On October 13, 2025, Xinhua Net published a commentary celebrating Xi Jinping’s speech at the Global Leaders’ Meeting on Women. Confirming that “Women play an important role in creating, promoting and carrying forward human civilization,” Xi reflects on the severe status quo: “the gender digital divide is widening, and equality between men and women remains a lofty yet arduous task.” How is the gender digital divide widening if supposedly the digital system is becoming more affordable and accessible with the deepening of initiatives on gender equality? One of Xi’s crucial proposals hinges on women’s participation in “the new wave of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation” and the goal to “empower women’s high-quality development through innovation” (Xinhua, 2025). This leads to the key momentum of commentary: Are Chinese rural women empowered by participating in the platform economy, one of the fastest-growing fields of the contemporary economic system within and beyond China? Below, we tease out three important forms of engagement regarding contemporary rural women’s involvement in platform labor: rural women’s participation in e-commerce, rural women’s vlogging, and female migrant workers as delivery couriers. Rural women’s participation in the burgeoning economy mirrors the subaltern condition of both the female and the rural as precarious labor, the intersection of which hints at the increasing wealth and labor gap that gradationally divides our world.
Karl Marx (1904) theorized that productive power, oftentimes represented by technology, promotes productive relations, including ownership and human relationships, in the production of value. Later Marxists, including Mao Zedong, revised such a view, arguing that much attention should be paid to productive relations to promote productivity and social development. In the case of digital platforms, technology has advanced vastly, while the production relations, including urban-rural and gender dichotomies, lag behind. In highlighting rural women’s platform labor, we intend to highlight women’s often neglected and marginalized roles in the modern (patriarchal) economic model of development. We argue that enhanced attention to the intersection between productive relations and productive power is necessary to promote a more just world for all laborers.
Women’s general participation in the e-commerce economy shows the persistence of patriarchal gender norms.While Chinese Internet companies gain enormous attention for their success in e-commerce, many rural women participating in e-commerce remain outside the spotlight. Since the official “mass entrepreneurship, mass innovation” campaign started in 2015, e-commerce has been seen in the eyes of the State as a crucial channel to raise the employment rate and stimulate China’s economy. Digital platforms such as Alibaba mobilize rural residents to participate in e-commerce as producers, operators, and consumers. Based on the courtyard economy that has driven China’s rural economy for hundreds of years, Chinese peasants construct a supply chain with a cheap household labor force. Many rural women gain economic empowerment from e-commerce, yet this comes with clear limitations.
Economically, a lot of rural women participating in e-commerce gain more income and autonomy of consumption (Yu and Cui, 2019; Zhang, 2023). Before the mushrooming of e-commerce, rural women were left behind in villages to shoulder the burdens of agricultural labor and care of the young and elderly. E-commerce production in villages allows them to earn a salary from local work and reduces their dependence on their husbands. Accordingly, many rural women face fewer complaints and accusations of being “useless” or making no money within the family. Working for e-commerce also breaks down the social predicament rural women have long encountered, in which they have a weak social network after marrying into their husbands’ villages. Working for e-commerce workshops brings them opportunities to develop social connections of their own, leading to affective empowerment (Liu, 2025, p.28-30). In many cases, rural women become the actual heads of family-run e-commerce and they gain honors in the public sphere thereby. For example, some of them win titles of “role model” or get invited to present at political or formal occasions (Yu and Cui, 2019, 11). Rural women in e-commerce acquire a higher status than before because of their role in stimulating the domestic and public economy.
The economic empowerment of rural women, however, does not naturally activate the consciousness of gender equality, as it does not necessarily translate into political and cultural empowerment. Many female entrepreneurs allow their husbands to be the sole legal representatives of their business in formal documents, despite their major contribution to the family-run e-commerce. Few women gain places in local governmental organizations, even while their husbands do. Despite women’s successful management of family e-commerce, many rural residents commonly think that “going out in the public or spotlight” is “unwomanly” (Yu and Cui, 2019, p.11). Rural women’s participation in e-commerce platforms does not consequently challenge traditional gender roles of household labor. Instead, their participation is constrained by gender roles. Moreover, e-commerce does not benefit rural women equally. For example, while younger women usually manage e-stores and communicate with customers, older women are likely to take on manual crafting and get paid by the piece, or they do household chores, which is essentially free labor (Zhang, 2023). In comparison with the younger generation, older women are further marginalized in rural e-commerce. Overall, e-commerce platforms bring rural women more economic opportunities, but they do not necessarily bring more gender equality. Reforming production relations might alter that dynamic.
