Minus 9 Degrees, Open-Air Sorting, and the Parcels Keep Coming

This is what courier delivery looks like in Beijing right now. Forget the coming Double 12 shopping festival — plenty of courier companies and their stations don't yet know how to keep their ordinary daily operations going.

The dozen-odd STO Express three-wheelers that used to be parked inside a warehouse every evening after work have spent the past week lined up along a narrow road between the Third and Fourth Ring Roads in Fengtai District.

Shortly before 7 a.m. on November 30th, in the thin early light, courier Liu pulled his vehicle from the row and drove south toward a bridge still under construction.

The afternoon before, around four or five o'clock, he had read a notice in the company's WeChat group: the morning's sorting would happen on the bridge. The bridge had been widened over the past two months; its southeastern side was still under construction, walled off with blue corrugated iron. At that hour, almost no one was about.

Liu was the first courier to reach the bridge. A mid-size box truck loaded with the day's entire batch of parcels was already waiting. It had been loaded at the Shunyi transit hub at midnight, then parked overnight along Shoujingmao South Road.

The three-meter truck bed took up the eastern stretch of the bridge. Three fire extinguishers stood propped against the cab as usual, waiting for the couriers.

The temperature was close to minus 9 degrees Celsius. Over the quarter-hour or so around seven o'clock, more than thirty couriers in hats, masks, and gloves rode up one by one on their three-wheelers and gathered around the truck.

With no warehouse conveyor belt or sorting racks, the parcels came straight off the truck onto the ground. The couriers sorted by hand, grabbing the packages for whoever's zone they belonged to and tossing them that way — large or small, boxes or thin envelopes alike.

"Compound 88." "Over here." "Electronic Technology Institute." "That side." Someone started singing a line from Walk All Over the Land.

One courier, worried about throws going too wide, warned the man next to him: "Don't throw so far — it'll go off the bridge and you'll have to climb down for it." "Who's going to throw it off the bridge? Anyone who does is an idiot." The little river below had run dry, with only a few plastic bags and scraps of paper that lifted now and then in the wind.

"Thank goodness the weather's been clear these past few days," said one supervisor on the scene. "Rain or snow would be a disaster."

By around 8:30 a.m. the sorting was done. Each courier scanned the parcels with a handheld scanner, loaded them onto a three-wheeler, and set off on their rounds.

One courier still wasn't sure everything had stayed on the bridge. He stood on his toes at the railing to confirm nothing had fallen before walking back to his pile.

Since the STO sorting station near Huaxiang in Fengtai District was sealed on November 27th, the couriers have been sorting in the open every morning. The first two days they used a wider spot on the east side of the road across the way, but urban management officers chased them off almost at once. "It's like guerrilla warfare," Liu said.

A parcel entering Beijing passes through three layers of transit — two of them are now hit by the evictions

Normally, a parcel entering Beijing and reaching your door passes through at least three handoffs: first by air to a distribution hub, then by truck to a district-level branch for sorting, and finally to a neighborhood station, where couriers deliver by electric three-wheeler or customers collect in person.

Different companies use different names for these layers. YTO, for instance, routes from its "Beijing Transit Center" to its "Shunyi District Hedong Company" and then to its "Shunyi District Beixiaoying Town Company."

The STO station described at the start of this piece is a neighborhood station. On a normal day, two waves of parcels arrive there for sorting. Couriers used to reach the warehouse between 7 and 8 a.m. to sort the morning batch, then head out to their assigned zones. At 2:30 p.m. they would come back for a second sort, and by 6 p.m. they returned to hand in the day's outgoing parcels and park their three-wheelers.

Lately, that daily rhythm has fallen apart.

On November 20th, the Beijing Municipal Work Safety Commission issued a rectification order, launching a 40-day campaign to inspect, clear, and remediate safety hazards. Logistics warehouses, corrugated-steel buildings, street-front restaurants, shops, rental apartments, and rental compounds were all named as priority targets. Non-compliant logistics warehouses, corrugated-steel buildings, and factories would be shut down and evicted.

