When British authorities passed laws targeting working-class pamphlets during the Industrial Revolution, they did so because they knew that words can be powerful. The poetry and writing of those who experience hardship can be galvanizing.
In China, the People’s Republic, a genre of literature known as “workers’ literature,” written by gig-economy and factory workers, is becoming increasingly popular. It’s also under increasing government scrutiny. Today my colleague Yan Zhuang writes about the fine line that Chinese worker-poets have to walk.
‘I am a Chinese worker’
By Yan Zhuang
In Seoul, where I live, it’s normal to place an online order on Korea’s equivalent of Amazon a little before midnight and have it arrive at your door before 7 a.m. It’s a striking example of the convenience made possible by the gig economy that so many of us rely on to keep our lives running smoothly.
But around the world, the human cost of this ultraconvenience is increasingly hard to ignore. To understand what it looks like in one country, I’ve recently turned to a growing body of books, essays and poems out of China, known as migrant workers’ literature.
These stories, written from factory floors and, in more recent years, from the front lines of the gig economy, tell of the harsh realities of a work force of over 400 million people who moved from the countryside to cities like Beijing to seek better lives. The stories have started to attract attention outside China, with English translations of books like Hu Anyan’s “I Deliver Parcels in Beijing” and Xiao Hai’s “Adrift in the South.”
For many readers, including me, the attraction is learning about the lives of workers whose presence is ubiquitous but whose voices are rarely heard. For some Chinese readers, that curiosity is also tinged with anxiety about their own futures. The country’s economy is stagnating, jobs are drying up, and the once-solid promise that hard work will lead to a better life feels increasingly uncertain.
The genre’s growing popularity has meant more recognition from China’s literary establishment. But that recognition has also come with more state control, from a government that has always seen literature as political, and that is wary of the power of workers’ grievances to illuminate class disparities.
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Masters of the country, once
Literature by the working class has a long history in China. Under Mao Zedong, the state held up workers and peasants as the masters of society and encouraged them to “speak bitterness,” or tell the stories of their past hardships in order to cultivate class consciousness and solidify allegiance to the Communist regime.
But the workers writing about their experiences today have a much lower standing in society than under Mao, who died in 1976. “Before the 1980s, the working class was proclaimed to be the master of the country,” said Xin Yang, a professor and expert in Chinese literature at Macalester College. “Today, however, workers have become an underclass under the new socioeconomic order.”
Some of this literature speaks of the hopelessness and despair of being consumed by the backbreaking demands of factory work — like Xu Lizhi, a 24-year-old Foxconn worker whose poetry was widely circulated after he leaped to his death in 2014. Others take a more hopeful tone, writing of how they maintain their humanity in the face of dehumanizing labor — such as Wang Jibing, the 56-year-old food delivery driver and poet, who in July won the Lu Xun Literary Prize, one of China’s most prestigious literary honors.
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A portrait of a man smiling while holding a book.
The poet Wang Jibing.Credit…Wang Xuzhong
Dignity, resilience — but no system critique
Wang’s prize signifies the highest institutional recognition for the genre yet, and his win has been celebrated widely in Chinese state media for embodying a shift in the literary landscape, in which publishing opportunities are not limited to the elite.
But experts I talked to also noted that Wang’s poems are the kind of politically benign worker narrative the government is keen to promote. Wang speaks of his desire to be known by his name instead of “that guy”; he describes the experience of always trying to squeeze an extra second out of every minute. His poems have a tone of dignity and resilience; they do not, however, focus on inequality, or criticize the system.
The workers’ literature movement grew organically over several decades through writers groups and was largely self-published in online spaces. The government’s move to bring it into the world of mainstream publishing will create more opportunities for writers, experts told me. But they expect those opportunities will mostly fall to the writers whose perspectives the government wants to highlight.
Still, the government’s moves to shape the genre are a testament to the resonance of these stories in an era of economic uncertainty. For some readers, the lives depicted in this literature could well represent their own futures if something goes wrong, said Ping Zhu, a professor of Chinese studies in the department of literature at the University of California, San Diego.
I’ll end here with a couple of lines of a poem by Xiao Hai that I like. It throws into relief the realities of some of the workers who powered China’s rise:
I am a Chinese worker
Lurking inside the desire of tall mansions in steel and concrete is our captive cut-price
Youth
The changes of the season are not ours
Food and vegetables don’t need our attention
All we can do is let the mystery of the words
Made in China
Fiercely flood every river leading to the four oceans and seven continents
— “Chinese Workers,” translated by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Read Yan’s full story here.
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