Recent studies on precarity among gig workers has turned away from labour process factors to explore the role of the wider social, cultural and institutional environment. Existing western-centred studies in this aspect argue that platforms reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies to leverage control over vulnerable populations. This study extends this literature by focusing on the migration factor in a non-western context. Using the case of Didi, drawing on ethnographic and interview data, it is argued that migrant drivers’ high tolerance for platform precarity should be understood as an imposed position, for they are actually trapped in the platform by China's state-led, tech-driven economic restructuring project, through a new mode of migrant labour differentiation comprising three factors – changes in the labour market, hegemonic gender norms and the reformed hukou system. It thus enriches our understanding of worker precarity in the gig economy by highlighting the impact of migration and the state.

Worker solidarity is a recurring theme in the digital labour debate. While recent studies of the on-demand platforms contribute to highlighting digital affordances in fostering solidarity among gig workers, few have explored how this works in depth and offered a theoretically informed evaluation of this potential. This study of Didi drivers in China fills this gap by looking at how agential practices amplify or constrain the effects of digital communication. We contribute to constructing a mediated framework of affordances for association, for discourse and for mobilisation to examine the process of fostering worker solidarity. Increasingly under structural constraints of platform control and state surveillance on labour activism, this article discloses the theoretical puzzle of ‘solidarity in question’ by rooting the agential practices firmly in the analysis of workers’ gender, migratory status, work experience and critical media literacy, and how they intersect with the tactical appropriation of social media to create potential.