The truck delivering parcels to the couriers is a stand-in for a shuttered STO sorting station. On November 22nd, that warehouse received a notice saying its courier branch had "too many people and vehicles, chaotic management, and serious safety hazards," and must vacate by December 1st. On November 27th, the power was cut and the doors were sealed with official tape.

Similar things have happened at the stations and warehouses of other courier companies, for all sorts of stated reasons.

The entire 468 Logistics Park in Changping District, for example, got an eviction notice on November 24th and had its power cut on November 27th. The reasons given: the land was collective-use, zoned non-residential, and many warehouses in the park were built of corrugated steel — an insulating foam-core panel that is energy-efficient but prone to fire — which counts as illegal construction.

A YTO third-tier station in Banbiandian Village, Liqiao Town, Shunyi District, was sealed on November 18th for eighteen safety violations, including the lack of a fire safety permit and the presence of "three-in-one" or "multi-in-one" premises — meaning office, sleeping, and cooking areas all under one roof.

Each closure comes with a stated reason — yet all these buildings have stood for years, and the window to clear out is just one or two weeks. The STO warehouse had been running for seven years. 468 Logistics Park has had logistics tenants since 2008; all of them were suddenly told to clear out within a week.

Talk of clearing logistics out of the city goes back to 2015 — but the rationale and the pace are different now

In February 2015, the policy of "relieving Beijing of non-capital functions" was announced, and before long logistics became one of the sectors marked for relocation. Beijing's largest book logistics center, the Southwest Logistics Center, began relocating in 2015 and was slated for complete demolition by the end of June 2018. The reason given at the time was that it could no longer "adapt to the area's industrial development."

This year the pace of logistics relocation picked up. In March, the largest building-materials logistics and warehousing base in southern Beijing was cleared; a local official called it a "low-end industry."

A logistics park on Luqiu Road in Huangcun, Daxing District, received its eviction notice on July 20th, on the grounds of "improving the residential environment for villagers and promoting industrial upgrading."

Also in mid-July, several logistics parks in Daxing District — the Huanyu Meihe Logistics Park, Dayun Logistics Park, Wankai Logistics Park, and others — all received eviction notices.

After the Daxing fire that killed 19 people on November 18th, the government sped up the clearance of logistics yet again.

That logistics park had been ordered to relocate in 2016. The area had once housed 97 logistics enterprises on more than 5,000 mu of land, with over ten thousand trucks passing through each day; the original plan called for the move to be finished by 2018.

By November 29th, the site had been completely emptied. On both sides of Luqiu Road, the logistics parks, steel markets, supermarkets, and restaurants had all moved out, leaving a desolate stretch.

Zhongxing Guoji Electromechanical Co., which deals in construction materials, hardware, and metal goods, had not yet moved out but had posted a closure notice at its gate, citing relocation due to demolition and dated November 23rd. Across the road, Yujun Storage had been under demolition for two weeks and was now a jumble of rubble, a sign at the entrance reading: "Demolition site — no entry."

A little farther south, at the Beijing Jingkai Fangsheng Hardware and Building Materials Mall, workers were still tearing structures down. They told QDaily the area had been clearing out since around the 20th. "If you don't leave, tomorrow — November 30th — they'll level it."

A logistics park in Houshayu Town, Shunyi District, next to the airport, had stood for more than a decade. It was demolished in a single day. According to a November 20th report in the Beijing Evening News, the area had housed 91 warehousing and logistics enterprises. "Three excavators, three water trucks, and two forklifts were used to forcibly demolish 13,200 square meters of illegally built warehouse space... from morning to night, it took exactly twelve hours to tear down the whole complex."

Logistics parks are the usual home base for courier companies' district-level branch warehouses (second-tier stations). Among the 274 enterprises sealed in Tianzhu Town, Shunyi District, were JD Logistics, Zhongchu Logistics, China Railway Express, and Deppon Logistics.

After warehouses and neighborhood stations were evicted en masse, several courier companies began on November 20th to post customer notices warning of delivery delays, and to limit inbound parcel volumes, cap weights, and raise prices for shipments bound for Beijing.

