There is no evidence that the company organised the police actions in China, but it is evidence of the close monitoring of Chinese students in Australia by Chinese security.

 

The gig economy is notorious for its exploitative conditions, low pay and insecurity. The dispute reveals Chinese state interference in Australian labour relations which must be condemned.

 

 

HungryPanda is the brainchild of Liu Kelu, then a young student from China studying in Britain. Apparently dissatisfied by the availability of authentic Chinese restaurant food, he opened a food delivery service in the United Kingdom in 2017 and expanded it to Australia and the United States in 2019.

 

The company now operates in nine countries and more than 100 cities, with 6.5 million registered users, 100,000 partner merchants and around $US1 billion in annual transaction volume.

 

What separates HungryPanda from other delivery services like Uber Eats and DoorDash is that it is aimed at only one demographic – the Chinese language diaspora. Consequently, it employs young people within that demographic who often have no clear idea of their rights in a foreign country. 

 

Grievances over wage reductions, opaque algorithmic management and worsening conditions have festered within HungryPanda for some time.

 

Wang Zhuoying is one of the few to have taken HungryPanda to court over payment and welfare issues. 

 

HungryPanda’s abysmal record includes the case of a HungryPanda delivery driver who was killed in a road accident while working in 2020. The company failed to report the rider's death to SafeWork NSW promptly and refused his wife’s claims for compensation, saying that he was not an employee, but an independent contractor. A court awarded an $830,000 payout against the company, ruling that the worker was indeed an employee.

 

The previous year, the company reinstated two riders who had taken it to court for unfair dismissal.

 

HungryPanda remains a private company, and because it is not listed on the stock exchange, many key details are obscure. No-one knows Liu Kelu’s personal wealth, but it is reasonable to assume that it is greater than the delivery riders that he employs.

 

The company itself has raised significant venture capital — reportedly hundreds of millions of dollars across multiple funding rounds — but no public document from those rounds has disclosed Liu’s ownership stake or personal wealth. 

 

International finance and venture capital has bought into the company, a fact presumably known to Chinese state security services when they have interfered to warn delivery riders from organising against the company.

 

Its major sources of capital are Mars Growth Capital, a joint venture between Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and Liquidity Group, which stumped up $55 million in 2024; UK and French-based private equity firm Perwyn that led HungryPanda’s $130 million Series D round in 2021; Swedish investment firm Kinnevik; 83North (formerly Greylock Israel Partners), an Israeli-headquartered venture capital firm that invests at all stages of a startup fundraising cycle; Australian venture capitalist Felix Capital and various other private investors. 

 

Marx wrote that one capitalist kills many, meaning that free market competition resulted in competing firms being driven into bankruptcy or taken over.

 

HungryPanda is becoming very hungry, and in our region has taken over EASI (Australia), a Melbourne-based food delivery service, and BUY@HOME (New Zealand), an Asia-focused delivery platform based in New Zealand.

 

In addition to acquisitions, HungryPanda has expanded its own product offerings using investment capital, including:

 

• PandaFresh – a fresh-food and grocery e-commerce platform.

• VouchersPanda – lifestyle deals and discounts platform connected to delivery services.

 

Capital compels its owners to find new sources of surplus value for the purposes of capital accumulation. Along with expansion goes intensified exploitation and the growth of precarious employment.

 

 

Allegations of Chinese interference in the dispute have come from protest organisers.

 

Former HungryPanda delivery driver Wang Zhuoying has launched a legal claim against the company and accused it of slashing her orders after she organised protests against it.

 

She told the ABC she had recently received three separate phone calls from police from her home province in China which made her feel "targeted" and "intimidated". She said on the same day she got another call from a different police officer who was not aware of the first call and threatened to get her arrested upon her return to China if she chose to protest in Australia.

 

Another delivery driver in the group, Wang Caifa, verified the claims, saying that earlier this month he received a "panicked" phone call from his father in China who had just been taken to the local police station.

 

He told the ABC that the police warned his father that his son was involved in "dangerous activities" overseas.

 

Chinese police confirmed that they had monitored communications between protest participants on the Chinese WeChat platform. It is almost mandatory for Chinese citizens to use WeChat (or its Chinese parent Weixin), meaning authorities can monitor all of a person’s communications, personal, legal, financial and political. You can't really function in society in China without a WeChat account.

 

The Chinese Communist Party may have decided to intervene, not because HungryPanda has la-ed some guanxi (pulled strings and made use of personal connections), but because it has always required overseas Chinese to obey the laws of the countries in which they were residing.  From the early 1950s on, the policy of Party leaders was that overseas Chinese should not participate in local political movements and should respect and abide by the laws and regulations of their countries of residence.

 

There was nothing illegal under Australian law in what the organisers of the HungryPanda protest had done.  Therefore, there was no excuse even under the policies of the Chinese Communist Party for the Chinese police to intimidate and harass the organisers and their families. By discouraging lawful industrial protest by Chinese workers in Australia, the CCP has confirmed that it stands for the stability of capitalist relations of production and is opposed to working class struggle against exploitation.

 

The fight of migrant and diaspora workers deserves visibility and solidarity. The struggles of Chinese workers abroad are part of the common struggle of the international working class and should not be marginalised or silenced.

 

Last November, the Transport Workers Union (TWU) reached an agreement with Uber Eats and DoorDash for minimum safety net pay rates and other conditions for delivery drivers and riders. This followed years of campaigning by workers and the union.

 

The TWU must take up the case of HungryPanda emloyees and force the company to agree to minimum wage rates, improved safety measures, accident insurance paid by the company, an agreed dispute resolution procedure, and the right to union membership. 

 

We demand that the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in Australia issue a statement confirming the legal right of Chinese citizens in Australia on visas to organise, to speak up, and to demand fair pay and conditions.