4:30 A.M. at a day labour market in China, a drink to start a day’s toil

Thousands chase a day’s wage at Guiyang's largest day labour market.

Jul 04, 2025

China’s informal labour markets are fleeting theatres of toil—unmarked spaces that spring to life before dawn and vanish by the break of day, playing out daily in nearly every major city, from Shanghai to Hefei. In Guiyang, the capital of the mountainous, landlocked province of Guizhou, one such stage comes alive at 4:30 a.m. A stretch of bare concrete bursts into motion—minivans idle, hard hats bob in the half-light, and a seventy-year-old woman pours shots of baijiu for men too old for formal employment but too young to stop working.

The original report by Zhang Yue was published on June 26 on the official WeChat blog of Guyu Lab under Tencent News. It ventures into Guiyang’s largest day labour market, offering a ground-level view of job seekers, middle-aged recruiters, livestreamers, and the quietly resilient souls who, far from China’s innovation parks and luxury malls, still wake each day with only one goal: to find a way to live.

—Yuxuan Jia

在凌晨四点半的零工市场，买一杯酒干一天活

At the Day Labour Market at 4:30 A.M., a Drink to Start a Day’s Toil

In the age of the Internet, anything can become a spectacle—even a day labour market. Search for “Guiyang’s largest day labour market” and a cascade of viral clips unfolds before you: a vast expanse of concrete, stirring to life at 4:30 a.m., teeming with bodies that seem to rise straight from the earth. Some bear plastic pails, others carry bamboo baskets or balance shoulder poles; a sea of yellow hard hats moves in tight formation, jostling and shouting, the air thick with urgency.

Search results for “Guiyang’s largest day labour market” on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok

If you’re unsure what you’re witnessing, you’re not alone. Everyone, from migrant workers to vloggers, is streaming it live, narrating how as many as 3,000 people converge here each morning, all chasing the slimmest promise of work. In the local Guizhou dialect, they call it finding huolu—“a way to live.”

Through glass screens, people glimpse lives far removed from their own—a fleeting enchantment of our interlinked age. And yet, the sobering truth is this: these glimpses vanish as quickly as they arrive. That, too, is the destiny of digital spectacles.

Yet if you ever find yourself in Guiyang, in that liminal hour when darkness leaks into dawn, standing in the thrumming heart of the day labour market, you’ll come to understand something vital: the clamour doesn’t wait for cameras. It surges on, unseen or spotlighted, ignored or mythologised. What unfolds here is more unvarnished, more urgent, and far more resilient than any viral clip could convey.

These are not the protagonists of the digital age. Most are older, edged out by technology, by formal education, by the blunt arithmetic of competition. They have little to lean on but their own muscles and grit. They are both cunning and plainspoken, crouched in the half-light of a time that exploits and exhausts them, left often wandering, sometimes dulled by drink.

But fragile, they are not. They hold fast like flora, quietly weathering the elements and each tracing its huolu. And perhaps that is the most enduring constant of every age.

“No storm can shake my will to work.”

At Guiyang’s largest day labour market, people start drinking as early as 4:30 a.m.

The woman selling liquor is named Zhang. She’s nearing seventy, her face is dotted with large freckles, and she dresses in loud, chaotic colours—a red coat, orange oversleeves, a purple apron, and a pink hat. She sits in silence behind a small wooden table, on which three repurposed plastic water bottles stand in a row: two filled with medicinal liquor and one with baijiu. Each shot costs two yuan, poured into one of two yellowed glasses that seem unwashed for years. Now and then, the woman gives them a half-hearted rinse with the medicinal liquor, but she never wastes a drop—whatever’s left is poured right back into the bottle.

The drinkers here don’t dwell on those unsettling details—they have more pressing needs to tend to. In the frigid pre-dawn darkness, a cheap shot of low-grade liquor offers warmth and relief from exhaustion, with the added bonus of so-called medicinal benefits. It’s a cost-effective indulgence. The woman running the stall sells forty or fifty shots a day.

This “market” is hard to pin down on any map, bears no official name, and defies the usual contours of a marketplace. It’s merely a roughly 200-square-metre concrete lot. In daylight, the place looks grim: flanked by greasy eateries and traditional Chinese medicine clinics hawking miracle cures, all gasping for business.

But by 4:30 a.m., the scene suddenly springs to life. A dense crowd materialises out of the darkness—as if the earth itself has exhaled them—people with yellow hard hats and backpacks, some clutching plastic buckets or bamboo baskets, others shouldering carrying poles. A line of minivans pulls up along the road. These belong to labour brokers who’ve wrangled jobs from construction sites and factories. They’ve come to fish for manpower—a routine known in the trade as baiche, or “van in.”

