Carry Burawoy’s legacy forward: Public sociology and Chinese labour scholarship in the age of platform capitalism

Introduction

In December 2005, Michael Burawoy was invited to deliver the keynote address at the Annual Conference of the Hong Kong Sociological Association. His visit coincided with the WTO Ministerial Conference, when trade unionists, farmers, migrant workers, feminists, and other anti-globalisation activists gathered in Hong Kong. The chants of “Down, Down WTO” reverberated across Victoria Harbour, symbolising a global insurgent moment against neoliberal globalisation. Burawoy used Hong Kong, China and the WTO protest as an entry point to advocate public sociology as a global project: a sociology rooted in struggle, solidarity, and the making of a global civil society from below.

History unfolded through paradox. The neoliberal order that had consolidated capitalist power since the early 1980s reached its zenith, yet simultaneously sowed the seeds of its own resistance. In the words of Evans (2008: 271), a colleague of Burawoy at Berkeley, a “counter-hegemonic globalization” from below was taking shape. From Seattle in 1999 to Hong Kong in 2005, social movements challenged neoliberal globalisation, opening new spaces for engaged scholars and academic activists to participate in global civil society. In this conjuncture, Burawoy redirected his ethnographic gaze – from Zambian copper mines, Chicago shop floors, and socialist factories back to the university – to reflect upon, and argue for, the transformative potential of public sociology.

As a global city that connects China’s world factory to Western markets, Hong Kong also served as an Asian hub of global civil society, playing a significant role in supporting Chinese workers embedded in global value chains. Against this backdrop, in the early 2000s there also emerged a vibrant field of labour activism and research in Hong Kong and mainland China. Another world briefly seemed possible: labour NGOs proliferated, transnational solidarity networks deepened, and a generation of young scholars and activists sought to reclaim the dignity of labour (Xu and Chan, 2018). However, this window soon closed. After 2015, the crackdown on labour NGOs in southern China and criminalisation of labour activists signalled the consolidation of authoritarianism (Howell and Pringle, 2018). The optimism once attached to “civil society” and the labour movement (Li, 2021) gave way to coercive governance, digital surveillance, and the disciplining of dissent.

Two decades since the Hong Kong WTO protests, the world has been profoundly transformed. China has shifted from a sweatshop “world factory” (Pun, 2005) to a techno-authoritarian powerhouse challenging the United States (Lei, 2023). Hong Kong, once defined by a vibrant protest culture and freedom of speech, has been incorporated into the Chinese security state. Globally, far-right forces advance, authoritarian tendencies proliferate, and precarious workers and migrants bear the costs of overlapping economic, political, ecological, and technological crises. Even in liberal democracies, academic freedom is shrinking; universities that are increasingly subordinated to capitalist accumulation; and public intellectuals are ever more closely policed or silenced.

In this conjuncture, can public sociology still claim emancipatory power, or must we re-theorise its project under conditions of authoritarian capitalism and fragmented global resistance? I argue that reading Burawoy today requires a return to Gramsci and a renewed focus on organic intellectuals embedded in class struggle (Hui, 2020). My reflection proceeds in three steps. First, despite repression, a new generation of labour scholars in China continues – in diverse and often concealed ways – to enact public and policy-oriented intellectual roles. Second, the contradictions of platform capitalism have created opportunities for such intellectual practices. Third, as public and policy sociology practice are both controversial and limited, our analytical lens should extend beyond sociology and the university to locate the experience and practice of organic intellectuals outside academia (Pun, 2006).

Indeed, scholarship under authoritarian constraint carries global significance. If forms of public and critical sociology continue to survive under such conditions, pessimism elsewhere is premature. The challenge is to identify historically-grounded and politically-resilient strategies that sustain intellectual autonomy and working-class alliances. Burawoy’s final public commitments, including his solidarity with Palestine, remind us that the public intellectual is inseparable from historical struggle.

This article builds on the author’s observation of, engagement with, and integration in the community of Chinese labour scholars. I am deeply indebted to friends and colleagues who generously shared their insights and experiences, though I bear sole responsibility for any analytical biases. Beyond publicly available information, the principle of anonymity is strictly maintained throughout this article. In the following sections, I first trace Burawoy’s Gramscian foundations and distinguish his approach from liberal visions of civil society. I then examine state crackdown on labour activism in China and its political-economic context, and the subsequent shift of Chinese labour scholars toward the practice of public and policy sociology in relation to platform labour. Finally, I explore the emergence of organic intellectuals beyond academia and discuss the global implications of the case of China.

From global civil society to organic public sociologist: Burawoy’s intervention

Chan co-founded the Institute of Civil Society at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. As one of the key trio leaders in the Occupy Central with Love and Peace movement in Hong Kong in 2014, his social and political engagement shifted back to Hong Kong after 2013, although his legacy continues to shape mainstream civil society discourse in mainland China. Zhou (2026) offers a forceful critique of this liberal elite-led project of civil society that Chan represented. According to her, “an independent space for political participation had not actually existed in China” (Zhou, 2026: xvii). She further demonstrates that since the late 2000s, the influence of liberal actors has progressively waned. In key social movements of the 2010s, especially labour and feminist activism, participants actively contested the liberal framing of civil society, and increasingly regarded its agenda as inadequate and disconnected from their concrete struggles (Zhou, 2026: 4–5, 24–25). Drawing on the notion of the public sphere and Michael Mann’s concept of interstitial space, she reconceptualises civil society in China as “interstitial publics,” referring to spaces “where the exercise of power has not been fully institutionalized” (Zhou, 2026: 6). While criticising the liberal elite-led project of civil society advocacy, she does not transcend the liberal logic that conceptualises civil society as a domain external to the state and the market.

