The hundreds of millions who have built modern China from the ground up – sweeping its streets, labouring in its factories and ferrying its goods – are often overlooked. But they refuse to go unheard. Last week, a food delivery rider won China’s top literary award. Wang Jibing, 56, first caught attention when a poem about his experiences went viral in 2022. The following year, Hu Anyan’s memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, became a bestseller.
In the early 20th century, Chinese intellectuals sought to capture the harsh realities of working-class lives. But it was under Mao Zedong that the idea of writing by as well as about the masses became reality, with labourers encouraged to take up the pen. In an era when the party tried to govern the language even of diaries and personal letters, the parameters of style and content were strict, and this enthusiasm swiftly diminished after Mao. But workers’ writing has seen a revival in the 21st century. This time, it is bottom-up rather than directed from above.
Maoist literature was meant to educate and mobilise the masses. Heavy labour was portrayed as offering a kind of transcendence, with workers becoming almost superhuman in their efforts. Contrast that with the testimony of the poet Xiao Hai, whose memoir, Adrift in the South, was published in English in May. Forced by family poverty to work on assembly lines from the age of 15, he writes of his “bitterness and regret … when I realise I let the best decade of my life slip away from me on the factory floor”.
The individual scrabble to get by has replaced paeans to collective toil, and the sense of hope has given way to numbness or despair. The image of the screw once represented workers’ pride in their small contribution to a greater cause. But in the poetry of Xu Lizhi, a Foxconn worker who killed himself in 2014, it reflects their insignificance and replaceability.
These accounts of exploitation and dangers, of bodies and souls ground down, may seem unsparing. But the Communist party has little tolerance for work that touches on topics such as the role of corrupt officials or collective organisation. Many grassroots writers post online, where their work can easily be deleted. The well‑known poet Zheng Xiaoqiong collected the stories of fellow labourers in Woman Worker, but it has never been issued in full because publishers demanded extensive changes.
The work of this new generation has drawn wider attention in the last few years. Fan Yusu’s essay on life as a migrant worker made her a literary sensation in 2017. In the pandemic, some began to notice the low-paid workers who were keeping the country running. A growing sense of precarity among the middle classes may have contributed. Labourers have been at the sharpest end of China’s breakneck development, but others share their concerns about the country’s path – and fear what happens if their status slips.
These narratives resonate with readers outside China too. They delineate the unsavoury underpinnings of the globalised economy and speak to the unease that many feel with it. I Deliver Parcels in Beijing has been sold to 16 countries; an English edition came out last year. In many places, there are still more books about workers than by them. Where is the English-language bestseller by an Amazon warehouse operative, or the viral poetry about care work on a zero-hours contract?
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