The brokers roll down their passenger-side windows. One after another, job seekers bend down, asking: How much? What kind of work?

In the Guizhou dialect, they call it finding huolu—“a way to live.” At its peak, over three thousand people would gather here, packed so tightly that police cars were dispatched to keep the peace. It is Guiyang’s largest day labour market, and its scale alone has turned it into a kind of digital spectacle.

Search “Guiyang day labour market” online and you’ll find clips of jostling bodies scrambling for a day’s wage. The scenes rack up numerous views, clicks, and likes. One comment reads, “There are labour markets like this all over China.”

The pork vendor next to the market sometimes wakes up early. On those mornings, he throws on a coat and walks to the nearby overpass to watch the crowd stir. He told me the crowd still looks big, but it’s much smaller than it was two years ago. “Because work’s harder to find now,” he said.

On my first morning there, I met Kong, fifty years old. He was the kind of cheerful, easygoing uncle who, even as the crowd jostled him around, kept a warm smile on his face. A familiar coworker asked why he hadn’t been there the day before. In a booming voice, even with a hint of pride, he replied, “I was out chasing unpaid wages!”

A few years back, Kong landed work on a major project. In 2018, one of China’s major real estate developers poured hundreds of billions into a sprawling cultural and tourism complex in Guiyang—8,000 mu [over 1317 acres] of entertainment, culture, commerce, and residential spaces. Kong was hired to install large sheets of exterior glass, earning a little over 100 yuan a day. But by 2022, the developer’s funding chain snapped, and the once-ambitious project became Guiyang’s largest unfinished ghost complex overnight. The over 10,000 yuan [1,395 U.S. dollars] in unpaid wages that Kong was owed became a distant dream.

Kong has been in this day labour market for six or seven years. Before this, he worked at a vehicle repair shop in Guiyang, specialising in diesel engines, where he earned six to seven thousand yuan a month. He still speaks of that time with pride: “I used to do skilled technical work.” But then the shop shut down, and diesel engines gradually faded from the market. At that time, in his early forties, jobs were hard to come by. He tried his hand at a small business, investing over 100,000 yuan of his savings into a vegetable trade venture someone had recommended—only for the guy to disappear with the money, while he ended up here.

As Kong aged, his competitiveness waned. At his lowest point, he was lucky to get four or five days of work in a month. When I met him, he hadn’t worked in days. “The recruiters just don’t want people like us,” he said.

On workless days, he and a few fellow labourers, each owed, would band together to demand their overdue wages, totalling around 200,000 yuan [27,911 U.S. dollars].

Looking back over a longer stretch of time, what Kong has lived through is the final frenzy and collapse of an industry. Now, the long shadow of changing times falls squarely on him.

Most of the people scrambling for day labour jobs in this labour market are like Kong—older, lacking specialised skills, and without access to quality education. They were edged out of society’s competition early on, left with nothing but their physical strength to rely on. In the days of the real estate boom, there was work everywhere, and the money followed. But that world has vanished. What remains is a landscape unrecognisable.

Two years ago, Kong had stomach surgery. The recovery left him with a debt of over ten thousand yuan [1,395.6 U.S. dollars] to the bank. He couldn’t say exactly when life had begun to fray, when the holes started opening—one after another—until there was nothing left to stitch them shut. Eventually, he learned to stop worrying about it. “If I can’t pay it back, so be it,” he said, “Money in the hands of the poor has to wait till the poor have more.”

These days, the only thing he takes pride in is his surname—he claims to be a descendant of Confucius. Pinned at the top of his social media feed is a photo of himself taken at the entrance of the Temple of Confucius back in 2019. He even enthusiastically discussed with me the ancestral ties between the Kong and Zhang clans.

In this market, respect flows toward the recruiters, the ones who seem to hold the power of life and livelihood.

Among the baiche crowd, I spotted Qu. She had already picked her workers for the day: six middle-aged men wedged into the back of her minivan, with a seventh squatting in the aisle. The job that day was to haul construction debris and clean up an office building—120 yuan a person.

Qu sat behind the wheel, unbothered. She was in her early fifties, with eyebrows tattooed so carefully they passed for delicate strokes of makeup in the half-light of the van. There was something refined about her—an incongruous elegance amid the grit and dust. She didn’t acknowledge me. Her fingers flicked across her phone screen and switched to selfie mode. I watched through the window as she filmed a series of lip-sync videos, her expressions coy, utterly absorbed.