In this sense, civil society cannot be understood as a realm opposed to the state, but as a political process that reproduces or contests class rule. While political society represents coercive institutions, civil society represents hegemony, where moral and intellectual leadership enables the ruling class to secure consent and rule through persuasion.

One of the distinctions in Gramsci’s civil society framework lies between traditional and organic intellectuals. Traditional intellectuals, such as clergy, teachers, artists, and scientists, appear to stand above class divisions, but are, in fact, historically tied to the dominant class. Organic intellectuals, by contrast, emerge from within a specific emerging social class, and participate directly in its economic and political activity. Their task is to organise the class both intellectually and morally, transforming it from a merely economic category into a cohesive political force. This process is neither automatic nor purely educational; it involves the formation of critical self-consciousness and the construction of alliances among subordinate groups to build a counter-hegemonic bloc in civil society.

Gramsci further distinguishes between the “war of position” and the “war of movement” as two different political struggle strategies. War of movement refers to direct, confrontational struggles aimed at seizing state power, such as revolutions or mass uprisings. By contrast, war of position is a more gradual and diffuse process that takes place within civil society, where competing groups seek to build ideological influence, reshape common sense, and establish moral and intellectual leadership.

Burawoy’s intellectual project is best understood as part of the Gramscian strand of Marxist thought. Although he does not make this clear in some of his writings, such as the public sociology thesis discussed in this paper, Burawoy’s work remains preoccupied with the central questions confronting Gramsci’s generation: Why is capitalism able to perpetuate itself so durably? How do ruling classes build hegemony and secure the consent of workers? How do organic intellectuals intervene in social struggles and contribute to social transformation?

While Burawoy’s (2005b) early work centred on the workplace, in later reflections he acknowledges that he had overlooked the changes taking place at the community level (p. 3): “All this [globalisation and industrial relocation] was entirely unanticipated in Manufacturing Consent. I paid no attention to the surrounding community and focused on what I called the hegemonic organization of work as though it were the end of history.” Responding to a changing world, reflected in economic globalisation and anti-globalisation movements, his later edited volumes Ethnography Unbound (Burawoy, 1991) and Global Ethnography (Burawoy et al., 2000) extended ethnography from the workplace to the emergent global civil society and the diverse justice movements of the late 20th century.

It was in this intellectual and historical context that the thesis of public sociology was developed. In his Presidential Address to the American Sociological Association (ASA) in 2004, which has influenced a generation of global sociologists and activists, Burawoy does not explicitly acknowledge his intellectual debt to Gramsci, even though his concepts and ideas are deeply informed by Gramsci’s theory of intellectuals. Burawoy (2005a) delineates four interrelated types of sociological practice that together constitute the “division of sociological labour.” Professional sociology is “a scientific sociology created by and for sociologists” (p. 9), generating the theoretical frameworks and empirical research that underpin the discipline. Policy sociology “applies professional sociology to the interests and problems of clients” such as governments, corporations, or NGOs (p. 10), producing instrumental knowledge directed toward specific goals. Critical sociology serves as the reflexive conscience of the discipline, “interrogating the assumptions — methodological, philosophical, and theoretical — of the research programs of professional sociology” (p. 10). Finally, public sociology seeks to “engage multiple publics in multiple ways” (p. 5), opening dialogue beyond the academy to make sociological knowledge relevant to civic and moral debates about the kind of society we wish to create.

Within public sociology, Burawoy distinguishes between “traditional” and “organic” modes. Traditional public sociology involves “speaking to publics that are largely invisible, thin, and passive,” through opinion pieces, books, and media commentary (Burawoy, 2005a: 7). In contrast, organic public sociology entails “a more intimate, dialogic relation with a visible, thick, active, local, and often counter-public” (p. 7). Organic public sociologists work collaboratively with social movements, labour organisations, or community groups in a relationship of “mutual education,” learning as well as teaching.

After reviewing the three phases of American sociology dominated by professional, policy, and critical sociology, Burawoy asks, “From where will the next impetus for sociology come?” and then answers: “Thesis I claimed that the gap between the sociological ethos and the world is propelling sociology into the public arena” (Burawoy, 2005a: 20). While scholars from the “traditional sociology” tradition have rejected public sociology on the grounds that it risks undermining the discipline’s legitimacy and autonomy from politics, Burawoy’s global vision and optimism have, nevertheless, provoked critical reflection among critical labour scholars. For example, Bezuidenhout et al. (2022) criticise Burawoy’s four-fold typology and his “public sociology” framing as insufficiently attentive to the conditions of South Africa and other countries in the Global South. Building on her praxis in post-colonial Hong Kong, Pun (2006: 70–71) criticises the “regression” in Burawoy’s concept of “public sociology” advocating a more radical form of intellectual engagement more explicitly rooted in the Gramscian tradition: “what is missing is not only a vision or standpoint of public sociology, but tactics, war of position, intra-politics, line of movement and most important of all, the creation of insurgent subjectivities who are ready to resist the present practice of sociology.”

In his critique of Burawoy’s work, Wood (2026) offers a historical interpretation of Burawoy’s intellectual regression. He argues that while Burawoy was pessimistic about the potential of working-class politics in advanced capitalist societies with his concept of “consent” or “hegemony” in the workplace, he retained a degree of optimism about the role of workers in shaping socialist transformation under state socialism. However, this expectation was undermined by the political developments in Russia and Eastern Europe in the early 1990s, where transitions did not lead to democratic socialism, but instead resulted in marketisation and new forms of inequality. For Wood, this disjuncture contributed to Burawoy’s subsequent shift away from a worker-centred “politics of production” towards greater emphasis on civil society. His pre-1991 work “advocated for a Marxism with microfoundations in which the workplace acts as the source of micro-institutions and lived experiences that shape class identities,” whereas his post-1991 writings turned to civil society “as the key agency resisting marketization, initially in the form of ‘real utopias’ and later via ‘public sociology’” (Wood, 2026: 1). By highlighting the contradictions between these “two Michael Burawoys,” Wood calls for “a return to the politics of production” (p. 11) and for “viewing class struggle as an ever-present feature of society” (p. 12), particularly in the context of the global rise of far-right populism. However, Wood’s approach remains limited by its continued adherence to academic Marxism.

