On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China 0231212143, 9780231212144

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Preface: Trial by Fire
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Grasping the Precarious
1. The Delegators
2. The Ragpickers
3. The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists
4. The Cliffhangers
5. The Microcelebrities
Conclusion: Viral Precarity
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

ON TH

E

E DG E

Feelin g

P re c a rious in C h ina

MARG A RET HILLE NBRA ND

ON T HE E D G E

On the Edge FEELING PRECARIOUS IN CHINA

Margaret Hillenbrand

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press wishes to express its appreciation for assistance given by the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange and Council for Cultural Affairs in the publication of this book.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York  Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2023 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from the Library of Congress LCCN 2023003860 ISBN 978-0-231-21214-4 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-231-21215-1 (paper) ISBN 978-0-231-55923-2 (electronic) Printed in the United States of America Cover design: Chang Jae Lee Cover image: © Li Wei, 29层自由度, “29 levels of freedom,” 2003, Beijing, 150 × 150 cm. www.liweiart.com

For Sam, Max, and Alex

Contents

Preface: Trial by Fire  ix Acknowledgments xxi Introduction: Grasping the Precarious  1 i   The Delegators  54 i i   The Ragpickers  94 i i i   The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists  129 iv   The Cliffhangers  167 v   The Microcelebrities  202 Conclusion: Viral Precarity  247 Notes 267 References 325 Index 361

[ vii ]

Preface Trial by Fire

What greater sorrow than being forced to leave behind my native earth? —E URI PI D E S, EL ECTRA

F

ire is a routine peril in the migrant settlements that fringe the outskirts of Beijing. These perimeter places are tightly packed with people who dwell in cramped, sometimes multiuse spaces alongside chemicals and machines; serviced by outdated, overloaded electric wiring and with communal cookers in the corridor. Once ablaze, a fire can rip explosively through these shanties, leaving scant time or space for refuge. Yet fire itself is not necessarily the cruelest threat posed by conflagration to those who live in China’s urban twilight zones, as residents of the Daxing District 大兴区 on the outskirts of Beijing learned to their cost in the winter of 2017. On the evening of November 18, a blaze broke out in the coldstorage basement of a two-story building in Daxing’s Xinjian 新建 urban village, located just outside the capital’s Sixth Ring Road. At least nineteen people, including eight children, died in the flames.1 Yet in the days that followed, locals had little chance to mourn. Before the gutted building was even fully soused, the local authorities had issued a comprehensive eviction order for Xinjian. Using fire safety as its rationale, the city government essentially condemned the entire settlement.2 Residents, perhaps as many as 250,000 of them,3 were forced to evacuate their homes; workshops and small businesses were shuttered; stock spilled out onto the sidewalk; chaos reigned on the subzero streets (figure 0.1). Bulldozers rolled in and flattened the makeshift structures in which, only days earlier, a dense ecology of people had lived and moved and had their being. Desolate photographs [ ix ]

Figure 0.1 The posteviction streetscape in Xinjian. Source: Reproduced with permission from Shutterstock.

of the freezing posteviction streetscape showed shattered lives and numbed faces, abandoned toys, and pedicabs piled high with hastily packed possessions. For some of these migrants, even a return to their rural roots was impossible, since large-scale land dispossession in the countryside since the 1990s has steadily unraveled that traditional safety net.4 In one sense, the numbed faces and abandoned toys suggest that the Daxing fire and evictions offer an object lesson in what Naomi Klein has called “disaster capitalism”5—although “disaster capitalism with Chinese characteristics” might be a more apt term given the state’s still-stated commitment to socialism. According to this “shock doctrine,” traumatic events, either natural or man-made, crack open exploitable portals of opportunity through which governments can railroad—bulldoze—radical socioeconomic change that their shell-shocked subjects, still reeling from catastrophe, are ill-equipped to fend off. As Klein puts it, “It is in these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted, that these artists of the real plunge in their hands and begin their work of remaking the world.”6 The district of Daxing had long suffered under what Loïc Wacquant calls “a blemish of place.”7 It warehouses migrants of varied skill sets whose services [ x ]  P reface