Qu told me this was her little escape to find joy in poor conditions. She puckered her lips toward the crowd outside the van and said, “We’re really no different from them.” Everyone here depends on someone higher up the food chain. She called those who gave her jobs “bosses.” Sometimes the bosses have work, sometimes they don’t. And if the pay is too low for certain jobs, she might not even find workers. Her job, as she put it, was “human resources.” She admitted she made a little more than the day labourers, but only a little. Five or six thousand yuan a month, she said.

Compared to others in her line of work, Qu is the more hardworking type. Divorced and raising a daughter on her own, she’s up by 3 a.m. each day to cook breakfast. After that, whether she has a job lined up or not, she drives to the lot and parks her van.

She holds herself to an unrelenting code: the phone stays on 24/7, 365 days a year. Her social media overflows with motivational dispatches: “Believe in yourself—there’s boundless energy within you. Coming from the countryside into this city, the only option is to push forward with endless effort. No room for retreat. Miracles can happen. No job is too big or small—I take them all. Welcome all bosses in my network to call and ‘disturb’ me anytime. Mission guaranteed!”

On May 20, rain lashed the city. Qu filmed herself driving through it, and her caption read: “Not even wind and rain can shake my will to work. Big job or small, even if it’s just buying a cabbage on 520, I’m on it!”

Whether selecting workers or being selected, by 7 a.m., when daylight fully breaks, the results of this bruising contest—too many hands for too few jobs—are already decided. Those who secured work have already been ferried away in vans. Those left behind drag themselves home, tired and disappointed, to sleep. Vendors hawking breakfast, hard hats, and work gloves start packing up. An auntie who sells sticky rice cakes hurries off to her second hustle—selling vegetables at a nearby market. Three sanitation workers slowly make their way through the square’s overflowing 17 trash bins.

Sometimes, Qu films this scene and posts a tongue-in-cheek update: “Dawn breaks, and the glamour of human resources takes centre stage. If you haven’t found work by now—myself included—it’s time to head home and catch some sleep.”

“As long as you're not lazy, there's always work to be done”

But not everyone heads home at dawn. For those without work, the day yawns wide and empty. Time needs killing, and here, it often dies by way of a gambling game called 189, where players bet on who holds the higher card.

Huang Fei, 36, had managed to save seven or eight thousand yuan from last year’s labour. This year, he lost it all.

He’s been a regular at this day labour market for nearly a decade, ageing out of his youth into middle age. His eyes are unusually large, a cigarette dangling from his lips. His hair is a wild snarl, like something a crow might nest in. When talk turns to gambling, he grows irritated, convinced there are hustlers here, preying on migrant workers like him.

For now, he says he’s done. “If I gamble again, it’ll be somewhere legit.”

Huang lives in a rented room across the day labour market, up a low hill, just a ten-minute walk away. At 230 yuan [32.1 U.S. dollars] a month, the place is home to many of the market’s workers. The room is, quite literally, bare—a bed, a floral-patterned blanket, a single bulb for light. The rice cooker is the only object of value. Most days, he eats plain noodles, sometimes with a dab of oyster sauce for flavour. His phone has been cut off for over two months, long out of credit.

He isn’t particularly troubled by his poverty, having developed his own philosophy of life: “In this day and age, there are plenty of rich people and plenty of poor ones. If you’ve got money, you eat a little better. If you don’t, you eat a little worse. Money buys pork, no money buys cabbage. But poverty won’t kill you, and being rich won’t save you either.” In front of the woman selling liquor, he generously offered to buy me a drink.

Huang Fei was born in a rural village near Guiyang, his life following a path all too familiar in China—growing up poor, dropping out of school, working odd jobs… until he eventually ended up in this market and never left.

To an outsider, this would naturally seem like an unfortunate trajectory, one that could easily breed resentment, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness towards reality. But Huang Fei is at peace. “I used to think I could climb my way up,” he said, “that by 30, I’d have made something of myself. But if you haven’t made it by 40, you’re not going to—you’re just a nobody, scraping by. As long as I’m not hungry, that’s enough. I’ve accepted my fate. If my belly’s full and my body holds out, then life is passable.”

Huang approaches his circumstances with diligence—a seriousness edged with calculation. He rises each morning at four, scans for jobs with intent, and weighs his options carefully. Two meals, two bottles of water, half a pack of cigarettes—daily life costs him at least 40 or 50 yuan. Anything less than 170 or 180 a day isn’t worth the sweat. If a job offers only 150, he’d press the boss to cover lunch.

