Abstract
This article examines how Chinese digital platforms export tight temporal governance, characterised by algorithmic urgency, work intensification, and short-term monetisation, into Global North labour markets. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), it analyses two Chinese-owned platforms operating in Australia: Bigo Live, a livestreaming platform, and HungryPanda, a food delivery platform serving Asian diasporic communities. Rather than treating Australia as a uniformly protected labour regime, the article approaches it as a typical Global North dualised core–periphery system, where stable working conditions are concentrated within a protected core while peripheral workers face increasing time insecurity, despite a broader discourse of fairness and protection that is not consistently realised in practise. Within this context, Chinese platforms extend domestic labour practises across borders and amplify pre-existing forms of time insecurity, along with racialised understandings of international labour, through platformised governance, algorithmic incentives, and migration precarity.
Introduction
Digital platforms have become key infrastructures for organising labor, mobility, and consumption across borders. Much of the existing research has focused on platforms rooted in the Global North, such as Uber, Airtasker, Amazon, and Facebook, often within national contexts (Churchill & Craig, 2019; Lata et al., 2025; Nieborg & Helmond, 2019; Nieborg & Poell, 2018). More recent scholarship has begun to trace the global expansion of these models, highlighting their monopoly tendencies, data extraction practises, and the growing influence of US-based platforms as a form of digital dominance shaping everyday life, labor regimes, and cultural imaginaries worldwide (Jin, 2013; Lata, 2024; Lata, 2025; Srnicek, 2017; Van Dijck, Poell, & De Waal, 2018). By contrast, far less attention has been paid to the expansion of Global South platforms into Global North markets, where they often operate with limited media visibility and regulatory scrutiny. This article addresses this gap through an empirical analysis of two Chinese-owned platforms operating in Australia's platform labour market.
The study draws on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews conducted between 2022 and 2025, focusing on two platforms: Bigo Live, an adult-oriented livestreaming platform, and HungryPanda, a food delivery platform serving overseas Asian communities. Drawing on the concept of sociotemporal order (Zerubavel, 1977; Zerubavel, 1985), the article examines the ways in which the temporal governance embedded in Chinese platforms are reconfigured as they operate in Australia. In what follows, we first introduce the theoretical lens of sociotemporal order and review the operational logics that characterise Chinese platforms. We then situate these platforms within the Australian context, treating Australia not as exceptional but as a typical case of a Global North core–periphery labour regime in which formal protections coexist with a weakly protected migrant labour periphery. Finally, we outline the research methods and present the findings.
The Sociotemporal Order
Sociological theories have long treated time not as a neutral or universal constant, but as a socially constructed and historically contingent phenomenon (Bluedorn, 2002; Bluedorn & Denhardt, 1988). In pre-industrial societies, time was often embedded in natural rhythms and local social relationships. This began to change with the advent of industrial capitalism. Thompson (1991) argued that the spread of mechanical clocks and the enforcement of time discipline fundamentally transformed temporal consciousness. Time became something to be measured, regulated, and economised (Thompson, 1991). The capitalist ethos that “time is money” socialised individuals into a disciplined, efficiency-oriented orientation to time from a young age. This shift supported the rise of “clock time”, a standardised model of time that enabled the coordination of labor, strict work scheduling, and intensified productivity (Bluedorn, 2002; Bluedorn & Denhardt, 1988). Time itself became a resource to be managed, enabling capitalist systems to extract greater value from human labour and to institutionalise control through technologies of temporal precision (Foucault, 1995 [1977]). Time becomes not merely a neutral measure but a technique of governance that embeds power into everyday practice (Zerubavel, 1985). This fundamental understanding underpins the notion of sociotemporal order, which delineates the organization and experience of time as a socially produced phenomena. The sociotemporal order is shaped by human-created institutions, including timetables, calendars, and institutional routines, which impose artificial constraints on the perception and utilisation of time (Zerubavel, 1977; Zerubavel, 1985).
Sociotemporal order has proved valuable for analysing changes in contemporary labour, particularly in the digital age. With the spread of the internet, theorists have argued that we have entered a new phase of “informational capitalism” (Castells, 2002), “digital capitalism” (Schiller, 1999), or “the acceleration of life in digital capitalism” (Wajcman, 2020). The concept of time-space compression captures how ICTs collapse spatial and temporal distances, facilitating near-instantaneous communication and coordination across the globe (Harvey, 1989). Castells (2009) extends this argument with the notion of “timeless time”, a temporality detached from historical sequencing and operating in a continuous present, resulting in an overload of emails in people's thumb-accessible inboxes (Wajcman, 2020). Similarly, John Urry (2000) uses the term instantaneous time to describe how real-time digital communication shortens temporal intervals to such an extent that time becomes disembedded from linear progression. Temporality is no longer merely segmented and disciplined; it is increasingly compressed, desynchronised, and de-historicised. Hassard and Morris’ (2021) study shows that middle managers increasingly experience a dual shift in work boundaries: extended hours within formal workplaces and voluntary work beyond office settings through mobile and digital technologies (Hassard & Morris, 2021).