China’s capital city needs but whose living, breathing personhood it often prefers not to encounter at close quarters.8 I say “needs,” but “needed” might be the more accurate form of the verb since plans to reduce Beijing’s swelling migrant population were already afoot well before the fire9—a point driven home by the fact that no relocation options were apparently offered to the dispossessed after the order to leave.10 Furthermore, if social cleansing formed one part of the eviction agenda, the lucrative possibilities of land requisition and reuse predictably constituted the other. In short, a strong stench of disaster capitalism lingers amid the ashes of the Daxing blaze. Yet Klein’s study of inventive state pillaging includes a quotation from the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano that is perhaps even more pertinent to the case at hand. Galeano asks, “How can this inequality be maintained if not through jolts of electric shock?”11 In citing Galeano, Klein is referring explicitly to the links between torture and predatory neoliberalist policies, but this connection between opportunism and ruin can be extrapolated more broadly. As a ramshackle settlement that abuts the sleek metropolis, a peri-urban site that ministers for a while to the city’s wants but is sealed off from it by a cordon sanitaire, Daxing emblematizes inequality and exclusion. But it did so long before the fire and evictions in November 2017. Like the many other so-called urban villages that have sprung up in semilegal ways on the outer rims of China’s big cities, its status as a site of stigma was already well-established.12 These “island-like slums”13 form notorious archipelagos of disenfranchisement. Their denizens usually lack urban household registration (hukou 户口) and are thus denied access to public services such as local schools, public housing, and health care; they work jobs without contracts in workplaces without security; for a time, the government actually dubbed them the “low-end population” (diduan renkou 低端人口) in policy documents aimed at demographic control.14 As such, they have long been counted among contemporary China’s most precarious people. What kind of change then—what electric jolt—might the evictions mark? Put another way, what does it mean to be officially banished from a place of already de facto exile? When I began this book, I intended it to be a study of the relationship between precarity and cultural practice in China. My aim was to explore precarious life and labor in China through the prism of the vibrant, iconoclastic cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated for some years now—from garbage art to protest performance over wage arrears to poetry from the factory floor. I was struck by how precarity, so copiously and P reface  [ xi ]

contentiously theorized elsewhere, had only recently begun to enter the conceptual lexicon of China researchers, both inside and outside the country, except in the work of a relatively small number of dedicated labor scholars. Ultimately, I hoped to situate Chinese experience more centrally within our global understanding of precarity by exploring how frayed sureties are shaping multiple practices of culture in one of the world’s most populous nations. This project from its outset, then, was implicitly premised on the notion that Chinese experience, surveyed through a cultural studies lens, would deepen and sharpen the conceptual outlines of precarity as a universal key word of our times. Whether we understand precarity as a condition that arises essentially from labor practices—even as it fans centrifugally outward from work to envelop life more ineluctably—or as an ontological state that besets every person precisely because we are human and thus vulnerable to plague and pain, a study of China-as-precarious, I imagined, would add richer shading and nuance to these reasonably fixed parameters of debate. The Daxing fire and its subsequent evictions, however, cast matters in a different light. They made me wonder instead about the intensifying relationship between precarity and prolix forms of expulsion. Daxing District was a preeminent site of precarity well before the flames and the bulldozers engulfed it. Thereafter, it became something closer to a non-place, which it remains to this day; its former residents, meanwhile, can equally no longer be called by that name because their dwelling places have been demolished. Like the non-place they once inhabited, they were cast by the evictions into a limbo that impinged on their very right to existence. Their fate, as nomads of toil denied a berth in the city and sometimes even barred from return to the countryside, invokes questions about the limits of inequality and exclusion as meaningful descriptors of contemporary social plight. These limits have prompted Saskia Sassen to argue that we are now witnessing “the emergence of new logics of expulsion” in the global political economy.15 This new momentum “takes us beyond the more familiar idea of growing inequality as a way of capturing the pathologies of today’s global capitalism.”16 It recognizes that the language we use to describe immiseration and unbelonging on a systematic scale is too tepid. Crucially, Sassen defines expulsion in broad and open ways that extend from states of liminality to all-out exile: I use the term “expelled” to describe a diversity of conditions. They include the growing numbers of the abjectly poor, of the displaced in [ xii ]  P reface

poor countries who are warehoused in formal and informal refugee camps, of the minoritized and persecuted in rich countries who are warehoused in prisons, of workers whose bodies are destroyed on the job and rendered useless at far too young an age, of able-bodied surplus populations warehoused in ghettoes and slums.17 Expanding the semantic reach of expulsion in this way has strong political potential, but it also elides a terminological, and again political, anomaly at the heart of the meaning of exile. To expel is to cast out: that prefix “ex” cannot sit idle if the term’s central meaning is to hold. This point can arguably be dismissed as a linguistic quibble if we simply counter that expulsion is never conceived in spatial terms alone, that casting out always encompasses modes of economic, social, legal, and affective excommunication too.Yet in an age in which national sovereignty norms make cross-border banishment almost impossible, the fact remains that those who are purged from the polis often have no next place to go. They must stick within the bounded territoriality of the nation-state, and often much closer to hand as land dispossession in rural areas across the globe continues apace. This presence-inabsence—this internal exile, by any other name—is a core precondition for my investigation here. The inability of contemporary states to export their surplus population to penal colonies, to cast it beyond a social pale from which there is no feasible return, or to discharge it into the sea like plastic waste means not only that civic death has to morph into new forms (the expanded expulsion of which Sassen speaks) but also that these mutations remain stubbornly visible within the normative social weal. As Matthew Gibney notes, banishment is supposed to be a ritualistically visual process: it “removes the offender from public view and thus decreases the likelihood of a spiral of revenge and retaliation that would upset the civil peace from those who have been harmed by unlawful acts.”18 When banishment cannot be executed in this visual way—which is to say, when society’s outcasts stay within its direct line of sight—the ritual of punitive purging is stymied in ways that do indeed “upset the civil peace.” This disharmony becomes all the more jarring when governments engage in flexi-expulsion: the process whereby people are exiled from the polis until they become useful again, suspended meanwhile in states of civic half-life. To be more precise, widespread internal exile in contemporary China via dispossession, disenfranchisement, and dislocation has created an aberrant socio-legal condition. I call this state of being zombie citizenship, and it P reface  [ xiii ]

