By Li Yuchen
In 2020, an overseas research team published a report on instant messaging software, the title of which, when translated, is five words: “We chat, they watch.”
The researchers found that overseas users thought they were chatting privately, but in reality, all pictures and files were screened by the server. And all of this was not indicated to the user. You think you’re chatting with a friend, but in reality, you’re feeding a machine.
When this report was published, a group of Chinese food delivery riders in Sydney may not have read it yet. But six years later, they verified every word with their own experiences.
In early February 2026, Sydney, dozens of Chinese riders delivering food for HungryPanda discussed one thing in their group: not taking orders during the Spring Festival.
This is not a radical idea. The company continuously lowers delivery fees, and the algorithm operates in a black box, with the platform’s mood determining how much or how little they work. The Spring Festival is a peak season for orders, and the riders want to express their dissatisfaction in the most simple way—taking a few days off. In Australia, this is called a legal strike and is protected by law.
The plan was still in the group chat stage, the work stoppage hadn’t started, and the banners hadn’t been written.
But the police from their hometown arrived first.
Not the Sydney police. They were from Henan and Zhejiang, the police officers from their hometown police stations. They couldn’t reach the riders in Australia, so they contacted the riders’ parents.
According to an exclusive report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on February 18, a rider received a call from his father at dawn. The old man had just been called to the local police station for a “talk,” with a police officer standing beside him. The police officer took the phone and asked: What kind of protest are you organizing abroad? Specify the time and place. Another former rider received calls from three different numbers on the same day—the first “to understand the situation,” the second threatening her with consequences if she returned to China, and the third calling a few days later to continue pressuring her.
Multiple provinces, multiple time points, and multiple riders were contacted simultaneously. Richard McGregor, a senior research fellow at the Lowy Institute for East Asia, said in an interview with ABC that this kind of multi-location synchronized action “indicates a high degree of organization behind it.” He also said one sentence: This kind of intimidation is usually only used on specific sensitive groups.
When did a few food delivery workers become a sensitive group?
The answer may be hidden in that group chat.
Let’s break this down. To understand this story, you must first understand a chain: real-name registration of mobile phone numbers—communication software tied to mobile phone numbers—group chat content through the server—the platform cooperates with data requests in accordance with the law.
Every link in this chain is legal, compliant, and commonplace. You need to swipe your ID card to get a mobile phone number, and you need to bind your mobile phone number to register communication software. The platform states in its privacy policy that it will cooperate with data requests in accordance with “local laws and regulations.”
But when you link these together, what you get is: a food delivery rider in Sydney using a domestic mobile phone number to roam the internet, saying in the group chat “I don’t want to take orders during the Spring Festival,” and his identity, location, social relationships, and what he said to whom are all transparently exposed to a set of infrastructure.
Researchers used technical means to prove the existence of this system. The riders used their bodies to verify its efficiency. From the appearance of the word “strike” in the group to the summons of the riders’ family members by the police stations in Henan and Zhejiang in the middle of the night, the response speed was faster than the police in most countries.
This is not the personal behavior of one or two enthusiastic police officers. This is infrastructure at work.
Speaking of infrastructure, let’s look at the other end.
HungryPanda was founded in Nottingham, UK, in 2017. According to Forbes, founder Liu Kelu started his business after graduating from the University of Nottingham, and in 2023, he was included in the Forbes Europe 30 Under 30 list. Public financing records show that the company’s total financing is about $296 million, with investors including Kinnevik of Sweden, Felix Capital and Perwyn of the UK, and 83North of Israel. The business covers ten countries and has more than six million registered users.
A standard globalized entrepreneurial story: Chinese people start a business in the UK, take European money, use Chinese riders, and serve Chinese people around the world.
But this story has a side that didn’t appear on the cover of Forbes.
In Australia, most of HungryPanda’s riders hold temporary visas and are Chinese citizens. They are not permanent residents, not locals, but people whose status may be interrupted at any time. The company classifies them as “independent contractors”—this classification means no minimum wage guarantee, no workers’ compensation insurance, no annual leave or sick leave, and no protection in the sense of labor law.
In September 2020, a rider was killed by a bus while delivering food in Zetland, Sydney. He was 43 years old, leaving behind his wife, two children, and a 75-year-old father. According to multiple Australian media outlets and the Transport Workers’ Union, HungryPanda did not even report the death to the New South Wales SafeWork NSW at the time.
When someone dies, the company’s first reaction is not “how to compensate,” but “I have no obligation to tell the government.”
Two years later, the New South Wales Personal Injury Commission ruled that the rider was actually an employee of HungryPanda and ordered compensation of AUD 834,000. The Transport Workers’ Union said this was the first case of workers’ compensation in Australia’s gig economy that recognized platform riders as employees.
One life in exchange for a landmark ruling. What about after the ruling?
In August 2024, Australia passed the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Closing Loopholes No. 2), which empowers the Fair Work Commission to set minimum standards for gig platform workers. The core concept of the law is “employee-like”—recognizing that you are not entirely an employee, but you should not be completely without protection.
But what is written in the law is one thing, and what is implemented is another. During the Spring Festival in 2026, HungryPanda’s riders were still protesting the low delivery fees and the lack of transparency in the algorithm. According to ABC, some riders had previously been “demoted” on the company’s App for organizing protests—orders dropped from thirty or forty per shift to zero. She sued the company in the Fair Work Commission.
Now she not only has to go to court with the company, but also has to answer calls from her hometown.
HungryPanda’s spokesperson said something to ABC that is worth amplifying: “The company is not aware of this situation. It should be that their own remarks in the group attracted attention.”
