Expendable Workers: Food Delivery and Technopolitics in China

Through a case study of Meituan Waimai, China's dominant food delivery platform, this article examines how algorithmic management is entangled with labor politics. It develops the concept of the technopolitics of labor expendability, which rests on two interrelated arguments. First, the logic of optimization underpinning algorithmic management is not realized solely through the manipulation of data inputs and computational models; rather, it fundamentally depends on the presumed expendability of migrant workers. In the Chinese context, couriers are first imagined as disposable, an assumption that enables the exclusion of their needs, preferences, and well-being from the computational frame. Second, this vision is further normalized and legitimized through its alignment with specific political and ideological formations, particularly China's fetishization of technological superiority and the long-standing marginalization of rural migrant workers. By situating algorithmic management within the local political economy, this article challenges its dominant portrayal as a universal technical phenomenon and highlights the situated labor conditions that shape its design and application.