Precarious Labor in China’s Grid Governance: Public Perceptions and Implications for Regime Sustainability

초록

China’s grid governance has rapidly expanded nationwide since the zero-COVID era, aiming to maintain social stability and strengthen grassroots services. Yet the system depends on grid workers (网格员), who are low-wage and precariously employed laborers. This study analyzes how Chinese citizens perceive this contradiction using LDA topic modeling and deep-learning sentiment analysis of approximately 3,500 social media posts collected from Zhihu (知乎), Weibo (微博), and Baidu Tieba (百度贴吧). The results show predominantly negative sentiment, with “Job Environment and Compensation” the most negative (–0.80). Drawing on Scott’s (1990) notion of “hidden transcripts,” we argue that netizens indirectly criticize the gapbetween the state’s discourse of stability and the unstable means of its implementation, often through complaints about labor conditions rather than overt dissent. These contradictions may weaken confidence in the state’s stability narrative and raise questions about the long-term viability of performance-based legitimacy.

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