Over the past few years, China’s leading internet companies—like ByteDance and Alibaba—have gone through rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting amidst slower economic growth and regulatory pressures. Employees over 35 are particularly vulnerable, often facing termination without proper compensation as companies prioritize younger blood. With no other job prospects available, some former white-collar workers have turned to working as ride-share drivers or food delivery riders in order to make ends meet.
2024’s Upstream is a reflection of this trend. In the film, famed comedic actor-director Xu Zheng plays a 45 year-old coder named Gao Zhilei who loses his job. With a sick father, a child aspiring to attend international school, a housewife, and mortgage, Gao becomes a food delivery driver after failing to find a white-collar job for months. As a consequence, he comes to learn about the exploitative nature of China’s food delivery apps.
Even before its release in China in early August 2024, Upstream sparked intense debate among Chinese netizens, who saw it as further exploiting the working class for entertainment rather than providing helpful social advocacy. An analysis of the film’s narrative choices shows such accusations hold water, even if it is not as exploitative as some critics claim. Upstream’s first half does make a commendable effort to accurately depict the social environment of China’s delivery drivers. However, the movie disjointedly veers into a more conventional “overcoming adversity” genre mold in its second half, resulting in an overall superficial attempt at social commentary.
Starting on an Authentic Note
If Upstream leaned more into its first half, it would’ve been a better film; its first hour offers a realistic portrayal of food delivery workers as nuanced humans suffering under an exploitative system. Gao Zhilei becomes a proxy for the viewer; as Gao navigates his delivery station in Shanghai, he meets a diverse set of fellow delivery workers both young and middle-aged, from provinces ranging from Inner Mongolia to Hubei.
Gao soon learns that the delivery drivers are ranked, with lower-ranked ones assigned “trash orders” that require driving longer distances for less pay. While each month’s top performer can get a substantial bonus, other drivers rack up penalties—negative reviews (often for arbitrary reasons like not disposing of a customer’s trash) result in deductions, failing to complete system verifications can lead to account suspensions, and so forth. Given these challenges—which China’s delivery drivers face in real life—Gao only earns a paltry 4,000 RMB in his first month, and must learn tips like building relationships with security guards to enter malls and restaurants for quicker pickups, and understanding the layout of old neighborhoods where GPS is ineffective.
By helping viewers build emotional connections with an array of delivery drivers, and then highlighting in detail their struggles and skillful attempts to persevere, Upstream helps audiences who may not be aware of delivery drivers’ plight to feel a sense of empathy and understanding.
Squandering its Second Half
While a better social commentary movie might’ve taken that empathy and understanding as fuel for advocacy, Upstream unfortunately goes in an opposite direction. In its second half, Upstream decides to make a spectacle out of the delivery drivers’ lives, and becomes complicit with an exploitative system instead of offering critiques. The film’s last hour focuses primarily on Gao Zhilei’s attempt to become the delivery service’s top performer, in a competition that comes to evoke the Olympics and features racing scenes and melodramatic car crashes.
Gao starts to gain an edge not just by applying the tips he learned from other delivery drivers, but also by using his white-collar programming skills to develop an app that aids in deliveries. Without giving too much away, Upstream ends on a more optimistic note, one which implies Gao might get a coding job, and that white-collar workers needn’t worry too much about unemployment as long as they have strong qualifications.
This not only gives a slap in the face to the myriad unemployed or underemployed white-collar workers in China today, but also disrespects those who choose to make a profession out of delivery work without a white-collar background. Upstream’s implication that a “happy ending” means escaping gig work creates a dichotomy of white versus blue collar, one in which blue-collar jobs like delivery work are always “bad” and taken only out of desperation. Reframed through this lens, the film’s empathetic treatment of delivery workers in its first half also starts feeling emotionally manipulative; we see Gao’s delivery worker colleagues embodying an exaggerated litany of woes, whether raising money for a child’s leukemia treatment, repaying debts, or paying off bills after losing their limbs.
Instead of suggesting that the path to a better life is to exit delivery work entirely, perhaps Upstream could’ve discussed ways to make delivery work more humane and respected. Yet, beyond cursory mentions of exploitative corporate systems and labor arbitrations, it fails to have this discussion. The film chooses to depict delivery workers and users as opposing forces, and never critiques the platform company itself. Safety guarantees, reforms of the driver penalty system, and fair pay schemes never come up.
Division through Optimism
What could’ve been a valuable piece of social commentary like Xu Zheng’s Dying to Survive instead became yet another excessively optimistic “overcoming adversity” film common to Chinese cinema, closer to examples like 2022’s Nice View—which shows a 20 year-old boy miraculously transforming from phone repairman to tech company CEO as he tries to help his heart disease-stricken sister. Upstream’s relatively poor box office performance, combined with its negative internet discourse, suggest that such “overcoming adversity” narratives have become less persuasive to even middle-class Chinese audiences.
The notion that hard work can guarantee a return to one’s dream life seems disconnected from contemporary China’s cruel social reality. In fact, netizens have noted how, in the real world, the 45 year-old Gao Zhilei might not even have a chance at delivery work. After a 50 year-old deliveryman died in Hangzhou last month after working 16-hour days, Chinese social media buzzed with screenshots saying that delivery companies (who’ve denied such charges) were excluding drivers 45 and over from their platforms.
Ultimately, Upstream is not made for delivery workers. It’s meant to be a salve for middle-class viewers facing life changes, one which tries to deliver its medicine by reminding said viewers that they could always be worse off—creating class division instead of solidarity. In today’s slowing economy, perhaps it’s even more important for people to have empathy for one another, and challenge the excesses of capitalist corporate practices. Upstream unfortunately squanders this opportunity in favor of a tired chicken soup narrative.
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Upstream (Chinese: 逆行人生)—China. Dialog in Mandarin Chinese. Directed by Xu Zheng. First released August 9, 2024. Running time 2hr 1min. Starring Xu Zheng, Xin Zhilei, Wang Xiao.
Tianshu Hu is a contributor based in Chicago focusing on Asian films, TV, and pop culture.