WCL 7-9: Chinese migrant worker poetry

Three-part podcast series on the migrant worker poetry scene in China, the precarious social conditions in which these poets live and, of course, the poetry they produce.

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Episodes

For these episodes, we spoke to Maghiel van Crevel, Professor of Chinese Language and Literature at Leiden University. Maghiel has travelled extensively in China meeting with and writing about the work of Chinese migrant worker poets. More information about Maghiel and his research is available here.

Part 1: Introduction to the concept of the ‘migrant worker’ in China, and how it relates to the internal hukou system and China’s relationship to global capitalism. We also discuss what we mean by ‘migrant worker/migrant worker poetry’ in relation to the Chinese words dagong and dagong shige. We also look at two migrant worker poets, Wu Xia and Zheng Xiaoqiong.

Part 2: The relationship of Chinese migrant worker poetry to the wider poetic tradition in China; the Migrant Worker Home Museum of Working Culture and Art; and two migrant worker poets: Xu Lizhi and Xiao Hai.

Part 3: Censorship and unofficial publications in China; the LGBTQ migrant worker poet, Mu Cao, and questions of who gets included under the label ‘working-class writing’ (and who doesn’t).
- Bonus: Maghiel discusses some of his experiences at migrant worker poetry events, the relationship of migrant worker poetry to other poetry scenes in China today, the music of the New Labour Art Troupe (whose music we use for these episodes), and the issue of translation – available exclusively for our Patreon supporters.

More information

Two excellent English-language anthologies of Chinese migrant worker poems that we drew on for this series:
- Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry – Qin Xiaoyu (ed.). Translated by Eleanor Goodman
- In the Roar of the Machine – Zheng Xiaoqiong. Translated by Eleanor Goodman

We would also recommend the following articles as further reading on the subject:
- ‘Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry’ by Maghiel van Crevel
- ‘Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene’ by Maghiel van Crevel
- ‘Farewell, Picun! On the Closing of China’s Museum of Working Culture and Art’ by Asian Labour Review
To learn more about the history and social conditions in China, check out some of the excellent books in our online store

Videos

Playlist of clips from the fantastic documentary, Iron Moon, featuring interviews with the poets.

You can also watch this excellent mini-documentary about the New Labour Art Troupe, whose music we use for these episodes.

Images

Zheng Xiaoqiong at Poetry International, 2019. Credit: Hielke Grootendorst.

Xu Lizhi, early 2010s. Unknown photographer.

Xiao Hai at the Migrant Workers’ Home library, 2017. Credit: Maghiel van Crevel.

Entrance to the Migrant Workers’ Home in Picun (outskirts of Beijing), 2017. Credit: Maghiel van Crevel.

Image of a worker striking a gong (that is, ‘making their voice heard’), here presented in the traditional Chinese art form of paper-cutting. The Migrant Workers’ Home uses this as a kind of logo, often accompanied by the slogan “Migrant Workers throughout the Land Are All One Family” (天下打工是一家).

Sources

ALR Editors. (2023) ‘Farewell, Picun! On the closing of China’s Museum of Workers’ Culture’, Asian Labour Review, 19 May. Available at: https://labourreview.org/farewell-picun/ (accessed 12 September 2024).
Bao, H. (2018). ‘Queering the Global South: Mu Cao and His Poetry’. In R. West-Pavlov (Ed.), The Global South and Literature (185-197). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108231930.015
Berardi, Franco. (2015) Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. London: Verso Books. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/11-heroes
Goodman, Eleanor. (2017). ‘Translating Migrant Worker Poetry: Whose Voices Get Heard and How?’. Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese, 14(2)-15(1), 107-127.
Junyan, Ma. (2022) The Sound of Chinese Migrant Worker Writers, Sixth Tone. Available at: https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1010031 (accessed 12 September 2024).
Le Blanc, Guillaume (2009). L’invisibilité sociale. Paris: PUF.
Meisner, Maurice. (1996). The Deng Xiaoping Era : An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994. New York : Hill and Wang.
Qin Xiaoyu, ed. (2016) Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press.
Rauhala, Emily. ‘The Poet Who Died for Your Phone’, Time. Available at: https://time.com/chinapoet/ (accessed 12 September 2024).
Standing, G. (2014). The Precariat. Contexts, 13(4), 10-12. https://doi.org/10.1177/1536504214558209
Stonewall (2018). ‘Global Workplace Briefing on LGBTQ+ rights in China’. Available at: https://www.stonewall.org.uk/system/files/china_global_workplace_briefing_2018.pdf (accessed 12 September 2024).
Van Crevel, Maghiel. (2017) Walk on the Wild Side: Snapshots of the Chinese Poetry Scene. Available at: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/walk-on-the-wild-side/ (accessed 12 September 2024)
Van Crevel, Maghiel. (2019) ‘Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry’, Chinese Literature Today, 8(1), pp. 127–145. doi: 10.1080/21514399.2019.1615334
van Crevel, Maghiel. (2023) ‘I and We in Picun: The Making of Chinese Poet Xiao Hai’. positions 1 May; 31 (2), pp. 303–331. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-10300214
Zhang, Yueran. (2020) ‘Leninists in a Chinese Factory: Reflections on the Jasic Labour Organising Strategy’, Made in China Journal, 25 June. Available at: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2020/06/25/leninists-in-a-chinese-factory/ (accessed 12 September 2024)
Zheng Xiaoqiong (2022) In the Roar of the Machine. Syndey: Giramondo Publishing.

Acknowledgements

As always, huge thanks to our patreon supporters who make this podcast possible. A special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.
Our theme tune for these episodes is ‘A Young Man from the Village’ by the New Labour Art Troupe, from the Migrant Worker Home. Stream it here.
This episode was produced by Jack Franco and edited by Jesse French.

Transcript

Part 1

Matt: In 2002, three Chinese workers who had migrated from their rural hometowns, founded the Migrant Worker Home on the outskirts of Beijing. The Home served as a community and cultural centre for China’s precariously employed migrant workers, including a theatre, a writers’ group (with its own literary journal) and a Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art. It was shut down by the government last year after over 20 years of activity. This is Working Class Literature

[intro music]

Matt: Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our patreon supporters. Our supporters fund our work, and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise and other content. For example, our patreon supporters can listen to all three parts of this series now as well as an exclusive Patreon-only bonus episode that goes into more detail about the Migrant Worker Home, some of the writers we discuss and their influences. Join us or find out more at patreon.com/workingclasshistory; link in the show notes.

This series is going to be a bit different to our previous ones in that it was co-produced, and will be presented by, our good friend, Jack Franco, who has been working on the topic of Chinese migrant worker poetry for some time.

Obviously, much of the work by Chinese migrant worker poets remains untranslated, but there are a few fantastic translated volumes that we’ve used for these episodes: specifically, we would highly recommend Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, published by White Pine Press in 2016; and In the Roar of the Machine, a collection of poems by Zheng Xiaoqiong (who we discuss later in this episode), published by Giramondo Publishing in 2022, both translated by Eleanor Goodman. The collections are fantastic and we’ll include links to buy them on the webpage for the series, along with links to a number of books about Chinese history.

A quick note that some Chinese names can sound quite different to how they’re written in English, but the webpage for these episodes also has information on all the poets mentioned in this series, as well as their poems and notes on pronouncing Chinese names; link in the show notes.

Anyway, we’re really grateful to Jack for sharing this series with us and, without further ado, we’ll hand it over to him.

[intro music fades in and back out]

Jack: The past 40-odd years of deindustrialisation in the West has led many to think that the industrial working class is a thing of the past. But rather than disappear, a lot of it has simply moved and one place they’ve moved to is China, particularly the Pearl River Delta in the south-east, known as the ‘workshop’ – or the ‘sweatshop’ of the world. Most of these workers leave their villages and towns for precarious and dangerous work in the cities, where they are erased from the narrative of China’s economic boom. Since China’s shift towards capitalism in the 1980s, and especially since the turn of the century, one of the ways these people have communicated their lived experience is through poetry.

To get a sense of the character and impact of this migrant worker poetry you need to understand something called the hukou, or household registration, system. Because when we talk about migrant workers in China, we are talking about internal migrants moving from one part of China to another.

After China’s revolution, with up to 85% of its half a billion citizens peasants living in poverty in the countryside, the hukou system was designed to regulate migration to the cities by tying individuals to their place of permanent residency, and classifying them as either rural or urban. Created in part with a view to stop agriculture from crumbling, the hukou tied civil, social and economic rights – such as access to healthcare, schooling, and formal employment – to whether citizens were rural or urban, grossly favouring urban citizens, and making it virtually impossible to change hukou.

By the end of the 1970s, Deng Xiaoping had come to power and began a programme called ‘Reform and Opening Up’ which brought China into the global economy. Deng established deregulated ‘Special Economic Zones’ in southern, coastal China, providing favourable conditions for global corporations to invest and find cheap labour. An army of workers was needed to fill factory floors and cities like Shenzhen became the destination for millions of rural Chinese looking for work.

Maghiel van Crevel: All of this led to this rural-urban migration where people left the countryside to escape from poverty and to seek employment. There was a lot of unemployment in the countryside and there still is today. Perhaps also, it was to escape the strictures of village life and live the city life or the urban dream.

Jack: This is Maghiel van Crevel, professor of Chinese literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He has spent years doing fieldwork in China, meeting and discussing with Chinese literary publishers and authors, including many migrant worker poets.

Maghiel van Crevel: Unsurprisingly, most if not all of the work that is done in these, let’s say, migrant-labour jobs and settings is precarious labour. That means a fundamental type of socioeconomic insecurity, as in will I have a job tomorrow or as in if I don’t know whether I’m going to have a job tomorrow, would it be responsible of me to start a family? Precarity is an issue worldwide and ever more present on the political agenda and the agenda of social movements as one manifestation of inequality if you will. China is a not so shining example. So if you look at this migrant-worker population, you’re talking about roughly 20% of the population of the country as a whole – 300 million or thereabouts – since the 1980s. That is astonishing and unprecedented I might add, and it’s going to sound very high-falutin, but in the history of mankind.