A classic example of the outward diffusion of temporal regimes from the Global North to the Global South can be found in studies of Chinese factory workers in global production networks, which show how industrial capitalism reorganises workers’ everyday lives into highly punctualised routines governed by the rigid rhythms of factory time (Pun, 2005). However, far less attention has been paid to how platform-driven temporal regimes, characterised by intensification, acceleration, and algorithmic modulation and originating in the Global South, are increasingly reshaping labour practices in the Global North, particularly within its often overlooked peripheral segments. This is precisely the issue that this article seeks to address.
The International Expansion of Chinese Digital Platforms
The global proliferation of Chinese digital platforms has garnered increasing academic interest, particularly as companies from China extend their operations beyond domestic markets (De Kloet, Porll, & Guohua, 2019; Keane & Yu, 2019), notably in Southeast Asia (Nguyen-Thu, 2026). In Global North contexts, however, the landscape is more complex. While major platforms such as Alibaba and ByteDance have emerged as strong competitors to US-based tech giants, a large number of lesser-known, smaller-scale platforms are also expanding rapidly. These smaller platforms do not directly displace dominant incumbents; rather, they tend to proliferate within specialised or diasporic market segments, often operating with limited regulatory visibility, as is the case in Australia (Liu & Pertierra, 2024).
The global expansion of Chinese digital platforms is shaped by a combination of institutional support, labour conditions, and platform-specific operational logics. One key factor is sustained state support for digital infrastructure and platform development. China's Internet + strategy, launched in 2015, promotes the integration of digital technologies with advanced manufacturing and positions digital infrastructure as a driver of international competitiveness (Keane & Chen, 2019). Early efforts focused on major firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, and ByteDance, and recent developments have also supported the globalisation of small and medium-sized enterprises (Author, 2024). This combination of large platforms and rapidly expanding smaller platforms has encouraged a high degree of experimentation in both content and platform formats. In markets where platformisation remains relatively underdeveloped, Chinese platforms often encounter limited competition, particularly in areas such as short-form video, online gaming, micro-dramas, and adult-orientated content (Liu & Pertierra, 2024). This enables them to establish early footholds by offering diversified and highly monetisable content forms that align closely with platform logics of visibility and engagement.
Equally important are the labour conditions and cultural norms that underpin these platforms. China's labour regime has long been shaped by a system of rural–urban differentiation and a gendered division of labour, which together have produced a large, mobile, and highly flexible workforce (Pun, 2005). More recently, across the broader infotech sector, long working hours, high temporal density, and sustained overtime are often framed not simply as constraints but as indicators of individual commitment and national competitiveness (Sun & Chen, 2021; Wang, 2021; Zheng & Qiu, 2023). This orientation has contributed to the emergence of extreme working patterns, such as the widely discussed “996” culture, and has normalised forms of temporal intensification that are embedded in platform operations (Sun, 2019; Sun & Chen, 2021; Zheng & Qiu, 2023). These dynamics are particularly visible in sectors such as food delivery and ride-hailing, where labour is organised around strict temporal imperatives of speed and punctuality, fostering what has been described as an “all-day worker” orientation (Huang, 2026; Li & Jiang, 2022).
Another important characteristic of Chinese platforms is their extensive global recruitment and deployment of flexible intermediary actors, such as gonghui (guilds) and multi-channel networks (MCNs). In the domestic Chinese market, digital entertainment platforms often leverage the youthfulness of content creators and performers from rural backgrounds, whose labour is organised and supervised through intermediary organisations (Lin & de Kloet, 2019; Liu et al., 2021). On livestreaming platforms, formally employed in-house staff (primarily programmers and UI designers) remain relatively limited, while the majority of workers, including guilds and streamers, operate under flexible, non-standard employment arrangements (Liu et al., 2021). This organisational model has been shown to extend beyond China into overseas markets, achieving particular success in regions with cultural proximity, such as Southeast Asia, as well as in contexts characterised by weaker labour protections, including parts of the Middle East and Russia (Liu & Pertierra, 2024).