When I met him, he’d just finished a full day hauling stainless steel barriers—8 a.m. to 6 p.m., 180 yuan. The boss had provided a 15-yuan lunchbox: braised pork and a boiled egg. Huang recounted the job with contentment. “Didn’t feel too exhausting,” he said.

“As long as you’re not lazy, there’s always work to be done,” he told me confidently.

Huang Fei has a friend—Li, forty years old—and their bond is rock-solid. Whenever a decent job turns up, Huang makes sure Li comes along. When I invited him for a meal nearby and suggested grilled fish, he immediately rang Li to join us.

Huang Fei later confided in me that Li tends to slack off, loves drinking, and sometimes gambles when drunk, even turning down work when he’s not in the mood. But Huang insisted he was nothing like that. When he gambled, he said, it was not for fun but just to make some extra cash.

Huang prides himself on his discipline, on knowing when to stop—unlike others in the market who, after losing it all, resort to what he calls “easy meals”: stealing from construction sites to get by. He mentioned one man who got caught stealing cables and ended up in prison. “I warned him,” Huang said, “Told him to get back to real work. But he wouldn’t listen. Got played—just wasn’t sharp enough.”

The “easy meal” doesn’t always mean stealing. Qu told me she’d been burned not long ago. She’d taken a crew to clean up a construction site when one of the workers drove a piece of metal into his own hand.

She’s certain it wasn’t an accident. “I offered to take him to the doctor,” she said, “but he waved me off—said he’d use his insurance later, that it’d cost less that way. What he really wanted was for me to pay for his lost wages and some living expenses. That’s when I knew this guy was a real pro.”

After some back-and-forth, Qu paid him 600 yuan [83.7 U.S. dollars] to settle it. Another contractor she knew had it worse—a worker stabbed himself in the thigh with a steel bar, refused medical treatment, and demanded a payout. The contractor ended up handing over 10,000 yuan [1,395.6 U.S. dollars] in cash.

Huang Fei doesn’t want to rely on risky “easy money.” What he wants is to sustain his current life in a safer, more sustainable, and morally sound way. “Some people just live day to day,” he said, “but this road, you have to walk it every single day.” He believes this is a good era, where, even if you had nothing, you wouldn’t die of starvation.

When there is no work, Huang passes the time scrolling through short videos. Even with no phone credit, he keeps a data card handy. His favourites are singing and dancing clips, especially those with songs of Aidy, a Chinese singer known for rustic love ballads.

He also has a soft spot for The Shell Games, a 1980s Hong Kong drama about the gambling world. What he loves most are the moments when the gambler, pushed to the brink, suddenly turns the tables.

He has also saved a few motivational quotes on his phone. One he shared with me read: “What’s past is over. Don’t walk the wrong road again. Stay disciplined, keep improving, and work hard to earn what’s yours. Keep your eyes sharp and your mind clear. May what you love become yours, and what you lose be let go. And in this unpredictable future, may good fortune come uninvited.”

He “stays disciplined and keeps improving”—echoing that saved quote—as a way of holding the line. With no immediate threat to his survival, he feels no urgency to change course. When I asked why he didn’t try something more stable, like food delivery, he said, “I can’t ride an e-bike. Getting older. Don’t know the roads. Besides, this way’s more comfortable—freer.”

He pulled out his phone to show me some of his favourite short videos. One featured a group of pretty girls lip-syncing Love is to Blame to a catchy beat. As he watched, his voice trailed off, and he stopped talking altogether. He was somewhere else now—his gaze fixed, his mind folded into the screen.

Boss, you’re like a monkey

Most of the time, the day labour market drifts in a haze of fatigue and numbness. The backbreaking labour, endless job hunting, and the disappointment and weariness of fruitless searches are etched on people’s faces. It’s rare to see any intense excitement among them—until I met Hui.

It was 6:30 a.m., and in a corner far from the main road, Hui—42, clad in a yellow hard hat and a fluorescent vest stamped with Migrant Worker across the back, was in full performance mode. He bounced, strutted, and gestured wildly in front of his phone camera, the crowd of day labourers behind him serving as the backdrop.

His voice boomed, quick and theatrical: “Brothers and sisters, take a good look at this hardworking migrant worker! Your brother here can’t even afford to go home, no money to go home! But I’m still here, hanging on! Who knows how long I’ll have to tough it out before I can finally head back!”

Then someone gifted him a virtual canned peach—20 yuan’s worth. Hui exploded. He jumped nearly half a metre off the ground, lunged towards the camera, and squealed, his voice rising several octaves: “Oh my goodness!!! Thank you, Brother Ming!!! Thank you for the canned peach!!! That’s just too sweet!!!”