is a zone in which a significant minority of the nation’s huge population currently languishes. This term, with its explicit invocation of the living dead, is an attempt to conceptualize both the forms of civic nonpersonhood mentioned previously and—just as pertinently—their impact on those who, for now at least, are spared such a fate. The crucial backdrop to this notion of zombie citizenship is Article 1 of the Chinese constitution, which states: “The People’s Republic of China is a socialist state under the people’s democratic dictatorship led by the working class and based on the alliance of workers and peasants.”19 Symbolically enshrined at the vanguard of national life, and nominally protected by a panoply of other legal provisions, Chinese workers technically enjoy full, even special, personhood under the law. Yet many millions actually experience violent cognitive and material dissonance as both the national constitution and the law of the land are stripped of substance and made skeletal, if not spectral, in lives that are eked out in sliding states of expulsion and denuded of substantive safeguards.This, in part, is why their citizenship can be called “zombie.” It is the corroded carcass of the more fully fleshed civic identity accorded to those who belong in the polis by birthright. To an extent, the notion of the zombie citizen shares epistemological space with Susan Greenhalgh’s notion of “stratified citizenship,” with what Jieh-min Wu calls “differential citizenship,” and with Samantha A. Vortherms’s concept of “multilevel citizenship.”20 More generally, civic unbelonging in contemporary China can also be viewed usefully through the lens of denizenship, another spectrum-based category that denotes “partial insiders with limited rights”21—those who “dwell in the territory of the nation-state without formal citizenship status.”22 All are valuable terms, not least because they explicitly register the vital point that belonging and expulsion do not exist as simple in-out binary states but rather occupy a fluid continuum. As definitions, they are also less culturally loaded and inflammatory than “zombie.” Beings without speech, without agency, without free will, without rational thought, resurrected from the dead but devoid of human qualities—zombies epitomize the state of existing in mindless thrall to the dark power of others. In this sense alone, the term is surely an unacceptable usage for China’s already chronically disadvantaged people; it adds gross insult to grave injury. Furthermore, the usage becomes still more fraught at a time when foreign media representations so often harness the trope of brainwashing to describe the mental state of Chinese people in offensively blanket ways. For these twin reasons, I should make it clear from the outset [ xiv ]  P reface

that I do not deploy the term “zombie” as a descriptor of people. Instead, I apply it, in the formulation of zombie citizenship, as a deliberately emotive definition of the states of civic abjection into which some people are thrust in our current precarious epoch. It is an enforced zone of existence rather than an embodied identity. Indeed, I settled on the term zombie citizenship because it captures the sense in which many working people in China, like the original zombies of Haitian folklore, are locked in forms of quasi–slave labor and cut adrift from the law, “existing only for the benefit of others and pushed to almost morbid exhaustion.”23 In an obvious sense, this makes their state fearsome because they have every right to seek revenge for the maltreatment they suffer: their insurrection, even if it never comes, always hovers at the edge of the horizon. Just as important, the notion of zombie citizenship is crucial to my analysis here because the zone of the living dead captures in gruesome shape the paradox of banishment when there is no “pale.” It embodies the threat and strife that surge when segments of society are effectively rendered into surplus matter yet cannot be physically purged, either because there is no next place or because their labor might prove useful once more. And finally, the precincts of the undead—not cast beyond borders but always close at hand and harboring the threat of contagion—metaphorize the fear that anyone and everyone in a society that applies the shields and shelter of the law capriciously might find themselves cast into a similar realm of civic half-being. And precisely because this fear is sometimes more hallucinatory than rational, the notion of zombie citizenship is its apt vessel. I argue that this ambient mood of civic jeopardy shapes the contemporary experience of precarity at its very core—and that China is a peerless, standout case study for tracking its outworking in culture. This is not to dispute for a moment that precarious feeling in China is also indissolubly tied both to labor practices and to human vulnerability at the deepest ontological level. On the contrary, it is yoked painfully to both those things. Those exiled to zombie citizenship are by very definition tethered to contingent, casualized work, and their lack of protection from the law leaves them defenseless and exposed in ways that touch excruciatingly on what it means to have, or lack, what Judith Butler calls a “grievable life.”24 But if we are to gain hard purchase on what it means to feel precarious in China over the last couple of decades, it is also crucial to consider the affective impact on society at large of witnessing at close quarters the process whereby state policies have effectively carved out an underclass consigned P reface  [ xv ]