Jack: As Maghiel explains, however, their lived experience, as workers, as family members, as individual citizens, is extremely complex when looked at up close.

Maghiel van Crevel: ‘We’ve got 300 million people on the move,’ but who are these people? What is their lived experience? I think it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that this experience has been gruesome for many of these people. You’re talking about exploitation and mistreatment basically. If you look at the kind of work on the assembly line, on construction sites but also things like courier services, delivery people and sex work, then there are many ‘3D jobs’ there: dirty, dangerous and demeaning. There are many people there who are overworked. Overworking could almost be a transitive verb here as in I’m going to overwork you. I’m going to make you work more than you can actually handle both physically and psychologically. Overworked and underpaid. Labour rights in many places are highly questionable, although, I shouldn’t be painting a black and white picture here. There’s been a great deal of change since the 1980s which is 40 years ago and there should have been. Sometimes, it took very violent incidents for this to be catalysed into action. The most famous one was in 2003 when a migrant worker called Sun Zhigang to summarise the story or what we know reliably know of the story, he was beaten to death in a police station in one of the hubs of migrant labour in the Pearl River Delta in South Eastern China for not carrying his temporary residence permit on him. He was questioned on the street, ended up in a police station and then in a hospital and that was that. With labour rights, there are a lot of abusive contracts and abusive management not paying people or paying people too late. You’re talking about people who don’t have a lot of resources to fight that and sue the employer. They’re a vulnerable group in dehumanising labour conditions.

If you talked about the lived experience on the ground here, it’s probably displacement, discrimination and things like family separation. There’s a group of children that is quite literally tens of millions in size. Statistics vary but we’re very definitely talking about something to the tune of 50 million people in absolute numbers over a period of time as the left-behind children. That has become a common designation for them. Now, for example, in scholarship, we see work on the psychological situation of these children whose parents have left the countryside in order to travel to the cities and settle down there, in as much as that’s possible, and who quite often only return to their rural homes once a year. That means you see your children for two or three weeks once a year if it works out and the children are raised by older generations and others. There are all kinds of social problems in the villages as well. If you focus on the people that do the travelling to the cities and the migrant labour or the people that we’re talking about today, one way of summing up their situation is that, in many ways, they are second-class urban citizens. They’re not really urbanites. They’re second-class citizens when it comes to, for example, residents’ rights.

WCL: In these conditions, the ability to endure becomes essential, and writing poetry is one such strategy. Maghiel explains why migrant workers so often draw on poetry to reflect on and reveal their marginalisation.

Maghiel van Crevel : It comes straight from real life so to speak. So one thing that this poetry does is document historical reality in a unique way. We have plenty of documentation of this particular historical reality. We have government reports. We have journalism. We also have other literary genres like fiction and non-fiction but I’d say that probably, poetry works a little differently in that it does more in resetting the reader. The moment that the poetic voice starts to speak then something extraordinary is about to happen. Something different happens. Language works differently. There might be rhythm. There might be the movement of the body. There might be music. There might be associations. There might be crazy stuff. Poetry works differently. Even if you recognisably are describing a building site, funny stuff might happen in poetry that would not happen in the government report or in the newspaper article. Even if, yes, it is useful for documenting a particular type of historical reality, it is more than that because it does so in a unique way. That’s what makes it different from the opinion piece and other genres.

Jack: What’s more is how these poets challenge and interweave more established ways of writing their experience – like government reports, journalism, letters home, etc – but with one eye always turned inwards, capturing individual emotion, and the other eye looking at their assigned place in the global order.

Wu Xia was born in 1981 in the western province of Sichuan, one of the largest points of departure for workers, given its large rural population. By fourteen, she was working in Shenzhen, the unofficial capital of Deng’s reforms. In 2016, she was still working in a clothing factory when the following poem, ‘Sundress’, was published in Iron Moon, translated by Eleanor Goodman.

Maghiel van Crevel:

‘Sundress’
The packing area is flooded with light
The iron I’m holding
Collects all the warmth of my hands

I want to press the straps flat
So they won’t dig into your shoulders when you wear it
And then press up from the waist
A lovely waist
Where someone can lay a fine hand
And on the tree-shaded lane
Caress a quiet kind of love
Last I’ll smooth the dress out
To iron the pleats to equal widths
So you can sit by a lake or on a grassy lawn
And wait for a breeze
Like a flower

Soon when I get off work
I’ll wash my sweaty uniform
And the sundress will be packed and shipped
To a fashionable store
It will wait just for you
Unknown girl
I love you

Maghiel van Crevel: I recall reading this poem for the first time in Eleanor Goodman’s translation in Iron Moon, this anthology. I went back to the book for today’s recording and noticed that I’d pencilled in some notes and they say quite literally ‘Unbelievable. This is unbelievable’ except they say this in Dutch. The reason being is that I found it almost unimaginable that somebody working in a sweatshop producing cheap garments for elsewhere in China or elsewhere in the world’s consumer society… can think about this stuff and think about the person who is going to wear the dress and the person who is privileged enough to be able to buy the dress and not be bitter about this but be gentle and loving to say ‘I love you.’ This is a phrase that would make many ‘Western’ critics cringe but a phrase that we should probably think about again in the context of this very heterogeneous genre of poetry and knowing these circumstances and knowing the biography of the author who started to work in a factory when she was 14 years old. The contrast is just astonishing not just between the biography and the imagined wearer of the dress in the poem but also within the poem between the person who is about to get off work and then wash their sweaty uniform which she was wearing while she was pressing the sundress for this faraway, unknown girl that she professes to love.

Jack: Wu’s poem bridges the gap between consumers and the workers who produce what they consume. So it starts with the factory worker producing the poem’s sundress before moving – through the workers’ imagination – to the future consumer who will buy it. The worker imagines how a hypothetical girl might use the dress: sitting outside, relaxing with a lover in a ‘tree-shaded lane’ while she, by contrast, is in her ‘sweaty uniform’ in a ‘packing area flooded with light’. The image of the ‘Unknown girl’, then, is a future life which the factory worker makes possible, but to which she herself has no access. As Maghiel mentioned earlier, it’s here that poetry wins over genres like journalism: ‘globalisation’ and ‘consumerism’ aren’t just about trends and trades, but a two-way daydream that allows workers and consumers to imagine each others’ positions in an otherwise anonymous global system.

The French sociologist Guillaume Le Blanc talks about precarious work creating a condition of ‘social invisibility’, where workers are unable to take part in public life. They don’t have access to traditional forms of representation, like trade unions. Long, often unpredictable hours mean they even lack time to socialise in turn creating an increasingly precarious and fragmented sense of self. But despite their difficult conditions, many Chinese migrant workers still maintain a desire to put that sense of self into writing.

Maghiel van Crevel: Why does somebody in the sort of living and labour conditions that I outlined above, and this is not just about China, choose to write? This is what you might call the paradox of writing by the underclass. I mean there’s plenty of other terminology out there but I’m going to stick with that here and also because that is very much a term that is used in Chinese – diceng – literally, the lowest level or bottom level of society. You’ve got no time. You’ve got no access to cultural resources in the way that your ‘average’ poet or literary author does like libraries, bookstores, money or a family where they talk about literature at the dinner table perhaps. I’m not trying to homogenise here but you have no access or very little access to these things but I think, in a sense, that it is precisely this ordeal that motivates the decision to write and that drives the urge to write. There’s one particular example of a poet called Xiao Hai who left home at age 14 because his family couldn’t afford the school fees any longer. He got on a train and ended up in a very shady job placement scheme in the Pearl River Delta and then went on job hopping and city hopping for the next decade and a bit more. One of the reasons that he’s looking back at that time today as potentially having been a waste of time is that he said that writing was so important to him and that drive to write. After a 12-hour shift or a 14-hour shift with no privacy and the rest of it, that led him to neglect other aspects of his life. He’s a pretty extreme case. This guy was going to be a poet no matter where he landed on Earth and Xiao Hai happened to land in a poor, rural family in Henan Province and made his way to poethood. We can talk more about him later. He’s the perfect illustration of how this very ordeal locks you out from access to cultural resources and might motivate you to break through those obstacles and to write like there is no tomorrow. I’d like to take that fairly literally because that sums up the socioeconomic experience – like there is no tomorrow. You might get fired tomorrow and this is not just about making ends meet and how much money I’m going to make or not make this month but it is about that fundamental situation of being on the edge and being in a precarious situation. These are generic things. I think you could say these things about labour migrants the world over but what might be culturally specific or, in plain words, what might be Chinese about this is the power of poetry as a meme in Chinese cultural tradition. I mean the meme in the original sense; basically, the cultural sibling of the gene. I could also say poetry is part of China’s cultural DNA. That’s not a very original metaphor but it’s certainly one that works.

That is one thing that explains how this ‘floating population’ of migrant workers produced, in relative numbers – it’s not as if everybody is writing poetry but in absolute numbers, yes, a very large number of people who are writing poetry and trying to get it published in various ways.

Some of them don’t care about publishing and just the love of the writing and the exchange with others by just putting on their blog or posting it on social media.

WCL: In this context, migrant worker poetry can be a way to piece together an identity and a narrative about oneself. But even this label of ‘Migrant Worker Poetry’ is not without its problems. As Eleanor Goodman writes in her essay ‘Translating Migrant Worker Poets’, there’s a dilemma between not reducing the poets to their social conditions, and the belief that their collective identity is a source of power.

Maghiel van Crevel: There’s a real debate in China and in other places, so that means in Chinese and in other languages. I had to categorise or label this poetry and so that also means how to translate its various names and designations. What are the implications of these various names? So in Chinese, for example, I could probably think of about ten different terms that have been associated with this poetry. I’m just going to give you a handful. It’s been called nongmingong shige which means peasant-worker poetry; the peasant worker being a description that is now often experienced as pejorative of these rural-to-urban migrants. It’s poetry written by people that we call peasant workers. They’re not real workers. They’re really peasants but they’ve somehow turned themselves into workers and that sort of thing. That term is actually not very widely used now. It was used when people were grappling for ways of talking about this poetry but less so now.