Drawing on the experience of China over the past two decades, this paper proposes looking beyond sociology and academia, and returning instead to Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals emerging from the working class. Through the practice of organic intellectuals, a more coherent and relevant agenda for contemporary Marxism can be reconstructed: one that reconnects the “war of position” and the “war of movement.” This linkage, largely absent in Burawoy’s academic Marxism but hinted at by Pun (2006), reinforces the “connection between class and workplace” advocated by Wood (2026: 13).

Organic public sociology against sweatshop: From 2005 to 2015

The year 2025 marks 20 years since Burawoy’s speech in Hong Kong. After his 2005 visit, Burawoy was invited to Hong Kong and mainland China on several further occasions, developing close intellectual exchanges with labour-engaged scholars. After Burawoy tragically died on 3 February 2025, dozens of Chinese labour scholars wrote tributes and memorial articles, sharing personal memories of their interactions with him or his impact on their work. Prof. Shen Yuan, a friend of Burawoy and well-known labour sociologist at Tsingua University who translated his book Public Sociology into Chinese (2007), remarked: “How Professor Burawoy’s works have profoundly influenced the trajectory of labour sociology in China is a major academic question” (Shen, 2025).

While Burawoy has indeed influenced many Chinese labour scholars, as Shen (2025) observed, my intention is not to argue that he directly shaped the formation of public labour scholarship in China. Indeed, not all public intellectuals support his thesis of public sociology (Pun, 2006). Rather, I use the trajectory of Chinese labour scholars’ sociological practice over the past two decades to reassess Burawoy’s thesis of public sociology in a changing world. Within the community of labour studies in China, leading domestic and overseas scholars have laid a strong foundation of public engagement and connections with labour organisations. This includes Hong Kong-based scholars such as Anita Chan, Pun Ngai, and Ching Kwan Lee, who maintained varying degrees of involvement with labour and civil society groups, as well as mainland Chinese scholars formerly affiliated with the Chinese University of Industrial Relations under the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU).

From roughly 2005 to 2015, numerous labour sociologists collaborated closely with labour NGOs, effectively acting as organic public sociologists. Many of these labour NGOs were connected to the global civil society through trade unions, labour organisations or public sociologists in Hong Kong. In Burawoy’s (2003) terms, they were a core part of the Polanyian type of civil society that mobilised against the expansion of the global market. In other words, they did not have a strong agenda directed against the state, although some actors within labour NGOs did attempt to build a “counter-hegemony” by challenging capitalist economic and juridico-political “common-sense” (Hui, 2020). In this regard, Burawoy’s reconstruction of the concept of civil society from Gramsci and Polanyi helps us better understand the nature and role of labour NGOs in China. Students and early-career researchers participated in training programmes organised by leading universities in mainland China and Hong Kong. Some became deeply involved in high-profile labour advocacy campaigns, such as the Foxconn investigations and various solidarity networks (Pun et al., 2016), and the cleaning-workers’ strike on the Guangzhou university mega-campus (Xu and Dou, 2021).

The wave of suicides among young female migrant workers at Foxconn’s Shenzhen mega-factory in 2010 marked a significant moment for Chinese labour public scholarship. Scholars, journalists, and students from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan launched unprecedented cross-border investigations to document Foxconn workers’ lives. This transnational sociological intervention, led by Prof. Pun Ngai and collaborators, exposed how the despotic labour regime in global supply chains dehumanised workers in the pursuit of efficiency and profit. Through empirical research and public engagement, scholars and students made workers’ suffering visible globally, shaping scholarly debates and contributing to transnational labour-rights advocacy (Pun et al., 2016).

Also in 2010, labour scholars played an important role in one of the most significant strikes in post-reform China: the 17-day Honda workers’ strike in Foshan, Guangdong. This included the involvement of Prof. Chang Kai from Renmin University, who served as an advisor to the strikers and participated in management-labour collective bargaining on 4 June. His involvement contributed to a series of party-state initiatives promoting wage bargaining in the automobile sector and beyond (Chan and Hui, 2012).

Both the Foxconn campaign and the Honda strike encouraged a network of labour NGOs to shift from a service-based model toward a movement-oriented one, actively organising workers in strikes and pushing for collective bargaining (Chen and Yang, 2017). Their approach attracted many PhD students and young scholars, who conducted fieldwork within these organisations, and built strong rapport with both organisers and workers. In short, during this decade, many Chinese labour scholars, particularly sociologists, played significant roles in supporting labour rights, labour NGOs, and labour activism.

However, on 3 December 2015, exactly 10 years after Burawoy’s keynote speech in Hong Kong, the Chinese government launched a major crackdown on labour NGOs. More than 20 labour activists were suddenly detained in Guangzhou and Foshan, and five were formally charged in 2016 (Chan, 2020). This crackdown followed the arrests of feminist activists in March and human rights lawyers in July of the same year, forming part of President Xi Jinping’s broader strategy to suppress civil society and restrict grassroots mobilisation (Fu and Distelhorst, 2018). In addition to this direct repression, the Foreign NGO Management Law, implemented in January 2017, further tightened state oversight of overseas funding for grassroots organisations. Rights-based labour NGOs found it increasingly difficult to secure funding and faced heightened political risk.