to zombie citizenship. To watch this process is to apprehend its menace. It is to wonder: Who is next? A growing body of scholarship on contemporary China has shown that a sense of trepidation—sometimes faint but difficult to dispel—trails the witching hours of even those who by certain measures should feel more privileged and secure but instead face an anxious mismatch between long-held expectations and their actual living or working conditions: university graduates, entry-level trainees, small-scale entrepreneurs, cultural creatives, IT employees, white-collar workers.25 This trepidation can be usefully conceptualized as a fear of the cliff edge: the slow slide or sudden tumble downward into states of penury, risk, and civic threat. And as it looms, the imminent fall exacts a socio-affective toll, breeding strife and friction between social classes. This besetting unease, and the conflict it stirs, is by no means exclusive to China, just as expulsion itself is a logic that runs rife across the planet. Yet Chinese experience can illuminate the condition of surety under siege in vivid, telling ways, and for a series of interlinked reasons. The vast size, and thus unmissable visibility, of China’s underclass; the dark memories, either firsthand or inherited, of the class violence that blazed during China’s still relatively recent socialist past; the strategic silencing of class as a category of political action even as a de facto caste system has steadily hardened, together with the sense of unease that such suppression of evident truths so often foments; the huge policy power wielded by the authoritarian Chinese state, a power, when it turns its hand to expulsion, that inevitably affects the most vulnerable the most absolutely; the long-term propagation of prejudicial discourses about “human quality,” and its supposed lack, which works to segregate China’s people into the civically deserving and the not; the emergence of a social credit system that proliferates the protocols for citizenship while remaining subject to potentially devastating algorithmic error; and the ever-tighter web of surveillance that monitors conduct and misconduct—this matrix of factors makes contemporary China an almost unparalleled site for the study of the cliff edge as a perniciously divisive structure of feeling. Here, once again, the Daxing fire and its aftermath are instructive. As several commentators have noted,26 the evictions caused real outrage across the social spectrum, sparking a petition submitted to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress,27 open letters with many signatories,28 WeChat posts, and social media furore.29 Eva Pils even argues that the case “marks a rare moment when advocates from different spheres of China’s segregated society came together to find a shared language of citizenship.”30 [ xvi ]  P reface

If so, it was heartfelt anxiety over the civic death that had been meted out to the Daxing residents that animated this exceptional solidarity, as the petition made clear. That document argued that government actions had violated five constitutional rights (wu xiang xianfa quanli 五项宪法权利) of Chinese citizens, including “land rights, individual or private economic rights, private property rights, the right to the inviolability of human dignity, and housing rights.”31 As Pils puts it, “in calling for (greater) respect and inclusion of the evicted Daxing residents, their fellow citizens seemed to be articulating a civic ideal denied not only to these evictees, but also to Chinese citizens more widely, as well as a shared anxiety about the precarity of their rights as Chinese citizens.”32 Significantly, this outrage and solidarity also took filmic form, in the shape of a rough-hewn documentary by the artist-activist Hua Yong 华涌, titled After the Great Fire (Dahuo zhi hou 大火之后, 2017), that tracked the horror of the evictions in real time. Since 2017, a scholarly consensus has begun to settle around the idea that the evictions, despite the violent dislocation they enacted, also fostered fledgling shoots of civic awareness, social conscience, and interclass fellowship even as the prevailing political winds in China grew harsher. This, moreover, is a burgeoning that is constitutively cultural at its core, whether we understand this in terms of the petition and the claims it staked within public culture or in terms of an aesthetic movement, as exemplified by Hua Yong’s documentary. In many ways, this argument about a culture of solidarity is beguiling. It’s also a rallying cry with parallels across the globe in the work of the many scholars, activists, and artists who see shared precarity as the banner under which the divided multitudes can come together. In this book, however, I suggest a counter case. My argument begins here with the Daxing evictions of 2017, but in subsequent chapters it journeys back across the last two decades to amass a freight of cultural evidence that unsettles the notion that fear and dread of zombie citizenship will naturally tend to alchemize into camaraderie. In the case of Daxing, claims of broad solidarity with the evicted have arguably been overstated. So far scholarly attention has focused on the vibrant support for the evictees that was articulated on social media, often ingeniously as anti-eviction activists sought to outwit the cyber censors. But vital as this solidarity was, it tells only part of a sometimes bleaker story. For example, responses posted on WeChat and Weibo news accounts of major national and municipal media outlets that covered the story also reveal startlingly strong and varied popular support for the evictions. At the kinder end of the spectrum, netizens argued that buildings in Daxing P reface  [ xvii ]

