“Debt-Repaying Rider” Forced Offline 240 Times: “Initially, I Resented Overwork Reminders, They Affected My Earnings”
Recently, the topic of a delivery rider allegedly staging photos to claim he repaid 400,000 yuan in debt over two years has sparked heated discussion on multiple platforms. The rider, Wan Denghui, 37, from Xiantao, Hubei Province, previously ran a hot pot restaurant, earning 500,000-600,000 yuan a year, but the business collapsed after a few years due to overexpansion and other reasons, leaving him with millions in debt. Wan Denghui says, “Apart from delivering food, I can’t find a job that pays around 30,000 yuan a month.”
“Working 365 days in 2024 without rest, 14 to 16 hours a day, with a total income of 223,000 yuan,” Wan Denghui clarified that the 14 to 16 hours refers to the time spent “leaving early and returning late,” and the actual time spent taking orders (running deliveries) does not exceed 12 hours, because the platform has a fatigue prevention mechanism, and deliveries can only be run for a maximum of 12 hours.
A relevant person in charge of Meituan rider protection stated that they immediately verified with the relevant station and confirmed that the rider is a Meituan rider, registered on April 9, 2024, with 714 days of recorded deliveries, completing a total of 47,393 orders, and earning 447,002 yuan (including order income and platform subsidies). The rider’s self-reported delivery data is consistent with the records in the background system. At the same time, since the launch of Meituan’s fatigue prevention mechanism in major cities nationwide in December 2024, Wan Denghui has been forcibly taken offline 240 times.
The above-mentioned person in charge stated that over the past year, the proportion of riders who continuously run deliveries and triggered the “fatigue prevention” mechanism for forced offline is 0.54%, and 99.46% of riders did not trigger the “12-hour” threshold.
▲ Rider Wan Denghui at work.
Forcibly Taken Offline 240 Times Due to Fatigue Prevention
On his personal video account “Xiao Wan Hen Nuli” (Little Wan Works Hard), Wan Denghui introduces himself as—"a person working hard to clear debt.” From his video account, it can be seen that he regularly shares delivery data and his feelings.
Wan Denghui describes his day as follows: “I get up at 6 a.m. and run deliveries until 9 a.m. before going to eat breakfast. I start taking orders at 10 a.m., take a short break after the lunch peak, and work during the evening peak until around 10 p.m.” This is also his clarification of “running deliveries for 14-16 hours a day”—it calculates the time from leaving in the morning to returning in the evening. “I insist on working all year round without taking a day off, hoping to repay my debts as soon as possible through my own efforts. I have already repaid about 400,000 yuan in the past two years.”
According to the station manager of Wan Denghui’s station, Wan Denghui is one of the few riders at the station who insists on running deliveries for extremely long hours. Due to debt pressure, he often “disregards advice” and insists on high-intensity deliveries. “Every time I see him, I advise him to rest for a few days. He can rest at the station or relay station, but he often insists on running deliveries.”
Wan Denghui emphasized, “Many people say I don’t rest, but in fact, the platform has a fatigue prevention mechanism, and deliveries can only be run for a maximum of 12 hours.” “Every order I run, every piece of data I post, can be tracked by the platform’s background system.” This is consistent with the data provided by Meituan: since the official launch of Meituan rider’s “fatigue prevention” mechanism in major cities nationwide on December 30, 2024, Wan Denghui has cumulatively triggered 240 forced offline events, with an average daily order duration of 11 hours. The mechanism’s rules are: a rest reminder is triggered after 8 hours of deliveries, and a forced offline occurs after 12 hours.
▲ Rider Wan Denghui shows the interface for fatigue rest reminders.
Regarding the forced offline events, Wan Denghui admitted that he was initially resistant: “At first, I resented it because it affected my earnings.” But he also acknowledged that during the forced offline periods, “no one could disturb me, I just ate and rested.”
Riders like Wan Denghui who are unwilling to proactively choose to rest are not an isolated case. Zhang Dandan, Vice Dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, has “lurked” in multiple rider WeChat groups and observed a similar phenomenon: when the rider captain said in the group that “there are a few rest slots available tomorrow, those who want to take a vacation can sign up,” very few riders proactively signed up.
This is also the original intention of establishing the “fatigue prevention” mechanism. According to a relevant person in charge of Meituan’s rights protection, this mechanism was piloted in Sichuan and Guangxi provinces in the first half of 2024, and after multiple iterations, it was officially implemented in major cities nationwide on December 30, 2024. Over the past year, the average daily delivery duration for riders running deliveries normally nationwide has been 5 to 6 hours, and the proportion of riders who triggered forced offline due to excessively long delivery hours is 0.54%, with 99.46% of riders unaffected. In addition, in recent years, Meituan has held nearly 400 rider symposiums, collected suggestions from more than 5,000 riders, and established an algorithm advisory committee composed of external experts to provide external supervision for the continuous optimization of the “fatigue prevention” mechanism.
Balancing the Safety Bottom Line with Autonomous Choice
According to the “Understanding and Bridging: 2025 Rider Occupational Work Reality and Public Cognition Survey Report” (hereinafter referred to as the “Report”) released by the research team of the School of Economics at Zhejiang University in December 2025, nearly 70% of delivery riders have a daily order duration concentrated between 6 and 9 hours, and only 20% of riders have an order duration exceeding 9 hours. The “Report” points out that riders being “online” does not mean they are continuously working, and about 30% of their online time is spent waiting for orders and resting.
The “Report” also shows that 60% of riders believe that flexible working hours are the most attractive factor, and one-third of riders enter the profession to earn money quickly, with debt, buying a house, and supporting the elderly being important drivers.
As the chief writer of the “Report,” Yuan Zhe, a researcher at the School of Economics at Zhejiang University, believes that riders extending their working hours often reflects the reality of economic pressure. Therefore, when the platform improves the “fatigue prevention” mechanism, it needs to balance labor protection and the right to autonomous choice. He suggests that the platform can explore building a more scientific, dynamic, and refined fatigue management mechanism, comprehensively considering the rider’s continuous working intensity, actual workload, and rest and recovery status, while effectively protecting the health rights of workers, fully respecting their autonomous labor arrangements, and promoting the transformation of platform governance from crude restriction to precise protection, achieving a higher level of balance between safety protection and employment flexibility.
Regarding rider fatigue management, Qiu Zeqi, a professor in the Department of Sociology at Peking University, believes that the prerequisite for fatigue management is to clarify the causes, and different causes and classifications should correspond to different strategies. How many hours a rider works a day is essentially an autonomous choice by the worker. Wang Tianyu, a researcher at the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, also pointed out that a prominent feature of new forms of employment is the significant autonomy of workers in the labor process. The key to addressing the problem of overwork is to build a bottom-line guarantee system adapted to the characteristics of flexible employment, rather than simply applying the thinking of traditional working hour management. The exploration of the “fatigue prevention” mechanism by delivery platforms is consistent with the guiding direction of “supporting and regulating the development of new forms of employment” in the current policy framework, providing a practical sample for filling the gaps in traditional labor law protection with institutional innovation.
Maintaining the safety bottom line while respecting workers’ autonomous choices is the core principle of labor protection in new forms of employment. From the exploration of platform companies represented by Meituan, the design of the “fatigue prevention” mechanism based on data, with gradient reminders as the main approach and forced offline as the bottom line, reflects the transformation of the platform from crude control to precise service, and is also a positive signal of the maturity of algorithmic governance.