The 25th China Internet Conference was held at the China National Convention Center in Beijing from July 8 to 10. Photo: IC PHOTO

Certain groups of young people in contemporary China differ markedly from others in their career preferences and strategies. Many seek positions in the state sector for the security and stability they offer. At the same time, the rapid rise of the internet industry—a core engine of the digital economy—has drawn tens of millions of young knowledge workers into a fast-changing, highly uncertain sector. As expectations of long-term employment have eroded, a career strategy and work orientation centered on “seeking development through mobility” has taken their place.

This study draws on fieldwork at a medium-sized, publicly listed internet company founded more than a decade ago and long established as a leader in its niche market. Combining participant observation with in-depth interviews, it examines two related questions. At the structural level, how do firms turn opportunities for mobility in the external labor market into mechanisms of labor control that drive greater work effort? At the individual level, what forms of self-understanding and orientation lead young knowledge workers to internalize mobility as a career-development strategy?

Transformation of employment relations, career strategies

Classical labor process theory examines how capital converts workers’ potential labor power into actual labor that produces surplus value through mechanisms of labor control. American Marxist theorist Harry Braverman argued that firms exercise control through deskilling, while American sociologist Michael Burawoy showed how seniority-based promotion systems shaped workers who expected to remain with one organization throughout their careers. With globalization and technological change, however, stable employment relations have weakened, and various forms of precarious work have become increasingly common.

This shift in employment relations is closely associated with the expansion of knowledge-intensive work. Unlike traditional manual labor, knowledge work is highly complex and difficult to observe. Because knowledge and skills cannot easily be separated from workers or standardized, the forms of control associated with Taylorism and Fordism—based on breaking tasks down into standardized operations—have become less effective.

Under the traditional career development model, workers derived occupational security from an organization’s promise of long-term employment and defined their professional identities largely through organizational membership. Today, young knowledge workers in China’s internet industry increasingly view mobility as a positive career strategy and a means of enhancing their employability. Rather than remain loyal to a single employer, they pursue advancement by leveraging one platform to move to the next.

This shift implies that occupational identity is no longer anchored in a particular organization, but instead rests on transferable professional capabilities and an industry-wide reputation. It also calls for a reassessment of conventional theories of labor control. This study proposes the concept of the “mobile self” to describe the distinctive self-understanding and orientation that young knowledge workers develop in a highly mobile labor market. Specifically, these workers see themselves as units of human capital whose value must be continually cultivated and increased. They assess that value against the broader industry labor market rather than a single employer, deriving career security not from an organization’s long-term protection but from their own employability in the external market.

High labor mobility in internet industry

To understand mobility-based labor control, it is first necessary to examine the industry conditions that make it possible. As globalization deepens and technological change accelerates, capital increasingly responds to uncertainty by continually reorganizing production on the basis of market information collected, analyzed, and transmitted during the circulation process. This changing mode of accumulation requires a new approach to labor allocation: Firms must be able to recruit, deploy, and release workers quickly rather than remain bound by long-term employment commitments.

The internet industry is a prime setting for this flexible allocation of labor. Its high level of labor mobility stems first from the opportunities continually created by the diversity of firms and their differentiated development trajectories. It is also sustained by institutional arrangements jointly built by internet companies and labor market intermediaries, including the standardization and transferability of skills, industry-wide job-grade benchmarks, transparent information networks, and an industry discourse that presents mobility as legitimate and desirable.

Together, these mechanisms shape the internet industry’s labor market. As transferable skills replace firm-specific skills, the boundaries of internal labor markets no longer align neatly with organizational boundaries. Job grades, project experience, and professional competencies acquired within one firm therefore carry value beyond that organization and can be exchanged in the external labor market for higher pay, a more senior position, or a larger platform for career development. Although this logic operates across the industry, outcomes vary by direction: moving from a large firm to a smaller one often brings a pay or rank premium, while moving from a smaller firm to a large one generally involves much higher entry barriers.

Labor control through mobility

Industry structure explains both why high mobility is possible and how the external labor market can become a resource for managerial control. But if workers expect to leave their current employer in the near future to advance their careers elsewhere, how do firms ensure that they continue to invest heavily in their present work?