were unsafe and illegal and that demolishing them was the only way to prevent further loss of life.33 Others offered lavish praise to the municipal government for its strict enforcement of the law, while commiserating with officials for the tough job they do.34 Others again supported the evictions because Daxing residents were squatting against the law in a city already overrun with migrants who sully its image as China’s high-spec capital.35 Even harsher voices taunted, “Why don’t you just go home?” and “Lowend workers should just get out of Beijing.”36 All in all, out of 111 responses to twenty-one news articles, nearly 72 percent of posts and comments that I viewed on these mainstream news websites backed the Beijing municipal government’s decision to eject the fire-stricken residents of Daxing into a wintry November night. Of course, it’s more than reasonable to counterargue that these sites are precisely the kind of online spaces routinely targeted by China’s so-called 50 cent party, the virtual troops who pepper-spray cyber discourse with fake pro-state messaging. Indeed, a more extensive survey of 168 responses—this time scanning the comment sections of news articles posted on a broader range of sites, including Chinese major search engine Baidu 百度, as well as Guancha 观察, Epoch Times, Caixin 财新, and Sohu 搜狐—brings the picture closer to 50/50.37 Yet these numbers still throw significant shade on the rosy vision of surging multilateral solidarity. My aim is not to deny that the condition of zombie citizenship in China has the power to foster fellow feeling. Evidently, it can and does stir esprit de corps, and that sentiment holds intense, important value. But the focus on sincere support across class lines that has dominated analysis of the evictions—and plenty of scholarly work on other subaltern cultures in China—may be skewed disproportionately toward hopefulness. This bias, however well-intentioned, is epistemologically unhelpful; it forestalls a fuller analysis of how fear of the cliff edge can also eat away at our social sinews. In this book, I balance this rosiness with a different set of proofs, drawn from cultural practice, about the toll that state-sanctioned forms of expulsion can take on all its citizens. The case studies I present suggest that the ambient mood of jeopardy referred to earlier can also curdle into social poison as the specter of zombie citizenship begets strain and strife between social groups. China, its citizens are continually told, is a “harmonious society.” Indeed, the class struggle that wracked the Maoist years has been so thoroughly vanquished that even the very word “class” (jieji 阶级) has been rendered unsayable in what Lin Chun calls “a titanic act of symbolic violence on the part of the Chinese state.”38 Yet the conjunction of a society supposedly [ xviii ]  P reface

without class and a huge caste of de facto untouchables is an anomaly so stark that propaganda can at best only paper it over. Precarity, as I define it here, spawns dark feelings that do not conveniently dissipate amid state hype about social harmony, and culture is a core space in which such emotions break cover. The threat or reality of the cliff edge is now a significant force shaping contemporary culture in its raw materials, its personnel, and its practices. In the chapters that follow, I explore ethically dubious performance art, the aesthetics of waste, poetry from the factory floor, suicidal protest movements, and short video and livestreaming apps. All are cultural forms created in the crucible of Chinese precarity and its fraught and divisive affects. More than this, these modes of culture are novel or breakout in terms of genre, shape, and emphasis. As such, they reveal how cultural expressions morph under the threat of zombie citizenship and the social frictions it stirs. But these cultural practices never merely represent class tension. They do not simply reflect it in some supposedly freestanding mirror of art. Culture, I demonstrate throughout this book, is a key site where class strife is physically staged in China, as precarious feelings turn garbage dumps and construction sites into vital vectors of the contemporary moment in which art and life cannot be disaggregated from each other. Crucially, these practices are born not of isolatable class categories—urban middle-class, rural-city migrant, and so on. Rather, they emerge from the generative clash between competing interests in an era when the loud rhetoric of the China dream is shot through with sotto voce intimations about how some must suffer, or even be sacrificed, if that fantasy is to be made real. As Elizabeth Perry has noted, divide-and-rule has always served the Chinese Communist Party well—and citizens themselves, partitioned into “separate state-created categories,” are schooled “to accept these divisions as a normal part of the political order.”39 If society is indeed harmonious, this is a tense and fragile peace predicated on a highly prejudicial pecking order in which everyone is racing to avoid the bottom rung. In this context, the works I explore can be understood as fractious forms: cultural expressions that emerge from tense encounters between different class actors under the fear or fact of zombie citizenship. Unfolding as they do in the zone of intersubjectivity, these cultural works always harbor the potential for fellowship. But just as often, they are the means via which rivalry, exploitation, protest, and control are articulated, and through which class difference is directly or obliquely asserted.These practices are frequently P reface  [ xix ]

grimmer than many humanists would like cultural forms to be. But at the same time, they also testify acutely to culture’s role as a paramount space in which the political happens. And if culture can exercise this role so vividly, presumably at some point it might also exercise it more solidly for the good, as the latter is conventionally conceived.Yet perhaps such practices—despite or even because of their rebarbative character—should also be understood as vibrant expressions of agency among those who experience, or fear they will experience, a deadening of their capacity for will and action and subjecthood. At a time when the resourceful capacity of precarious people in China to manage their emotions is drawing scholarly attention, and when the notion of apathy-as-protest has gained ground,40 the fractious forms I examine in this book restore a sense of the unmanageable to precarity as a condition. They acknowledge that undisciplined feeling—antagonism of different kinds, in fact—is a legitimate response to the cliff edge as threat or reality. Dark feelings are creative, and never more so than when the right to civic belonging is at stake.

