[Comment] 320 million "flexible employment" is not a benefit: when there is no stable work, repackaged as free, unemployment anxiety disappears.

The most contentious economic issues on the Chinese Internet in the last two days are not GDP or real estate, but rather a word — “welfare”.

In his discussion of social security for flexible workers, Zhang Dan Dan Dan, Professor and Vice-President of Economics at the National Institute for Development Studies, Beijing University, argued that from a labour economics perspective, “flexibility is a benefit in itself”, arguing that traditional workers are guaranteed, for example, a fixed time in exchange for a pension, while flexible workers are given more time autonomy, but social security is weak. This statement then provoked widespread criticism.

This theory is certainly of value if China ' s flexible employment consists mainly of highly skilled workers who have chosen to choose a free profession. But the real figures make the controversy completely different. The China Research Centre for New Employment Patterns projects that the number of flexible employment in 2026 will increase from 280 million in 2025 to 320 million, or about 44 per cent of the urban employment in China. At the same time, China ' s economic slowdown has made it increasingly difficult to obtain stable full-time jobs.

This means that many people are “flexible” not, first and foremost, free to choose, but rather, without a passive outcome after stable labour contracts.

The delivery rider can decide when to go online, but the platform algorithm determines how much; (b) Cyber-car drivers can decide when to leave, but have to bear the cost of depreciation and significant labour security; Temporary workers may leave a factory, but enterprises can likewise avoid establishing long-term labour relations and assuming full social insurance responsibility. The simple expression of this relationship as “security for freedom” can easily shift the costs of enterprises and systems into the life choices of the individual worker.

More critically, it is not the language of a professor, but the increasingly sophisticated set of economic language conversions under Xi Jinping. Unemployment can become “flexible employment”, low income can be described as “employment restructuring”, and youth cannot find stable jobs to enter the new statistical profile. When language continues to be beautiful, labour security in real life does not increase by a penny.

The figure of 320 million is particularly alarming. If nearly half of the urban workers end up in employment without a traditional long-term labour relationship, the current system of old-age, medical and unemployment protection in China is not just a matter of employment, but a long-term financial and social security risk. The reduction of fixed employees in enterprises can certainly reduce costs, but society must ultimately bear the burden of security for these workers after retirement, sickness and unemployment.

The CCP propaganda system has long preferred to rename economic difficulties, as renaming is much cheaper than solving problems. The “new employment form” of “free enterprise” “flexible employment” can describe the real new economic model, but when these terms are used to mask the decline in stable jobs, they become a form of cosmetics in the statistical and promotional sense.

The reasons for this public anger are therefore not complex. People are not unaware of the value of working time freedom, but are too clear about what is really a benefit. Benefits should mean that workers have more choices than being told that they are “free” after losing their pensions, stable income and labour security.

If a society has 320 million flexible workers, it is not the “flexibility” that they should really be asked why they value, but why the Chinese economy is creating such a large and unstable labour force, and who the Xi Jinping regime is prepared to pay the final bill for this employment structure.