In the global context, Chinese platforms have attracted substantial attention around governance, particularly in cases such as ByteDance–TikTok's contested operations in the United States (Rubbert, 2025) and its ban in India (Song & Ray, 2023), often framed in relation to concerns about state influence and regulation (Yu & Li, 2022). When attention turns to service-orientated platforms operating overseas, it is similarly dominated by exceptional incidents. For example, the HungryPanda case in Australia, widely discussed following the death of a delivery rider in New South Wales in 2020, brought issues of safety and underpayment into public view but framed platform governance primarily through moments of crisis (Taylor, 2022). Yet such exceptional events obscure the routine forms of platform power that shape workers’ everyday experiences. In the case of HungryPanda, a Chinese-owned, UK-based enterprise that entered the Australian market in 2019 with a Chinese-language application focused on Asian food delivery, this influence is reflected in its reliance on a migrant workforce, many of whom have limited English proficiency and depend heavily on platform-based income, often facing structural vulnerabilities within the Australian gig economy, a pattern also identified in prior studies of Uber Eats riders (Marmo, Sinopoli, & Guo, 2022). Algorithmic job allocation, opaque performance metrics, and time-pressured delivery systems further make speaking out a materially risky act for workers (Om, 2024). This article shifts the focus from such exceptional moments to the normalised, everyday operations through which temporal precarity is produced and sustained.
Situating Chinese Platforms in Australia's Core–Periphery Labour Regime
An analytical focus solely on China's stringent temporal governance may neglect the particular circumstances that make Australia an advantageous location for platform expansion. Rather than a uniformly protected labour system, Australia is better understood as a dualised regime with a core–periphery sociotemporal order, similar to other Global North contexts: a regulated core with stable hours and institutional protections coexists with a deregulated periphery that largely falls outside these safeguards (Howe, Stewart, & Owens, 2018; Robertson, 2014; Robertson, 2019; Wright & Clibborn, 2020). Since the mid-1990s, the expansion of temporary migration programmes in Australia has produced a “guest worker” regime marked by weakened rights, reduced mobility, and diminished bargaining power (Wright & Clibborn, 2020). Since then, constant policy shifts have normalised unpaid and underpaid work among temporary migrants, particularly international students and working holiday visa holders, whose employment is often tied to visa conditions or employer sponsorship (Howe et al., 2018; Ziersch, Walsh, & Due, 2021). As a result, workers become highly dependent on continuous employment and less able to refuse poor conditions or exit exploitative arrangements (Howe et al., 2018; Ziersch et al., 2021), a dependence made especially visible during COVID-19, when many were excluded from state support and compelled to continue working under precarious conditions (Hastings, Ramia, & Wilson, 2023).
Regarding the gig economy, recent developments reveal a contradictory trajectory in which a performative commitment to worker protection coexists with increasingly restrictive and exclusionary migration conditions. On the one hand, reforms such as the Closing Loopholes legislation (2023–2024) introduce new protections for “employee-like workers”, including safeguards against unfair deactivation, signalling a belated regulatory response to platform precarity (Fair Work Ombudsman, 2024). On the other hand, these measures do not resolve but instead coexist with ongoing shifts in migration policy that continue to unsettle migrants’ ability to plan for the future. Frequent changes to visa categories, rising financial thresholds, and tightening eligibility requirements repeatedly force migrants to adjust their work, mobility, and life strategies (Robertson, 2014; Robertson, 2019). These pressures have intensified in recent years: the maximum eligible age for the Temporary Graduate visa was reduced from 50 to 35 in 2023 (Zhao, 2023), while by March 2026 the cost of the post-study work visa had jumped from $2,300 to $4,600 (Wise, 2026). Practices that were once relatively common, such as “visa hopping”, in which migrants extended their stay by moving between different temporary visa categories, have been increasingly restricted or closed off (Australian Government Department of Home Affairs, 2026), narrowing already limited pathways for migrant workers. As such, the Australian migration system is increasingly shifting toward a more restrictive, employer-driven model, in which even improvements in protections for gig workers are unlikely to enhance substantially the lived conditions of those who constitute the majority of the workforce. As early as 2019, research showed that many migrants are required to “start over” multiple times, recalibrating not only their jobs and locations but also their everyday rhythms (Robertson, 2019); it is reasonable to infer that, amid increasingly restrictive migration policies, more temporary visa holders no longer see permanent settlement as attainable and instead prioritise short-term, flexible income strategies—an orientation readily taken up and exploited by Chinese-owned platforms, as this article demonstrates through empirical evidence.
