For 40 yuan ($6) an hour, Huang Mingyu hired a 25-year-old to roam the streets of a small city in eastern China, asking strangers if they’d seen her missing bird.

The bird — a green peach-faced lovebird she’d hand-fed for weeks — escaped in April, during a holiday trip to Jingdezhen, known as China’s “Porcelain Capital.” A blurry security video offered the only clue: an elderly man walking down a street, bird in hand.

And when social media posts, tips from strangers, and even online psychics failed, Huang, out of options, found Liu Jiabao on Xianyu — a secondhand app now full of odd jobs — willing to take the task.

For the next four days, Liu, a recent graduate, combed the area with a screenshot from the video, showing it to shopkeepers, asking around, checking with local police. At a hardware store, someone finally recognized the man, and said he walked by often.

Midway through the conversation, the man from the video walked past the shop. Liu stopped him, explained everything — and he confirmed he’d found the bird and was happy to return it.

“The whole thing was surreal,” Huang tells Sixth Tone. She paid Liu 300 yuan, including a tip, and gave 500 to the elderly man who’d picked up the bird. “If I hadn’t gotten it back, I think I’d have had a shadow over that place — even just seeing the building from there in my friends’ posts would’ve given me PTSD.”

Liu echoed the feeling. “I agreed to help her find the bird, first because I’d seen her post on Douyin, and second, because it was a source of income,” he tells Sixth Tone. “I was really surprised when I succeeded. After checking all that footage, asking around — suddenly finding it brought a real sense of joy.”

Liu usually delivers food and runs errands — anything from picking up parcels to queuing for limited-edition drops. “As long as it’s something we can do and it’s not illegal,” he says, “we’ll do our best.”

On Xianyu, Liu is now one of millions of young Chinese offering odd-job services — part of an improvised, fast-moving economy that has turned China’s largest secondhand app into something far stranger.

Launched by Alibaba in 2012 as “Taobao Secondhand” and rebranded as “Xianyu” or “Idle Fish” in 2014, the platform was originally built for casual peer-to-peer resale: old textbooks, worn-out kitchen appliances, clearance clothes. But as it scaled, users veered off-script, offering scalped concert tickets, access to members-only stores and VIP lounges, even fake documents for refund scams — all with little buyer protection.

With regulators eventually taking notice, Xianyu began introducing service fees and stricter rules to rein in commercial sellers. But the platform’s open design still rewards improvisation. 

Now, with over 600 million users, it functions as an informal job board. Listings include résumé help, gaming rentals, gym bookings, and in Huang’s case, pet care services. Some users even offer to cancel stubborn phone plans, which in practice, often means arguing with telecom staff on your behalf.

Users list services under mislabeled categories, set their own prices, and negotiate in private chat, relying entirely on trust. For many young people, it’s a way to earn a little extra, cut a few corners, or get things done cheaply — all just regulated enough to function.

Help, for hire

Like Cao, 28, a recent graduate in Beijing, who needed access to a few paywalled books on messaging app WeChat’s reading platform but didn’t want to pay full price for a monthly membership. 

On Xianyu, she found a listing offering a one-month account for 9.9 yuan, slightly cheaper than the official 15. After she paid, the seller told her the account would be activated in a few days. Confused by the delay, Cao later realized the membership was tied to a reading challenge: users had to log 30 consecutive days before the platform unlocked access.

“He was reading Zizhi Tongjian — hundreds of pages a day,” she laughs, referring to a historical chronicle spanning more than a thousand years of Chinese dynasties. “Six to 10 hours every day.”

Cao admits she’s never had that kind of discipline. “He deserved the money. People who can stick with things like this will always succeed,” she says. “And he might only earn 4 yuan in profit, maybe it motivates him to read too.”

For a brief while, Cao sold on Xianyu, too. She flipped leftover ClassPass credits, booking fitness classes for others and charging slightly below market rate. Bulk purchases lowered her per-point cost, and new users got a deal. But as gyms began requiring check-ins within a set radius, the margins vanished, and she stopped.

Huang tried selling on the platform as well, running a side business making handmade stress toys called nie nie. She started in March last year after seeing the trend take off online, eventually selling about 100 pieces. But with rising competition, safety concerns over the materials, and looming postgraduate exams, she shut it down.

According to Xianyu’s 2024 report, 9.5 million users took on side hustles through the platform that year. Of these, more than 40% were born after 2000, and 25% after 1995. The average income across all users was 3,660 yuan.

Xianyu’s design helps make that possible. It facilitates direct, peer-to-peer exchanges and encourages users to monetize not just goods, but time and skills. However, unlike traditional e-commerce platforms, it also offers access to individual resources with minimal oversight. 