Acknowledgments

M

any people and institutions have helped, encouraged, and supported me in the writing of this book, and it is a pleasure to have the chance to thank them now. I owe a tremendous debt to the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust for awarding me two consecutive fellowships that allowed me to work on this book for three uninterrupted years. The opportunity to focus solely on research and writing during that time enabled me to finish a project that would otherwise have taken me many more years to bring to completion. The KS Fund at Oxford made it possible for me both to conduct fieldwork in China and to convene an ongoing seminar series on Chinese visual culture at my institution, which helped to shape the direction of this book. I am also very grateful indeed to the friends and colleagues who invited me to present parts of the book through lectures, workshops, and conferences, both online and in person. Carles Prado Fonts and Xavier Ortells Nicolai invited me to Barcelona to give two talks on the project at an important moment for me. Barbara Mittler, Lena Henningsen, Sun Peidong, and Damian Mandzunowski organized a wonderful lecture series during the pandemic, and I very much appreciated their invitation to take part in it. I also thank Lennart Riedel for acting as such an insightful discussant for that talk. Conferences and lecture series convened by Ying Qian, Debashree Mukherjee, Laliv Melamed, Pang Laikwan, and Pamela Hunt allowed me to sharpen my thinking on the project in key ways, as did a wonderful [ xxi ]

symposium on “Fragile Lives” held at Ca’Foscari, University of Venice in 2022. I also thank Dolores Martinez, David Alderson, Carlos Rojas, Bo Ærenlund Sørensen, Mai Corlin, Chris Lupke, Maki Fukuoka, Peter Gries, Shiqi Lin, and Mei Li Inouye for inviting me to give lectures or join panels at which I learned a great deal. Astute comments from Clare Harris, Wu Ka-ming, Peter Cave, and Yomi Braester after these talks have made their way into this book. I am hugely grateful to Gloria Liu for superbly professional and multi-skilled research assistance, particularly in the latter stages of this project, when her contributions were crucial. Chris Berry, Michel Hockx, Jie Li, and Carlos Rojas gave me exceptional support at key moments (Michel on more than one occasion), for which I will always be grateful. I thank Wang Yi, Pan Yiyan, and Fang Zhilan for valuable input, advice, and discussions. Fabrizio Massini and I swapped chapters, and I suspect I learned more from our subsequent discussions than he did. Nicolas Lin offered valuable bibliographic suggestions, and Chen Ziru helped me get hold of some vital books, as well as offering insights into my research. Matthew Johnson read and talked to me about my previous work in ways that I very much appreciated, both now and then. Chris Mittelstaedt has kindly helped me many times with technological matters. Carwyn Morris shared unpublished work with me, and many stimulating exchanges on the subject of precarity.The same is true of Harriet Evans, who has been a longterm friend and mentor to me. For their friendship, inspiration, and kindness during the writing of this book, I thank—in addition to the friends and colleagues already mentioned—Gordon Barrett, Angela Becher, Paul Bevan, Keru Cai, Chow Yiu Fai, Irena Hayter, Erin Huang, Heather Inwood, Paul Kendall, Jeroen de Kloet, Song Hwee Lim, Qian Liu, Jason McGrath, Dirk Meyer, Astrid Møller-Olsen, Chloe Starr, Shelagh Vainker, Nicolai Volland, Justin Winslett, Jiwei Xiao, and Fan Yang. My current and recent graduate students Billy Beswick, Aoife Cantrill, Chen Ziru, Kate Costello, Annabella Massey, Flair Donglai Shi, Wang Hao, Wu Xiaochu, Yeo Min-Hui, and Zhu Linqing have created a warm and exciting research atmosphere in our field at my institution, and I have learned so much from all of them.Warm thanks go to Rosanna Gosi for being such a kind friend and colleague over the years. I owe a special debt of gratitude to colleagues who engaged with this book in unusually constructive and supportive ways. Patricia Thornton read large chunks of the manuscript and commented on them with her usual insight, erudition, and generosity, saving me from several missteps. Maghiel van Crevel read the whole thing and offered truly transformative advice, [ xxii ]  A cknowledgments

encouragement, and inspiration, as well as unstinting practical help with everything from references to typos. Earlier versions of chapters 2 and 4 appeared in Prism:Theory and Modern Chinese Literature and Cultural Politics, respectively. I thank Duke University Press for permission to reuse that material. Thank you also to the anonymous readers at Columbia University Press, whose astute comments and suggestions on the book helped me to improve it. At the press, I have been very fortunate indeed to work with Christine Dunbar, whose expertise and efficiency have smoothed the way for this book, and with Christian Winting, whose patient advice has been invaluable. I am also very grateful to Ben Kolstad, for managing the project with such care, and to Kay Mikel for meticulous copyediting. As ever, my friends and family have supported me more than words can say. Thank you to my “big birthday” friends; to Ruthie and my parents— especially my father, who read every page; to my husband and best friend, Tom; and to my three sons, Sam, Max, and Alex, to whom this book is dedicated with much love.