Faced with capital volatility, competitive pressure, and rapid technological change, firms translate these external uncertainties into continual internal adjustment. In practice, organizational restructuring, internal transfers, promotion systems, and workforce optimization normalize change, replacing long-term security based on seniority with continuous selection based on job fit. Frequent restructuring becomes a mechanism of dynamic screening; institutionalized internal mobility and continual personnel changes make movement an ordinary part of organizational life; promotion systems become sharply hierarchical; and workforce optimization most directly breaks down expectations of job stability, leading workers to see mobility as a normal condition of employment.

The normalization of dynamic adjustment cultivates workers’ expectations of mobility without weakening their commitment to current work. On the contrary, firms successfully use short-term incentives, project-based management, inverted salary structures, stock options, and non-compete agreements to turn anticipated mobility into motivation for intensive work. As a result, high mobility and high labor input become mutually reinforcing, representing the optimal strategy for workers within the contemporary industry structure.

Short-term incentives sustain effort by offering visible immediate goals. Project-based management ties effort to measurable results, while compensation systems leverage both internal and external pay differentials to motivate continued high performance. In essence, mobility-based labor control allows the rewards of intensive work to be realized either internally, through immediate organizational benefits, or externally, through future opportunities in the labor market. Because the value generated by strong performance can be “cashed out” in either setting, intensive work remains the rational choice regardless of whether a worker plans to stay or leave. Mobility therefore does not weaken labor control; it becomes a means by which firms continually compel workers to demonstrate and enhance their market value.

Formation of ‘mobile self’

The effectiveness of mobility-based labor control depends not only on organizational mechanisms but also on a shift in how workers understand themselves. Such control becomes fully operational only when workers stop treating mobility as a passive threat and actively internalize it as a strategy for career advancement.

Within the internet industry, changing occupational identities have fundamentally reshaped how workers understand both work and mobility. Mobility is increasingly seen as a positive means of career development, grounded in a new conception of how personal value is created and accumulated. Together, these changing ideas about careers, work, and mobility produce a new form of selfhood—the “mobile self.” Workers come to see themselves as market actors whose value must be continually increased through movement across organizations, making “seeking development through mobility” their primary strategy for occupational survival.

The mobile self, however, is not simply a matter of individual choice—it emerges through the operation of structural forces. Industry-wide technical standards, job classification systems, evaluation mechanisms, and occupational culture provide the structural foundations for its formation, while firms continually reinforce expectations of mobility through dynamic organizational adjustment and mechanisms that link anticipated mobility with intensive work. The mobile self thus represents both an active adaptation to market conditions and a product of industry structure and organizational control.

Once established, the mobile self gives rise to the everyday practice of “working for the next move.” In a highly mobile industry, workers invest heavily in their current jobs not only to perform well but also to secure future opportunities and preserve their ability to move. Sustaining the mobile self requires repeated confirmation that external opportunities remain available, often through actual experiences of job mobility. Workers must remain constantly prepared to seize new opportunities. Even when they have no immediate plans to change jobs, they continue “working for the next move” by maintaining their competitiveness and employability.

This state of perpetual readiness is not activated only when a job change is imminent. The daily work of knowledge workers in the internet industry already requires them to keep pace with rapid technological and organizational change, while high levels of internal mobility further compel them to maintain their capacity to move through everyday work. The maintenance of the mobile self therefore extends beyond the workplace into daily life. Many workers voluntarily spend their leisure time improving their professional skills in order to remain employable, while industry discourse and peer pressure further reinforce and internalize the logic of mobility.

This study explains the seemingly paradoxical coexistence of high labor mobility and high labor input among young knowledge workers in China’s internet industry. Future research could further investigate how the specific characteristics of different industries reshape mechanisms of labor control, or examine, from a social policy perspective, the tensions between existing social welfare institutions and increasingly mobile forms of employment. Because eligibility for social insurance, home-purchase qualifications, and other protections often depends on continuous employment records, highly mobile workers may face significant periods of insecurity between jobs.

Li Yi and Zhao Wei (professor) are from Beijing Normal University. This article has been edited and excerpted from Youth Studies, Issue 2, 2026.