The China New Employment Forms Research Center, a semi-official think tank co-founded by Capital University of Economics and Business and the China Employment Promotion Association, both operating within the orbit of China’s Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, recently published its 2025 China Blue-Collar Employment Research Report. Based on 28,450 survey responses, the report documents changes in China’s blue-collar labor market from 2024 to 2025. The lead researcher is Zhang Chenggang, a professor at Capital University of Economics and Business.
Flexible employment, the official euphemism for gig work and informal labor arrangements, reportedly stood at 240 million people in 2024, rose to 280 million in 2025, and is projected to reach 320 million in 2026: a net increase of 40 million people per year.
The report’s own data on the three largest gig categories, domestic services, food delivery riders, and courier workers, shows combined growth of under three million in 2025. Where are the other 37 million coming from? The report does not say. The most plausible explanation is that the statistical definition of “flexible employment” was quietly broadened. More workers are being reclassified, not newly employed.
Formal employment is collapsing while gig work expands
In 2015, flexible employment covered 120 million people, about 15.7 percent of the total workforce. By 2025, that share had reached 38.6 percent. On current projections, it will exceed 44 percent this year.
Subtract flexible employment from total employment, and the number of people in formal, stable jobs fell from 640 million in 2015 to 440 million in 2025, a drop of 200 million over a decade. Two forces drove this simultaneously: total employment contracted by roughly 40 million, while a growing share of remaining workers slid into informal arrangements, adding roughly 160 million to the gig rolls.
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2025 was the worst year on record for this trend. Total employment shrank by 9.35 million people. Flexible employment grew by 40 million. Formal employment fell by nearly 50 million in a single year, the steepest one-year drop in at least a decade. The report does not foreground this conclusion.
Who is gaining work and who is losing it
Total blue-collar employment stands at 427 million, up slightly from 425 million in 2024. The growth came almost entirely from domestic services, delivery riders, and couriers.
Manufacturing employs 82.2 million people, a relatively stable figure. Construction has 40.22 million, a sector in gradual decline as China’s property market contracts.
The domestic services category is the largest single blue-collar occupation, at 46.8 million workers, three times the size of the food delivery workforce. That number seems counterintuitive at first. Cross-referencing with figures from the Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, both of which put the domestic services workforce around 30 million, the gap is best explained by the report’s expansive definition: housecleaners, postpartum care nurses, nannies, moving companies, live-in helpers, hourly housekeeping workers. Anything involving paid service inside a domestic setting appears to have been counted.
Food delivery riders totaled 15.9 million, up only 900,000 from 2024. This is a striking figure given that 2025 saw an intense “delivery platform war” among China’s major apps, with aggressive subsidy battles and promotional campaigns that drove order volumes sharply higher. More orders, but almost no new riders. Each rider is processing more deliveries, and the saturation shows.
Ride-hailing drivers numbered 37.24 million, the second-largest blue-collar category after domestic services, but the total fell two percent year on year. Anyone who has noticed longer waits or drivers complaining about thin earnings is seeing this in the data. Livestreamers and truck drivers also declined.
How the report obscures a decade of wage trends
The monthly income gap between blue-collar and white-collar workers has narrowed from 3,344 yuan (roughly $460) in 2013 to 2,250 yuan (roughly $310) in 2025, according to the report, which presents this as evidence that blue-collar wages have outpaced white-collar wages since 2019.
The narrowing of the gap says nothing about whether blue-collar wages rose or white-collar wages fell. Both possibilities produce the same chart. The gap was actually smallest in 2019, at just 1,695 yuan. The accurate summary is that the gap narrowed from 2013 to 2019, then widened again. The report’s framing smooths over this reversal.
During 2020 to 2022, white-collar wages rose sharply while blue-collar wages barely moved, widening the gap quickly. Lockdown conditions hammered in-person service industries: restaurants, retail, and other sectors where blue-collar work is concentrated. Then, from 2022 to 2025, the pattern reversed. White-collar wages declined while blue-collar wages edged up marginally. China’s major technology companies began large-scale layoffs after 2022, and the financial sector implemented mandatory salary caps. Two of the primary engines of high white-collar compensation switched off at roughly the same time.
The three best-paid gig jobs, and what the hourly rates reveal
The three highest-earning blue-collar occupations are postpartum care nurses, food delivery riders, and truck drivers, all exceeding 8,000 yuan (roughly $1,100) per month. Postpartum care nurses, known in Chinese as yuèsǎo (月嫂), are specialist caregivers who live with new mothers in the weeks after childbirth, a role that commands a significant premium in China’s urban middle class. The very top earners in this category reach 25,000 yuan per month, placing them at the apex of the entire blue-collar income distribution.
Food delivery saw the largest wage increase of any category, at 10.5 percent, a benefit that the 2025 platform wars did deliver to workers even if they added almost no new jobs. At the other end, ride-hailing drivers and construction workers both saw monthly wages fall about two percent: one due to oversupply, the other due to the continued contraction of the property cycle.
Postpartum care nurses earn 38.5 yuan per hour. Food delivery riders earn 37.3 yuan. Beijing’s minimum wage, the highest in the country, stands at 27.7 yuan. Environmental cleaning workers, who maintain the streets and public spaces of China’s cities, earn just 19.2 yuan per hour, with wages that grew by only 1.5 percent in 2025. Office workers willing to calculate their effective hourly rate, factoring in unpaid overtime, may find the comparison uncomfortable.
What the report calls modernization, the data calls a crisis
The report’s authors characterize their findings as follows: flexible employment has evolved from a supplementary feature of the labor market into one of its primary pillars, and the system for valuing labor is shifting from traditional organizational affiliation toward market-based pricing based on individual skills and real-time contribution.
The data supports a plainer reading. Formal employment is eroding at an accelerating pace. Tens of millions of workers who once held stable jobs with social insurance and employer pension contributions now earn piece rates with no benefits. The official response is to relabel this transition as modernization.
The data in this report was assembled with genuine care: nearly 30,000 respondents, systematic methodology, ten years of trend lines. The conclusions drawn from that data are, in places, chosen with equal care.
民生多艰. It is a classical Chinese phrase meaning: the people’s livelihood is hard.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Vision Times.)