He’d only been livestreaming for a month, but already Hui had pulled in 12,000 followers on the short-video platform. That morning, I watched him grind to push his live viewer count from 130 to 150. “Type 150 in the chat, everyone!!” he shouted, “I refuse to believe this—come on, is Douyin messing with me or what?!”

And then his numbers started climbing, eventually surpassing 300. Leaping into the air, he screamed at the top of his lungs: “Fine, I admit it. I’m just a country bumpkin! A migrant worker made his livestream blow up! You see that? It’s that simple!! Watch me tear open the floodgates of clout!!! I’m going viral, y’all—look at me, I’m viral! A total rookie, carrying this whole livestream on my back!” By the end, he seemed almost delirious, chanting over and over, “I’m viral!! Viral!! VIRAL!!”

Curious migrant workers, just passing by, craned their necks to see what all the fuss was about. Hui seized the moment, pulling them into his act: “Big bro, why you always hating on me? I’m not crazy, not stupid—why the hate? I just made 20 bucks, real cash! Dead serious!”

His voice was so loud that it drew scolding and rolled eyes from a nearby security guard. “Keep it down!” the guard said. But Hui ignored him. The guard finally stomped off in frustration.

After three days of watching Hui livestream, I decided to approach him for a conversation. He told me that his colleagues had already noticed me and even warned him, “That guy’s probably here doing research. Don’t spill all your secrets to him.” But Hui laughed it off and said frankly, “I don’t have secrets. I’m just a guy full of passion and authenticity.”

Once his livestream ended, we went to a nearby restaurant for breakfast. He ordered a bowl of beef noodles, and when the owner recognised him as she served us, he couldn’t hide a flicker of pride.

“I’m kind of a public figure now, you know?” he said, “In the livestream world, I’m a rising star. People think it’s wild, impossible, that I’ve come this far in just over a month.”

Off-camera, Hui came across as a calm, perceptive man, worlds apart from his on-screen antics. As he slurped his noodles, he pulled out his phone to check his livestream stats. For an hour and a half of streaming that morning, he had pulled in 11,000 “sound waves”—the platform’s virtual currency—equivalent to 1,100 yuan [153.5 U.S. dollars].

I was stunned, but Hui just gave a small, satisfied smile. He explained that before diving into livestreaming, he had meticulously done his research, visiting every day labour market in Guiyang. This one, he told me, was “the biggest”—not only in terms of the number of workers, but also in its online influence.

Indeed, when failure becomes large enough and statistically undeniable, it begins to mutate into a spectacle, a resource. Besides Hui, many others were livestreaming here. As we moved through the market, we passed a man in a blinding red suit, striking theatrical poses in a pair of crimson leather shoes.

A little further down, a young woman stood with a more professional setup, with a ring-shaped light positioned behind her phone. Speaking in the local Guiyang dialect, she interviewed a middle-aged migrant worker who stumbled through his story: his wages had been withheld by someone. She offered to help draft a legal complaint.

Before talking to Hui, I thought this would be a story about a poor migrant worker scraping by through livestreaming. But what he shared next completely shattered my narrow assumptions. The twist? He wasn’t poor. Not even close. In fact, Hui was wealthy—seriously wealthy—and none of it had anything to do with his newfound internet fame.

According to Tianyancha, a prominent Chinese enterprise data platform, the 42-year-old Hui is listed as the chairman and general manager of a company with a fully paid registered capital of 16.76 million yuan [2,339,018 U.S. dollars]. He holds a commanding 62.89% personal stake.

Hui told me he was born in a village in Tongren, Guizhou. He was an extremely diligent student and earned a spot at a leading university in Wuhan, where he studied civil engineering. After graduation, he landed a job as a project manager in real estate, but the role didn’t satisfy him. He felt he was meant for more—bigger roles, more reward—so he struck out on his own.

He caught China’s real estate boom. Starting with interior renovation jobs, Hui went from a scrappy contractor to a heavyweight, eventually landing government-funded relocation and poverty alleviation projects. At its peak, he said, his firm was managing three to four billion yuan in contracts each year.

Though the golden era of real estate has dulled, it’s still hard to imagine someone like Hui waking at 5 a.m., driving across Guiyang, parking his BMW a kilometre from the labour market, and walking the rest of the way to don a fluorescent vest and play the part of a migrant worker.

He jumps, he shouts, he thanks with full-bodied conviction for virtual canned peaches worth 20 yuan, of which, after platform cuts, he keeps just 10. His biggest tip so far is a digital “sports car” worth 120 yuan. His cut: 60.