The consequences for China’s labour NGO sector, and for the transnational civil-society movement that once supported it, were severe. Many organisations were forced to shut down, restructure as service-oriented entities, or self-discipline under state co-optation pressures (Howell, 2015). As labour NGOs lost capacity to assist workplace struggles, left-leaning university students, particularly from elite campuses, attempted to fill the vacuum, most notably during the 2018 Jasic mobilisation in Shenzhen. However, this escalation of contention triggered another wave of repression, with detentions and criminal charges against workers, NGO staff, and students in 2018–2019, the most severe crackdown on labour activism since 1989 (Chan, 2020). Drawing on earlier networks, global scholars mobilised to support Jasic workers by signing petitions and publishing op-eds in international media. Inside mainland China, however, public sociologists who supported students and labour NGOs faced heavy pressure from their universities. The situation stood in stark contrast to 2010, when scholars could openly support workers in the Honda and Foxconn struggles. It should be noted that Jasic is a domestically owned enterprise, whereas Honda and Foxconn are foreign-owned enterprises, reflecting the broader shift in ownership structures within China’s manufacturing capital.

To conclude, the dominant form of public sociological practice between 2005 and 2015 was organic public sociology. Students, researchers, and scholars maintained close contact with labour organisations and working-class communities, while the boundary between organic and traditional public sociology was often blurred: many were interviewed widely by international, national, and local media, and published books and articles for general audiences to promote workers’ rights. Being well-connected with international actors (Pun et al., 2016; Xu and Chan, 2018), they formed part of a global civil society seeking a “counter-hegemony from below,” as Evans (2008) argued.

Applying Burawoy’s reconceptualisation of civil society and public sociology to the Chinese context from 2005 to 2015 and beyond does not imply that all social actors identified themselves as public sociologists or endorsed his notion of civil society. For instance, some students from elite universities who actively participated in the Jasic case were strongly influenced by Maoism, while some scholars and students involved in the Foxconn campaign were more closely aligned with Gramsci’s ideas of organic intellectuals and the war of position (Pun, 2006). Nevertheless, Burawoy’s framework still offers useful insights into the evolving roles of academics and other social actors, as well as their contributions and limitations.

What, then, is next for the practice of public sociology in China? In recent years, mainland Chinese labour scholars have rapidly adapted to the shifting political-economic context, and have engaged deeply with questions of labour rights in the newly-emerging platform economy. As detailed in the next section, new forms of traditional public sociology and policy sociology have emerged in China.

After the labour NGO crackdown: Practising traditional public sociology and policy sociology in platform capitalism

Kuruvilla (2018: 1083) rightly acknowledges the shift in Chinese labour scholarship “from cautious optimism to renewed pessimism” after 2015, as the hard-line political environment created a chilling effect on both labour organising and labour research. While I agree that the state’s crackdown on civil society and labour NGOs in 2015 (Fu and Distelhorst, 2018; Howell and Pringle, 2018) is a decisive turning point, I go further by situating this historical moment within a political-economic analysis inspired by Gramsci’s distinction between civil society (consent) and political society (coercion), a framework that Burawoy also intellectually and politically extended in his own work.

There is extensive scholarly analysis of the change in ruling strategies on civil society and labour NGOs from the Hu–Wen regime (2003–2012) to Xi’s era (since 2013). Howell and Pringle (2018) propose a dynamic framework called “shades of authoritarianism” to capture variation and change over time, arguing that a more “encapsulating” or controlled authoritarianism under Xi has replaced the more “open” authoritarianism of the Hu–Wen period. Fu and Distelhorst (2018) also find that under Xi, state repression has shifted from a fragmented approach to a more consolidated one. However, the causes underlying such a dramatic change have been underexamined. It is easy to conclude that change results from factional struggle within the party-state (Choi et al., 2021), but the question is why a specific faction, or ruling strategy, could gain support within the party during the transitional period.

Based on the cases collected by China Labour Bulletin, Figure 1 reports a significant rise in the number of worker strikes and protests from 2012 to 2015, implying that the working class gave neither active nor passive consent to the party-state and ruling class, even though a “harmonious” labour-relations policy, such as wage collective bargaining and workplace trade-union elections, had been implemented, especially in the post-strike factories (Hui and Chan, 2013). Figures 2 and 3 show the economic limits of the existing socio-economic policy from Hu–Wen’s regime. The economic growth rate declined after 2012, and net FDI inflows also narrowed significantly from 2012 onwards. With both political and economic challenges, the hegemonic project that had created opportunities for civil-society actors, including labour NGOs and public labour sociologists, could not be sustained; thus, a new ruling strategy was called for under Xi’s administration.

As noted above, from 2015 onwards, numerous political crackdowns targeting labour NGOs were carried out, followed, in 2018, by the repression of left-wing student activism. These developments can be interpreted as moments of class war, in which the state aligned itself more closely with the interests of global and domestic capital, particularly amid pressures of capital accumulation during an economic downturn. At the same time, the party-state advanced a digitalisation strategy. For instance, development of the internet economy was made a national priority following Xi Jinping’s speech at the World Internet Conference in 2015, which articulated the goal of transforming China into a global internet powerhouse (Liu, 2023). Taken together, these political and economic strategies can be understood as mutually reinforcing efforts to sustain and facilitate capital accumulation.

In his prominent book Platform Capitalism, Marxist scholar Srnicek (2016) illuminates how the platform economy was adopted as both a “technological fix” and an “organisational fix” to sustain global capital accumulation after the 2008 economic crisis. In other words, platform capitalism became a new capital-accumulation strategy for global financial capital in response to declining profit rates in traditional sectors, as well as a political project aimed at dismantling the collective power of the working class.

