QR Network Production: Labor Reskilling and Mass Customization in China's Shoe Supply Chain

Abstract

E-retail platforms are fundamentally restructuring global production networks, creating new forms of labor exploitation hidden behind digital interfaces. In China's shoe manufacturing sector, factories are adapting to platform-driven consumption through what I term “QR network production.” It is a process where products exist first as digitalized Stock Keeping Unit and are manufactured only after payment generates a QR code. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork across shoe production networks in China's Pearl River Delta in the late 2010s and early 2020s, this article challenges conventional narratives of both labor deskilling and technological replacement. Instead, I demonstrate how QR network production demands constant reskilling as workers negotiate complex interactions with automated systems, digital programs, and algorithmic controls. This reskilling process unfolds through data collection and translation, knowledge relearning, and process standardization, thus creating a flexible production system that appears digitally driven but depends fundamentally on workers’ bodies and adaptability. By examining how mass customization (Guimo Dingzhi, 规模定制) integrates human and machine capacities, I reveal how platform capitalism extends exploitation by demanding worker flexibility while refusing to recognize or compensate for the new skills this flexibility requires.