Beijing at Its Most Real! Day Labor Video Deleted at 2.7M Views—“Worse Than Ukraine’s Front Line”

Chinese online personality Zhou Lifeng, known as Feng Ge, recently released a video showing life among Beijing's poorest residents. Not long afterward, he said during a live stream, someone's knocking and stepped away from the camera. In the recording, someone can be heard saying, we're from the police station and we've met many times. When Feng Ge returned to the camera, he said something's come up and ended the live stream. The whole incident lasted about 20 seconds. People online suspected police intervention. People online said the Chinese Communist Party does not allow attention to the lives of those at the very bottom of society. Even when people see their struggles, they cannot speak about them publicly. Feng Ge shared some of those realities during a live stream, and police came to his door. Simply turning a camera towards China's poorest people was enough to unsettle the authorities. On October 25, Feng Ge released a documentary about spending a day as a day laborer in Majuqiao, Beijing earlier that month. It received more than 2.7 million views on Bilibili in just one day. But by the evening of October 27th, the roughly 25-minute video had been taken down. The documentary is titled Feng Ge spends a day working for daily pay in Majuqiao. Its background song centers on enduring the same life for 30 years, ending with the collapse of a building. In October 2024, Feng Ge traveled to war-torn Ukraine for sightseeing and filming. He said he narrowly escaped being kidnapped and later got away safely. But his latest video left out material he had previously described as more intense than going to the front lines in Ukraine. Before dawn every day, large numbers of casual workers from across China gathered on Majuqiao streets, at shopping street intersections, and outside employment agencies, waiting to get picked. Most jobs involve warehouse sorting, loading and unloading, and other odd jobs. Daily pay usually ranges from 150 to 260 yuan. Some jobs include a meal, and workers are paid the same day. Feng Ge worked about five hours and earned 180 yuan. Feng Ge's video shows him negotiating pay with an employment agent, starting work, and experiencing the demands and conditions of manual labor. Majuqiao is an area of Beijing where people can live cheaply. Shared accommodation costs around 15 yuan a night, but conditions are dirty, crowded, and poorly maintained. Some kitchens have been turned into bedrooms, with beds beside dirty sinks. Nearby are cheap hotels, small restaurants, physical therapy shops, and employment agencies. A filling meal at a small restaurant costs a little over 10 yuan. The video shows noisy streets, people urinating in public, and trucks illegally transporting workers to construction sites. It also shows suspicious recruitment ads, including ads seeking only women and promising unusually high pay. Feng Ge interviewed several fellow workers. One delivery worker said he reports for work at 6 a.m. and finishes around 5 p.m. That counts as an early day. He takes almost no days off and earns a little over 5,000 yuan a month. During busy periods, his station manager will not let him take time off. People doing demanding work, such as parcel sorting, earn about 260 yuan a day. But the work is so exhausting that they need five days to recover after one day on the job. One young man who graduated from a traditional Chinese medicine vocational college could not find a regular job. With only about 2,800 yuan left, he had obtained a passport and was saving money to work abroad. Others described being temporarily unemployed, between jobs, or in debt. The footage shows Feng Ge walking down a street and placing clothing over a homeless man living on the ground. The video prompted widespread discussion online. Many saw it as a portrayal of the real living conditions of the low-income and people in gig employment. On October 22, Feng Ge had said during a Bilibili livestream that he had filmed sensitive material while trying day labor in Majuqiao, and did not intend to release the footage. If I release it, I'll be detained. That's how serious it is. I'm happy just being a small online personality and living a quiet life. I never intended to do the work of an investigative reporter. Feng Ge said. When viewers pressed him during the live stream about what he had filmed, he described the material as more intense than the front lines in Ukraine. He said, I filmed things I should have filmed, and things I shouldn't have. It was really frightening. Explaining his reluctance to release the video, Feng Ge said the issue went beyond whether it would pass censorship. Its release could also cost people their jobs, possibly referring to some lower-level officials. People online believe the video he eventually released on October 25th was an edited version. But just two days later, even that version was set to private. One person who uploaded the video to X, which is blocked in China, said they had already watched it on Bilibili and found it fairly ordinary. A day labor market on Beijing's outskirts looked much like any other area where the city meets the countryside. They had not expected even that video to be taken down. Another person posted a video saying authorities had tightened controls in Ma Jiuqiao after Feng Ge's filming to prevent large numbers of other content creators from going there to take similar videos. The person said other cities have places like Ma Jiuqiao, and the CCP would further strengthen its efforts to maintain political control. At the boundary between Beijing's Tongzhou and Daxing districts, Ma Jiuqiao has developed a labor market where workers gather for jobs that pay by the day. It is one of Beijing's most chaotic