There are then those who called it gongren shige which means workers’ poetry. That’s well and good but it is also problematic because that is the same term that was used for the high-socialist, working-class poetry or the literature produced by the proletariat with the guidance of the Communist Party. That is really a different animal. The latest, let’s say, eulogy of drilling for oil in the far west of the country is going to be different from an account of the physical and psychological disintegration of an individual in post-socialist China who has basically been destroyed as an assembly line worker in their particular position in that food chain that I keep coming back to. So I’m not sure that calling it worker poetry in that sense is useful because I think we do need to make that distinction.

Jack: Given the issues with these terms, there is one in particular that Maghiel thinks best conveys the lack of autonomy and demeaning jobs these poets endure.

Maghiel van Crevel: The term that really matters to most and I think we need to grapple with is one that includes this Chinese word that has surfaced a couple of times today and that is dagong which means ‘working for the boss’, basically. It means selling your labour because you have nothing else to sell and so it fits perfectly theoretically there as well. Chūqù dagong is often linked with the term Chūqù or going out and meaning leaving the village. So dagong basically means leaving home in order to find work. This work is often going to be of the precarious kind. That is very definitely the strongest association with the notion of dagong. It’s not a steady job. It’s not a high-flying job. It’s not a well-paying job. It’s not a widely-respected job, etcetera. It’s the rough stuff.

The point here is the most widely used term in China is dagong shige. Dagong – working for the boss poetry, selling your labour poetry, being vulnerable or being precarious poetry. All of these are approaches or approximations of what I’m trying to say here but I haven’t found the right translation.

Jack: How we translate has its own set of ethical difficulties: translation is not just a case of translating words between languages, but of meaning between cultures. Like many others, we’ve opted to use the term ‘migrant worker poetry’ as broadly descriptive of the experiences of those poets. But Maghiel often uses a different translation.

Maghiel van Crevel: At one point, I did find what I think is a suitable translation and that is Battler poetry. We have migrant worker poetry which is very widely used. I have no issues with that other than that I want to say that it’s actually not a translation but an explanation. What we’re missing out on is the feeling of the word in the source language. Dagong is a colloquialism and it is something, certainly in the context of the literature, that can be worn as a badge of pride. That matters a great deal to me. Now, I’ve been going back and forth and looking for a good translation and other translations in English that we’ve seen as workers’ poetry or working-class poetry. At one point, a friend of mine who is an Australian sociologist, philosopher and sinologist, David Kelly, and who I’ve known for a long time, said, ‘How about Battler?’ Battler, as it turns out, is an Australian colloquialism for people living on the ‘lowest rung in society’ or precarious labour often and faced with adversity. That’s things like family separation, having to move around to get the job done and not being sure whether you have a job tomorrow. It has a beautiful ring to it and it can do this thing that Dagong can do in Chinese and that is that it can be worn as a badge of pride. There is a community formation power here in this word and that’s exactly what there is in the Chinese word and that’s when I knew that we were home and we were going to use this.

Jack: ‘Battler’ captures the sense of a working-class person having to fight for everything they can in an unequal and exploitative society. Perhaps the most well-known, and certainly one of the most significant ‘battler poets’ is Zheng Xiaoqiong.

Maghiel van Crevel: She was born in 1980 and around aged 20 (or a little earlier than that), she relocated from rural Sichuan province in Central China to the Pearl River Delta and the Southeast where the workshop of the world was very much located at the time. She became an assembly line worker and she did this for about eight years. She is one of the shining examples of the power of poetry in Chinese cultural tradition because she made it her business to be a literary author and then quickly decided after a few years to be actually a poet at the same time as managing this fairly gruelling existence. She was trying to make money for the folks back home. In the interview I had with her, which was in 2016, she mentioned that she would try and get as much overtime as possible because that would make you extra money but it also means wearing out your body. Doing a 14-hour shift is going to wear out your body in circumstances that included, for example, the restriction of movement. They were in dormitories that were locked from the outside and on Sunday afternoons from 2-4pm, they would get to take a walk and that sort of thing. All of this is in the literature and it’s in the journalism in English as well. It’s been well-documented. But that life story is quite incredible because she made it her business to be a poet which is a very Chinese thing to do to see yourself as somebody who could learn the trade of being a poet.

So she became a poet while being an assembly line worker and at one point, she had a lucky break which was richly deserved because she has an extraordinary talent. She was recognised actually not through poetry but through short prose and writing about life in the Pearl River Delta with very famous examples of thinking about all the fingers that were cut off by the machinery in those factories and if you lined all of those up, where would that take you? She had a breakthrough at the national level. This then gave her an opportunity because the local government was paying attention and had been doing so for some time. They actually had given her, at one point, a sabbatical which is a beautiful illustration of the shades of grey between oppression, resistance, the government and the grassroots. The local government said, at one point, ‘We’re going to give you three months off work so you can complete the book of poetry.’ That had actually come out in 2006 and so this was before she was nationally famous. This is beautifully illustrative of that complexity of the force field in which this culture operates.

Jack: What Maghiel highlights here is how Chinese migrant worker poetry is critical, but not always considered as necessarily threatening to Chinese society. As such, there is a degree of opportunity in the public sphere for this kind of critical cultural production, in contrast to conventional accounts that view Chinese society as a highly regimented whole.

This is part of the Chinese state treading a fine line between allowing an outlet for debate and criticism while ensuring that certain topics (such as human rights, Hong Kong, Xinjiang etc) remain off limits. That leeway allowed Zheng to write critical poetry from a migrant worker perspective and receive funding in a way not dissimilar to artists in western countries.

Maghiel van Crevel: Zheng Xiaoqiong has gone on to become a celebrity. She is a celebrity in China. She actually wrote her way out of precarity because her talent was recognised. She was offered an internship at a literary flagship journal out of Guangzhou called Art Works or Zuòpǐn in Chinese and she has, by now, made it to the rank of Vice Editor in Chief. She has a steady job and a steady income. Surprise, surprise, there were those who accused her of ‘selling out’ and who say she can no longer be classified as a worker or a migrant worker because she has left the ranks of the assembly line workers. She is no longer there herself. She has a comfortable life and she has a steady income.

Jack: The next poem, ‘Life’, comes directly from Zheng’s experience on the assembly line and depicts the collective migrant worker experience in her own unique poetic voice. Maghiel is reading his own original translation, but it is also available in a collection called In the Roar of the Machine, translated by Eleanor Goodman. More information and a link to buy it can be found in the show notes.

Maghiel van Crevel:

Life
You all don’t know but my name is now hidden in a worker ID
My hands are now part of the assembly line, my body signed over to a contract
Hair gone from black to grey
What’s left is the racket, and the rush, and the overtime, and the wages
Through the white-hot lamplight, I see my tired shadow project on the machine
Slowly shifting, turning, bending, silent like a chunk of cast iron
Iron that speaks like a mute covered in the trust and hopes of strangers
All this iron rusting in time and trembling in reality
I don’t know how to protect a voiceless life
This life that’s lost its name and gender, mechanical life at the mercy of contracts
Where is it and how does it start?
On eight iron dorm room bunk beds, moonlight shines on sorrow
In the roar of the machine, they’re slyly flirting love and youth birthed on a pay slip
How can this restless, mortal life comfort a frail soul
If the moonlight comes from Sichuan, my youth is set alight by memories
But dies out on the assembly line seven days a week
What’s left is blueprints, iron, metal products, white quality labels, wrecked rejects
And under the white-hot lamp, the loneliness I still bear
And the pain amid the rush, hot and endless

Maghiel van Crevel: This is really part of her early work and she has moved on in an incredible way and written very diverse stuff since. You can sort of see the poetic voice taking shape or poetic identity and choice of words and style over the years and by now, a couple of decades. But if you just look at this poem, there are a couple of things about it that are striking to me. One of them is that there is a total fearlessness when it comes to using big words. I think that if you take any high-brow creative writing programme – Eleanor Goodman has written about this – they’re going to teach you not to call a poem ‘Life’ because it’s a big word. It’s like ‘Love’ and those other bad, big words. This is what I find interesting when I think about the encounter of a variety of readers with this poetry and their reflection on why they’re reading this poetry, how they came to it and what the encounter is like. One possible way is to say, ‘That’s not very sophisticated,’ and this actually gets said and not just by foreign consumers either. Chinese critics in China say this as well. Another way of looking at it might be that it’s kind of interesting that somebody actually has the guts to say, ‘Yeah, that’s what this is about and this is what this poem feels like to me. I’m actually going to make a statement about life and I’m bloody well going to call it that.’

There is the very recognisable factory workshop and assembly line situation. It’s literally there. ‘My hands are now part of the assembly line’ is a beautiful image, of course. You’re robotised. You’re made part of the assembly line – talk about alienation, right? ‘My body signed over to a contract’ – the means of production and in whose hands they are and so on. That’s illustrated very expertly by saying things like, ‘My hair has gone from black to grey’ and describing this factory workshop and the white-hot lights, the shadows and the machines around you and all of that stuff. But then, all of a sudden, this very central image which has turned out to be probably… well, certainly, one of the most central images in her work at large of cast iron. She writes about iron all the time and then and then ‘iron that speaks like a mute’ is very, very powerful. Zooming then out of the big picture, this iron is ‘covered in the trust and hopes of strangers’ and the word here in Chinese, if I recall correctly, is wailairen which literally means people who come from the outside or people who are not part of her local community or part of the city basically. Here are your labour migrants.

You have another point of, let’s say, the expertise, if you will, but I don’t really like that word; just the poetic ability or ability of the poet that is speaking to us here. ‘Iron rusting in time, trembling in reality’ and then, all of a sudden, stepping back again and there’s that sentence that is almost a political declaration of ‘I don’t know how to protect a voiceless life’ and then moving on to ‘this life that has lost its name and gender.’ Again, you can haul in all kinds of observations about the particular situation of the Pearl River Delta but you could relate it to migrant labour all over the place worldwide; namely, you become a number. She does a lot with this in her work as well and remembers the various work numbers or ID numbers that she had in the various factories where she worked.