An international company registered in the UK, holding money from European private equity funds, and operating in Australia, its spokesperson used an extremely natural tone to describe the matter of “cross-border summons of citizens’ family members” as—as if it were as a matter of course as running a red light being caught by a camera.
“It should be them themselves”—this “themselves” is carefully selected. It’s not that the company lowered wages and forced people to strike, it’s that the riders “themselves” said the wrong things in the group.
But even if we accept HungryPanda’s statement, even if the company is really unaware, that’s even more terrifying. Because this means: dozens of Chinese people in Sydney’s group said “I don’t want to take orders during the Spring Festival,” which triggered a multi-provincial linkage, cross-border pressure, and a late-night summons. Food delivery workers don’t want to deliver, which is equivalent to “dangerous activity.”
And a company with an annual transaction volume of billions of dollars is neither surprised nor reflective of the existence of this system. It just shrugs and says: It has nothing to do with me.
Does it have anything to do with it? It may be difficult to prove it legally. But from a structural point of view, a clear symbiotic relationship has been formed.
Global capital needs cheap, compliant, and unwilling-to-assert-their-rights labor. And a certain force happens to be able to provide this “compliance”—not through law enforcement in Australia, but through their hometown ten thousand kilometers away, through your father and mother, through the phone call from the police station at dawn.
This is not a problem unique to HungryPanda. This is a structural dilemma faced by all platforms that rely on Chinese temporary visa workers: your workers communicate using domestic communication software, register with domestic mobile phone numbers, and have family members in China—this means that no matter if your company is registered in London or Sydney, no matter if your investors come from Stockholm or Tel Aviv, a certain administrative force has a much greater influence on your workers than your human resources department.
David Shoebridge, the Green Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson, pointed out this paradox in an interview with ABC: Although HungryPanda is labeled as a “Chinese App,” its investors come from all over the world. Global capital is making money from the blood and sweat of Chinese riders, who is maintaining stability for global capital?
This question will be clearer when viewed in a larger picture.
An international human rights organization has been tracking overseas police service stations since 2022, and has found more than 100 such stations in dozens of countries. These stations nominally provide administrative services such as document renewal, but are actually used for “repatriation” operations. According to the organization’s report, from April 2021 to July 2022 alone, about 230,000 people were “repatriated.”
In April 2023, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted several related personnel on charges of “transnational repression,” and the FBI arrested two people in New York. During the same period, at least 14 countries, including the Netherlands, Canada, Ireland, and Germany, demanded the closure of related stations or initiated investigations.
Just one week before the HungryPanda incident was exposed, according to foreign media reports, the Australian Federal Police charged two other Chinese citizens with suspected foreign interference—spying on a religious group in Australia.
But in all these cases, the HungryPanda incident is unique. The previous targets of cross-border pressure were dissidents, social activists, and specific religious groups. This time, the targets are a few food delivery riders who wanted to take a few days off because the delivery fees were too low. The boundary of pressure has expanded from the political sphere to labor relations, from “sensitive personnel” to “ordinary people who don’t want to deliver food during the Spring Festival.”
McGregor was right. This does seem like a treatment for “sensitive groups.” The question is: when did the delivery fees of a few food delivery riders become a sensitive issue?
The answer may be: in a certain governance logic, any organized collective action is itself sensitive. You don’t need to oppose anything, you just need to say “let’s not take orders together” in a group. The words “together” are enough.
After the incident was exposed, the Australian government’s response followed a familiar diplomatic formula: strong statements, vague wording, and pending action.
According to foreign media reports, a spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior said: “The Australian government does not tolerate the surveillance, harassment, or threats against any Australian citizens or individuals legally residing in Australia.” The Counter Foreign Interference Taskforce stated that it was “aware” of the matter, but declined to comment on specific cases.
Labor Senator Tony Sheldon said the right thing to ABC: “Everyone working in Australia has the legal right to organize, to speak out, and to fight for fair pay and treatment, and should not be subject to fear or intimidation.”
But the problem is never what Australian law says. The problem is: when the greatest threat to a food delivery rider’s labor rights does not come from the employer, not from legal loopholes, but from ten thousand kilometers away, transmitted through his father’s phone—can Australian law protect him?
His father is sitting in the police station back home. The Australian Fair Work Commission can’t reach there.
According to ABC, the rider’s father was almost at dawn when he returned home from the police station.
An old man in the countryside was called to the police station in the middle of the night because his son in Sydney, ten thousand kilometers away, wanted to not deliver food during the Spring Festival. The old man may not know what “gig economy” is, what “closing loopholes law” is, or what “cross-border pressure” is.
He only knows that someone came to him.
Six years ago, when the researchers wrote that title in the report, they probably didn’t expect that the five words “we chat, they watch” would have such a specific footnote: you chatted in a group in Sydney about “not taking orders during the Spring Festival,” someone saw it back home, and then your father was called for a talk.
The profoundness of the digital age is never in the technology itself—not in how much data the server can store, or how many keywords the algorithm can screen. Its power lies in the seamless connection with a set of offline administrative machines: the words in the group chat become a summons from the police station, and the grievances on the keyboard become a knock on the door back home.
You go to the other side of the earth to make a living, thinking that distance can be exchanged for freedom. But you are still using a domestic mobile phone number, your contact list is still tied to your mother’s number, and your parents still live within that jurisdiction.
Your freedom never depends on where you stand, but on where your soft spot still is.
Li Yuchen’s article stands in the dust
Written on February 22, 2026
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