When temporary visa holders work for Chinese platforms, labour relations become more complex, especially given that many forms of work, such as livestreaming, can be performed outside Australia while still generating income within the Australian market. Recent efforts by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2025) to conceptualise and measure digital platform work have focused primarily on labour services delivered through digital platforms and organised into two broad categories: profile-based platforms, which include task-based services (e.g., Airtasker), professional services (e.g., Upwork), and care work (e.g., Mable), and on-demand platforms, which include personal transport (e.g., Uber) and delivery services (e.g., Uber Eats). While this framework provides important insights into platform-mediated labour, it is less equipped to capture more complex platform-mediated arrangements such as livestreaming and creator economies, which do not fit neatly within either profile-based or on-demand classifications. Significantly, a substantial portion of this labour is performed by temporary visa holders, whose contributions are inadequately recognised in current classifications. Acknowledging these complications, this study seeks empirically to shed light on their working conditions, with particular attention to their experiences and perceptions of time, rather than focusing on policy or legal frameworks.
Research Design
This study employs a comparative, multi-sited, ethnographic research design to examine how Chinese infotech temporal governance is operationalised through contractor-based service work and intermediary-managed creative labour within Australia's core–periphery labour regime (Wright & Clibborn, 2020) and its highly racialised and culturally diverse context (Robertson, 2019), focusing on livestreaming and food delivery. The concept of sociotemporal order (Zerubavel, 1977; Zerubavel, 1985) is operationalised in this study through attention to how time is structured, experienced, and governed in practice, including working hours, rhythms of activity, responsiveness, waiting time, and the temporal expectations imposed by platforms.
The first case attends to Bigo Live (hereafter Bigo), a livestreaming platform run by a Chinese-owned company that primarily uses an outsourced platform-guild-streamer arrangement instead of direct employment relationships. Despite having its official headquarters in Singapore, Bigo's worker governance, monetisation tactics, and operating logics are closely aligned with those of China's local livestreaming sector. In Australia, Bigo does not directly hire streamers; instead, third-party guilds handle hiring, scheduling, performance management, and revenue distribution. This intermediary arrangement allows the platform to amplify temporal requirements, including prolonged streaming durations, immediate reactivity, and emotional performance. The intermediary-based approach is fundamental to Bigo's labour governance; nevertheless, the platform's rising popularity has facilitated a greater number of users to livestream autonomously and obtain viewer tips via in-app methods. During 2022–2023, the primary author conducted around 20 interviews at Bigo's Guangzhou headquarters with regional supervisors, operations managers, guild leaders, and design personnel. The interviews concentrated on the assessment of regional markets regarding job intensity, monetisation potential, and perceived labour discipline. From July 2024 to January 2025, the third author engaged in participant observation while interning with Bigo's Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) regional team, operating in Guangzhou and Sydney. This was supplemented by additional fieldwork in Sydney in early 2025, encompassing interviews with outbound personnel and the observation of routine organisational activities. Collectively, these materials demonstrate how platform and guild participants convert abstract performance indicators into specific temporal expectations for streamers in Australia. The research team also carried out extensive participant observation of livestreams by 14 prominent female streamers from various global locations, examining how streaming duration, tempo, emotional intensity, and interaction patterns were adjusted.
The second case study analyses the employment experiences of food delivery couriers in Melbourne, Australia, operating on HungryPanda. In contrast to livestreamers, delivery workers were typically classified as independent contractors at the time of the research, although this status remains subject to ongoing legal and regulatory debate, and they engage directly with the platform rather than through intermediaries. HungryPanda's user interface design, order placement process, payment options, particularly its support for Chinese payment methods, order tracking features, and customer service communication closely emulate the user experience of Meituan, a leading food delivery platform in China. This research is based on 12 semi-structured interviews with Chinese migrant delivery workers primarily employed by HungryPanda. Interview participants were recruited from a bicycle repair shop in Melbourne where they sought to get their bicycles serviced. Of the 12 riders, 10 held student visas, while two possessed working holiday visas. Their ages varied between 23 and 34 years. Although some were employed part time, the bulk were full-time riders who struggled to secure stable, long-term employment. They chose delivery work among many short-term employment possibilities to optimise their income and working hours while in Australia. The semi-structured interviews covered participants’ entry into the platform-based gig economy, motivations for delivery work, employment histories, current roles, and understanding of platform operations, as well as the advantages and challenges of this work, the role of social networks, engagement with the Transport Workers’ Union, migration background, and key socio-economic characteristics, including age, income, education, and strategies for navigating platform labour.
