Does a third employment category protect platform workers? Evidence from a national census of Chinese judgments and local arbitration records, 2021–2026

Abstract Whether platform workers should be assigned to a third employment category, intermediate between employee and independent contractor, remains contested internationally. China created such a category in July 2021, when eight central ministries distinguished a situation "not fully meeting the conditions for establishing an employment relationship" from both standard employment and civil cooperation. Five years on, how it actually operates has not been assessed. Drawing on an exhaustive full-text phrase census of a national legal database (164 distinct documents from two phrase searches, retrieved August 2026), a purposively coded database of 66 authoritative and lower-court decisions screened from 771 retrieved judgments, and the complete population of 24 platform-related arbitration cases handled by a district labour arbitration commission in Ningbo between 2025 and mid-2026, this article examines the category's actual use. Three findings emerge. First, it is close to dormant: only five judgments nationwide characterise a relationship affirmatively under it, and none of the 24 arbitration cases does so. Second, its application is displaced: two of the five concern traditional storefront service work rather than platform work, and only one involves a location-based gig platform. Third, and most consequentially, its observed function has been delimiting rather than conferring. In four of the five, characterisation preceded dismissal of the worker's claims; in the fifth and only case producing a payment, the obligation arose under a commercial employer's liability insurance policy rather than from any labour-law entitlement; and in one further case an employer invoked the category in its own submissions. This article argues that the pattern is structural rather than incidental: a classificatory position that remains at the level of policy guidance, is defined only by exclusion, and is unaccompanied by any change in evidentiary access, has no operative content that an adjudicator can apply. The findings bear directly on jurisdictions now designing intermediate statuses and rebuttable presumptions of employment.