The plight of China’s delivery drivers is front-of-mind for the Chinese public. In August, CDT translated an account of one courier’s death in the summer heat, while a viral photograph of a Meituan driver kneeling before a security guard drew attention to the indignities many delivery drivers are forced to suffer. This week, a 55-year-old driver famous locally for his work ethic died while making deliveries. Video of the deceased driver, who had appeared to be sleeping on the back of his bike, went viral—spurring an outpouring of tributes to the deceased, and to the profession in general.
One such tribute, a poem titled “Algorithm” posted to the Bilibili account Koko the Earthling (地球人口口, dìqiúrén kǒukǒu), is translated in part below. The final lines of the second stanza, “A man/ Is not a steed/ Nor a machine” capture the long-unrealized desires of China’s working class. They closely mirror the Communist revolutionary Li Lisan’s stirring call for a worker’s strike at Anyuan in 1922: “Once beasts of burden, now we will be men!” A century later, the words still ring true.
Algorithm
—dedicated to the departed delivery manYour pose, lying flat
Never again to be seen as laziness.
Stretched all the way out,
Death allows you an ease that was long taboo.Parsing your life is of no interest to me.
In this age of sound and fury
I’ll call you the simplest of names:
A man
Is not a steed
Nor a machine.[…]
In the evening of this Republic,
Can the brand new algorithm
Tally the life of a slave—
His ancient fate
And fleeting existence?Koko
September 10, 2024 [Chinese]