A cknowledgments  [ xxiii ]

ON T HE E D G E

Introduction Grasping the Precarious

We live in a class society in which the discourse of class has almost disappeared. — WAN G HUI , “TWO K I ND S O F NE W PO OR A N D T HEIR FU T UR E”

I

n her 2016 novella, Folding Beijing (Beijing zhedie 北京折叠), Chinese sci-fi writer Hao Jingfang 郝景芳 conjures an ingenious idiom for zombie citizenship.1 The story reimagines China’s capital as a collapsible structure that “folds” every twenty-four hours, like concrete origami, so each of the city’s three segregated social classes can have their waking, working time while others slumber in pharmaceutical pods. The stinger is that these moments in the sun are divided in horribly inequitable ways. The ruling class—the five million residents of “first space”—can enjoy the earth for twenty-four hours, while the epsilons of “second space” and “third space,” with far vaster populations, have inversely proportional access to air, food, and remunerated work. Those from “first space” are coiffed and smooth-skinned in their driverless cars, whereas the third-spacers, such as the novella’s hero Lao Dao 老刀, are famished waste pickers whose jobs lie under imminent threat of automation. In an interview, Hao Jingfang told the New York Times that the novella is about the idea that “people live together but can’t see one another.” Her aim in writing, she said (perhaps tactically), was to make readers “realize that there are so many invisible people in their lives.”2 I would suggest the exact opposite reading of Hao’s text. This is not a literary work about unseeable others. Rather, it ponders the dilemma of their extreme and confounding visibility. The collapsible city Hao imagines in Folding Beijing is a brutal futurist solution to the contemporary conundrums of banishment: namely, where can states warehouse [1]

their surplus human population in an era of strictly patrolled national borders? How might governments “cold storage” their social dross until their hard labor is needed once again? Folding Beijing deals laterally with this impasse in ways that echo Saskia Sassen’s expanded definition of expulsion as the subterranean logic of our times. Since space cannot invisibilize those who are unwanted, either temporarily or forever, let us turn to time for a solution. For some years now there has been a looming recognition that precarity as an experience of the labor market involves a violent shrinking and stretching of the temporal margins. As Tsianos and Papadopoulos put it, “precarity means exploiting the continuum of everyday life, not simply the workforce . . . [it] is a form of exploitation which operates primarily on the level of time.”3 In real terms, this tends to refer to the short duration of a job, the exhausting length of its shifts, the last-minuteness of a zero-hours gig, and so on. But Hao Jingfang explodes these conventional parameters of time to make access to the sunlit hours the mechanism through which a kind of flexi-expulsion can be executed. Workers are summoned when they’re needed and banished again when they’re not; their physical presence blights the eyeline for not a moment longer than necessary. The immiserated in Folding Beijing are literally out of time, zombified in cocoons for long stretches of the day until their shift—in which they slave for others—rolls around and they are reanimated once more. Technically, time keeps turning on its linear axis, but in practice it has become as territorially spatialized as a gated community within a social system that acknowledges the use value of its underclass only on a part-time basis. I begin with Folding Beijing here because, like the Daxing fire discussed in the preface, it captures in tight microcosm—this time within the realm of storytelling—the nexus of concerns that shape this book. At the heart of this nexus is the de facto underclass, which has been legislated into existence in China since the 1990s, and this introductory chapter opens with both a definition of this vast cohort and a rationale for dubbing it an underclass. I then discuss how this underclass has been carved out, focusing on how state policies have not simply institutionalized zombie citizenship but executed this process in ways that almost appear crafted to induce cognitive dissonance among China’s migrant workers in particular—a group whose size, relative youth, and labor potential gives them heightened visual prominence. China’s migrants endure psychic disjuncture on multiple fronts: neither rural nor urban, both vital to growth and made superfluous to it, they are [ 2 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

told repeatedly that they lack “human quality” (suzhi 素质) even as superhuman demands are made on their stoicism, fortitude, and sacrificial labor power. This contradictory assault on subaltern personhood paves the way for practices of expulsion, in which long-familiar forms of inequality and exclusion cross over into more radical states of civic exile.With this in mind, I explore expulsion in contemporary China as a flexible and hydra-headed thing. It ranges from forced eviction to life-changing workplace injuries to the extraction of back-breaking labor without pay, but it is consistent in the way it deepens estrangement from the polis for those already condemned to lesser life. Small wonder, then, that China’s censors are nervy about the presence in popular culture of zombies—avatars of drudgery, social apartheid, and contagion—and have taken steps to exorcise the living dead from films and video games. Ultimately, zombie citizenship stirs disquiet because it emblematizes the riddle of indisposable waste. This is the paradoxical process whereby segments of society are rendered surplus yet remain within the body politic, either because it is no longer possible, as in olden times, to transport them overseas or across sovereign borders or, more commonly, because they retain on/off use value for the neoliberal authoritarian state despite their assigned status as social debris. Chinese society is already rife with many of the standard determinants of precarity. In this context, the growing number of social subjects—those cast into zombie citizenship—who remain acutely visible even as they are effectively excommunicated compels a deeper consideration of the relationship between feeling precarious and the fact or fear of expulsion. To reflect on this question is, on one level, to situate China more assertively within already-existing discourses on precarity, from which Chinese experiences have been perplexingly absent or at best underrepresented until quite recently. I consider why this lack has occurred, but I also argue that China and its experiences need to be understood not tangentially but as a central starting point for the conceptualization of precarity as a master term for the present. These experiences throw harsh light on the relationship between corroded certainties and civic exile. For a tight and specific set of reasons, they illuminate the pathway between precarity and expulsion in ways that have few direct global comparators. Above all, conditions in China offer a grim assemblage of insights into precarity as a sense, both intuited and grounded in the immediately observable world, that a life without access to core rights looms like a precipice I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 3 ]

