Meet China’s postmen poets Working-class literature is deeply subversive

“A screw falls to the ground,” wrote Chinese migrant factory worker and poet Xu Lizhi. “In this dark night of overtime / Plunging vertically, lightly clinking / It won’t attract anyone’s attention / Just like last time.”

In 2014, this quiet 24 year old from rural Guangdong jumped from the 17th floor of a mall in Shenzhen, just across the road from his favorite bookshop. His death reverberated across China, drawing attention to his beautiful and disarming poetry, as well as to the despair of millions of factory laborers across the nation. By evoking images of spare parts, discarded screws and lumps of iron, Xu used China’s most revered classical art form to articulate the degrading experience of modernity.

A few years later, an essay by live-in nanny Fan Yusu also became a surprise literary sensation. “My life,” she began, “is a book that is unbearable to read.” While Fan cared for wealthier people’s children in Beijing, she mourned her “left behind” children in “motherless villages”. She worried that they, too, could “become screws in the world factory and terracotta soldiers on the assembly line”.

Neither Xu nor Fan set out to write political tracts. Their verse and prose were coping mechanisms, efforts of profound humility and humanity, and that’s what made them so heartbreaking. These so-called “bottom-rung”, or diceng, writers forced people at every level of Chinese society to confront the fate of those who had been forsaken during the years of economic uplift, which saw millions of people move from the countryside to the cities in search of factory jobs.

At the time, Marxists and those on the New Left saw migrants as poignant symbols of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) discordant messaging: socialist ideology foregrounded ordinary workers, while free-market economics required their cheap labor and exploitation. Living on the outskirts of new towns and cities without official residence permits (hukou) or access to any form of social security, China’s estimated 274 million rural-to-urban migrants have lost their ideological status. They have gone from being celebrated by the regime as “worker peasants” to the pejoratively labeled “floating population”, “vagrants” or “I-slaves”. These city workers have effectively become illegal migrants in their own country and, unwittingly, central protagonists in China’s contemporary identity crisis. From such despair, a powerful new literary movement has sprung.

China has long had an established literary genre of “bottom-rung” fiction, rooted in a belief that literature should “flip minds” and awaken people to the suffering of others. But now, the confluence of industrialization with widespread internet access in China has given rise to perhaps the largest working-class literature movement in history. These writers are telling their stories on their phones, in literary forums or in self-published worker magazines — whether or not the Party approves of them as “pure” literature.

The latest of these writers to capture China’s imagination is gig worker Hu Anyan, whose memoir I Deliver Parcels in Beijing will be published in English later this month, two years after it went viral in China. At the time of writing, Hu had already worked 19 jobs since leaving school, including as a waiter, bike seller, popsicle wholesaler and delivery driver. As a delivery driver, Hu suffered daily humiliations. He was blamed for failing to keep fresh a notoriously smelly durian fruit, when no one was at home to receive it; penalized for late deliveries even if a customer gave the wrong address; and refused entry to malls because of his garish, low-class uniform.

However, his artistic spirit sustained him. A few years before, Hu’s eyes had been opened to the world of literature when he worked as an unpaid drawing apprentice with a comic book publisher. He and a bunch of fellow anime enthusiasts listened to punk, talked up rebellion and individualism, and read Kafka. “From then on,” he writes, “both work and writing became ways for me to build my spirit.” The group committed to writing and reading “wild works” — edgy underground comics and literature that couldn’t be published anywhere except on subversive online forums — and to rejecting any work that resembled “tamed livestock that had long lost its animal nature”. In an age of intense pragmatism and material ambition, Hu instead devoted himself to the humanities.

In his book, Hu argues that the only way to maintain one’s individuality and sanity in the age of Big Data is to remember what it is that makes us human, and to resist the algorithm at all costs. “What I learned was that so long as I didn’t care about being efficient, if I forgot about my return on investment, then every customer was easy to get along with,” writes Hu, with an almost child-like innocence.

Hu’s memoir has sold more than two million copies in China, and a TV adaptation is already in the works. Its popularity signifies a deep philosophical shift in China, and reflects a widespread feeling that the China Dream is over. Whereas white-collar workers once read factory-worker writers like Xu Lizhi and Fan Yusu with a degree of disconnected sympathy, Hu’s experience of gig work resonated with them. Seeing themselves as products of the “gaokao factory” (China’s incredibly stressful university entrance exams), and competitors in an immensely oversaturated job market, graduates have started to re-brand themselves as “IT peasants”. There’s increasingly a sense of communality with those migrant workers who have felt this despair all along.

For “bottom-rung” workers, the myth of social mobility died long before China’s slowing economy started to worry those higher up the ladder. But in its place, a devotion to the humanities has blossomed. While the majority of lower-rung authors write for no other reason than to process menial work into something meaningful, they have created a growing folk tradition of life outside the system. Migrant dorms and communes are places where artists, vloggers, musicians and writers nurture a freewheeling, troubadour spirit. Picun village on the outskirts of Beijing, which was home to thousands of migrants before it was demolished in 2023, was famous for its New Workers Art Troupe and the Picun Literature Group, in which workers hosted pop-up exhibitions, gigs, plays and poetry readings. More recently, artist Li Liao exhibited his scooter and screenshots from his Meituan “super app” at a gallery in Shenzhen, rural migrant Wang Haijia was dubbed “the courier poet” for his widely shared poem “People in a Hurry”, and 23-year-old Song Yucai become an online sensation for singing on the streets of Chengdu after grueling days out on his bike.

Many white-collar workers are following their lead, turning back to the humanities, and even returning to the countryside to work the land. Having been warned against studying non-vocational subjects by anxious parents and strident educational influencers, the young have decided they no longer want earning potential to shape their decisions. Interest is growing in rural reconstruction movements such as the Bishan project — a rural commune committed to bringing modern ideas and culture back to traditional village life that was shut down by the local government in 2016. And people continue to intentionally set up libraries and artistic communities away from cities. The countryside is once again becoming a place of the imagination.

Rattled by the prospect of graduates turning into a bunch of work-shy hippies, Xi Jinping announced in 2021 that it was necessary to stop what he called this trend of “involution” and “laying down”. One way to do this was to “disrobe”. In a public ticking-off of disillusioned university graduates, state broadcaster CCTV suggested they consider “taking off the long gown”. This is a reference to a story by one of China’s most revered writers, Lu Xun, in which failed scholar Kong Yiji insists on wearing the “long gown”, the sartorial symbol of wealth and education, in contrast to the “short jackets” worn by the poor and uneducated. The moral of the story is that status is a trap and those who cling to it are obtuse and conceited. By continuing to ally itself with Lu Xun, a writer beloved by Mao, the CCP is trying to shift the focus away from its own economic responsibilities towards China’s workforce to the moral responsibilities of the individual.

One proponent of disrobing is Ding Yuanzhao, a graduate of Oxford as well as China’s two most prestigious universities, Tsinghua and Peking, who this year was forced to sign up as a delivery driver when he couldn’t find a suitable job. It offered him a stable income, he told the Oxford Mail cheerfully, and it enabled him to “make a contribution to society”. He will not be the last scholar destined for a wardrobe change.

In her science fiction story Folding Beijing, Chinese novelist Hao Jingfang imagined a future in which the different classes of society were physically separated into three spaces, and that traveling between them was a criminal offense. Now it seems possible that white-collar and blue-collar workers are folding into one. Automation, algorithms and AI pose existential threats to everyone’s role in society; all workers will end up competing for similar jobs. In such a world, literature offers an opportunity to live beyond the rat race.

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