Findings
In what follows, we present everyday platform labour practises to show how these dynamics reflect a broader sociotemporal order (Zerubavel, 1977, Zerubavel, 1985), in which platform temporal governance, migration constraints, and a core–periphery labour regime (Howe et al., 2018; Robertson, 2014; Robertson, 2019; Wright & Clibborn, 2020) jointly shape how time is organised, valued, and experienced. First, we show how the two platforms establish a macro-level temporal hierarchy that prioritises extended hours, flexibility, and continuous availability, and how these expectations intersect unevenly with Australia's labour market. These temporal logics also inform how China-based platform centres evaluate regional labour and assign differential value to it. Second, we examine how shared platform logics of temporal intensity are enacted and contested in the micro-management of livestreaming and food delivery work, highlighting how Bigo's affective demands and HungryPanda's operational rhythms interact with local labour practices. Third, we demonstrate how platform practices and Australian labour arrangements converge in their reliance on the transient and precarious labour of Asian migrant workers, who are positioned within the periphery of the labour regime and treated as flexible and expendable under conditions of limited protection.
Temporal Hierarchies and Labour Discipline
Chinese platforms operate within a temporal hierarchy of employment that prioritises prolonged hours, flexibility, and constant availability, therefore reinforcing and intensifying existing inequalities in Australia's labour market. This core–periphery configuration illustrates the convergence of platform expectations with migration status and racialised labour segmentation, fostering the perception that Asian migrant workers, especially those on temporary visas, are more reliable, accessible, and committed than their Australian-born peers. This dynamic is particularly apparent at HungryPanda, where managerial trust is more readily bestowed onto migrant workers who are ready or able to work extended hours and overtime.
Like many gig-economy services operating in Australia, HungryPanda has formally classified riders as independent contractors; however, recent industrial relations reforms have introduced the legal category of “employee-like workers”, under which such riders may now be more appropriately understood and afforded certain protections (Fair Work Ombudsman, 2024). Riders have the autonomy to select their working hours, log in and out at their will, and determine whether to accept assignments. Most interviewees observed that HungryPanda provided enhanced earning potential owing to its swift expansion and comparatively high amount of accessible orders. The interplay of formal temporal autonomy and ample task availability motivated numerous migrant riders to engage in prolonged work hours as a strategic approach to maximise pay, rather than as a direct mandate from management. Wang, a 30-year-old male student visa holder from China, elaborated: This work is great since you can make money quickly. The platform gives you plenty of work if you’re willing to do it. I’ve worked on farms and construction sites before. Those jobs usually only offer around eight hours a day, with breaks on weekends or public holidays, so you can’t earn as much. In the end, I chose HungryPanda. It's mostly because the HungryPanda delivery job pays more, promises more hours, and is hard labour. I work about 12 hours a day, and while the money might build up—sometimes reaching $10,000 a month—it's mostly because I put in a lot of time, not because each order makes a lot of money. There are no days off and not much time to relax. My everyday schedule is rather set. I get up about midday, eat, and keep delivering till the evening. Then I go to bed after brushing my teeth and taking a shower. This happens every day of the year, over and over again. I may take a day or two off, but I probably only take ten to fifteen days off in a year.
The rigorous temporal logics also affect how platform centres in China evaluate and appraise regional labour markets. Bigo Live's global expansion plan has an internal evaluative framework that measures regional success based on profitability, perceived labour discipline, availability, and time commitment. At Bigo's Guangzhou headquarters, the ANZ region is often characterised as “cannot be driven up” (dai bu qilai), indicating both commercial frustration and a perceived challenge in increasing labour hours under local Australian conditions.
Chinese regional managers consider time a fundamental measure of production. A prevalent grievance is that ANZ-based streamers “log off too early”, “don’t livestream during holidays”, or “lack urgency” in content production. As our participant Marina (female, 30, ANZ streamer and guild manager) observed, “Audiences on Bigo are used to watching livestreams starting at 9 pm., but the Australian streamers sign off at 5 pm. Wendy (female, 28), a user growth promoter, relocated from Guangzhou to Sydney and remarked humorously: Back in Guangzhou, working overtime for two or three hours every evening was just normal. But since I came to Sydney, even my overtime habits got cured! By around 4 or 5 pm , our colleagues, mostly local Australians, are already packing up. By 6, the office is totally empty. That would never happen in Guangzhou!
