Meituan has publicly pushed back against a viral short video in which its subject claimed to be a recent graduate of Peking University working as a food-delivery rider. The company’s official account says it verified the rider’s platform record with a Haidian district site and found a single registration in early December 2025 and only five deliveries logged on December 9, with no subsequent activity.
The statement reiterated a structural point about Meituan’s onboarding: riders can register without submitting academic diplomas, so the platform has no independent record of users’ education and cannot validate personal claims posted on social media. Meituan also recalled a similar episode last year involving a man who said he had graduated from Tsinghua University; internal checks then found his delivery history fell far short of his public assertions.
The row sits at the intersection of two highly charged topics in China: the prestige attached to elite university degrees and the visibility of gig-economy work. Clips that pair a top-tier diploma with service-sector jobs draw intense attention because they seem to invert expected social mobility narratives. Creators can rapidly monetize that attention, and platforms face reputational fallout whether claims are true or not.
The episode comes against the backdrop of a vast and fast-changing flexible labour market. Chinese analysts expect the flexible-employment market to reach trillions of yuan by 2025, with more than 320 million people in flexible roles and over 43 million combined delivery riders and ride-hailing drivers. Meituan’s own annual report for 2024–25 shows millions of active riders on the platform each month and a growing share of younger couriers, while average incomes for high-frequency riders stretch into the mid-to-high thousands of yuan per month.
At the same time, Meituan is under commercial strain. The group signalled an expected operating loss for 2025, driven in part by intensifying competition in the food-delivery market and strategic increases in ecosystem spending. That financial pressure makes the company sensitive to stories that might shape consumer perceptions of its service and its workforce.
Beyond corporate calculation, the incident raises broader questions about how Chinese society interprets credential signals. For many graduates, an elite degree no longer guarantees a clear career path or immediate financial security, particularly for students who leave university with limited internship or practical experience. Sensational anecdotes — whether authentic or staged — can obscure structural problems such as recruitment churn, mismatches between course content and labour-market needs, and the precarious economics of gig work.
Meituan’s call for “rational” public judgement and its reminder of the platform’s limited means to verify claimed credentials are modest policy moves. A longer-term response could include more transparent data on rider demographics and incomes, clearer rules for creators who exploit academic labels, and deeper public discussion about the changing meaning of university degrees in a crowded job market. Until then, episodic viral stories will continue to shape perceptions of China's gig economy more than the underlying statistics do.