This pattern has also been observed in Asia and China, demonstrated by the flooding of venture capital into the emerging platform economy, led by some Asian capital (Qiu and Chan, 2025). However, Chinese platform capitalism, which Pun (2014) conceptualises as part of broader infrastructure capitalism, has its own uniqueness compared to its American counterpart. The state has played a much more active role in facilitating, encouraging, supporting, and even investing in platform companies (Lei, 2023). The effect of the digital transformation is huge. In 2019, an estimated 9.7% of China’s total workforce was engaged in the platform economy, compared with only 4% in the UK and 0.4–0.6% in the US (Zhou, 2020). By 2021, the number of platform workers in China had reached 84 million, surpassing the total workforce employed in the manufacturing sector (State Information Centre, 2021). To encourage expansion of the platform economy, the state initially adopted a laissez-faire approach to labour relations, leaving platform work largely unregulated. As a result, the limited gains achieved through workers’ struggles – often supported by students, public sociologists, and labour NGOs between 2005 and 2015 – such as employment contracts, social insurance coverage, and minimum-wage protection, were gradually dismantled, as most platform workers were “self-employed” or agency workers. This created public concern and opportunities for Chinese labour scholars to engage in both public sociology and policy sociology on issues related to platform workers’ rights. I elaborate on this development in the following sections, drawing examples from field observations and insights shared by informants in China.

Traditional public sociology

As reviewed above, Burawoy distinguishes between organic public sociology and traditional public sociology. Organic public sociologists support and collaborate with social movements, trade unions, NGOs and working-class communities, while traditional public sociologists maintain dialogue with the general public. While it may still be possible for some sociologists to practise “organic public sociology” by maintaining relations with workers and their communities, their roles are limited compared to the pre-2015 period; and to pre-empt state repression, their work must remain largely invisible, making it difficult for outsiders to observe. Therefore, the dominant form of sociological practice under Chinese platform capitalism is traditional public sociology.

A widely discussed example is Chen Long, a Peking University PhD student in sociology and now an associate professor at China Agricultural University. As part of his fieldwork, he worked as a food-delivery courier and published a widely watched video diary in 2020 that captured the precarity, emotional exhaustion, and algorithmic harms of gig work. His digital storytelling sparked nationwide concern and public empathy. In Burawoy’s typology, Chen functions as a traditional public sociologist: translating sociological insight into public discourse and shaping collective understanding.

Chen is not the only example. Public attention to the plight of food-delivery couriers in China was also drawn by the widely circulated investigative report Delivery Workers Trapped in the System (Waimai qishou, kun zai xitong li), written by journalist Lai Youxuan for Renwu (People) magazine in September 2020. Based on 16 months of in-depth investigation, Lai’s report vividly revealed how algorithmic management and time-pressure systems governed the daily lives of delivery workers. Among those interviewed was Sun Ping, a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences who had conducted long-term research on platform labour. Following the publication of the article, which went viral and prompted national concern about the structural conditions of gig work, Sun herself – and other labour scholars – came to occupy an increasingly public position, engaging in discussions across media and academic forums about labour rights, algorithmic governance, and the ethics of research participation.

Another significant example of public sociology is the truck-driver investigation project led by leading sociologist Shen Yuan and his research team, which culminated in the influential report Survey of China’s Truck Drivers (Zhongguo kache siji diaocha). Drawing on extensive fieldwork, the study documented the everyday struggles of long-haul drivers, including overwork, precarious employment, and the logistics industry’s exploitative subcontracting system. The report, published in 2018, received wide public attention. The research team also included several of Shen’s students, who went on to become young scholars in leading institutions. For example, Ma Dan, now a researcher at the China Social Science Academy, interviewed 49 truck-drivers’ wives in five cities in 2018 and was active in sharing these stories through media platforms to highlight the gendered dimensions of truck drivers’ lives.

Despite these eye-catching stories of public sociologists, some informants also shared the hurdles and risks of media interviews. One stated: “In my university, it means one should report to the party secretary and, only if they say yes, [we] may accept [media interview invitation]. This means many scholars cannot do so even they want to …” Apart from the political and institutional pressure that some scholars face, informants also shared with me the compromises that some public sociologists have to make, including the growing tendency to be directed toward policy sociology, which I expand on in the next section.

Many younger students have also become active in promoting the rights of platform workers through social-media platforms such as Little Red Book (Xiaohongshu). Another notable trend can be observed on Bilibili, where some creators have gained visibility by documenting everyday labour experiences. They record what they see in factories, logistics hubs, and service sectors, producing short videos and mini-documentaries that reveal the realities of contemporary work. Some of them go further to advocate for the right to strike and for genuine trade unionism, using digital spaces as alternative arenas for labour education and mobilisation under restrictive political conditions. In this sense, the boundary between organic and traditional public sociology becomes blurred once again (Figure 4).

Policy sociology

In Burawoy’s (2005) schema, policy sociology was defined as “sociology in the service of a goal defined by a client” (p. 9). Policy sociologists often work with governments, unions, or firms to look for solutions to specific problems. Comparing Burawoy’s description of American policy sociology with what we observe in China today, the difference is obvious. In the US, policy sociology rose to prominence from the 1920s, particularly during the post-World War II era, when the U.S. state and private foundations sought social-scientific expertise to manage complex social problems. Public sociology was envisioned by Burawoy as sociology to be renewed in the 21st century. In China, we have observed the partial turn from public sociology in the global commodity chain to policy sociology under platform capitalism, implying that the linear development from professional, policy, critical to public sociology in the US that Burawoy described is not a global phenomenon. Moreover, to some extent, policy and public sociology currently overlap in China: the values and ethos of public sociology infuse policy engagement.

