I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
By Hu Anyan
Published by Allen Lane, 2025, £12.99
Reviewed by Pete Mason
In September 2020, a video of an elite Tsinghua university student perilously riding his bicycle while working on his laptop went viral in China. He came to symbolise the crazy, self-defeating race to the bottom, termed ‘involution’, caused by extreme competition.
Within a year, involution hashtags were viewed over a billion times in China. The term ‘996’ had gone viral in China in 2019. Working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week, is demanded ‘voluntarily’ by many firms, particularly in IT and very typically of Chinese migrant workers, who have gone in search of work in other provinces.
Into this storm of anger 41-year-old migrant worker Hu Anyan began blogging about working 996 night shifts in a parcel warehouse in Foshan. It went viral and book offers ensued. Hu’s understated blog-turned-book became a runaway bestseller.
The book follows Hu to Beijing and into the gig-economy. About 220 million people, roughly 30% of China’s non-agricultural workforce, now work in flexible gig-style roles such as food delivery, ride-hailing and livestreaming according to the Wall Street Journal (21 December 2025). Parcel delivery companies compete to offer the lowest prices with workers paid per delivery.
Pointless military-style afterwork meetings were called several times a week: “[The] company was asking too much of people. I had to leave my place at six in the morning to get to work on time, and couldn’t go home until past eleven at night because of the meetings”. Hu simply adds: “There was no need for it”.
Occasional asides in I Deliver Parcels in Beijing channel the anger that arose against 996 working and involution. After being laid off, Hu intones: “We proletariat will never be anything but cynical of capitalist schemes. We had no illusions”.
An intensely private individual, we only gain fragmentary details of Hu’s family background in the scrappy later chapters: his parents, “from farming stock”, worked for 30 years in a state-owned factory where the relatively sheltered 48-hour working week was the norm, and still is. But that’s a long-gone era for many of Hu’s generation.
Hu didn’t “get along with studying” and left school without ‘good’ qualifications to join the world of work. He took his first paid job in a clothing store in 1999, and in the 19 jobs since, Hu joined several attempts by his friends to make a go of a capitalist ‘start-up’. But Hu works the longest hours recorded in the book trying to sell takeaways in a small rural town – seventeen-plus hours every day, from 8am to 1.15am, sleeping in his small, one-room, insect-infested workspace – selling little more than a few canned drinks a day.
Any illusions in ‘capitalist enrichment’ are lost by the time, in 2017, Hu begins the crucifying twelve-hour warehouse night shifts in Foshan: “Sometimes, I would black out… I was like the walking dead – a thousand-yard stare and a foggy mind”.
Chinese bloggers celebrated the book, identifying elements of ‘996’ exploitation in their own manual or office work. Hu became one of a few working-class, so-called ‘Wild’ writers in China who were not part of the establishment literary clique. His book has sold two million copies in China. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), eager to earn credibility, endorsed him.
The book speaks, worker to worker, in an authentic, direct language. Chinese reviewers saluted the ‘dignity’ Hu displays, and one senses a modest pride in his ability to hold down the job – many, he tells us, give up after just two hours of the three-day unpaid trial.
Hu gets the typical migrant worker four days off a month, and sticks with the job for ten months. His wage, however, makes his life generally affordable. Chinese workers typically save around a third of their income, and Hu is no exception. He lived on his savings for a year to focus on his writing but without success. Nevertheless, he writes that “it was a magical year”.
But the cash nexus is a central focus of the book. In Foshan, Hu lives cheaply and costs everything. He rejected the free or heavily subsidised ‘dorm’ accommodation typically provided for migrant workers and found a cheap rent – his only large expense.
While Hu simply blames his frugal mentality on his parents, when he moves to Beijing a real insecurity emerges – the lack of free healthcare.“This single period of illness set me back some ¥3,000, which was what I earned in half a month”. Hu had pneumonia, a temperature of 103, yet dragged himself round various increasingly dodgy clinics rather than pay the main hospital’s fees, which he eventually ended up using. He was cured in one week, lost a week’s pay and spent ¥1,500 on the fees.
There’s a dim sense of desperation. Hu soon swapped jobs to a parcel delivery company offering full insurance compensation – which was then bought out and closed down by the same rapacious company that he had left.
While the book condemns the capitalist aspects of the economy, there’s no suggestion that the CCP should do more, even to regulate them, leave aside nationalise them or, critically, that the workers should organise collectively to fight back.
It is true that Hu’s wage tripled from between ¥1,500-¥2,000 around the year 2000, to ¥6,000 in 2019. Indeed, Chinese wages hit a four-year period of 13.5% annual growth during that time. A period that included increased strike activity in the workplace. But now there are reports of migrants returning home, disillusioned, and wage growth is slowing.
Hu reflects a certain fatalism about the turn to the capitalist dog-eat-dog, exploitative economic conditions that he experienced, while exposing in great detail its failings. But there is perhaps an unwritten warning running through the book: that the working class will not forever tolerate these conditions.
The millions-strong Chinese working class is potentially a powerful force. Critical is the building of independent trade unions and the linking up of workers across China in company-wide and sector-wide combinations to fight for improvements, including a massive reduction of the working week without loss of pay. Through this book the Chinese working class gained a voice and anticipates the stirring of the giant.