So it combines all these things and then talks about things like flirtation and love in this particular context, very interestingly, and rehumanising the protagonist in the poem and then linking it to your own history by saying, ‘If the moonlight comes from Sichuan…’ Well, Sichuan is her home province. If we see the moon… and yes, we talk about homesickness and I see the moon and I think of my hometown in Sichuan and ‘my youth is set alight by memories.’ It’s a reinvigoration and a life force but it dies out on the assembly line seven days a week. It’s a beautiful contrast. I could go on. I’d just like to reiterate here that I know Zheng Xiaoquiong and have known her for some time. I’m in regular correspondence with her, often interviewed her and translated some of her work and I think she wouldn’t discard this poem. She knows that it’s one of her best-known works but she also knows, and she doesn’t hide this, that she feels she has developed as a poet tremendously over the years and the decades. So I’m aware that I’m showing an early specimen but I think it is incredibly important because, to my mind, it’s astonishing to see that somebody could make an intervention like this in 2006 with all that it pulls together.

Jack: It should also be noted that a high number of these Chinese labour migrants are women. As such, it should be no surprise that gender also plays a central role in Zheng’s work. The factory, and to a different extent, in the literary world, women face a challenging, often violent, reality.

Maghiel van Crevel: There’s the fact that a high percentage of factory workers or assembly line workers in China are female. What we know about this, simply because of fieldwork done by social scientists interviewing factory managers and so on, is that their fingers are nimble and Zheng Xiaoqiong would actually describe how when she applied for a new job, people would look at her hands. What about the fingers? Have the joints swollen up? Are the fingers nimble enough for this work on the assembly line? But also because, and this is the manager speaking, ‘female workers tend to be more obedient,’ or easier to manage, so to speak in a fairly cynical phrasing.

But one thing that has run through her work from the start is the factory as a place that punishes the body and particularly the female body. So she will write about disruptive menstrual cycles and about sexual harassment. She will write about womanhood and about how life away from home, life in the factory and sometimes the physically toxic environments. I’m now not talking about workplace relations. I’m also talking about that but I’m talking about physically and chemically toxic environments which can obviously damage and, indeed, destroy the body; the body that could have been a mother and people forced into sex work and forced to drink to the point of alcohol poisoning who could have been a mother but never got to be a mother because they died aged 23. This is actually a little example from a poem called ‘Hu Zhimin’ which is the name of a woman who was once a workmate of Zheng Xiaoqiong in the factory and found her way into other work in the hotel business and ended up dead at 23 through alcohol poisoning. The reality of the workplace, and I’ve talked about hardship before, is that that is also very much a gender issue.

It is surveillance and near complete control over the physical body. In her case, she’s also very much focusing on the female side of things and then saying what we see here is the conjunction of a capitalist labour regime with Confucian patriarchy because you’re talking about young women and, like I said, some of them would also be motivated to try their luck in moving away from rural homes to move to the city to escape from the strictures of village life which can be fairly imposing in the patriarchal sense in what a woman is supposed to be and do in a traditional family configuration and social and economic configuration in the countryside. So that is one thing that Zheng Xiaoqiong has just astonishingly and powerfully put on the table and I’m so glad that she’s done this because there is some consolation here in that she is somehow setting the record straight because she is the face of China’s Battler poetry or China’s migrant worker poetry. She’s also the exception to the rule in that the representation of this poetry is overwhelmingly male-dominated. The authors that get published, the authors that run the show and organise the conferences and the authors that get translated into foreign languages are overwhelmingly male, sadly so. There’s this famous and fantastic landmark anthology in English called Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry translated by Eleanor Goodman and edited by Qin Xiaoyu. In the preface, the editor says something about this and recognises the gender imbalance and expresses his regret. He’s in between a rock and a hard place because if you look at the representation of this poetry in Chinese, it is very male-dominated as well. So it’s not as if he could pick up a magic wand and set the record straight but the great coincidence – maybe it’s not a coincidence – of Zheng Xiaoqiong being a woman and being the face of China’s Battler poetry, and writing about womanhood and writing about gender is a really important part of the discourse and it has helped us a great deal to get a grip and understand how this works. As I said, I think it’s probably not a coincidence that she is the exception who proves the rule herself because that is a ‘herself’ and not a ‘himself.’

[Outro music]

Matt: That’s all we have time for in today’s episode. Join us in Part 2 where we’ll discuss how China’s migrant workers have organised themselves, specifically looking at the Migrant Workers’ Home on the outskirts of Beijing. We also look at the poetry of some other migrant workers, such as Xu Lizhi who rose to international fame after taking his own life in 2014.

We also have a bonus episode where we go into more detail about some of the topics we discuss in the main episodes, like the relationship between migrant worker poetry and the Chinese state, the New Labour Art Troupe (whose music we’re using for these episodes), and the international reception of Chinese migrant worker poets like Zheng Xiaoqiong and Xu Lizhi. That bonus episode is available now, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. That bonus episode will be available soon, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts. So if you appreciate our work please do think about joining us at patreon.com/workingclasshistory, link in the show notes. In return for your support, you get early access to content, as well as ad-free episodes, exclusive bonus content, discounted merch, and more. And if you can’t spare the cash, absolutely no problem, please just tell your friends about this podcast and give us a five-star review on your favourite podcast app.

If you’d like to learn more about migrant worker poetry in China, then check out the webpage for this series where you’ll find images, a full list of sources, further reading and more. We’ve also got a great selection of books available about Chinese history in our online store, and you can get 10% off them and anything else using the discount code WCHPODCAST. Links in the show notes.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.

Our theme tune for these episodes is ‘A Young Man from the Village’ by the New Labour Art Troupe, from the Migrant Worker Home on the outskirts of Beijing. Thanks to them for letting us use it. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 2

Jack: Welcome back to Part 2 of our series on Chinese migrant worker poetry. If you haven’t listened to Part 1 yet, I suggest you go back and listen to that one first.

[intro music]

Also, a quick content note that this episode includes mention of suicide and self-harm.

You might remember that this series is being produced and presented with the help of friend of the podcast, Jack Franco, so at this point we’ll hand back over to him.

Jack: In our first episode, we discussed some of the difficulties in classifying Chinese migrant worker poetry as writing that balances personal history with political activism and social critique. In this episode, we’ll talk about how poetry in China is a ‘social practice’ and what that means, looking at a number of migrant worker poets, including the life and work of Xu Lizhi, one of the most significant in recent years. And we’ll also take a trip to the Migrant Worker Home, a self-organised space run by and for migrant workers living in the urban village of Picun, on the outskirts of Beijing.

All of this relates to how poetry as an artform has been historically conceived in China, which Maghiel van Crevel, Professor of Chinese Literature at Leiden University, explains.

Maghiel van Crevel: What can we expect from a Chinese poet through the ages? That’s a fantastic question on the importance of poetry in Chinese culture and society. My very cheeky answer would be we can expect everything from them. Why is this? Because poetry, as a social practice in China, especially in antiquity and the Imperial times up to the 20^th century but continuing today in fact, is a very occasional art. This is not in any sense a pejorative thing to say. Parting with a friend; I’m going to write a poem. Visiting a far away friend; I’m going to write a poem. Getting a new job; I might write a poem. My daughter graduating from high school; I might write a poem. This is a way of perhaps indicating how ubiquitous poetry is in Chinese society. It’s entirely normal for Chinese children – yes, we’re talking about a cultural elite but a fairly large also in percentage numbers – to learn by heart several hundreds of famous poems from the Imperial era.

Jack: Maghiel is clear that poetry plays a far wider role in Chinese society than we might be used to in other countries. But China’s poetic tradition also goes far beyond just being an ‘occasional art’.

Maghiel van Crevel: Poetry is an industry. Poetry is a very thriving, bubbly thing in China and culturally, hugely important and then the notion of industry and appropriating that to reflect on migrant worker poetry even though it holds for the larger picture. That is a very instructive way of looking at it.

Now going back to the more culturally specific Chinese situation, what can we expect of a Chinese poet? If I’m going to try and be less universal about that, I might say things like speaking truth to power. I might say things like a lament for the suffering of the common folk to which the poet very definitely doesn’t belong because they’re part of a cultural elite. So some of China’s most famous poets, Du Fu, among them, are famous for just that. They’re famous for their ability to write about the horrors of war even as, or perhaps especially, they found themselves in a relatively privileged position in that they survived and had the wherewithal to survive and move around when that was necessary. Speaking truth to power as an age-old tradition probably going back to the person who’s commonly seen as the first archetypical Chinese poet.

Jack: The poet Maghiel mentions, Du Fu, is perhaps China’s most important classical poet, during the ‘golden age’ of the Tang dynasty in the 8th century. He was a civil servant, as was expected of his social class, but spent much of his life on the road, unsettled by war. But China’s poetic tradition was just as rich in the 20th century.

Maghiel van Crevel: You’ve then got the People’s Republic of China’s orthodox, high-socialists poets like He Zhingzhe who wrote the Song of Lei Feng which is basically a totally utopian, Maoist ideal of the new Chinese person who consists mostly of self-sacrifice. You might also find people in Guiyang and in Beijing in the late ‘70s, when underground literature was about to surface after the Cultural Revolution, posting their poetry or pasting it actually literally. The Guiyang Troupe, in 1978, just after when the mausoleum for Mao Zedong was being erected in the same Tiananmen Square that we’ve seen recur in Chinese history, pasted their poetry on the walls of the building site there a couple of months later. The group in Beijing pasted their poetry on city walls in various places in Beijing. So that is still a very political undertaking even as these people were saying, ‘We are reclaiming poetry to be an individual thing or a cultural thing and not just be politics.’

You could then move on to Yin Lichuan and the Lower Body Poetry group around the year 2000, who was totally irreverent and fearless and not interested in politics, writing about heroin junkies in Beijing, sex workers and that sort of thing and crashing through all kinds of taboos on the cultural scene and being hated and misunderstood by everybody and their brother. You could then turn to migrant worker poetry and still talk about poetry as a social practice in China. That really drives it home. You see the muchness, the complexity of it, the diversity of it and that’s why I’m not ashamed of that metaphor of poetry being part of the cultural DNA of China.