Mao Yufei, a labor economics professor at Capital University of Economics and Business, in Beijing, sees the rise of gig work on Xianyu as more than a financial shift. “It’s actually a kind of community culture,” he says. “Many young people aren’t fully satisfied with their main jobs, so they take on side work, often just to do something they genuinely enjoy.”

“It makes full use of idle resources,” Mao adds. “And where there’s supply and demand, it naturally brings convenience to people.”

Still, he warns that openness comes with risk. Services like pet-sitting, for instance, are nearly impossible to supervise without built-in safeguards. “Purely peer-to-peer exchanges are hard to regulate,” he says. “If something goes wrong, there’s no reliable way to trace responsibility.”

While payments are routed through Alibaba-owned Alipay, one of China’s leading digital payment gateways, and sellers carry buyer ratings, protections remain basic. When contacted by Sixth Tone, an Alibaba spokesperson said: “Taking all factors into consideration, we are not in a position to comment on regulatory-related topics at the moment.”

The platform taps into what Chen Bing, deputy dean of the School of Law at Nankai University, calls a broader shift among young Chinese toward thriftier, more selective spending habits. 

“Platforms like Xianyu invest far less in content vetting, staffing, or infrastructure compared to formal marketplaces like JD.com or Meituan,” Chen says. “To boost traffic, some may even tolerate — or actively encourage — sensational listings.”

Through the gaps

That looseness is part of the appeal. 

To attract younger users, Xianyu blurs commerce with community. It promotes trending topics, runs late-night livestream “night markets,” and offers perks for users who post purchases on social media. Its ads now feature coupon trading, discounted travel bookings, and employee-only deals — low-cost, limited-access offers aimed at budget-conscious buyers.

On microblogging site Weibo and the lifestyle app Xiaohongshu, known globally as RedNote, the hashtag “Xianyu is too comprehensive” has drawn millions of views. Users share everything from resold flight perks to alleged scams involving fake death certificates or backstage passes.

One viral story shared online involves a mop, a fake uniform, and a Jay Chou concert.

In 2017, Zhou, then a recent graduate with little savings, paid 300 yuan through Xianyu for “insider access” to a sold-out show. 

At the venue gate, however, she was handed a cleaner’s badge and waved through a staff-only entrance. No one questioned her. Another buyer showed up in a fake security guard’s uniform. Zhou got a mop and rag. 

When she asked the seller if she’d have a seat, she was told, “You paid 300 yuan — what kind of seat are you expecting?”

She and the other buyer drifted around the outer ring of the venue, unsure what to do. “I just wandered with the cleaning tools,” 33-year-old Zhou recalls, giving only her surname for privacy. “No one stopped me. Everyone was busy watching Jay Chou.”

That blurry line between scam, shortcut, and workaround is a hallmark of Xianyu’s gray economy. Many listings for concert access appear under vague labels like “ticket agent” or “on-demand purchasing.” Few explain how the access works. 

Another student, surnamed Xin, bought access to a music festival through Xianyu in 2018. When he showed up, he was handed a box of bottled water — his improvised disguise for entry. “You never know what kind of tricks scalpers on Xianyu have up their sleeves,” he tells Sixth Tone.

Chen, from Nankai University’s Law School, says some risk is inevitable in peer-to-peer trade, but platforms like Xianyu exist in what he calls “off-market” spaces. “The rules are vague — sometimes nonexistent.”

In response to growing scrutiny, Xianyu has begun tightening rules. Since mid-2023, the platform has rolled out new service fees and compliance rules targeting high-volume sellers — those processing more than 10,000 yuan and 10 orders a month are now charged a 1% fee on the excess. 

Users flagged as “commercial” are also required to offer seven-day unconditional returns, in line with national e-commerce laws. The company has introduced “mini court” mechanisms for user-led dispute mediation, and reportedly carried out widespread account bans in recent months.

Still, Chen believes the core tension remains. Balancing user growth with regulatory oversight is now one of the platform’s central challenges. He warns that such exchanges must not infringe on legal rights or disrupt market order.

“If we try to eliminate these exchanges entirely, they’ll just resurface in more fragmented or riskier forms,” he says. “In the past, regulation followed growth. Now, it needs to keep pace with it.”

Yang, a university student who works part time for music festivals, has seen just how far some buyers and sellers will go. At smaller venues, he says, it’s not unusual for people to sneak in through holes cut in fences.

“It’s especially common at local festivals where access control is weak,” he says, asking that only his surname be used.

After working more than 50 shows, manning entry gates, artist services, and operations, he’s learned to spot fakes quickly. “If someone shows up in police jackets but it’s two girls in full makeup — it’s pretty obvious. We either escort them out or call the police.”

Still, he says, that window is closing. “At most big festivals now, even staff need full-name registration and facial scans. Security’s everywhere. It’s much harder to sneak in.”

Additional reporting: Wu Yufei; editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Visuals from VCG and Google Play, reedited by Sixth Tone)