Governing in the gaps: Welfare interfaces and delivery riders in urban China

This article examines how a local state in Wuxi governs delivery riders whose labour is indispensable to urban life yet difficult to gather into stable organisational forms. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork between 2023 and 2025, with follow-up into 2026, it develops the concept of welfare interfaces to describe modest infrastructures of contact through which mobile platform workers become reachable. Warm stations, service maps, meal schemes, medical channels and complaint procedures offer practical support, but they fit welfare to the temporal pressures of delivery work. They make fatigue, injury, hunger and grievance visible as public-order, welfare and organisational matters while leaving the employment relation unresolved. The article argues that local state capacity is assembled through rooms, lists, map pins, counters and channels rather than exercised from above. Welfare becomes a way of meeting riders in motion: easing exposure, keeping circulation intact and making hardship administratively addressable without settling the labour question.