The School of History and Sociology presents:

PhD Defense by Linzhou Xing
NAVIGATING THE PRECARIOUS CHINESE DREAM OF INNOVATION: STATE, RIDE-HAILING PLATFORMS, AND WORKERS
Friday, May 30, 2025, 9:00 am EST, Zoom Meeting

Abstract

The platform economy is among the most influential recent technological innovations. While bringing hopes for national economic growth and innovation as well as individual employment and success, platforms also raise growing concerns about national security, social disruption, and degradation of work. Based on the case of Didi, the largest ride-hailing platform in China and the world, this dissertation examines the co-constitution of platforms, gig workers who use platforms for work, and tech workers who design and operate platform algorithms, situated in China’s rapid economic growth, compressed social transformation, recent economic and employment difficulty, geopolitical tension, and pervasive techno-nationalism and techno-developmentalism. It analyzes how the multilayered precarity of platforms (manifested in their contingent and shifting structures and temporality) interacts with that of workers (manifested in fluctuating and degraded work and lives, and hopelessness regarding technological innovation and the future).

Drawing on longitudinal research with data from ethnography, semi-structured interviews, and documentary analysis, the dissertation adopts a three-layered framework, seeing platforms as similar to assemblages, value chains, and embodiments of sociotechnical imaginaries. It has the following major findings. (1) It traces Didi’s unstable structure and uncertain development, revealing its precarity as shaped by the contingent interactions of heterogeneous constituting actors in China’s context. (2) It zooms in on ride-hailing drivers’ precarity, manifested in digital hustling, loss of work-based communities and work-life balance, fluctuating and degrading working conditions, and hopelessness caused by Didi’s fluctuating operations. (3) Moving along the platform value chain, it reveals that Didi’s algorithms are not stable mechanisms of control and exploitation, but are mutable and contingent, shaped by not only technological and business concerns but also Didi’s internal organizational dynamics and contingent symbiosis with governments. (4) It analyzes tech workers’ precarity manifested by hustling disguised as innovation, fluctuating and degrading working conditions, and hopelessness caused by Didi’s fluctuating operations and state interruptions—conditions echoing those of gig workers. (5) It investigates how gig and tech workers respond to their stratified yet resonant precarity, showing that their shared precarity generates nascent albeit limited solidarity and potential re-imaginations of technological innovation.

The dissertation offers an analytical perspective of platforms that highlights the role of specific (especially non-Western) contexts, contingency, and failure. By tracing the interaction between the precarity of platforms and of workers, it expands our understanding of precarity related to technological innovation and work. Additionally, it unblackboxes the labor, technological, and organizational shaping of algorithm design and operation. Finally, it sheds light on how various social groups respond to and re-imagine innovation amidst strong but destabilizing techno-nationalist and techno-developmental values.

The Committee Members:
Dr. Amit Prasad (Chair), School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Willie Pearson, Jr., School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Hanchao Lu, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Ya-Wein Lei, Department of Sociology, Harvard University
Dr. Lin Zhang, Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire