach pain; the single mother Xiao Min has no choice but to carry her young son on the back of her electric scooter every evening while delivering orders; Lao Kou, struck down by a car and bleeding from a leg wound, refuses outright to go to hospital for bandaging, saving the driver’s compensation instead to pay for his son’s surgery for leukaemia.
At first, Gao Zhilei could not accept the riders’ logic that “one must endure in order to stay alive.” He, too, tried to resist. When stopped by a security guard, he insisted that as a customer he had once walked freely in and out of luxury shopping malls; when a customer pointed a finger in his face in humiliation, he tried to fight back; when a customer cancelled an order for being late, he furiously smashed the bouquet of flowers he had been carrying against the wall; when a customer lazily thrust a bag of rubbish at him, he chose to respond with a contemptuous smile; when delivering coffee to former colleagues, he chose to shrink away. But the consequences of all this were complaints, negative reviews and fines.
Faced with a mortgage payment of fifteen thousand yuan a month, Gao Zhilei ultimately chose to compromise — as all who live in hardship do. The protagonist of the film then enters a phase of growth. He decides to throw himself wholeheartedly into food delivery, learning from other riders the tricks of the trade and their optimism and resilience, and even learning to enjoy the process of working with restaurant staff to complete a delivery — that sense of fulfilment one feels only when truly settling into a new job. This section faithfully recreates many of the small details of a rider’s labour, a mix of hardship and pleasure, of finding joy amid suffering. The work is brutal, yet every rider has family and friends who look out for one another and keep watch over their community.
Yet the other side of this positive arc of growth is accompanied by cold, unyielding discipline. It is one thing for a rider to carry a hot meal from a restaurant to a residential building; it is quite another for that labour to be subjected to the pressure of platform capital and algorithmic control, driving riders to overwork and even to traffic accidents. Gao Zhilei faints on the roadside from hypoglycaemia, yet because he fears a fine he forces himself back to his feet to complete a verification for the “Smile Plan” — and simply cannot manage a smile. To stay alive, you must endure, submit to discipline, wear away your own life, and even shed your human dignity. The film persistently tries to strike a balance between hardship and joy, between the positive and the negative meanings of “everything for survival.”
But the film cannot see the other road in reality — struggle, and struggle is also “for survival,” and for surviving better. Outside the film, real struggles initiated by delivery riders are happening.
If dignity is trampled upon again and again, what riders choose may not be silence but a refusal to yield. Just three days after the film’s release, on 12 August, a delivery rider at Xixi Century Centre in Hangzhou knelt down after being fined by a property management security guard, triggering collective outrage among riders in the area, who gathered and demanded an apology from the management company and the guard. As far back as April 2023, in Guangzhou and Shanwei, riders collectively refused to accept orders in protest after a delivery platform fined those who declined to ride in severe weather; the platform summoned riders from other regions, and after negotiations the dispute was settled with an extra yuan per order. In May 2021, a delivery rider in Weinan, Shaanxi, set fire to his work uniform and delivery box on the street. And of course, we must not forget the organiser of a Rider Union who once used the internet to speak up for delivery riders and helped many of them resolve labour disputes. Meanwhile, hundreds of delivery riders’ protests take place across the country every year, though the vast majority go unnoticed due to their small scale.
III. “Programmers Don’t Understand the Rider’s Pain”
Programmers and delivery riders are probably the two best-known categories of “digital labour” today, yet because they occupy different nodes in the digital industry value chain, they cannot truly see one another. The algorithms that programmers design, far from serving the riders, become instruments through which platforms control and exploit them — hence the quip that “Programmers Don’t Understand the Rider’s Pain.” So what happens when a programmer “falls” and becomes a delivery rider?
The film uses a violent altercation between riders to dramatise the predicament created by algorithmic control. Da Hei, the top rider, records and refines his optimal delivery routes in his “secret playbook” every day; on the road he weaves through traffic as though it were empty, and in winning the title of top rider he compresses delivery times to their absolute limit, making it far harder for other riders to complete their orders. On this issue Da Hei comes into conflict with fellow riders, and the argument escalates into a brawl.
