PROTECTION WITHOUT EMPLOYMENT: THE POLICY LOGIC, IMPLEMENTATION, AND REFORM OF CHINA’S OCCUPATIONAL INJURY PROTECTION PILOT FOR PLATFORM WORKERS

Abstract

China hosts the world’s largest platform workforce: roughly 84 million people in “new forms of employment”, most of them outside standard labour law and the employment-based work-injury insurance that depends on it. Since 2022 the Chinese state has answered with a distinctive instrument, a status-neutral occupational injury protection scheme funded by platforms through a small charge on every order and triggered by the work rather than by an employment relationship. This article evaluates that pilot. It reconstructs the policy logic, reading the scheme as a case of Chinese policy experimentation that deliberately decouples social protection from employment status. It documents the design and the 2022 to 2026 implementation, during which the pilot grew from seven provinces to seventeen, lifted enrollment from 8.9 to 25.1 million, and set a course for nationwide coverage in 2026. It places the scheme in international perspective and finds no close analogue for its per-order, platform-funded, mandatory model. It then identifies the gaps that remain, namely single-risk coverage, thin evidence on claims and adequacy, unresolved worker status, weak portability, and the fragility of the move from pilot to permanent institution, and the reform pathways each implies. The pilot shows that social protection can be decoupled from employment and funded at the level of the transaction. Whether it becomes a durable, portable, multi-risk floor will be decided in the scaling and legislation now under way.