The earlier un-regulation of platform work in China, the problems created, and state attempts to regulate the sector in the later stage created opportunities for labour sociologists to conduct commissioned and consultation projects for platform firms, government departments, trade unions and international institutions. Many have produced rigorous academic studies and advocated policy improvements for platform-worker protection. In this section, I highlight two key examples.

At one of China’s leading universities, the School of Labour and Human Resources has maintained long-term partnerships with major platform companies such as Didi, Meituan, and Alibaba. Since 2016, the school has jointly organised the “China New Work–Employment Forum” with government institutions and several top platform firms, serving as a key site for dialogue between academia, industry, and the state. In addition, since the first quarter of 2021, the school has hosted a “Quarterly Employment Analysis Conference of China.” During these conferences, scholars present empirical analyses based on platform-generated data, for example from Zhilian Zhaopin (an online recruitment platform). Additionally, representatives from leading platform firms, including Meituan, share updates on current labour-market issues, such as supply and demand dynamics, skills requirements, and workforce composition. Government officials from the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security, the National Bureau of Statistics, and the Ministry of Education also attend regularly, illustrating the close intersection of academic research, corporate interest, and state labour governance in China’s platform economy.

At a university specialising in labour studies, a research team led by a senior scholar collaborated with a major food-delivery platform under a large e-commerce conglomerate in 2021. At the time, the platform was under pressure to comply with emerging national regulations and sought to improve its image by promoting workers’ career development. Like many similar partnerships between platform firms and academics, the company invited proposals from multiple scholars and ultimately selected the one most aligned with its corporate needs. The selected research team included members of the host university and several external collaborators. They conducted fieldwork in five major cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen, visiting dozens of food-delivery stations. The project was based on a questionnaire drafted by the research team, though it was substantially revised by the platform. The company also granted the scholars restricted access to its internal survey data through a monitored online interface, which allowed remote statistical analysis but prohibited data copying. After 2 months of mixed-methods research, the team produced several reports: one quantitative analysis based on the revised questionnaire, and several qualitative case studies of regional differences and operational models. To conclude the project, findings were presented at a hybrid conference. As in many such collaborations, the partnership was not driven purely by market competition; rather, it reflected prior informal relations and mutual trust between the academic team and institutional partners.

The same group of scholars has also undertaken commissioned research for local government departments. In 2018, two members of the team received separate projects from a provincial Department of Human Resources and Social Security. One project focused on digital platform labour, involving interviews with workers and managers across multiple sectors – ride-hailing, real estate, and other service platforms – in six cities across the province. The study aimed to map supply chains and employment patterns in the platform economy so that authorities could design appropriate governance frameworks. The project culminated in a detailed report, accompanied by case studies and a final presentation at a government-organised conference.

More recently, in 2025, scholars at this specialised university also started a key national project commissioned by the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security. The project reflected growing official concern over how to regulate and stabilise labour relations in the rapidly expanding platform economy. During preliminary consultations, ministry officials expressed strong interest in learning from international experiences in collective bargaining and union organisation on digital platforms. In response, the research team presented comparative cases from Western contexts but found policymakers eager for more concrete “best practices” that could be adapted domestically. Over the summer, the team conducted enterprise visits to several companies, including leading logistics and ride-hailing platforms, and state-owned enterprises.

Favouring public sociology as a “utopia,” Burawoy (2005: 10) claimed that “public sociology is the conscience of policy sociology.” In China, the extent to which policy scholars serving the clients of state and firms can maintain “conscience” is debated or reflected upon internally among some labour scholars. My discussions with scholars in China found mixed perceptions regarding the newly expanded opportunities for practising policy sociology in the platform economy. Some scholars are sceptical of these consultation projects, especially those involving leading platform firms; others see them as opportunities to conduct empirical research and influence policy and practice. Although management practices of platforms and state regulations can be influenced by many other factors, including rising patterns of protests from platform workers (Han and Song, 2024; Sun and Chen, 2021; Zhao and Luo, 2023), policy scholars clearly are part of this evolving process.

In 2021, the Chinese government issued guidelines for regulating platform work and protecting workers in the platform economy. These included The Guiding Opinions on Protecting the Labour Rights and Interests of Workers Engaged in New Forms of Employment and The Guideline on the Protection of Rights and Interests of Food Delivery Workers, which detailed specific protection for food-delivery platform workers. These guidelines, which are not formal legal regulations and have only limited binding capacity on the platform, led to a series of initiatives by the platforms themselves in 2025. JD.com announced full social-insurance and housing-fund contributions for full-time riders beginning in March 2025, with accident and health insurance for part-time riders. Meituan soon promised to extend social-security benefits to full-time and permanent part-time riders. Ele.me had piloted similar schemes since 2023 (Sun and Jia, 2025). While implementation and worker reception require continued study, these developments are widely seen by labour scholars as a significant breakthrough under rising regulatory and public pressure.

The shift from organic public sociology to policy sociology among many labour scholars can be understood as a form of “regression” (Pun, 2006). As Wood (2026) argues, the regression of Burawoy’s intellectual project has a historical root in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the resulting political disillusionment and pessimism experienced by Marxist sociologists of his generation. From this perspective, such “regression” can be interpreted as a strategic retreat during a period of declining working-class power. Similarly, the turn of some public sociologists towards policy-oriented work in China can be seen as a strategic response to the constraints placed on working-class struggles in a changing political-economic context.