Yunda stopped collecting same-city parcels from some of its sorting hubs, with no firm date for resuming. YTO, STO, and ZTO all imposed a 5-kilogram weight cap. Best Express added a 1.5-yuan surcharge per parcel. JD.com, which had promised next-morning delivery, stretched its delivery window to a full day to keep disruptions in its logistics network from breaking that promise.

Once some sorting hubs and delivery stations were shut, parcels were rerouted to nearby hubs and stations that could still run normally. But in far more cases, sorting simply moved to the roadside.

QDaily found makeshift sorting hubs and temporary delivery stations for STO, YTO, and Guotong near the shuttered 468 Logistics Park. One company moved its entire sorting operation under an overpass, paying about 2,000 yuan in rent for room to house its security scanner, conveyor belt, sorting racks, and three-wheelers.

Several couriers have suspended same-city delivery — and some parcels are sealed inside warehouses

On November 30th, Mr. Zhang, who lives near Beijing Aviation and Tourism College, asked a Yunda courier why the Cainiao collection point 500 meters away — which handles ZTO, Tiantian Express, YTO, and others — still hadn't reopened. His parcel had been sitting there for four or five days. He couldn't pick it up himself, either; when he called the number posted on the door, he was told the point could only receive incoming parcels.

The Yunda station manager gave an awkward laugh. "We're not allowed to open now — when the inspectors come, I just shut the door and run."

Several Taobao shoppers QDaily spoke to said packages sent to Beijing had been delayed by weeks. The delays began about a week after the fire. On November 25th, a resident of Anhui Province trying to send a parcel to Beijing was told by both STO and YTO that deliveries to Beijing had been suspended for now.

By December 1st, some of the sealed courier stations were allowed to retrieve their impounded goods. That day, QDaily watched a neighborhood station in Liqiao Town, Shunyi District, roll up its shutter. Staff inside were hand-labeling, with marker pens, the backlog of parcels that had built up over the past ten days, getting ready to carry them to a patch of wasteland across from a nearby post office. Several neighboring courier companies had all converged on that spot as a shared temporary station, texting customers to ask them to collect their parcels — because the nearby apartments had also been cleared, and many couriers had already left.

There was pressure from headquarters, too. If parcels pile up at a station without being sent out promptly, the parent company fines it. STO, for instance, charges 50 yuan per parcel per day for parcels that reach a station but aren't delivered on time. A station manager told QDaily that given the exceptional circumstances, the fines might be eased somewhat — but headquarters hadn't said by how much.

Couriers are struggling with housing and with nowhere to charge their electric vehicles

Liu's station had been running for seven years. The station manager became an STO franchisee in 2011. She now has more than thirty couriers, most of whom live in the warehouse compound. She rents eight single-room cottages, each sleeping four.

For now, no notice has gone out to clear the couriers out of the cottages — but many similar buildings elsewhere in Beijing have already been demolished. Courier turnover is high to begin with. She worries that if the cottages are next, she'll have no way to hold on to her staff. If the cottages are cleared, she would have to pay each courier a 300–500 yuan monthly housing allowance.

After the warehouse was sealed, she rented a small room in Fangshan District, an hour's drive away, just to charge the batteries for the electric three-wheelers. The charged batteries are then carried back each day.

Another station worker told us that everyone is willing to put up with the hardship for now — Chinese New Year is only two months off, and they can go home. He reckoned that if this were July or August, most people would already have quit, especially the younger ones born in the 1990s.

Open-air sorting goes on, but parcel volume at this station has dropped to around 2,000 a day. The manager said the station handled more than 6,000 parcels a day before the warehouse was sealed, and double that during the Double 11 shopping festival. A franchised station earns just over one yuan per parcel delivered, so the drop in volume hits their income directly.

By December 4th, with makeshift open-air sorting hubs and mobile neighborhood stations up and running, parcels sent to Beijing from elsewhere via the Tongda couriers — ZTO, YTO, STO, and Yunda — had largely resumed. Couriers at ZTO, YTO, and Tiantian Express told QDaily that same-city delivery had not yet come back; Best Express could not guarantee delivery to every district.

It's only getting colder.

Cover and body photographs shot and produced by the author / Feng Xiuxia