areas, but it also offers a candid view of life in the city. By 5 a.m. every day, a steady stream of people is already arriving to look for casual work. After a brief exchange with labor contractors, they squeeze into vans parked along the street and head off to factories around Beijing. At sunset, the vans returned to Ma Jiuqiao, where workers end an exhausting day with a filling meal. Southern Weekly previously published an account by Chong Rui'an, who spent an extended period working for daily pay in Ma Jiuqiao's labor market. The report described the workers' living conditions and the large crowds waiting on the streets every day. Some called days without work days off, while others said job opportunities were often uncertain. In a video, one content creator explained that workers gathering in Ma Jiuqiao are paid by the day and work 12-hour shifts without meals provided. Shortly after 4 a.m., as dawn was just breaking, hundreds were already waiting for work at an intersection. The requirements were simple. If the pay was acceptable, they would do the job. The content creator said people seeking work there generally fall into several groups. The first are newcomers to Beijing who have not found suitable jobs and take temporary work to get by. The pay is low and the work is tiring, but at least they can afford food. The second prefer the freedom of casual work working one day and taking three days off. The third are older migrant workers whom factories no longer hire. Without specialized skills, they look for odd jobs to support their families. Workers complained that pay had fallen further. More than a thousand people were waiting, but very few were hired. Those who found nothing in the morning returned in the afternoon to try again. Chinese independent content creator Li Banjiang previously published a study of Ma Jiuqiao's casual labor market. He quoted an older man from Hebei who said most workers there had been dismissed by factories because of their age. They could only look for casual work, and when they still found nothing, some sold their personal information or even their blood to afford food. The man said he had come to earn money to take home for the Chinese New Year. After two months, he had instead spent more than 1,000 yuan of his own money and did not know what to do. I haven't had any work for days. I'm almost starving. On April 10th this year, a man at Ma Jiuqiao said he'd been unable to find work for several days and that urban enforcement officers also drove workers away. He said he had pawned his most valuable possession, a Redmi phone for 100 yuan. That money quickly ran out, leaving him with only a few yuan. An employment agency had promised 250 yuan a day for parcel sorting, but he was actually paid only 150 yuan. Pointing to metal barriers along the road, he said they had all been erected during the COVID-19 pandemic and still had not been removed. They made it harder to find work and occupied a large open area. People are competing even for parcel loading and unloading jobs that pay 160 yuan for 12 hours. In a recorded street interview at Ma Jiuqiao, a middle-aged worker spoke emotionally about the difficult conditions. He said there were now too many people and too little work, making jobs much harder to find than a few years earlier. Even loading and unloading jobs paying only 160 yuan for 12 hours drew competition. Once hired, workers were treated like machines, with time limits even for drinking water and using the restroom. After one day of work, he said, they needed at least three days in bed to recover. After Fengguo's video went viral, another film began circulating widely again. It's called An Unemployed Programmer Living on the Streets of Ma Jiuqiao. It had previously appeared on Bilibili and other platforms before being removed or restricted across Chinese platforms. The full film runs about 40 minutes and follows a young former programmer living on the streets and working for daily pay. The young man said he had trained in software development and then lost two jobs. Afterward, he spent a long period out of work and also took jobs in food delivery, security screening, and security work. Eventually, his savings ran out and he began sleeping on the streets, surviving on six-yuan bowls of noodles and food that he found. He said, sometimes when I'm too hungry to stand it, I even have to eat dirty food. He said he had received an administrative penalty for verbally insulting someone. Later, he passed the examination for a security guard certificate, but failed the subsequent screening. After a cat scratched him, he faced an 800 yuan vaccination bill. He recalled asking himself, is my life even worth 800 yuan? In the film, another man who was about to lose his accommodation said one way to get by would be to spend six months or a year in prison. One person wrote in the comments, I feel like I'm getting closer and closer to ending up in Ma Jiuqiao. One person online said, a foreigner living in Beijing's embassy district would surely praised the city, but a trip beyond Beijing to the surrounding areas could leave a very different impression. Unless that foreigner had plenty of time and nothing else to do, he would be unlikely to visit Ma Jiuqiao, let alone the surrounding poverty belt around the capital. Most foreigners, the person said, do not understand how the vast majority of people in China actually live. Five-yuan boxed meals are common along Ma Jiuqiao's roadsides. Whenever a vendor approaches with a food cart, middle-aged and older casual workers gather around. They're reluctant to spend 15 yuan on a meal because making ends meet is difficult. They need money to support aging parents and keep children in school. Saving 20 yuan a day means saving 600 yuan a month. Their greatest wish is simply to