Organic intellectuals beyond sociology and academia

All men are intellectuals … but not all men have the function of intellectuals.

Gramsci (1971, cited by Simon, 1982: 94).

A global sociology agenda should extend beyond the discipline of sociology as sociology-trained scholars are not always based in sociology departments. This was evident in my discussion of public and policy sociology above. It is also evident in other countries, including the UK, where sociology-trained scholars work in fields such as management, development studies, or policy studies. Equally, scholars from various disciplines – communication studies, human geography, and political science – are now engaging with theories and concepts from sociological studies. Indeed, online posts relating to labour rights protection are not necessarily done exclusively by sociology students. Therefore, in this section, I suggest the need to look beyond academia to search for the agency of organic intellectuals. This partially responds to the global threat to academic freedom under authoritarianism and neoliberal managerialism, which, as Woodman and Pringle (2022) elaborated, partially reflects the deepening crisis in global capitalism.

Burawoy’s reconceptualization of civil society (2003) and re-envisioning of public sociology (2005a) resonated with the dynamics of neo-liberal globalisation and the rise of anti-globalisation counter-hegemony (Evans, 2008). However, we now inhabit a markedly different political, economic, and historical conjuncture – one defined by deglobalisation, resurgent authoritarianism, and the expansion of platform and surveillance capitalism. In the field of political philosophy, Chan (2025) argues that scholars need to broaden their understanding of what moral and political philosophy is by looking at the role of activist-thinkers throughout history. For those practising public sociology, it is also important to interpret the contribution of Burawoy from a historical perspective, and to look beyond the academic boundary to broader actors in civil society and the labour movement. In this sense, we must return to Gramsci’s concept of organic intellectuals.

In China labour studies, Hui argues that labour-related civil society actors (such as labour NGOs and labour lawyers) cannot simply be assumed to automatically represent workers’ interests. She offers a typology (unqualified organic, semi-organic, organic) that evaluates these actors based on how well they challenge capitalist economic “common-sense,” challenge state juridico-political “common-sense,” build a new “good sense,” raise worker class and political consciousness, and help build worker collectivity and system-transforming initiatives.

This principle also applies to public and policy sociologists in China. Although, following Burawoy’s (2005a) definition, many labour sociologists have sustained forms of public engagement and maintained dialogue with audiences beyond academia, not all are able to challenge capitalist hegemony or cultivate workers’ political consciousness. While some are effective in conveying workers’ concerns to the state through policy advocacy, the hope for more fundamental transformation may ultimately have to rely on other actors, particularly organic intellectuals emerging from the working class itself.

In the past decade, one of the most important organic intellectuals advocating for platform workers’ rights has been Mr. Chen Guojiang. Chen Guojiang, a food-delivery worker in Beijing and former secondary-school teacher, organised a grassroots self-help network through WeChat beginning in 2019, eventually attracting more than 14,000 riders. He later named it the “Delivery Riders Alliance” (Qishi lianmeng), facilitating both online communication and offline gatherings to share grievances and support. Hailed as “Mengzhu”, or “leader,” Chen became a key figure in voicing collective demands, especially against the lowering of delivery fees.

However, in February 2021, Chen was detained by authorities on charges of “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” after calling for a strike. While his detention suppressed formal organising, it also brought national and international visibility to the precarious conditions of gig workers, demonstrating both the possibilities and constraints of grassroots mobilisation under authoritarian governance (Hu, 2021). Chen’s arrest, along with earlier crackdowns on labour NGOs, exemplifies the Chinese government’s carrot-and-stick strategy – combining repression of independent organising with selective top-down reforms – to maintain control while managing rising tensions within the platform economy.

I regard Chen as a typical example of an organic intellectual in Gramsci’s terms. Organic intellectuals, according to Gramsci, are not those detached from the everyday lives of the working class. Instead, they emerge organically from within a particular social class, especially a subordinate class, and articulate that class’s experiences, struggles, and aspirations. Their role is to help the class develop a coherent worldview, organise itself politically, and engage in ideological struggle within civil society. Before he was arrested, with his solid educational background, Chen was highly articulate and well connected with other civil-society actors, voicing workers’ concerns while maintaining close contact with rank-and-file workers.

Scholarly and public attention has been increasingly paid to the rising form of protests from platform labourers, especially food delivery workers. In April 2023, hundreds of couriers employed by Meituan, the largest food delivery platform involving more than 7 million workers, in Shanwei, Guangdong, went on strike in response to a steep drop in per-order pay and the cancellation of rain-allowance subsidies (Han and Song, 2024). When the strike began, more than 70% of workers participated, forcing the company to dispatch replacement riders from neighbouring cities with higher pay. However, these replacement workers reportedly worked slowly partially because they were unfamiliar with local geography, but partially also to express solidarity with the strikers. The strike lasted roughly 14 days, representing one of the most sustained collective actions by platform workers in recent years. The workers managed to obtain partial concessions: Meituan restored the cancelled rain allowances and reversed some pay cuts, but they failed to achieve the more systematic demand of equalising tiered pay or abolishing differentiated subsidies across worker classifications. This case highlights the potential of local worker networks, combined with digital communication channels, but also reveals the current fragility of worker solidarity and indicates the need for the organising function of organic intellectuals.

As with the crackdown on labour NGOs in 2015, which did not fully eliminate labour activism or public scholarship, the defeat of left-wing student activism in the Jasic case in 2018 did not extinguish the momentum of working-class organic intellectuals. Although these practices have become more concealed and low-profile, some activists remain engaged in workplaces, communities, and the virtual public sphere, particularly through educational initiatives. Online labour rights bulletins continue to be published and circulated, while numerous social media accounts have been created to disseminate original and translated materials promoting the values of democratic socialism.