Jack: This idea of poetry that speaks truth to power, that depicts experiences of exploitation and injustice, are themes that link today’s migrant workers to China’s poetic tradition, such as the Book of Songs, whose earliest works are as much as 3000 years old.

Maghiel van Crevel: If you’re going to situate this migrant worker poetry going back into Chinese cultural history, then I’ve seen people and people that I respect who will claim, with some justification, there is, in fact, very direct linkage to the Book of Songs or the Book of Odes, this collection or this anthology of songs that allegedly come from the common folk. Of course, you need to think, ‘Well, how exactly did they come from the common folk if the common folk at that particular time probably were illiterate.’ How did that happen? Very interestingly, we find the notion of poem gatherers who were officials at the court who would go ‘among the people’ to gather these texts and find out what people were talking about and perhaps also to actually gather these folk songs. This linkage is established between that poetry of the common folk lamenting the horrors of war, lamenting the horrors of a famished existence, lamenting poverty, sadness, sorrow, impotence in the face of greater powers than yourself, be they political, be they natural or whatever. I can see why and at the same time, what I see is that that linkage is being romanticised. Great! Here today, we have an incarnation of something that is part and parcel of our culture and that now speaks back to us about the post-socialist era. Well, yes, it’s debatable, to say the least, but I can see the connection and I think it is justified but it comes with a couple of question marks.

Jack: What Maghiel mentions here in relation to famished existences, sorrow, and impotence in the face of greater powers is evident in the lives of many migrant worker poets (and migrant workers more generally). Xu Lizhi is one such poet who dealt with these themes: like Zheng Xiaoqiong, Xu was also a worker from a rural family who went to work on the assembly lines. Conditions at Foxconn in Shenzhen (where Xu worked), were so gruelling that they led to a spate of suicides in the 2010s with a dozen workers dying by suicide in 2010 alone. In 2014, just a few days after he had signed a new Foxconn contract, Xu would join them, taking his own life by jumping off a building.

Here, Maghiel reads his translation of ‘I Speak of Blood’ by Xu Lizhi.

Maghiel van Crevel:

‘I Speak of Blood’
I speak of blood for I have no choice
I’d prefer to chat about the wind, the flowers, the snow, the moon
About dynasties of old and the classical poetry found in spirits
But reality means I can only speak of blood
Blood with its source in rented rooms like matchboxes
Narrow, cramped, sunless the year-round
Squeezing in the Battler boys and Battler girls
Wives gone astray and husbands far from home
Guys from Sichuan hawking spicy soup
Old people from Henan selling trinkets on street-side blankets
And then me, toiling all day to survive
And opening my eyes at night to write poetry
I speak to you of these people
I speak of us, ants struggling through the swamp of life one by one
Drops of blood, walking the Battlers’ road one by one
Blood chased away by city guards or wrung out by machines
Scattering insomnia, disease, job loss, suicide along the way
Words exploding one by one
In the Pearl River Delta in the belly of the motherland
Dissected by reams of paperwork like seppuku blades
I speak of all this to you
And even as my voice grows hoarse and my tongue breaks off
I will tear through the silence of this era
I speak of blood and the sky will shatter
I speak of blood and my mouth turns bright red

Jack: Xu Lizhi explicitly links himself to China’s literary heritage. But in contrast to the scholars that Maghiel mentioned earlier who link migrant worker poets to their classical predecessors, Xu’s reality means he is unable to speak in the terms of that poetry: he would prefer to draw on more classical motifs of wind, flowers and the moon. But, as he says, he has “no choice”; he can “only speak of blood”, which itself symbolises the struggles of migrant worker life (not to mention that blood is not even just symbolic, but also a literal part of the violence they experience).

Maghiel van Crevel: I’m sort of trying to play a trick on you here because what I’m about to say about Xu Lizhi really somehow doesn’t totally match this poem. What is this poem? This poem is an angry poem. It’s a political poem. It’s not politically sensitive in the sense of saying, ‘I rise up and revolt and let’s overthrow the government.’ None of that. But it’s political in the description of… shall we call them asymmetrical power relations or shall we call it inequality? It’s heart-rending. It’s angry. The reason that I did want to read it, even though I have a picture of this poet Xu Lizhi that is a bit more complex than a straightforward mapping of the experience onto the poetry or the literary representation, is because of the way that he has been read. The image of Xu Lizhi has been taken by many people as a straightforward miniature for the story of migrant-worker literature and migrant worker poetry in China. I think that is just a little too easy but I get it. I understand how this has happened and for that, we need to look at his life and we need to look at what people like to read about. If we look at his life, we see a young man in Guangdong Province (actually in the Pearl River Delta or more or less in that same province) growing up in a rural area and being a kid that loved going to school from a very young age. His elder brother, at one point, said something to the effect of Xu Lizhi really not being suited to rural life and growing up as a farmer. He was trying to make his way to the city and having to make his way to the city. He completed high school but then needed to get out there and start making money but also saw this as an opportunity because what he wanted was a job in a library. What he wanted was to be a writer and somehow have a connection with literature, a bookstore perhaps. What he got was an assembly line job at Foxconn which is a Taiwanese electronics manufacturing company with most of its manufacturing plants in mainland China. Foxconn has become the epitome of the cruel labour regime that comes with that kind of organisation, including the well-known Foxconn suicides. This was when, especially in the 2010s, employees at Foxconn started killing themselves in large enough numbers to be noticed and doing this in ways that were noticed as embodied protests if you will. It’s a very academic way of putting it but basically, jumping off of a high building in order to make a point even if that’s the end of your life.

Xu Lizhi jumped off the ledge of a 17^th-floor window in a high-rise close to the Foxconn plant where he was employed at the tender age of 24. So he lived from 1990 to 2014 and that was it. When he did this, there was this explosion of publicity. It was unimaginable. Firstly, in China, the Shenzhen Evening News had a full page on this otherwise totally non-descript, regular, run-of-the-mill and powerless person and, yes, this was because he was a poet. The world over, in China no different than anywhere else, people have been fascinated by the death of the capital-P Poet or the Artist, preferably by their own hand and preferably at a young age. There’s a romantic ideal that is incredibly powerful which has not gone away, that just makes us – and I mean a very diverse and varied audience including totally untrained readers, highly professional readers and everything else – get really excited about the death of the Poet or the death of the Artist. We’ve seen hullabaloo about the death of the Poet in China in other cases but this was way bigger and also internationally and that’s because there was a third element that came in. That is we have a suicide, we have a poet/artist but we also have this figure of the migrant worker, of the subaltern subject of the precarious worker, of the person who’s at the very bottom of the global capitalist food chain, of the romanticisable but also scarily feel-good image of these people wearing yellow helmets. They look like ants because the picture is one of a building site that is the size of two railway stations or these people ‘shackled’ but actually, sometimes almost physically shackled to the assembly line wearing these uniformising sterile suits or the anti-dust stuff because with the iPhones and the iPads that you’re putting together in the Foxconn factory, we can’t have any dust in there and so the workshop has probably been conditioned. So there are these three things together. It was a suicide by a young person who was a poet or artist. He had a blog and published his poetry on his blog. He wasn’t widely recognised during his lifetime. Thirdly, there is this increasingly visible person in China, but also in the world at large, of the migrant worker.

Jack: Maghiel sees this poem as a challenge to the mainstream image that has been created of Xu Lizhi after his death in 2014, that goes beyond both the romantic ideal of the suffering poet, or a simple look into the life of three hundred million migrant workers.

Maghiel van Crevel: What I find noteworthy and, in a way, tragic is that his story has been turned into this straightforward miniature of the migrant-worker story but actually, if you read the collected works which were put together after his death… if he hadn’t killed himself, this wouldn’t have happened. That’s not a cynical comment; it’s just an observation. I read the collected works of a young man which is about 250 pages of poetry and you see that there is a very large component in this poetry that is not at all to do with sociopolitical issues, not to do with activism and not to do with anger over the way society treats the migrant workers but that is pretty straightforward, good, clean, existential angst. He has a poem about self-harm that is totally gruelling and the external forces, so to speak, that we might want to mobilise to explain his bitter fate are nowhere in sight in this poem. Whereas, in the poem by Zheng Xiaoqiong or in this poem ‘I Speak of Blood’ by Xu Lizhi himself, they are in sight. These things are visible. We can see that this is about power relations in society and that it’s about inequality. That makes it a bit hard for me to accept that Xu Lizhi has become this sort of token or emblem of the migrant worker story because I think it doesn’t do him justice as a poet or as a human being and it risks kind of homogenising that picture to the point where it doesn’t really teach us anything and it actually essentialises these people.

Jack: Despite the intrinsically isolating nature of precarious migrant labour and their risky legal status, migrant workers are still able to self-organise and forge networks of solidarity. Zheng Xiaoqiong in her poem dedicated to a 2016 protest when 100 migrant workers camped out in a Beijing underpass to demand unpaid wages (you can find a mini-documentary about the protest, with a reading of Zheng’s poem, ‘Kneeling Workers Demanding Their Pay’, in the show notes).

In the poem, Zheng writes about the workers:

‘They’re constantly put together arranged into an electronics factory ants nest a toy factory honeycomb’

The existence of these high concentrations of workers in these ants nests and honeycombs, also creates the possibility for bonds of solidarity to be created. Migrant workers are far from passive victims and one example of this is the Migrant Workers’ Home in Picun, Beijing.

Maghiel van Crevel: If we’re looking at migrant worker poetry and at the community building that happens around it, then the Migrant Worker Home in Picun, which is a village on the outskirts of Beijing to the Northeast, is actually an example of this ‘village in the city’ phenomenon where people started living because the rents were affordable and they could commute into the city to do their work. The population, in a small number of years, grew from something like 2,000 to 30,000 or thereabouts, so a factor of 10 or 15.