And yet, Hui treats this sideline with an almost devotional rigour. During the week I spent at the market, he never missed a morning. “You can’t stop or take breaks,” he told me. “It’s like a real job. If you do, the algorithm buries you.”

After an hour or two of streaming, he walks back to his BMW and drives to his company.

The whole thing felt at once absurd and awe-inspiring. I asked Hui if this meant his business had hit hard times. He shook his head. Yes, projects have shrunk. Yes, some construction payments were overdue. But his personal wealth and standard of living hadn’t been significantly affected.

The livestreams, he explained, were part of something much larger. He was building a personal brand that would become the foundation of a much bigger platform: a central hub for China’s vast construction industry. In his vision, workers, suppliers, contractors—everyone in the trade—would register, post information, and secure deals all in one place. “Eventually,” he told me, “everyone in construction will come to me. There’s not a single platform right now that solves all our problems—job hunting, buying materials, financing, and training. No one’s brought all that together yet.”

He had studied China’s internet giants and come to the conclusion that they were all chasing the consumer internet, not the real industrial internet. “Construction,” he told me, “has no rival when it comes to market size. Once this takes off...I’ll be bigger than Taobao and JD.”

For this grand ambition, Hui was willing to make temporary sacrifices. He told me his company’s accountant had once come to watch him livestream and said, “Boss, you’re still a boss—aren’t you afraid people will laugh at you, clowning around like a monkey?” He replied, “I just want to achieve my goal. I’m not stealing or cheating, right? I’m someone who can bend without breaking.”

And yet, the connection between his goals and playing a migrant worker remained elusive. Nowhere in his livestreams did he mention the platform he hoped to build. Some viewers questioned Hui’s “migrant worker” identity, pointing out that his hands lack the calluses of manual labour. He didn't respond to such doubts.

“Anyway, my ancestors were all farmers,” he said. “Migrant workers aren’t easy to define—what does it really mean? In the end, they’re a group representing the lowest echelon of society, the hardworking people who keep their feet on the ground.”

I asked if he still saw himself as one of them. Hui nodded, “Absolutely. I’m still a migrant worker.”

After our conversation, Hui drove me back to my hotel. He was in a hurry—he still had to rush to another construction site to film a video. He told me he does everything himself: filming, scripting, and editing before posting it on his video channel.

Before we parted ways, he asked me, “This is who I am. Do you think it’s meaningful?” “You’re very hardworking,” I said. He nodded, “Yeah, I think I work harder than most. We rural folks are used to hardship. To us, suffering doesn’t even count as suffering.”

“Drinking stops me thinking”

Whether Hui’s ambitions are sincere or attainable is still an open question, but one thing is certain: many in this market aspire to be like him. Yong is one of them.

Yong has a rather unique way of describing himself: “the ugliest guy in this market.”. It’s a bit of an overstatement—he’s 35, not very tall, with slightly chubby cheeks and narrow eyes, the kind of face that easily blends into a crowd.

He streams around the same time as Hui, standing in a corner just behind him, close to the pedestrian overpass. He seems a little nervous, speaking softly and timidly, with only about a dozen viewers tuning in. Hui swung by and offered a tip in passing: “You should remind people more often to like and follow.”

When a new viewer entered Yong’s stream, he tried to thank them by name but tripped over a character he couldn’t read. He paused, embarrassed, and apologised, “Don’t mind me—I didn’t get much schooling. Only finished second grade. Please don’t laugh at me.”

For day labourers venturing into livestreaming, the content falls into only two categories: one showcases the hardships of the day labour market, while the other encourages followers to start their own livestreams. “Listen, friends,” Yong said, “you’re all better-looking than me. If you can talk, you can stream. We’ve got to drop our faces and toughen up.”

His words sounded familiar. As I wandered through the market, I often paused beside livestreamers. They all spoke the survival philosophy for those with nowhere left to go.

A middle-aged woman named Tang lectured her audience with earnest conviction: “If you can’t find huolu right now, so what? I haven’t either. I’m broke, same as you. Doesn’t matter—just swallow your pride and go live. Drop the ego to earn the cash. Once you’ve got the cash, your dignity comes back.” Nearby, a male streamer put it bluntly: “Don’t be afraid of being laughed at. Thick skin gets you the feast; thin skin leaves you hungry.”

Yong, by nature, is introverted. He looks up to the frenzied energy of streamers like Hui. He is convinced that to make it, you have to go crazy.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it—success still felt far out of reach. He’s been in the day labour market for two months now, streaming for an hour each morning before hunting for odd jobs during the day. Few viewers send him gifts, leaving him with just a couple of yuan a day. “Barely worth the effort,” he admitted.

