The economic and social consequences of the pandemic can be understood through the global economy’s dependence on our collective mobility. This article was originally published in Pandemic Discourses. 

In the battle against the COVID-19 pandemic, we know who the enemy is. But it is not in the fields, the streets, or the hills—rather, it is inside our bodies. In turn, we are the soldiers, but also, the enemy’s base. Coronavirus relies on us to survive and rides on our mobility and interactions to flourish. In this war, our target is our bodies, and our military response is to control our own movements. A constant subject of monitoring and regulation, mobility is a key tool in containing this pandemic.

Controlling daily mobility at a global scale, however, poses unprecedented challenges. While nothing may seem easier than an individual moving their body, our collective mobility has become a basic driving force of our economy, and the grammar of how our social lives are organized. That is why halting this movement has created a near-total shutdown of the economy, a result that appears far more devastating than the 2008 financial crisis. While the 2008 financial crisis merely disrupted conventional circulation patterns of money and goods, the pandemic has stopped human activities and removed that foundation of economic life.

“Before 1980, Chinese citizens needed special permission from governmental departments or their employer in order to merely purchase a train ticket or check in at a hotel, let alone change jobs or residence. The market-oriented reforms transformed a society of immobility into a hypermobile one.”

This may explain why many governments were initially hesitant in imposing mobility control; why lockdowns did prove to be so disruptive; and why people are eager to resume their mobility. The Politburo of the Communist Party of China (CPC), in an effort to gradually reopen the economy even before the pandemic was completely under control, stressed on February 21st that the most urgent task is to “ensure full access to transport and smooth functioning of road systems.” Transportation was identified as the “vanguard” in the recovery as it would open the “arteries” and promote “microcirculation.” The same Politburo meeting highlighted the importance of “maintaining the stability of global supply chains.” In China, this is an entirely new official expression, which was reiterated by the Politburo Standing Committee on March 4th. Mobility has almost become a security concern—not only because mobility may raise security threats, but, more importantly, because continuous circulations must be protected.

China’s phenomenal development since the 1980s can be read as a story of mobility. Before 1980, Chinese citizens needed special permission from governmental departments or their employer in order to merely purchase a train ticket or check in at a hotel, let alone change jobs or residence. The market-oriented reforms transformed a society of immobility into a hypermobile one. The number of internal migrants (who reside more than six months outside the place of registration) doubled from 121 million in 2000 to 236 million in 2019. By that point, 3.6 billion Chinese were traveling on trains and 660 million by air, compared to 950 million and 87 million in 2003 when the SARS virus broke out. The number of private cars increased from 13 million to 206 million in that time period.

Tellingly, the famous ‘social credit’ system works due in large part to the punishment imposed: the system blocks the blacklisted from traveling on train or airplane. The threat of immobility is the most effective penalty; for many, an inability to travel means social death.

The inability to stop 

We have become hostages of our own mobility not because we have been moving so much for so long. Rather, we are trapped by mobility, so to speak, because we have lost the capability of stopping. So how did we get to this point?

The global economy became so dependent on mobility because of a wide range of structural and institutional changes. Based on observations about China—which has played such an integral role in the world’s 21st-century growth story—I will discuss three such changes, which could be a starting point for exploring more widely applicable hypotheses.

First, there is a trend of “de-materialization” with the rise of the service industry, which has been the biggest change in the Chinese economy in the last two decades. Service accounted for less than 40 percent of GDP growth in 2003, but nearly 60 percent in 2019.

The service industry is closely associated with mobility. One of the fastest-growing sectors within the service industry, tourism expanded 18-fold between 2000 and 2019. The number of domestic tourists jumped from less than 1 billion to 6 billion in that time period. Many workers in the service industry move constantly to deliver service and also rely on others’ movements to generate demand for said service. These workers include more than 5 million delivery riders (Liang 2020), and more than 3 million couriers, as well as 20 million drivers associated with ride-hailing taxi apps and 1.4 million regular taxi drivers. It seems that the closer its association to mobility, the faster the sector has grown.

“De-materialization” is not entirely accurate in describing the service industry as movement is made up of material processes. But service activities often appear dematerialized because the transactions leave a little trace; taxi drivers, for instance, are paid for each ride they deliver. Once the order is complete, their labor, and even their entire existence, vanishes. Unlike factory workers, service labor is typically un-accumulative, not solidified into material forms, and does not express itself through lasting social relations. The apparent “de-materialization” in the mobility economy is thus related to the second trend: “casualization.”