The Migrant Workers Home in Picun is an NGO that makes it its business to emancipate precarious workers, many of them migrant workers but it also includes people who are laid off from state factories or whatever. It’s not necessarily just migrant workers but many of them are migrant workers. It was founded by a small number of people who were actually migrant workers that came to Beijing in the late 1990s with high hopes of making it as artists, as musicians, as stand-up comedians in a Chinese variety of that particular art form. Like many other people, they’ve found their hopes frustrated and they didn’t quite make it as artists and entertainers and found themselves doing precarious labour. They stuck together and ended up working together through connections with a bunch of people sometimes referred to as the New Left, especially academics and other authors who have a particular political position. Now we’re talking about two decades ago when China was more or less clearly heading in the direction of a much more capitalist and open vision of the world than it has today under Xi Jinping. These new left intellectuals teamed up with these migrant workers and with other organisations that were emerging, for example, for the protection of the rights of female migrant workers at the time and founded this NGO. The thing that distinguishes them from many other organisations that work for the emancipation of precarious workers, and sometimes specifically migrant workers, is that they try to do this through what they call cultural education or Wénhuà jiàoyù in Chinese. That is actually clear in the background of its founding members who were musicians and comedians.

Jack: The Migrant Workers Home provides concrete material help to its population, such as free libraries, workers’ rights classes, or schooling for the children of migrant workers (who, as we mentioned in Part 1, aren’t allowed to attend local state schools as they don’t have the correct urban household registration status).

But its main mission is developing a rich cultural life for migrant workers. As it says in the Home’s mission statement: “Without our culture, we have no history; without our history, we have no future”. So, for instance, the intro song you’ve been hearing in this series is by the Migrant Worker Home’s New Labour Art Troupe. Far from being a Blairite tribute band, its members are all former migrant workers, like the singer Lu Liang who came from Shandong province to work in the coal mines. You can find a link to a short documentary about the Art Troupe on the webpage for this episode; link in the show notes.

In 2014, the Migrant Workers’ Home set up the Picun Literature Group and began publishing its own literary journal.

Maghiel van Crevel: How this group works is that one of the core people, the manager, called Fu Qiuyun, Xiaofu, realised that people wanted this, were interested in literature, wanted to try and write themselves and wanted to learn. Basically, they wanted some sort of education to happen in that particular realm. She advertised this on social media and people got in touch with her. One person in particular, Zhang Huiyu, an academic who is now a professor at Peking University, started going to Picun once weekly I think basically to lecture on literature, culture or anything that these people wanted to know about and to combine this actually with a workshop-type of approach. This is something that happens in other places as well like writing workshops as part of a social movement or as part of political movements. It was not necessarily a political movement here and I’m quite ready to say that it was not because people were careful of the red lines and had to tread carefully because of censorship and political sensitivity. This group has been ongoing for almost a decade – can you imagine? – and roughly, once a week, an academic or a cultural official would visit. This included people representing the Communist Party to talk about the party congress and what was the most important message that we need to work on. It could include practitioners like famous writers and moviemakers perhaps.

Jack: It should also be pointed out, however, that the relationship Migrant Workers’ Home has with local government is far from straightforward.

Maghiel van Crevel: These people are experts at working with the municipal government with whom they’re going to have to work because the municipal government is going to be in charge of that area. There have been very precarious moments where the village was about to be bulldozed but it didn’t happen over the last decade or so. Just recently, for example, one of the cultural places of pride in that community that was the museum of migrant worker or really Battler literature and art that they had set up on a shoestring budget in 2008. That was there for 15 years and is an incredibly impressive and moving place. Well, it’s been shut down because the city is expanding and there was no more room for their museum. They’re thinking about rebuilding the exhibition farther away from Beijing in other places where they are active. That is the sort of environment that you’re working in.

Jack: Maghiel has worked extensively with and on the Picun Literature Group, and one of its poets, Xiao Hai. Xiao Hai is a moderately successful poet who received official scholarships and recognition. In his essay, ‘I and We in Picun’ (which you can find in the show notes), Maghiel quotes Xiao who claims that in Picun he had finally found proof that “a pure revolutionary-era friendship still exists”. Solidarity and material stability created by cultural education and exchange, for free and for their own sake. Literature is seen as ‘salvation’, but not as an escape from work: as a way of making sense of life as a migrant worker and reclaiming, affirming, their personal identity by putting their work at the centre of their poetry.

Some of these themes are present in Xiao’s 2018 poem, ‘When I Watched the World Cup What Did I See’, translated and read by Maghiel.

Maghiel van Crevel:

‘When I Watched the World Cup What Did I See’
The first time I stayed up to watch the World Cup
it was Colombia against England
Truth be told I don’t even know where
Colombia is on this earth
But I do know that in Dongguan-Humen in the England football outfit factory
my workmates work year-round day shifts and night shifts racing to make those jerseys
A couple millions for every batch
They make ’em by the hundreds thousands millions
and before they know it they’ve been at it for many many years
As for the Colombia jerseys I’ve made those too in Suzhou-Wuzhong
But the Pearl River Delta and the Yangtze Delta as the workshop of the world
I only heard about that a couple years ago. . . Wanda and Adidas and Coca-Cola
and their million-dollar moving ads on the pitch have nothing to do with me
Youth slipped away is the only thing that’s mine . . . I looked up and out the window
Two breakfast stalls had set up shop
As darkness lifted a sleepless bachelor was on a treasure hunt near the trash. . .
The losing team left the pitch
The winners kept doing victory laps
All that was left was the workers making those jerseys year upon year day upon day
silent and voiceless
slogging on with no breaks

Jack: Like Wu Xia’s poem, ‘Sundress’, which we discussed in the previous episode, Xiao’s poem here brings together the consumer’s experience of the product (in this case the multibillion dollar a year football industry) and the workers who make it possible. The poem tells the story of Xiao’s first experience of anticipation for a World Cup game, yet he can’t avoid seeing in the ‘victory laps’ and TV ads a thing he knows intimately: the football shirts Chinese migrant workers make themselves. His poem puts these workers back on football’s biggest stage. For Xiao, the shirts are his workmates’ above all, no longer Colombian or English. When the ninety minutes are over:

The losing team left the pitch
The winners kept doing victory laps
All that was left was the workers making those jerseys year upon year day upon day
silent and voiceless
slogging on with no breaks

The feeling of friendship and solidarity Xiao found in Picun, Maghiel argues, can help us read and support working-class literature more generally, across languages and traditions.

Maghiel van Crevel: This is really what came home to me the most powerfully like a tonne of bricks in this research over the years, is that this is about identification and community building. It is a way to secure your place in the sun even if that’s just two minutes a day. It is a way to be a person that is identifiable with other persons in different ways than being the next person in line on the assembly line. It is a way of identifying actively and sharing and exchanging that, also connecting if only in spirit and sometimes, actually very practically, using translation software with other movements across the border or other poetry movements that are part of social movements. What they have in common these poetries is social concern and social aspiration. It’s not just identification per se full stop. It is identification that comes with social concern on issues that you see in front of your eyes in the society that you’re a part of and with the aspiration of emancipating marginalised, vulnerable groups and subaltern groups.

Matt: That’s all we have time for in today’s episode. Join us in Part 3 where we’ll look at the underground world of China’s unofficial poetry journals, questions of censorship, and the work of another Chinese migrant worker poet, Mu Cao, whose work asks questions about who gets to be included within the field of working-class literature – and who doesn’t.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.

Our theme tune is ‘A Young Man from the Village’ by the New Labour Art Troupe, based in the Migrant Worker Home on the outskirts of Beijing. Thanks to them for letting us use it. You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed the episode, and thanks for listening.

Part 3

Jack: Welcome back to the final episode of our three-part series on migrant worker poetry in China. If you haven’t listened to the other two episodes yet, I suggest you go back and listen to those first.

[intro music]

Anyway, with all that being said, I’ll now hand over to Jack.

Jack: In the previous two episodes, we’ve talked about the harsh social conditions that Chinese migrant worker poetry comes out of. We also discussed the important role poetry plays in Chinese society. In this episode we’ll look at issues around censorship and unofficial publications, as well as how the diversity of the working class comes out in the diversity of working-class writing and so asks questions about who gets included within the term ‘working class’ itself.

We’re joined again by Maghiel van Crevel, Professor of Chinese Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and an expert on migrant worker poetry in China. Maghiel spoke to us about working-class poetry in China – what it is, who writes it, and who it’s for – and how it developed across the last century, a development which is inextricably linked with the country’s communist movement .

Maghiel van Crevel: Another way to look at this culturally specifically would be the genealogy of working-class writing in modern China and then you’re really talking about the 20^th and 21^st centuries. In very broad strokes, I could probably carve that up into three periods. One period the specialists would call the Republican period which is, roughly, the first half of the 20^th century and culminating in the civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists – and I’m going to need to sweepingly generalise here a little – it was by and large intellectuals who produced working-class writing which means that we’re talking about writing about the working classes by people who don’t necessarily speak from first-hand experience. There’s an interesting debate about defining working-class literature not just in China, obviously. Is this about the first-hand experience of the author or is it about something else? Is it okay for you to not have lived that life but to write about it?

The second period would then be the high-socialist period where the state actually massively gets behind cultural production from the proletariat for the proletariat, more specifically for the workers, peasants and soldiers. That was the target audience. Now there, you have a very ambivalent situation because you have what I call a dignified political subject, the worker, so to speak; the vision of the worker. You have literature that is of this worker, for this worker and perhaps by this worker but it becomes unclear who actually did the writing, depending on where you sit and what kind of archival evidence you have access to and so on and so forth. You have a literature that is, let’s say, often very jubilant. It celebrates the motherland. It could be about the Korean War. It could be about land reform. It could be about socialist reeducation. It could be about the new oil rigs in the Far West, etcetera. In the third phase, and that’s what we’re talking about today, we move to what you could probably call the post-socialist period and what I said about a transformation of the proletariat into a precariat. That is another culturally specific framework to place this poetry as it were.

Jack: The literature of these different historical phases also ask questions of what working-class writing really means. While the second and third phases Maghiel mentions are both written by workers, in the case of the former, that poetry is an officially recognised part of the ruling party’s state-building project. By contrast, contemporary migrant worker poetry exists on the margins of what is sayable in Chinese society.