Even though he preaches in his streams, “You can’t work hard one day and slack off the next,” his own livestreams have dwindled. Days have passed since his last one.

Another thing distracting Yong from focusing on his work was that his girlfriend hadn’t answered his messages in days. She worked in the same market as a broker. They met one cold winter morning, sharing warmth around the same fire. They had been together for a few months, but lately, an argument had cracked between them over some petty stuff.

Yong was very proud of his girlfriend. During our first conversation, he abruptly brought her up: “My wife is in design,” he said. By “design,” he meant she sketched simple circuit diagrams and took on appliance installation jobs. He added that she owned two cars.

When I asked why he didn’t turn to her for help finding more work, he said most of her jobs involved air-conditioner installations—work he wasn’t trained to do. More importantly, he added, “I’m a man. I need to rely on my own skills.”

She’d been married before and had a daughter. Yong wasn’t entirely sure if the divorce was official. It was something they hadn’t discussed. When he visited her place, he sometimes felt a flicker of fear. “What if her husband is home?”

When it comes to relationships between men and women, this place has its own moral code. Huang Fei has a girlfriend—they've been together for five or six years. She also works day labour jobs at the market, but back in her rural hometown, she has a husband, who in turn has his own lover. Everyone knows about each other, yet they coexist peacefully.

“We’re like a pile of quicksand,” Huang says. “Her situation’s a bit messy, but I don’t want to call her out on it.”

When his girlfriend’s ten-year-old daughter came to visit from the village, Huang played the generous host, treating the little girl to a barbecue that cost him over a hundred yuan.

As for the future, it’s too distant to even think about. “I don’t see much hope in anything,” Huang admitted.

Only Li, now in his forties, seems to carry a more traditional code of duty. Each month, he sends a small sum back to his daughter, who lives with his older brother in their hometown. The rest of his earnings disappear into food, drink, and gambling. There’s rarely anything left to save.

There’s a woman at the market he fancies, but he’s never mustered the courage to say anything, because“you can’t raise a family in a place like this,” he said.

When the weight of things presses too hard, Yong often confides in the liquor-selling woman. They share the surname Zhang, so he calls her “Auntie.” She reassured him that his girlfriend was decent—“not like the others in this market,” she said.

Auntie Zhang had divorced twenty years ago, because her husband, she told me, “gambled and chased prostitutes.” So she walked away from her two sons and a small village in Zhijin, Guizhou, to escape the marriage. She spent a few years working day labour jobs in Zhejiang before returning to Guiyang, where she’s held her post in the market for nearly a decade.

In the beginning, she took cleaning, hauling mortar, and back-breaking shifts. After four or five years, the labour left her with rheumatism, her limbs constantly aching. That’s when she started selling liquor and collecting empty bottles—1.2 yuan per 500 grams. Just enough, she said, to stay afloat.

She told me old neighbours from the village pitied her. Even her sons, now working in construction in Zhejiang, had urged her to return home and reconcile with her husband. But she was adamant. “I don’t regret these twenty years,” she said. “Even if I had to beg for food, day after day in this spot, I wouldn’t go back.” When the time comes, when she could no longer manage the liquor stall, she would “take life as it comes.”

Yong couldn’t summon the same resolve as Auntie Zhang. Life, for him, pressed down with a more fragile weight. The unanswered WeChat messages from a girlfriend pulling away, the sputtering livestreams that never took off, the unyielding harshness of life…Sometimes, his mind drifted to the mother he never knew. She had died of illness not long after he was born. The only photo he had of her was the one clipped from her ID card. She was a young Chuanqing woman [a small ethnic group, primarily residing in northwestern Guizhou, not officially recognised among China’s 56 ethnic groups], her expression soft. Yong uploaded the photo to a short-video platform, but made it visible only to himself.

After his mother’s death, his father beat him often, and fear of going home took root in him. Sometimes, he didn’t dare return and would spend the night in the wild fields near the village. One day, when he was 13, his father struck him again, and he made up his mind to run away. For two whole days, he walked 150 kilometres until he reached Guiyang. For many years after that, he never went back.

Someone took him to Shenzhen to find work, but without an ID, no factory would hire him. He wandered the streets for four or five years, digging through trash bins for food, begging for leftovers at restaurant back doors, collecting bottles for change, and sleeping on the roadside.

He told me that most people living like that would go mad within a few years, but he was lucky enough to meet kind souls along the way. A woman running a hot-and-sour noodle shop would save leftover food and set aside empty beer and soda bottles. And then there was a social worker who offered him meals and a place to stay for a little while.