The logic of the algorithm laid bare here is crystal clear: when delivery riders speed, ride against traffic or run red lights because of the pressure of survival and attendance tracking, the time they save at mortal risk is absorbed by the algorithm and reproduced as a new time standard. The cycle repeats until the delivery time required for every route is compressed to its absolute limit. 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 knocked violently to the ground by a car, he can only stumble, dazed and barely conscious, through the final order as the countdown presses him on.
In the film’s closing act, Gao Zhilei develops an app called “LuLuTong”. The app can identify and flag the locations of schools, shopping centres and delivery lockers along delivery routes, as well as building numbers, unit numbers and a host of minor details, helping riders improve their efficiency. This is practical wisdom distilled from day after day of deliveries, fused with the painstaking effort Da Hei invested in his “secret playbook”.
Yet it is foreseeable that, so long as the existing algorithmic logic remains unchanged, the time saved through “LuLuTong” will simply lead to a further compression of delivery times. The fundamental problem, in the end, is still the question of power relations between platform capital and digital labour behind the algorithm. But at this point the film sidesteps any critique of the platform company, placing its hope in programmers being able to help riders out of their predicament on a technical level.
Under different social conditions, programmers can of course use their technical expertise to open an alternative path to survival for delivery riders. In France, the Coop Cycle movement has developed an app that allows riders in different areas to adapt the application to local needs and create their own bicycle delivery platform cooperatives; in Montreal, Canada, the delivery platform Radish is jointly owned by riders, merchants and consumers, who all receive a share of the year’s profits.
Yet in today’s world of platform monopolies, committing to such an enterprise demands a critical reflection on platform companies and the courage to shatter one’s secure shell — and Gao Zhilei, having chosen to “advance by retreating”, has no motivation to make such a choice.
At the film’s end, the LuLuTong proposal is placed before the chairwoman of the delivery platform, and Gao Zhilei is once again offered the position of programmer at the company, seemingly pointing to a neat and satisfying resolution. In this ending, his time as a delivery rider has taught Gao Zhilei the true warmth and coldness of human feeling, completing a transformation in his life values; through LuLuTong, he “finds fortune out of misfortune” by returning to a major internet company; the hardships of riders like Da Hei and Lao Kou are resolved, and LuLuTong will help riders overcome the many difficulties and predicaments they face in their work.
Let us imagine Gao Zhilei’s future life. If he cherishes the relationships and emotional bonds forged during his time as a rider, then once he is a programmer again, every day he will be developing algorithms — building the very tools through which the platform controls and exploits his former “comrades-in-arms”. How does he reconcile this contradiction? How does he act?
The German playwright Brecht, in his later works, consistently sought to prevent the suffering of the underclass depicted on stage from becoming mere entertainment for the audience. In the concluding stages of his plays, rather than eliminating the contradictions and tensions in the text, he preserves them, provoking the audience into ongoing reflection on reality, while guiding the characters within the drama towards new choices in life.
But Going Against the Flow chooses to paper over the contradictions and tensions inherent in its fictional world with an ending that cannot hold together logically, ultimately negating itself: if Gao Zhilei, having resumed his position as a programmer, slips back into the safety and privacy of his shell and can still calmly watch the platform’s oppression of riders, what grounds do we have for believing that his time as a delivery rider was seared deeply enough into his soul to heal his existential anxiety as a member of the middle class?
Stepping out of the cinema and watching riders speeding down the road, the warmth the film has conjured feels like an illusion — what one feels is not the strength to move forward, but powerlessness. The film never inspires its audience to imagine how society might actually act to help delivery riders escape their difficulties. Life goes on, suffering continues, and we cannot see so much as a ripple on the surface of reality.
Editor: Wang Hao