The possibilities open to poets were and are in many ways limited, forcing them to improvise, creating an exciting but risky underground movement of so-called ‘unofficial publications’, or DIY poetry, that are not within the confines of state censorship and Party themes. Maghiel is responsible for a unique collection of unofficial poetry journals available outside of China, at Leiden University. It is now largely digitised and available online, and you can check it out in the link in the show notes.

Maghiel van Crevel: I think the first thing we’d need to do is to reconsider what publication means. Perhaps if you ask somebody on the street, your neighbour or somebody who is not a specialist in this sort of thing and has not been exposed to it and you ask, ‘What does publication mean?’ They might say, ‘It’s like a book or a journal and it’s probably got the stamp of a publisher on it. It might have an ISBN number.’ It’s that sort of thing. That kind of definition is not going to get us anywhere if we talk about this kind of cultural production. Publication, to me, essentially is producing something like a literary text or music – you name it – whose audience you no longer control. If I write a poem and, let’s say, I live under a politically oppressive regime, my poem is politically sensitive and I’m worried about it, then I might show it to one of my best friends but I might not even give them a copy. I might read it to them once and then burn it. There are all of these stories of documents that this happened in China and it happened in other places and in China, for example, during the Cultural Revolution. So it’s about controlling your audience but the moment that it is out there and the audience is no longer something that you control and this stuff can travel, then as far as I’m concerned, we’re talking about publication.

You then enter into this phenomenon called unofficial publication and, as it happens perhaps not entirely coincidentally for historical reasons and contemporary reasons, there is a very strong tradition of unofficial poetry publishing in China. It’s a hugely impressive and fascinating DIY circuit. It’s really interesting because there are many, many shades of grey between the black and white extremes of the spectrum of state-sanctioned, state-supported and state-driven literature with orthodoxy on the one hand and, let’s say, truly underground, politically sensitive and dangerous texts on the other. There are all these shades of grey in between and I think this matters a great deal also to the migrant worker poetry and the Battler poetry that we’re talking about today. You see every possible permutation of, let’s say, print and online and official and unofficial. There are official publications in print and online. There are unofficial publications in print and online, like I said, on blogs, social media and so on and so forth. That means that in order to get a sense of how this poetry entered the public realm, in the sense of being published, you need to cast your net wide and you need to discard any illusions of control over actually getting the data that you need because you’re not working through the formal circuits of catalogues in libraries, bookstores or kept by the publishers themselves and so on.

Jack: For Maghiel, this almost functions as a form of working-class organising, in a country where independent trade unions are non-existent, and labour unrest is frequently repressed. This is particularly relevant for migrant workers, who are already legally marginalised, with little or no access to formal employment, associations or aid. Their decision to publish and organise unofficially is a way of claiming this marginal space for themselves, much like the Migrant Workers Home in Picun we encountered in the previous episode.

Maghiel van Crevel: As to organising, in the context of talking about working-class history and working-class literature which is one topic related to working-class history, again, we’d need to clarify what that word means. If you’re talking about labour organisation, there is very little of that in the bottom-up sense of the word or in the union sense of the word in contemporary China or the People’s Republic of China. That is basically out and the moment that initiatives like this raise their heads, the boot is going to come down and there’s basically going to be a repressive movement by the government because they simply won’t have it.

Jack: One example of the boot coming down on workers’ initiatives is the struggle which took place at the Shenzhen Jasic Technology factory in 2018. Part of an organising campaign originating among Maoist students, a group of workers at the Jasic factory started a petition for unionisation, which was signed by about 80 workers (approximately 10% of the workforce).

At this point, employers found out about the union drive and fired the ringleaders. When the sacked workers demonstrated outside the factory, they were attacked by police, resulting in more protests, this time outside the police station. Multiple waves of repression subsequently came down on the workers and their supporters, with dozens of activists arrested and Peking University disbanding their Marxist Studies Society. The crackdown also expanded to include labour activists with no connections at all to the struggle at Jasic, and in the wake of that struggle, the Chinese state became even more hostile towards labour activism.

Maghiel van Crevel: Organising can also mean something else and that might be interesting to what we’re talking about today because literature happens through institutions just like other cultural productions like universities, bookstores, libraries, learned societies, reading clubs and the list goes on. That kind of organising obviously has been happening in China around this poetry. That takes us straight back to what I said about shades of grey because there, very interestingly, we don’t get a picture that says the people that write migrant worker poetry are inherently and automatically going to be in opposition to the government line. So they’re going to have to be quiet, careful, do this in the margins, let nobody get wind of it and tread carefully with what they write about. It’s not as simple as that at all because, in fact, the government looking at this… and the government in its turn I guess is trying to place this in a genealogy of workers’ literature in the People’s Republic of China; a tradition that it is proud of and it is going to also support this writing. It’s not as if this is some sort of phenomenon that’s going to be stamped out at the first opportunity. That very much depends on the message that’s coming out of the poetry in question.

Jack: The relationship between these unofficial publications and poets, and local or state power is ambiguous and not clear cut. While China has a long and proud tradition of worker poetry that the state is keen to embrace, they are equally careful that expressions of dissent are carefully managed. This reality of censorship moulds the expression of migrant worker poets.

Maghiel van Crevel: The first thing that I’m made to think of as a China scholar is that the leading role of the Communist Party is enshrined in the constitution of the People’s Republic of China and in practice, that means that the party, very effectively – well, that’s a complicated discussion but going to say that it very effectively rules the place. You’ve very definitely got to hand it to them and that’s not meant to sound cynical about it but it is a large, difficult and complex place and the challenges for the government also, especially in regard to governance of the working population, are immense. To really simplify terribly so to speak, there’s a choice that they’ve been faced with ever since the reform and opening up era started four to five decades ago of keeping labour cheap in order to make their way into the global capitalist system at high speed, to become a part of that, ramp up productivity and to create jobs even if these were precarious jobs and even if they were 3D jobs on the one hand and the desire that I very definitely ascribe to the Chinese government to make life more livable, make life better and advance the economic standards of life for the working population. That is a big, bad dilemma to deal with but when it comes to organising and union work, the truth of it on the ground, as established by scholarship and by good investigative journalism, is that the grassroots voice is welcome as long as it doesn’t question policy and the dictates that flow from that and that land on these people from on high. Again, apologies for a very unoriginal metaphor but that is how it works. You need to toe the line.

Jack: By ‘3D jobs’, Maghiel is referring to the three D’s he spoke about in Part 1 that define the conditions of many migrant workers. That is: dirty, dangerous, and demeaning.

Maghiel van Crevel: Now, one of the things that the Chinese government is very good at, and this is not a sarcastic comment but a truly sincere comment, is treading that very fine line between allowing people to vent frustration, discuss their situation, reflect on it and to reflect on other possible futures on the one hand and a lot of this is happening on social media. Prior to social media, it was happening in other places and continues to do so with all kinds of in-person settings as well, of course. It’s the fine line between allowing people to vent on the one hand and allowing them to actually organise, institutionalise networks, build a budget, develop leverage in economic terms and develop, for example, effective mechanisms of going on strike. If you look at the records that are kept by the Chinese government and are actually in the public domain, and often cited in foreign media and scholarship as well, on labour unrest in China. We’re talking about tens of thousands, if not more and I might have this number wrong but it’s a very high number of so-called ‘incidents’ per year and these are documented. This is people barricading a police station because of a local situation surrounding pollution or other issues. So it’s not as if there is no labour unrest but the moment that this comes close to seriously organised action, that is when the state steps in.

Jack: Migrant worker poetry is therefore an important grassroots voice depicting the lives of precariously employed Chinese migrant workers. But what sometimes gets lost when thinking about them like this is that they’re not just important reports about the lives of real people; they’re also poems that need to be read as works of art and doing so forces the reader to ask why and how we read about the working-class experience.

Maghiel van Crevel: As soon as we start talking about, for example, working-class writing but then also a bit more broadly, we talk about subaltern writing or subaltern cultural production… subalternity can be a working-class background or working-class conditions. It can also be about being a woman. It can mean being gay. It can mean having the wrong ethnicity in the place that you’re at or one that is not appreciated and discriminated against. So you get the ‘prefixed literature’. You get the literature that is called workers’ literature. You get the literature that is called women’s literature, aboriginal literature, prisoners’ literature, queer literature and so on. The question then bounces right back at you and it can come from various quarters. It can come from leftfield or from where you expected it that says, ‘Is this real literature?’ or ‘Do we need to prefix it in order to justify it? Are we only going to read this because it’s about workers, by workers or for workers whenever we take an interest in the working class? Are we only going to read it because we feel it’s important that women’s emancipation happens and, therefore, we’re going to read this stuff or are we going to read it because it is that particular thing that humans do?’ They speak in various voices and they use this very particular voice that we call literary and there’s something about this that does something to us and sometimes, we want to dance to it or it makes us cry or laugh. I don’t think that debate is going to go away. I don’t think that, for example, migrant worker poetry or working-class literature at large, never mind the point about the question of class formation are going to fall on either side of the fence anytime soon. I think it needs sometimes a fairly aggressive, ongoing conversation of saying, ‘Can we just dislodge ourselves?’ It really matters who this ‘we’ is. Who are we referring to? Am I referring to my academic environment? Am I talking about a community that I’m somehow a part of but also feel like I’ve been flown into as in the Chinese poetry scene where I’ve been around for years and decades and people know me but I’m a stranger and then leave again? I’m the insider/outsider thing that ethnographers like to talk about. So who is the ‘we’ that we’re talking about?

Jack: Some of these issues around prefixes and insider/outsider status can be seen in the work of Mu Cao, a pen name meaning ‘grass on the grave’, one of China’s foremost LGBTQ poets.

Maghiel van Crevel: I’ve been in touch with Mu Cao since 2016 and he wrote to me at one point when I was doing fieldwork and I was visible on social media in China. I’d known his work but I’d never met him in person and one day, he dropped me an email. It was actually fairly indignant or it became indignant as we proceeded to have this exchange. The gist of it was, ‘So you think you’re doing research on Battler poetry and migrant worker poetry but you haven’t really looked at my stuff and I’m a migrant-worker poet.’ Everybody calls me something else and in everybody else’s defence, I should note here that Mu Cao had a website in the colours of the rainbow flag for a number of years, so you get pigeonholed. It happens. His point is really valid. Around the year 2000 when this stuff was really still beginning to happen, he actually has poetry in those unofficial journals that have titles like What It’s Like to be a Battler or a migrant worker or precarious worker – this dagong, this Chinese word that we’ve been circling for a while. So he should get this recognition if it was up to me.

