Blooming in the Cracks: Women Migrant Workers and their Everyday Practices in China’s Platform-mediated Gig Economy

This dissertation investigates the lived experiences of women migrant workers within China's platform-mediated gig economy. Adopting an intersectional, de-Westernized, and practice-based people-centric perspective, the research seeks to answer how the gig economy shapes and is shaped by dynamics of gender, migration, and class. Rather than treating these as separate variables, the thesis establishes a fundamental dialogue across platform studies, gender studeis, and migration studies to understand these workers' comprehensive life courses. Theoretically, the study situates contemporary gig labor within the long history of China’s informal economy, arguing that precarity is a historical continuity for migrant workers rather than a complete rupture caused by new technology. Furthermore, the dissertation critically reconceptualizes the Western notion of the "platform" as pingtai—a hybrid governance mechanism unique to the Chinese context. Pingtai integrates corporate power, state objectives, and vernacular culture, creating a specific environment where labor organization and worker lives are co-constituted by platform logics and broader social dynamics. Methodologically, the research employs feminist digital ethnography, drawing on 53 semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and autoethnography across three distinct sectors: domestic work, food delivery, and AI data annotation. The first empirical case focuses on female domestic workers. It examines the tension between platformization and social reproduction. The study shows that while datafied visibility on platforms promotes professionalization, it also encodes local biases, such as age, origin, and suzhi (quality) discourse into algorithmic filters. However, workers exercise agency by transforming non-relational gig work into relational networks, utilizing these connections for self-organization and resistance. The second case analyzes female food delivery riders navigating a male-dominated sector. Through the lens of "platform patriarchy," the thesis explains how platforms function as "affective infrastructures of hope" that systemically marginalize women. This what I term "infrastructural exclusion" is embedded in algorithmic designs that privilege speed over safety and fail to account for women’s care responsibilities. Women riders navigate this hostile environment by doing and undoing gender to manage customer interactions and assert agency. The third case turns to female AI data annotators in rural China, examining labor within state-led poverty alleviation projects. I propose a concept "ambiguity as governance" to describe how public-private partnerships maintain strategic opacity, decentralizing risk onto workers through unclear pricing and shifting rules. Simultaneously, this hidden labor is reframed as "care work," which is an essential form of social reproduction that nurtures and sustains AI systems, supported by the workers' collective resilience. The empirical studies proposed in this dissertation highlight the profound and gendered impact of the Chinese pingtai system on migrant women’s lives within and beyond it. While the platform—as a hybrid of state, corporate, and vernacular power—often reproduces different forms of precarity, it also provides new infrastructures for agency. This dissertation reveals how these migrant women build informal relational networks, perform “sympathy arbitrage,” and enact “data care,” creating their own forms of sociality and resistance. Their visible and invisible labor is ultimately essential to the pingtai’s operation, aligning this thesis with a critical feminist tradition that uncovers the human labor and power relations behind technology.