send a little more money home each month. This footage, filmed on August 31, 2024, showed homeless unemployed people throughout Ma Jiuqiao. One content creator said Ma Jiuqiao represents more than a place. It offers a cross-section of life at the bottom of Chinese society. Countless similar places exist across the nation, including the Sanhe Labor Market in Shenzhen's Longhua District. At its peak, more than 7,000 people work there each day, with over 2.5 million job seeker visits a year. The market relocated in 2020, but the workers didn't disappear. They moved to the Longhua bus station in Dongguan and Huizhou. The content creator said at least 600 million people in China live at the bottom of society, citing former premier Li Keqiang's statement in 2020 that 600 million people earned only about 1,000 yuan a month, barely enough to rent a home in even a mid-sized city. China's vast rural areas also offer many opportunities for casual work. When potatoes ripened in Inner Mongolia earlier, many people traveled there from other areas to help harvest them. On September 4th, a person posted a video about harvesting potatoes in Inner Mongolia. It shows a makeshift shed with a bare dirt floor. Rainwater flows straight inside, covering the ground with muddy water. Several rows of shared sleeping platforms are separated by narrow aisles. More than 200 men and women sleep side by side, with no partitions and no privacy. In the video, a man laments, young people, life ahead won't be easy, and it's hard to find work too. This room is full of people. The oldest is 75, the youngest is 15. Everyone, this is such a hard life. Migrant workers face similar hardships in Shanghai, one of China's leading cities. A Chinese content creator posted a video on March 11th showing hundreds of migrant workers waiting for jobs at 4 a.m. at the Xinchao Casual Labor Service Station in Shanghai. They were willing to take on any work, but many waited all day without receiving a single opportunity. Most were in their 50s or 60s and had gotten up at 2 or 3 a.m. to look for work. In recent years, China's economy has remained weak, its property market has collapsed, large numbers of businesses have gone bankrupt or closed, and foreign investment has withdrawn on a large scale. With jobs increasingly hard to find, the casual workforce continues to grow. China has become a gig economy. According to CCP figures, the number of gig workers has already reached 200 million in 2022. The China New Employment Forms Research Center, a think tank, estimates that the number of gig workers rose from 280 million in 2025 to 320 million in 2026. That vast group is nearly as large as the entire U.S. population and represents about 44% of China's workforce. Gig work often involves demanding hours, low pay, and no social benefits or protection. Workers must also bear the various risks associated with their jobs. Most casual workers are rural migrant workers. According to official CCP figures, China's migrant workforce exceeded 300 million for the first time in 2025, reaching 301.1 million. Of those, 180 million worked away from their home areas. Since the late 1990s, China's economic growth has drawn large numbers of rural residents into cities for work. But the CCP has not provided the support they need to settle there, including local household registration and access to schooling for their children. The vast majority have been unable to make a permanent home in the cities. U.S.-based human rights lawyer Wu Xiaoping said, the very existence of China's distinct category of rural migrant workers stems from the CCP's systematic exploitation of rural areas and farmers. The urban-rural divide pushes rural residents to seek jobs and higher incomes in cities. Wu said problems in China's economy have caused large numbers of urban factories to close or go bankrupt, leaving many people unemployed. Rural migrant workers make up a large share of that group. Unable to find jobs in the city, they have no choice but to return to their hometowns, creating a large-scale wave of return migration. China analyst Yang Bo said, many of China's migrant workers have learned skills and broaden their understanding of the world while working in cities. Many are also familiar with the internet, making them, in some ways, a new generation of farmers. If they can't survive on casual work in cities or make a living back home, they could become a force opposing CCP rule. Yang drew a parallel with the CCP's sweeping COVID-19 lockdowns, which ultimately triggered the white paper movement. He said that ignoring the struggles of the poorest while suppressing videos exposing their conditions angers migrant workers who rely on casual labor. That anger could lead them to see a connection between their own circumstances and the CCP's corrupt system. He said the possibility that they might rise up one day could not be ruled out. According to the latest report from China Dissent Monitor, a project of the U.S. non-profit Freedom House, its database recorded 15,820 incidents of dissent and protest in China from its launch in June 2022 through mid-2026. That included 846 in-person or online protests from April through June. Although the number recorded in the second quarter of 2026 fell by about 45 percent from the same period in 2025, the research team and Bloomberg said this did not reflect an actual decline in protests. Instead, the Chinese government sharply intensified internet censorship from late 2025 into 2026, making data collection much more difficult. A briefing released in May 2026 by the U.S. Congressional Executive Commission on China also reported 1,241 protests in the first quarter of 2026, an increase of 18.6% over the first quarter of 2025. The figures indicate an overall rise in social tensions in recent years.