In trade and hospitality, 70.8 percent of the Chinese workforce is in so-called “micro-enterprises” with fewer than 100 employees, many of whom do not have stable employment relationships. A survey reported that 80% of couriers have no legal relation with courier companies whom they work for (Yu and Cai 2020). For casualized labor in the service industry, the financial reward to their work is instant, but the loss of earning opportunity is irreversible. For example, a taxi driver who lost income in two months’ worth of lockdown during the pandemic cannot expect that the number of customers would double after the lockdown lifts. They rely on constant mobility for incomes. Casualized labor not only moves from one place to another but also from one job to the next. In the end, spatial movement and institutionalized precariousness are two sides of the same coin.

The rise of the “gig economy” shows even more clearly the relation between labor casualization and mobility. The capital behind platform technologies does not seek profits by possessing workers’ labor power, which is then turned into commodities through material production. Instead, platform capital purchases workers’ movement, which is tightly monitored. This is part of the process—and the third change—that I call “logistification.”

Logistification is the trend that capital maximizes returns and pursues monopolist positions through the management of circulation in addition to the possession of the means of production. The rapid development of the logistics sector itself is an obvious manifestation of logistification.

Officially recognized as an industry in 2003 and included in the national five-year plan for the first time in 2006, China’s logistics industry surpassed that of the United States in market size in 2013, the same year that China became the world’s largest trader. The total turnover of logistics increased from RMB 4.5 trillion (USD 0.64 trillion) in 2007 to RMB 283.1 trillion (USD 40 trillion) in 2018. Instead of factories and assembly lines, warehouses and shipping lines epitomize the capitalism we know today. At the end of 2016, the industry employed 50.12 million persons, accounting for 6.5% of the country’s employment. And among them, 56% are self-employed, an example of how logistification and casualization intertwine.

The gyro-like economy

These three structural and institutional changes—de-materialization, casualization, and logistification—mean that the economy could inevitably collapse if circulation stops. While economic function always relies on circulation to some degree, our current system is particularly dependent on ever-accelerating movements, namely because it is structurally unbalanced. A common syndrome of the imbalance is the widening gap between the returns to capital and rewards to labor. The concentration of profit amongst top earners and platform technology corporations, accompanied by the increasing precariousness among the employees, is a clear indicator of this.

In China, such imbalance is also seen in the rural-urban divide, the surplus production capacity, over-investments in fixed assets, and non-performing debts of state banks. If structurally unbalanced, the economy cannot stand on its own foot, so to speak, and must be in frantic circulation to sustain itself and prolong problems to the future. Otherwise, there will be debts defected, investments wasted, wages unpaid, and livelihoods crushed. And perhaps most importantly, deep contradictions could surface, leading to social tension.

Think of the global economy like a gyro. A gyro cannot stand balanced unless spun fast. This image forms a sharp contrast to the model of the “high-level equilibrium trap” proposed by Mark Elvin (1973).  Elvin attempts to explain why imperial China failed to industrialize despite its early achievements in the rural economy, science, and governance. His answer is that the steady growth of the population ate up rural outputs from the 17th century when new frontier land was exhausted. This prevented China from accumulating surplus into industrial capital. The large population, or the widely available cheap labor, disincentivized technical innovations. This high level of equilibrium resulted in a static trap.

The gyro-like economy represents an opposite type of trap. Highly dynamic and driven by capital’s feverish pursuit of surplus maximization, the economy has no stable equilibrium to be based on. Disequilibrium does encourage technological innovation and capital mobility to sectors with the highest returns, but it is far from clear whether these innovations—such as replacing local grocers with online shops—would improve human well-being and bring long-term stability. Unable to stop, the gyro economy is trapped in endless mobility.

Solving, or dissolving, social contradictions?

What will the post-pandemic economy look like?

Many of us hope that there will be more social protection (e.g. universal basic income schemes) and less casualization (e.g. formalization of the gig economy), which especially recognizes the vital social value of platform workers as evidenced throughout the lockdown.

But developments on the ground look less promising. Amazon and Alibaba are getting bigger with each passing day. Casualization could, in fact, become more prevalent with massive levels of unemployment. And as we know, forcing the unemployed into casual work and pushing them to move even more constantly has always been a way to dissolve — not solve — social problems.

After this is over, the gyro may spin ever faster.

Biao Xiang is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oxford and Director of Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. He has worked on migration and social changes in China, and subsequently India and other parts of Asia, since 1992.