Who is Mengzhu? His real name is Chen Guojiang. Born in 1990 in one of the most impoverished towns in China, he was trained to be a chef at early age. Since 2009, he worked in Beijing. He started as a delivery man, and he opened a restaurant but failed. So, in 2018, he became a delivery man again.
In 2019, he started organizing delivery workers on Wechat, by creating 11 Wechat groups. He also had 14000 Wechat friends, making it possible to reach a large number of people (mostly delivery workers).
He declared himself to be the chief of the “Alliance of the Jianghu of delivery knights”, and his followers call him “Mengzhu” (short for Alliance Chief). He spent most of his spare time helping the knights to fight for their rights as workers.
Knight in Chinese literally means the rider. And because delivery workers ride scooters or bicycles for their work, they call themslves “knight”. As you can see, there is a sense of pride in their work.
Jianghu is a very complex Chinese concept. The word first appeared in Zhuangzi two thousand years ago. Throughout Chinese history, it is normally a realm that is outside the reach of the government.
In Chinese history, there are two distinguishable structured worlds: Chaoting (朝廷) and Jianghu (江湖).
Chaoting is the government headed by the emperor. Today, it represents the central government. The power structure is centralized and highy hierarchical, with the dear supreme leader, I mean the emperor, at the top.
Jianghu is the opposite, mostly distributed. Wuxia novels by Jin Yong are often about heroes in Jianghu. (Wuxia literally means “martial heroes”, it is a genre of Chinese fiction concerning the adventures of martial artists in ancient China. Jin Yong is a Hong Kong writer whose Wuxia novels were widely read in China since 1980s.)
Most of the time, Jianghu and Chaoting are parallel powers. Of course they might use each other or fight each other. The famous 14th century novel Water Margin best described their dynamic relationship. The novels told the stories of governmental officials who were wronged and could not get justice, they ran away to join the Jianghu. And when they became a strong bandit group, the emperor made deals with them and recruit them to put down rebels.
However, in today’s China, there should be no power not controlled by CCP. Not surprisingly, Mengzhu was disappeared in early 2021. NPR has covered his case in April 2021.
Mengzhu “delivered hundreds of take-out food orders a day” on an electric scooter. He and his colleagues powered Beijing to be a paradise of cheap, convenient and delicious meals delivered to the doors within minutes. Salary workers who got off from work exhausted can get warm food with a click on their phone.
In fact, many Chinese on social media list this service as one of the top attraction of life in China, along with the High-Speed rail network.
However, as we have seen in our Newsletter 2, it is not a job that 8 hours of work will feed you and your family. It is just one of the three jobs the man squeezed into his flexible employment happiness. The pay is low, everyday there is harassment from the police and city management, and insult from the customers. Most workers have no insurance and even for those who bought insurance, the process to get reimbursed in case of accidents is long and tedious and most people could not get it.
The BBC article in Chinese reported on the history and challenge of this industry. Five years ago, when it started, it was a job with flexible time and high pay, at 10,000 Yuan (\(1500) a month. Now it is only 5000 yuan (\)800) a month, and the platform that hires the delivery workers learned to dictate their delivery time and turned the workers into non-stop robots, by using big data.
The two biggest platforms, Meituan and Eleme, have made huge amount of money off this expanding business. Jointly, they control 90% of the market. According to BBC, there are tens of millions of people working as delivery workers. Most of them are like Mengzhu, coming from impoverished areas.
The tension between the customers and the delivery workers are also very visible on social media. Most of the time, people on twitter sympathize with the delivery workers.
For example, a very famous Chinese writer, Murong Xuecun, described his food ordering experience in Nov 2020 on twitter:
(rough translation)
The old brother who delivered the food was about 50 years old, tall and fit, dressed very plainly, and I think he is from the north by his accent. I ordered a bowl of rice noodles and a bowl of congee. But the first time he made a mistake, the second time he delivered only the rice noodles. I waited for another 20 minutes before he delivered the congee. He earned 6.50 yuan for this order, and it took him more than an hour to make three trips back and forth. When I took the box, he said sorry at least 10 times and begged me not to give a bad review.
It is against this background that Mengzhu worked with his colleagues to fight for a better work condition. He tried to organize strikes and was detained for a month. He tried again, and he was disappeared in Feb 2021.
On Jan 3rd 2022, a video of Mengzhu appeared. The 34 second video is reposted on twitter.
Let me describe the video in details:
The video opens with his back towards the camera, walking away. Three big characters on top, saying, “I am okay”. A woman’s voice was reading the small caption text at the bottom. I searched the text on internet and I could not find its origin.
(rough translation)
I am not a gentleman, but I have a conscience; I know that Jianghu is dangerous and I wanted to be alone, but life is not what I want it to be; the world is changing and I am destined to fight alone. I've seen all the deceitfulness of the world, but I'm smiling and walking alone!
Then a Cantonese song that was very popular among migrant workers takes over. The song’s title is “This life of mine”. It goes:
The vicissitudes of being tossed and turned
I came to make a living, to explore
I am like the sand that drowns in the waves of people
The sweat went through my clothes, in the trains I took
Tears soaked my shirts, and I sobbed through the night
At the end, he turned and faced the camera, waved. Big Chinese text reads: “my brothers, we will meet again, see you in Jianghu. “
People who posted this video noted: “However, some key facts are unclear: did Chen make the video himself? Under his own free will? And when was the video shot? There are still many unanswered questions about his status and safety.”
The English word on the back of the jacket is “subvert”, and people are arguing, is this a secret message? Or, as most Chinese are unaware of the meaning of the English words they wear on their clothes, is it just a coincidence?
China has changed under Dear Supreme Leader. There used to be lots of mass protests. Chinese scholars estimated that there were 180,000 incidents in 2010 alone.
Thanks to big data, the same technology that turned a job that used to be attractive to workers for its flexibility to robotic control, Chinese people feel that they have been “atomized”. Meaning that organizing among themselves for collective action is harder than ever.
That is why, the wikipedia page “Protest and dissent in China” did not have any update since 2019. And the last mass incident it recorded was the Hong Kong protest.
It seems to me that Jianghu is being swallowed by Chaoting. Will we see Mengzhu again in Jianghu? In another country, he could have been winning local elections, I imagine.