In 2022, the German delivery company Gorillas started operating in cities across Europe, including London, boasting that you’d receive your order in ten minutes or less. At one point the company apparently selected job applicants by dropping a pin on a map and staging a race to see who could reach the location fastest. Gorillas has since folded, but the UK’s appetite for rapid delivery hasn’t disappeared. Instead, it’s been absorbed by supermarket giants with cuter, more comforting names: Tesco’s Whoosh, Sainsbury’s Chop Chop, Ocado’s Zoom.
But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about the global order, it’s that if something can be done quickly in the UK, it’s being done much faster in China. Last year the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba announced it was to begin testing rocket delivery. The goal: packages delivered anywhere in the world within an hour.
For now, the task of delivery remains with humans firmly planted on the ground. For two years Hu Anyan was one of the estimated ten million couriers in China – one of the 19 jobs he’s held in his 20 years of work, including security guard, waiter, bicycle salesman and convenience store clerk. Courier work, as he recounts in I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, is one of his most physically and emotionally gruelling jobs.
Customers are often unreasonable; one demands that he travel two hours back to deliver some durians they had not been there to receive the first time round. “The customer is king, don’t you understand?” another tells him. “But there should only be one king,” Hu replies, “I serve hundreds every day.”
Pressure comes from all sides. Once Hu has navigated the labyrinthine bureaucracy required to secure the unstable job, he faces constant surveillance and impossible targets. Efficiency is paramount; compassion has no measurable value. Companies encourage customers to complain, creating an endless loop of pressure and punishment.
Hu learns to measure life in lost minutes and fractions of yuan. “If a minute was worth 0.5 yuan,” he writes, “then the cost of urination was one yuan – that is, if the toilet was free to use and I only took two minutes.” To save time, he stops drinking water during his shifts. In the searing Beijing summer heat, he works himself sick.
It’s a hell that recalls James Bloodworth’s undercover account of life in an Amazon fulfilment centre, where British workers faced a similar brutal calculus. But Hu, who among those 19 jobs is a writer at his core, feels a tenderness towards the world he delivers to. Working the same neighbourhoods daily, he comes to know his customers’ pets, families and habits. They cease to be anonymous consumers; they become characters in a shared human story.
The contrast between the Chinese and Western attitudes toward work was captured sharply in the 2019 documentary American Factory – from Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground – which follows the reopening of a shuttered General Motors plant in Ohio by the Chinese glass firm Fuyao.
The cultural divide is immediate. American workers “are pretty slow. They have fat fingers,” one Chinese supervisor remarks. When the American employees begin discussing unionisation, the Chinese managers panic. “They think we’re lazy because we won’t work ourselves to death,” an American worker observes.
For Hu, the boundary between work and life is thin, perhaps non-existent. The final section of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, pointedly titled “Other Sides of Life”, spans only four pages. Work purely for survival, he concludes, “is a miserable prison”. Yet China’s hyper-consumerist system, promising freedom through effort, only replaces one form of bondage with another – “a different kind of lifelong imprisonment”, in which the worker is bound not by chains, but by aspiration.
Hu Anyan’s reflections touch on universal concerns. The language may be Chinese, but the exhaustion is global. Britain’s work culture, long defined by quiet endurance, has slipped into its own paradox: a nation that works longer hours yet produces less, where the promise of flexibility too often disguises instability.
Neither Britain nor China has found the right rhythm of work. Each builds its own kind of cage and calls it freedom. Hu reminds us how we grow used to the light, or the dark, or the thirst: “There is a reason that deep-sea fish are blind, and animals in the desert are tolerant of thirst – a big part of who I am is determined by my environment and not my nature.”
I Deliver Parcels in Beijing: On Making a Living
Hu Anyan, trs Jack Hargreaves
Allen Lane, 336pp, £20
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[Further reading: David Szalay’s Flesh wins the Booker Prize]
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This article appears in the 13 Nov 2025 issue of the New Statesman, What Keir won't hear