Concluding remark: Beyond sociology and academia

This paper has demonstrated why the liberal concept of “civil society” (Tocqueville, 2000), which sees civil society as an autonomous domain outside the state, is unable to capture the changing dynamics of state and labour relations in China over the past two decades. Instead, the Gramscian (1971) framework of civil society and organic intellectuals, together with the approach that Burawoy (2003, 2005a) has developed through his notion of public sociology and his engagement with the Polanyian school, serve as an insightful analytical lens.

Rooted in Marxist tradition, Burawoy consistently stood at the intellectual frontier of his time, securing an enduring position in the social sciences. As he argued, sociology entered a crisis in the 1960s amid social upheaval and youth radicalisation, and it was Marxism that revitalised the discipline (Burawoy, 2003). By the 1990s, however, with the end of the Cold War and the ascendance of neoliberalism, Marxism itself fell into crisis, and, in Burawoy’s words, sociology was then called upon to rescue Marxism by grounding it in empirical practice and public engagement.

Burawoy’s notion of public sociology has profoundly shaped the community of Chinese labour scholars. In this paper, I draw on my own observations and experiences since 2005. That year, while working as a labour organiser and studying sociology as a graduate student, I participated in organising the anti-WTO protests. Michael Burawoy’s speech at the Hong Kong Sociological Association deeply moved me, offering an optimistic vision for advancing public sociology in Hong Kong, China, and beyond. Like many Hong Kong and mainland labour scholars of that period, I had numerous opportunities to meet and interact with Burawoy after 2005. His passion, curiosity, humour, and generosity were consistently inspiring and encouraging. For me – and, I believe, for many colleagues in China labour studies – the decade from 2005 to 2015 was a “heyday,” during which we built a vibrant community of friendship and public engagement through personal meetings, conferences, training workshops, campaigns, and collaborations with labour NGOs. Many important publications emerged from this collective endeavour.

The 2015 labour-NGO crackdown, however, fundamentally reshaped this landscape. The space for organic public sociologists, embedded in grassroots struggles, contracted sharply. Nevertheless, despite mounting constraints, mainland Chinese labour scholars did not abandon the moral commitments and ethos of public engagement, choosing instead to adapt their repertoires of engagement. Many turned toward policy advocacy through research partnerships and consultation projects with state and firms, pushing for institutional reforms and better labour protections. Others pursued traditional public sociology, utilising news media, digital platforms, and social media channels to circulate sociological insights and sustain public attention on labour issues. This could be understood as a form of strategic regression when the working-class struggle has been constrained in a new political economic context.

In authoritarian contexts, political red lines shift; repression and permissive space coexist and evolve. Nevertheless, even within authoritarian China, public sociologists and organic intellectuals have been able to negotiate space for advocacy on workers’ rights. Our case shows that some initiatives have been partially recognised or tolerated by both state and capital. For capital, this is reflected in the high-profile announcements by major platform companies to contribute social insurance and housing-fund benefits for riders. For the state, their acceptance of public and policy scholars can be understood in relation to the state’s anti-monopoly campaign against platform giants. In short, the party-state tolerates a narrow space for civil-society engagement because it helps absorb social pressure and stabilise class relations, though such tolerance always coexists with the threat of repression.

What emerges, therefore, is not the disappearance of public sociology in China, but rather its migration and mutation beyond sociology and academia into hybrid spaces where policy engagement, digital activism, and grassroots organising intersect. Most importantly, as in the period between 2005 and 2015, a new generation of students continued to be part of the community promoting labour rights, even though they were generally invisible personally in this new context. The task ahead is to recognise these evolving forms, support them, and theorise them as part of a global struggle for labour rights and democratic life under conditions of authoritarian capitalism.

With Burawoy’s passing, an era of relative stability also recedes. Marxist sociology and public sociology now face unprecedented challenges. Authoritarianism and the marketisation of higher education – two sharpened blades – threaten academic freedom, intellectual autonomy, and political expression across the world (Woodman and Pringle, 2022). In the United States, state authorities have increasingly targeted Palestine solidarity movements on campuses, subjecting students and faculties to disciplinary sanctions. At that historical moment, Burawoy again stepped forward: beginning in October 2023, he led the ASA’s Sociologists for Palestine initiative, rallying broad member support while confronting resistance from what he called “traditionalist” sociologists. This action mobilised students and scholars in universities to the ongoing global political struggle against the new far right authoritarianism, beyond maintaining public dialogue and supporting civil society organisation that he defined as public sociology in 2004 (Burawoy, 2005).

In China, we have also seen the continued emergence of organic intellectuals outside academia. The case of Chen is emblematic. Drawing on his strong social capital and close ties to rank-and-file delivery workers, he organised both online and offline, moving fluidly between grassroots networks and the broader civil-society ecosystem. It is precisely this dual embeddedness – horizontally among workers and vertically through civil-society channels – that made his organising effective and, from the state’s perspective, intolerable. His detention, along with that of many other grassroots activists, demonstrates the pivotal role such organic intellectuals play in constructing counter-hegemony under authoritarian platform capitalism. Chen is not an exceptional case of an organic intellectual in China. Numerous well-educated students who maintain strong connections with working-class communities and broader civil society continue to play active roles in workplaces, communities, and online platforms, promoting labour rights and the values of democratic socialism. Wood (2026) calls for a return to Burawoy’s pre-1991 intellectual legacy, placing “the politics of production” and class struggle at the centre of analysis. This paper goes one step further and proposes revising Burawoy’s intellectual roots in Gramsci and identifying working-class organic intellectuals, those who are able to reconnect the “war of position” and the “war of movement,” as well as class and workplace.