Jack: Despite being a migrant worker who writes poetry about the migrant worker experience, Mu Cao is rarely considered a migrant worker poet. Rather, it is his sexuality that takes precedence in how people define his work. Mu Cao demonstrates how some groups come to be left out, how people think about who the working class is, despite the fact that his experience of his sexuality is inseparable from his experience of his class.

Maghiel van Crevel: Mu Cao was born in the 1970s in Henan which is one of the provinces that supply a large proportion of the migrant workers in contemporary China. He went out to work as his sisters did and had a fairly shocking story before then of his life at school. It was a very repressive school system where he ended up having a conflict with a teacher. Now that’s kind of a big thing certainly in a rural educational environment in China. It was actually hard for me to imagine that a pupil could have a conflict with a teacher which may have been naïve on my part but what I’ve read about and also what I’ve heard from him explains this idea that it doesn’t really happen because education is run very tightly in a rural context like that. It’s not as if you have any right to even speak up but apparently, he did. So there was this conflict with a teacher and it was a long-running conflict. His parents got involved and asked him to apologise and the school asked him to apologise but he refused to apologise, so he was kicked out. That was the beginning of the working life. This was when he was about 15. He came also from a broken home of substance abuse, violence and other things. He started building a life of his own as a migrant worker basically or as a precarious worker at the very, very, very bottom of the food chain. At one point, he got involved with somebody who said, ‘There’s this place I want to take you to.’ This person took him to a park in Zhengzhou, a provincial capital. I’m just simply quoting from an interview I did with Mu Cao during fieldwork. He said, ‘So he explained to me what homosexuality was and all of a sudden, everything made sense and I realised I was gay.’ He said this to me in a very matter-of-fact tone during the interview. I was wondering how this worked for him and how he could say this in this way in the light of his life story in which he had not known about this thing. The first introduction to it was a place where people went cruising and where you’d meet other homosexuals and all of this was on the sly because this was not meant to be out in the open, obviously.

So, by hook or by crook, and this is another example of this incredible urge to write, he began writing poetry and he’s another example of these people who know their way around the tradition and read widely in classical poetry but also in contemporary poetry. The internet came around and Mu Cao was clever and was quick to see that the internet was going to be the next big thing. He somehow taught himself to be a programmer, build websites, know that this thing was around and join chat rooms and all the various media that you have and had on the internet in China at the time and take poetry online. He was one of the earliest people who did this. There was a reason for this because he was gay and he was writing about being gay. He was doing this in very graphic terms and not only in graphic terms but also in very graphic terms, including same-sex scenes that left very little to the imagination in the good sense of the word. So he actually came out as gay in an unofficial poetry journal in the year 2000 which was run by one of his closest friends who is an ecological activist now. He came from the same place and he published his best friend’s poetry in this journal. It was so incredibly courageous to publish this stuff which is very outspokenly gay in subject matter, both for the editor of this unofficial journal because these things can be stamped out at the drop of a hat and for the author, of course, Mu Cao. Mu Cao is just eminently fearless and a very impressive person also in person to interview: gentle, direct, fearless. I think you’ve got the evidence. You don’t need my ethnographic fieldwork to know that he’s fearless if you look at what he’s done.

Jack: It’s important to note here the context that Mu Cao was writing his poetry in. Homosexuality was only decriminalised in China in 1997. It was only in 2001 (so one year after Mu Cao came out as gay in an unofficial poetry journal) that being gay was no longer considered a form of mental illness. And while in more recent years LGBTQ+ identities in cities like Beijing and Shanghai can be expressed through dedicated cultural spaces, they still remain taboo, as can be seen in the 2017 law on internet regulation where online content can be edited or even banned if it concerns what the state deems “abnormal sexual behaviours” such as same-sex relationships.

This context is essential to understanding the importance of Mu Cao’s work. Now we’ll hear his poem, ‘Working for the Boss in a Black Factory’, translated and read by Maghiel van Crevel. A ‘black factory’ in China refers to the type of factory that makes a complete mockery of any sort of labour rights or protections, providing informal or illegal employment usually isolated from the public, with workers often living on site.

Maghiel van Crevel:

‘Working For The Boss In A Black Factory’
This is a privately-owned Black factory
They will lock away your ID and your wages
The boss is eating well – big, fat baby face
He’s happy for eighteen out of twenty four hours
And for precisely that period of time
Sixty garment workers rush around with no breaks

The men are bent over like skinny dogs
The women’s eyes are red like a rabbit’s
They are overworked
They eat and sleep together
And the women’s buttocks often rub against the thighs of the men
But there’s no sex drive in any direction

It’s almost breakfast time
That good old thug of a cook jerks off like crazy
And shoots his load into the vat of porridge
This matter is duly observed by the boss
And for some reason, he suddenly gives him a raise

Maghiel van Crevel: I’d call this vintage Mu Cao poetry not just because he wrote it almost 25 years ago but also because what we see is a very recognisable mix of something that is ultimately political rage. There is rage there but ultimately, this is about social and political relations in society but also human compassion and a great deal of black humour that sort of threads its way throughout his oeuvre as well. It breaches taboos which is something that Mu Cao has done fairly fearlessly for the last couple of decades. They’re not just political taboos but there is other poetry where he is more explicitly political, for example, when he talks about the police force or he talks about politicians but also, in this case, a taboo on sexuality and on non-sanitised representations of sexuality. This is a taboo that has appeared in various shapes and guises throughout the history of the People’s Republic of China and is still there today. In that sense, I think it is a really important milestone text in the larger context of Battler poetry; also because it reminds us of the need to take an intersectional perspective and to not just, for example, classify this person as China’s first openly gay poet which is something he also is but one of China’s earliest Battler poets and one of the most explicit ones. In that sense, it reminds us that literature is just as complex and messy as life.

Jack: Mu Cao’s work, in exploring the daily experience of a gay, migrant worker is able to question more than one aspect of today’s China. Mu critiques China’s neoliberal economic reforms and the oppressive ‘black’ factories that have come with it by focusing on another part of the social margins: the sexualisation that defines the migrant worker experience. For the critic Bao Hongwei, Mu’s place as a migrant, working-class homosexual poet also questions the way homosexual identity has developed in China following its decriminalisation in 1997, providing an alternative view from the more visible middle-class homosexual circles in major cities to which he has no access.

Maghiel van Crevel: One of the best appropriations of political jargon ever has to be the term ‘comrade poetry’ or ‘comrade literature’ in China which means ‘gay literature’ or ‘queer literature’ by extension. One of the top scholars in this regard is Bao Hongwei at the University of Nottingham who has done more than anybody to bring cultural production and queerness to a wider public, not just including academics. He’s also one of the first who wrote on this poet, Mu Cao, in an academic fashion and stressed the importance of an intersectional perspective meaning we’re not going to look at this person from a single perspective and essentialise them down to their homosexuality or essentialise them down to their migrant workerhood or their poverty or their leading role as an internet poet. I mean that’s a perspective I could work with. I could write on internet poetry and make Mu Cao a pioneer and people have probably done this. So this intersectional perspective is very interesting and it takes us to a poethood that is full of sarcasm and humour. The fearlessness that I talked about just now is visible among other things in this biting sarcasm about local government officials and what they do when nobody is looking (take a wild guess). It is brilliant. He has a poem about ‘Uncle Policeman’. You can say this sort of thing in Chinese much in the same way you could do this in English in Dutch for that matter There’s this avuncular feeling that this is going to be this protective person like the wonderful policeman who is going to make sure that we’re all going to be safe but who arrests somebody and this somebody is actually the protagonist of the poem. As it turns out, Uncle Policeman arrests him because he’s stolen a bicycle or some sort of thing and takes him home, grooms him and makes love to him. This is all very spectacular and he says, ‘The mirrors on the wall of the apartment came crashing down,’ and this was the extent of their lovemaking, etcetera, and ‘Uncle Policeman was in high heaven and so was our little culprit,’ and words like that. It’s sarcasm from start to finish and it brings in all of this stuff of political power relations brought down to the level of the power of a policeman on the street in an authoritarian society but also queerness, homosexuality and the rest of it. It’s incredibly rich.

Jack: That marks the end of our third episode on China’s Migrant Worker Poets. We hope that these episodes have given a few glimpses into the lives and experiences of people all too often hidden from sight not only in literature and art, but more generally, despite their place at the centre of global capitalism. The likes of Zheng Xiaoqiong, Xu Lizhi, Wu Xia, Xiao Hai and Mu Cao – among many, many others – take us back to the original meaning of ‘poetry’: to make. These workers of so many different walks of life are poets whether it’s on the assembly line or putting pen to paper. Please read and share their poetry: you can find all the poets and poetry we have spoken about in the show notes and in the online transcript.

Matt: That’s it for our series on migrant worker poetry in China. Our supporters on Patreon also have access to a bonus episode where we go into more detail about some of the topics we discuss in the main episodes, like the relationship between migrant worker poetry and the Chinese state, the New Labour Art Troupe (whose music we’re using for these episodes), and the international reception of Chinese migrant worker poets like Zheng Xiaoqiong and Xu Lizhi. That bonus episode is available now, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon. That bonus episode will be available soon, exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

Thanks also to our patreon supporters for making this podcast possible. Special thanks to Jamison D. Saltsman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopez Ojeda and Jeremy Cusimano.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that’s it for today. Hope you enjoyed these episodes, and thanks for listening.

If you value our work please take a second to support Working Class History on Patreon!

WCL 7-9: Chinese migrant worker poetry

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WCL7: Chinese migrant worker poetry, part 1 – Working Class History

WCL8: Chinese migrant worker poetry, part 2 – Working Class History

WCL9: Chinese migrant worker poetry, part 3 – Working Class History

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