We were sitting in a milk tea shop when Yong, unprompted, spoke of a night he had once considered suicide. He couldn’t remember exactly when—just that he was lying by the side of a road, wondering what the point of his life was. “I thought about a lot of things—I had no money; I wanted to go home, but felt too ashamed. My father wanted nothing to do with me, and going back wouldn’t have changed anything.”

Just then, a social worker approached. They talked for a while, and in the end, Yong didn’t follow through on his thoughts. Later, that same social worker helped him find a job as a caregiver at a nursing home in Xiangtan, Hunan. He saved up some money and eventually returned to Guiyang.

Now and then, Yong returns to his village, but his relationship with his father remains strained. The old man sees him as a failure, and livestreaming is just “not an honest living.”

But Yong isn’t sure what honest living he can depend on. Life doesn’t seem like it’ll get better anytime soon. Behind the day labour market, there’s a narrow street lined with eateries that sell cheap, adulterated liquor. Fifteen yuan buys 50 grams. He often goes there to drink—one glass here, another there—until he’s drunk.

Once, after drinking too much, Yong collapsed in the street. His phone slipped from his pocket, and it was Auntie Zhang who found it. The worst time, he drank until his stomach bled. Still, he couldn’t quit. “People like us have nothing,” he told me, “No one to rely on. After drinking, we just sleep. That way, we don’t have to think about things anymore.”

At the day labour market, a security guard in his sixties sat inside his booth. He told me that in the summer, this empty lot would be littered with drunk men sprawling out on the ground. He didn’t understand these broken souls and looked down on them. “These guys are just lazy bums,” he said.

“I’m not admitting defeat”

In the day labour market, life is resistant to change like concrete. Yong’s relationship came to an unremarkable end after a few months. He posted a video on the short video platform: “Men, damn it, don’t feel sad because a woman leaves. The one who left is no different from the one who died. A woman who doesn’t love you—once she’s gone, she’s gone.”

Before I left Guiyang, I saw Kong one last time. He still hadn’t recovered the wages he was owed, but he’d finally found work—janitorial duties at an office building soon to open. It was about an hour’s drive from the city centre. A massive banner hung across the façade: Dream of the Times, Command the Prosperity, Pioneer the Future.

Of course, none of that had anything to do with Kong. He was just there to take out the trash. Wearing an apron, broom in one hand, dustpan in the other, his face and body were covered in dust. He moved slowly. The woman working next to him rolled her eyes when he lagged behind. Kong just smiled, looking untroubled.

He thinks his life isn’t likely to shift course. “You can’t do anything,” he said. “You don’t have a knife in your hand, so you can’t kill anyone. You don’t have money in your bag, so you can’t get anything done.” The only way to cope with this is to “take it easy. We’re all just here to make a living.”

Still, one small wish remained: to save a little money and go to Qufu, Shandong, to pay another visit to the Temple of Confucius.

For these people, the future has already been settled, while the younger generation continues to join in. I met a young guy in a food delivery uniform at the market. He was 20 years old and had just bought a yellow safety helmet and cotton gloves.

He’d only been here a month. Before this, he had worked in a mould factory in Zhejiang, but the gruelling day shifts wore him down. His parents called him home. Now, the three of them work in the day labour market together, watching out for each other.

I asked how long he planned to stay. He said he didn’t know,“I haven’t thought that far ahead.”

Huang Fei’s relationship has come to an end. In mid-June, he called to tell me his girlfriend had found someone else at the market. He was feeling a little down, and work was hard to come by.

“There are so many people looking for jobs,” he said. A few days earlier, he took a day labour job for just 100 yuan. And now, with Guizhou swallowed in days of rain, he has no work at all.

On the other end of the phone, his friend said, “It’ll get better eventually.” For some reason, both of them laughed, as if they had just shared a joke.

“I won’t give up,” Huang Fei told me. “I’ll keep looking. If I don’t, it’s like admitting defeat. And I don’t like losing.”

I asked him what exactly he was still looking for. “Both a job,” he said, “and a girlfriend.”

When he’s not working, Huang finds small ways to clear his head. One of his favourite places is Zhucheng Square, in the heart of Guiyang. At its centre stands a massive sculpture of a mythical beast, the Liu Jixiang—the Six Auspiciousnesses. Huang will buy a grilled meat skewer and stand watching people dance and sing folk songs.

Beside the beast, an inscription reads: This mythical creature symbolises harmony in all places, expressing people’s fervent hopes and good wishes for favourable weather, national prosperity, social peace, and a thriving life.