These observations point to divergent temporal orientations toward work. Australian streamers’ practices reflected different expectations around time, in which limited streaming hours were treated as reasonable and legitimate, rather than as signs of underperformance. From the viewpoint of Bigo's administration in China, however, these practices seemed inconsistent with the platform's temporal logics.
As a matter of fact, extended availability, nocturnal engagement, and sustained emotional expression are core elements directly integrated into Bigo's company strategy. In the headquaters of Guangzhou, regional dashboards provide the comparison of data such as average streaming time, user retention, and virtual gift revenue, with prolonged availability and sustained engagement serving as critical performance standards. Markets like the Middle East and Russian-speaking areas, characterised by extended streaming hours and late-night engagement, are considered more scalable and attract higher investment. In contrast, the ANZ region is often deprioritised due to its distinct temporal orientations rather than a deficiency in market potential. Joyce, the operations manager at ANZ, remarked, “The Australian numbers are poor,” and “the streamers here just aren’t trying hard enough”.
An illustrative instance of this evaluative discrepancy arose during Bigo's endeavor to capitalise on the 2025 Sydney Mardi Gras, one of the largest LGBTQ + festivals globally. Notwithstanding an extensive promotion with livestreamed parade coverage, virtual contests, and online community events, numerous Australian streamers engaged just marginally or chose not to participate. From the viewpoint of management in China, this result reaffirmed past evaluations of the ANZ region as challenging to expand under platform temporal logics that emphasise “hard work”.
As Fiona (female, 25), a visual designer working in the ANZ region, explained: “Sometimes event budgets and staffing are prioritised elsewhere. Australia frequently receives the least attention due to its lack of revenue generation”. Gradually, these evaluations crystallise into strategic choices that divert resources from areas whose temporal patterns do not easily conform to platform standards, converting perceived discrepancies in time utilisation into enduring hierarchies of investment and visibility. This signifies that neither delivery workers nor streamers are bound by rigid schedules or direct supervisory directives. Temporal control is instead implemented indirectly via performance metrics, income volatility, and regional comparative evaluations, which guide platforms’ strategic decisions regarding resource allocation and promotional support, exemplified by Bigo's regional investment priorities. Workers officially maintain control over their login and streaming times; however, the circumstances that enable adequate income generation render continuous availability and increased labour practically essential rather than explicitly mandated.
Lack of Temporal Intensity in Micropractise
While Bigo and HungryPanda headquarters sometimes interpret Australian streamers’ and workers’ practices as insufficiently industrious or temporally disciplined, nevertheless, a more nuanced examination reveals underlying frictions stemming from differing temporal expectations. These frictions stem more from a misalignment of platform-driven productivity models than from insufficient effort. In the realm of livestreaming, Australian practices frequently exhibit temporal orientations where shorter sessions, diminished emotive intensity, and reactive involvement are regarded as acceptable and sustainable, rather than as signs of underachievement. This discrepancy has caused persistent annoyance among guild administrators in Bigo's Australian office, who sometimes describe local streams as pingdan, a phrase implying mediocrity or low emotional intensity. As they noted, many Australian streams centre on casual, conversational exchanges such as “Where are you from?” or “How was your day?” These forms of interaction were understood as occupying time without necessarily producing the sustained engagement or monetisation rhythms prioritised by platform metrics. These frictions highlight that sociotemporal order is not uniformly imposed but negotiated across contexts, as platform-defined temporal expectations encounter locally situated understandings of reasonable working time and labour value.
In contrast, interviewees regarded livestreaming practices in Vietnam as more closely linked with Bigo's time requirements and performance criteria emphasised by the platform. Vietnam was often used as a benchmark for “successful” platform engagement, not as a cultural paradigm but as an illustration of how prolonged, intensive streaming habits more effectively yield platform prominence and monetisation. Vietnamese livestreaming sessions exhibited prolonged emotional intensity, strategic audience engagement, and a significant proficiency in platform functionalities. Observations during peak evening hours indicated substantial preparation and prolonged broadcasts, with numerous top-ranked female streamers streaming for eight to 10 hours nightly in meticulously maintained settings featuring professional-grade lighting, audio, and customised décor. Instead of signifying intrinsic disparities in work ethic, these activities demonstrate how prolonged availability, pace, and emotional output serve as temporal resources that are variably utilised across geographic settings in reaction to platform governance and incentive structures.