Upon the rise of the short-video economy, the so-called wanghong (网红 internet red) phenomenon, along with state-led rural revitalization, many left-behind rural women have been mobilized to become vloggers on short video platforms, with their rural lives becoming one of the many spectacles that can be monetized for an urban-centric viewership. This wave of rural spectacle consists of two forms of visualization. One is represented by the leading vlogger Li Ziqi, who’s a top-notch influencer both globally and domestically, with nearly 30 million subscribers on YouTube and 50 million subscribers on domestic short-video platforms. Li Ziqi specializes in an aestheticized representation of rural life, showing a “beautiful China” that is self-sustaining, ecologically balanced, and culturally enriched in remote mountain villages. Such visual representation fulfills the urban and international viewers’ imagination of rural China as an unpolluted utopian “Shangri-La,” soothing their anxiety about modern life burdened by all-around pollution and food safety issues. Numerous rural vloggers flourished in this Li Ziqi style, representing the vast land of rural China in a utopian aesthetic, vividly portraying an idealized rural life. On the other end of the spectrum are rural mothers speaking bitterness through short videos. In this guise, husbands often work at menial jobs in the city and leave them in the village taking care of children and elders while working in the fields and tending to domestic chores. Yet their husbands’ meager remittances often can hardly sustain the whole family’s life, and rural mothers who choose to become vloggers then take on one more burden of economic livelihood. These rural mothers have been vividly tagged as a “bitter squad team” (kugua dadui 苦瓜大队) by netizens, referencing the impoverishment of their lives as a collective problem rather than an individual issue. For instance, the leading vlogger in this idiom, Xiaoying (小英), became a spectacle due to the stark contrast between her presentation of a messy cowshed, piles of dirty laundry, endless fieldwork, and her carefree character. Nevertheless, such vlogging practices are hardly sustainable. Most bitterness vloggers remain unrecognized with few followers, and while some of them have gained attention, such attention remains precarious since audiences are skeptical of such “speaking bitterness” after they gain popularity. The increasingly disciplined digital economy also tends to regulate such vlogging practices. In a neoliberal frame of market economy, the empowerment of this group can hardly be realized, and any understanding of the intricacy of this gendered struggle is immersed in the overly depoliticized, consumerized, and spectacularized digital realm. (Details can be found in our upcoming article on this group).
Last but not least, female delivery couriers, many of them with kids on their backs, have become an increasingly normal yet heartbreaking phenomenon showcasing the interlocked problem of gender and labor. In urban areas, food delivery platforms offer jobs to a considerable number of migrant workers, men and women. The low threshold, the wages paid on time, and the flexible work environment make food delivery a widely chosen occupation for migrant workers who are marginalized in the fierce competition for employment. Women make up 7 – 10 percent of food delivery workers (Chen et al., 2025; Huang and Zhuang, 2023). Although women do not constitute a major percentage of couriers, the number of female couriers has increased over recent years during the slowdown of China’s economy. Statistics from Meituan, one of the two major food delivery platforms in China, show that the number of female food delivery workers grew from 517,000 in 2022 to 701,000 in 2024. This represents a 35.6 percent increase, even while the total number of food delivery workers grew only 19.4 percent during the same period of time.
Working for food delivery platforms generates female migrant workers’ distinct experiences in comparison with their female counterparts in villages and their male counterparts on food delivery platforms. Unlike rural women participating in short-video making or rural e-commerce workers, female migrant workers on food delivery platforms work outside their families; thus, they face less pressure from domestic patriarchal rules. Instead, they need to follow the efficiency rules implemented by food delivery platforms, just like their male colleagues (Sun et al., 2021). Food delivery platforms construct a “de-gendered” work environment because they do not emphasize gender segregation during the labor process. This doubtlessly facilitates women’s participation in the public sector. However, it also helps conceal the particular dilemmas of women.
Women’s precarious status on food delivery platforms is manifested in two aspects: traditional gender roles and algorithmic discrimination. First, many women join food delivery platforms because of the traditional gender role of being a caregiver (Chen et al., 2025; Huang and Zhuang, 2023). Quite a large number of female migrant workers choose to deliver food because this flexible job allows them to get paid for fragmented labor time. As wives and mothers, they are occupied with sending children to school, cooking, washing, and other household chores, and have only three to four hours a day available for delivering food orders. Some rural women leave their children in villages and work alone in cities, aiming at maximizing their work time and wages. Second, female couriers experience algorithmic, gendered discrimination in daily work. Food delivery platforms rely heavily on algorithms to distribute orders, plan routes, and monitor delivery time. This seemingly scientific and efficient technology conceals the fact that platform algorithms are trained by big data that is mostly generated by male couriers (Chen et al., 2025, pp.38-41). Empirical research shows that male couriers can handle heavier food orders, ignore traffic rules more, and spend less time climbing stairs and riding than their female peers. However, the gender difference is not included in the algorithmic design. Female workers have to race with the universal algorithmic standard made from male experiences, and they do not always succeed. Many female couriers take fewer orders and consequently earn less on average. Despite the harsh working environment, a small percentage of female couriers stand out in the delivery competition and become danwang (单王, indicating the courier who sends the most orders in a certain radius). These exceptional cases do not confirm the invalidity of algorithmic bias. Rather, female danwang usually extend working hours, and select orders with simpler routes and lighter food to counter their inferior status under platform algorithms. It is worth noting that female danwang are usually unmarried women (Huang and Zhuang, 2023) or single mothers who do not live with their children (Chen et al., 2025). Women living with children are unlikely to stand out in the race for time and speed. Again, this manifests the entrenchedness of traditional gender roles even when rural women migrate to cities.
As Chinese rural women participate in the digital economy, possibilities lure them into this burgeoning field to aspire for empowerment and opportunities, yet persisting forms of patriarchal power dynamics condition their engagement. The promotion of productive powers does not automatically lead to a better world without the advancement of productive relations. Gendered forms of production relations are a primary way to understand these social and economic structures. We hope that future in-depth inquiries into the intersectional issue of women, the rural, and the digital will reveal more dynamics of this situation and theoretical approach.
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Zexu Guan (Ph.D., Leiden University) is a lecturer in the School of International Politics and Communication, Beijing Language and Culture University. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender, information technology, and cultural studies.
Tingting Hu (Ph.D., Comparative Literature, University of South Carolina) teaches comparative literature, gender studies, and creative writing at Renmin University of China, Beijing. Her research interests include women’s narratives, as well as contemporary literature, film, and art in China and beyond.