For instance, as illustrated in Figure 1, one top-performing Vietnamese streamer engaged in a split-screen one-on-one battle, a common competitive format learnt from Chinese livestreaming platforms, against a male streamer. This gamified format uses visual effects and countdown timers to intensify viewer engagement. Throughout the match, the female streamer maintained rhythmic movements, direct visual contact with the camera, and dynamic emotional responses, particularly when her opponent, after losing, was prompted to perform a humorous punishment. With 22 consecutive wins, she immediately launched a new match, exemplifying the fast-paced, cyclical tempo characteristic of high-performing livestreamers.
Vietnamese livestreamers engaged in a battle session (21 May 2023, Bigo's Vietnam region).
On Bigo Live, Vietnamese streamers were frequently described as operating in closer alignment with the platform's temporal expectations. During peak evening hours, many streamed for eight to 10 hours, sustaining emotional energy and strategically managing appearance, pacing, and interaction. Their broadcasts made routine use of platform features such as battles and gift-based competitions, reflecting a calibrated approach to time, visibility, and monetisation. In one observed session, a Vietnamese streamer with approximately 700 viewers remained continuously responsive to live comments, using expressive gestures and visual effects to maintain engagement over an extended period, illustrating how prolonged availability and affective intensity function as temporal resources within the platform economy.
In contrast, many Australian streamers adopted shorter, more episodic streaming routines, demonstrating that temporal intensity operates as a platform-specific resource that is differentially realised across labour markets, in line with theories of sociotemporal ordering and platform governance, while also showing that these dynamics are locally mediated and not solely determined by the platform (Wajcman, 2020). For example, Diamond Princss, a leading Australian streamer, typically streamed for one to two hours with minimal preparation or visual staging. During a livestream on 8 May 2024, she noted: “I work two hours a day, sometimes more, depending on the situation… You never know. You just keep trying”. Rather than signalling a lack of effort, such practices reflect different temporal orientations toward platform labour, in which limited duration and lower affective intensity are treated as reasonable. From the perspective of guild managers, however, these time practices were read as insufficiently aligned with platform norms, shaping ongoing assessments of Australian streamers’ scalability and income potential. Alex (male, 35, ANZ streamer and guild manager) explained: Because Australian streamers did not prepare in advance, when Australian streamers sit in front of cameras, they merely speak about what they did today, what they ate, and where they went with their pals. This is not the kind of content that our platform needs. HungryPanda basically copies China's domestic delivery model, Meituan, bringing it to Australia to seize the market by pushing costs onto riders and restaurants. Unlike Uber, Panda offers no compensation for waiting time or cancelled orders—for example, if a restaurant is closed or delays preparation, riders receive nothing and may even be prevented from leaving. By contrast, Uber provides subsidies for waiting time and compensates failed deliveries, which makes the difference in how platforms value riders’ time very clear.
Racialised Temporalities in Platform Expansion
Our final findings suggest that the temporal demands associated with Chinese platform models do not simply clash with Australia's labour regime or amount to straightforward exploitation; rather, they take shape through a three-way convergence between Chinese-owned platforms oriented toward rapid monetisation (Sun & Chen, 2021; Wang, 2021; Zheng & Qiu, 2023), Australia's dualised and unevenly protected labour system (Howe et al., 2018; Robertson, 2019), and Asian migrant workers navigating constrained and uncertain time horizons.
In the case of Bigo, this convergence is evident in recruitment practices undertaken by China-dispatched staff based in Sydney, such as Alex and Marina, both of whom were responsible for identifying potential guild partners and streamers. Their recruitment efforts were mostly concentrated on Asian international student and migrant networks, rather than on Australian natives, who were broadly regarded as unlikely to participate in time-intensive employment. Alex articulated this viewpoint in distinctly comparative and racialised terms: “If white women are attractive, they would have already been picked up by modelling agencies or local media companies, offering more money. They wouldn’t come to livestream on our (Chinese) platform”. His recruitment efforts typically targeted international student social media groups, where prospective streamers were perceived as more amenable to integrating academic pursuits with income-generating endeavours and more inclined to work late hours. A notable instance of Alex's successful recruitment pertains to a Vietnamese foreign student in Melbourne, who initially participated in the platform as a streamer and eventually evolved into a guild role, ultimately enlisting a substantial number of new streamers for Bigo. Such experiences reinforced internal assumptions within Bigo's ANZ operations regarding the appropriateness of specific migrant groups for platform labour, functioning as an informal, essentialised rationale that connected migrant status, availability, and temporal endurance to platform success. This reflects how sociotemporal expectations become racialised, as assumptions about availability, endurance, and flexibility are attached to particular migrant groups.
Platforms such as HungryPanda operate through more than the willingness of Asian migrant workers to accept long hours in order to maximise short-term earnings; they also rely on an Australian labour regime that formally promises flexibility while unevenly distributing protection. In this context, high-intensity temporal regimes are not simply imposed from Chinese platforms, but take shape through the intersection of platform governance, migrants’ constrained time horizons, and a segmented system in which flexibility is enabled but security is selectively withheld. Among HungryPanda riders, such temporal strategies were widespread. During HungryPanda's early market entry in Australia, platform operators extensively used Xiaohongshu (a Chinese-language social media platform popular among young Chinese adults) to recruit delivery riders. Wang, a Chinese rider based in Melbourne, described his delivery work as a deliberately time-limited strategy aimed at rapid income accumulation before returning to China. It reflects a perspective commonly shared by riders on temporary visas. As Wang explained, compared with pursuing skilled migration, platform work offering no guarantee of permanent residency, appeared to him a more efficient strategy for income accumulation: For me, Australia is too costly to stay in for the long term, but working for HungryPanda is cost-effective. If I try to get skilled migration, it will definitely take five or eight years. I’m 30 now. What happens if I finally get PR when I’m 38? I’ve thought about this seriously. If I spend those eight years working with HungryPanda, I could make millions of RMB instead. Last year, many people complained about why so many Indian riders joined the HungryPanda platform. I said that as a company, Panda must be doing it from its own perspective and is not doing charity… As I see it, Panda is taking the initiative to accept Indian riders to avoid the situation where the Chinese united to strike, which would shut down the platform.
Conclusion
Overall, the temporal dynamics of Chinese platform expansion in Australia are best understood as a three-way alignment: opportunistic platform expansion strategies, Australia's core-periphery labour structure, and migrant workers on temporary visas aiming to maximise short-term earnings. Chinese platforms gain momentum in the peripheral sectors of the Australian labour market, where institutional safeguards are less robust and time is more easily transformed into income. In this context, platform temporalities are not merely transposed across borders but are formed through the interplay between established labour structures and the limited temporal perspectives of workers. The dynamics are further influenced by continuous changes in Australia's migration and labour laws, where frequent policy alterations and stiffer eligibility criteria render long-term planning increasingly challenging and necessitate that migrants continually adjust their work and living choices. The overlapping and frequently contradictory regulatory modifications do not alleviate precarity but reconfigure it into new forms of temporal instability, to which some Chinese platforms respond by adopting outsourced, short-term and less formalised operational models orientated toward rapid expansion and immediate returns. This article sheds light on the lived experiences of platform labourers that are largely overlooked in both Chinese and Australian mainstream media and academic research. Much of the everyday negotiation, compromise, and struggle involved in managing time, income, and uncertainty continues to unfold in ways that are difficult to capture fully. Future research should therefore pay closer attention to how workers navigate these shifting temporal conditions in practice and to the forms of agency that often emerge as seemingly reasonable responses to broader, overlapping structural inequalities.
Last but not least, beyond the scope of this study but pointing to an emerging line of inquiry, temporal synchronisation may enable new forms of transnational labour governance in Australia. Compared with other Global North contexts, the relatively small time difference between China and Australia (0–3 h) may allow Chinese platforms to coordinate, monitor, and respond to labour practices in near real time, extending governance beyond national boundaries. A HungryPanda dispute reported in early 2026, in which communications and possible interventions by Chinese police concerning the Australian HungryPanda workforce appeared to occur across borders, draws attention to this possibility (Zhao, Dziedzic, & Xiao, 2026). While such cases are difficult to verify independently, they highlight the need for further research into how synchronised temporal infrastructures may facilitate new modes of cross-border platform coordination, oversight, and influence.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to our participants who shared their stories with us. We would also like to thank the Journal of Sociology editorial team and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments which have strengthened this article.
Ethics Approval
Ethical clearance for this study was obtained from the University of Technology Sydney Human Research Ethics Committee (project ID: ETH25-10818) and the University of Melbourne Human Research Ethics Committee (project ID: 27249).
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The second author received funding from the University of Melbourne for her research project.
The authors confirm that there are no conflicts of interest, whether financial or non-financial, directly or indirectly related to this work.
Employment
The authors have no current, recent (within the past 3 years), or anticipated employment with any organization that may gain or lose financially from the publication of this manuscript.
Use of Generative AI
The authors used generative AI tools (e.g., ChatGPT) to assist with language editing and drafting support. All substantive arguments, analysis, and interpretations are the authors’ own, and the authors take full responsibility for the content of the manuscript.