not just for the few but potentially for the many. That feeling of menace is rooted in the vagaries of the law. From labor legislation that is among the strictest in the world but often does little to protect actual workers, to household registration reform that promises improved equality but makes mostly cosmetic changes on the ground, the law of the land can appear fatally fickle both to China’s underclass and to others who witness its surely strategic nonenforcement. This is not to suggest that the state is willfully indifferent or callous about the plight of China’s underclass. As I make clear, the picture is much more fluid and nuanced, and the reasons for the caprice of the law can be complex. Furthermore, the Chinese government is increasingly aware of the perils of unchecked inequality as recent leveling-up initiatives demonstrate. Yet the anxiety stirred by an ongoing sense of caprice is nonetheless a core constituent of the structure of feeling I probe in this book. This apprehension throws a shadow, I argue, that darkens the cast of social relations in China at a historical juncture in which class tension is already taboo. This shadow forms the backdrop to the surge in dark feelings the Daxing evictions unleashed alongside the heartwarming—and much betterdocumented—solidarity that has emerged. In this introduction, I acknowledge the vital role that NGOs, politically engaged researchers, public intellectuals, lawyers, students, and artist-activists have played, and continue to play, in bolstering commonality both across the class divide and within social cohorts. I also try to navigate a path through the minefield of what Sherry Ortner has called “dark anthropology”: academic work that looks so long and hard at “the harsh and brutal dimensions of human experience” that it can become almost rubbernecking in its scrutiny.4 Yet the fact remains that contemporary Chinese society poses a well-documented quandary, and the dark and divisive feelings I parse here may illuminate this in certain ways. Only a century ago, China was fomenting socialist revolution on a globally epic scale. As new-left thinker Wang Hui has argued, the “general societal mobilization” and vast sociopolitical change that the nation experienced across key decades of the twentieth century arose in no small part “at the boundaries between classes where they overlapped . . . it was the product of crossing the boundaries between classes.”5 Activists traversed caste lines to incite political action, and that crisscrossing movement fostered a solidarity that was often radically transformative. Today China is home to the largest underclass in human history, and it is physically concentrated in the cities of the eastern seaboard and thus logistically well-primed for concerted action. [ 4 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

But the people who make up that huge dispossessed group remain mostly unaligned, if not actively disunified, and cross-class solidarity, beyond a small number of well-documented projects, is in limited supply. In the era of the China dream, amid mantras about the harmonious society and the elimination of chronic poverty, tensions between different castes and cohorts are, in fact, rife and rising. This abrasive socio-emotional texture both links and segregates classes, and it is the focus of my case studies in this book. I suggest that zombie citizenship—as a lived reality for some, as a more or less imminent peril for others—seeds divisiveness as much as indictments of it bolster unity across society. In part, the limits of solidarity have been laid bare by the actually occurring contagion of several core traits of zombie citizenship into populations that might previously have considered themselves secure. China’s aspirant middle classes, in particular, face new travails: slum dwelling, informal work, bruisingly long hours, and concomitant sleep deprivation so acute that it has become a media phenomenon. Marginalized workers hooked on mostly unfulfillable dreams of climbing up the ladder, and a middle class consumed by entirely plausible fears that they will plummet downward, produce social conditions that may be congenitally inhospitable to solidarity, both within and still more acutely between different groups.6 In its place, enmity rises. Sociologists and anthropologists have begun to document this surge of rage and resentment in postmillennial China using the modes of inquiry specific to their disciplines: ethnography, participant-observation, in-depth interviews, and so on. In contrast, I propose an approach which argues that cultural forms offer an equally relevant purview of the social toxins that foment zombie citizenship. Artworks, photography, poetry, film, performance, and social media are material forms in which the affective dynamics of the cliff edge are made concrete. They are artifacts on which zombie citizenship lays heavy traces, and for that reason they are crucial tools for the analysis of expulsion as a determining logic in China today. My case studies show that, in a party-state that wants to prescribe happiness and proscribe hostility, cultural practices often serve as a stage on which stifled class tensions burst through. These practices, surfacing across many different media, become spaces of volatile encounter in which different class actors face each other in postures of grievance, anger, resentment, rivalry, or disdain. These stances do not tell us anything close to the full story of how people menaced by zombie citizenship in China interact with one another. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 5 ]

Telling the full story, if such a thing were possible, would require multisited, multimethod, multidisciplinary, multiauthored work. Rather, this study presents a series of detailed, focused snapshots taken from the field of culture that I hope might counterbalance other kinds of research findings that point to a different picture: heartening, cordial, more humane. I document these fractious forms in part because their disturbing energies may make them less agreeable objects of study than the work of culture-oriented NGOs seeking to empower dispossessed groups in China. In the field of cultural studies— particularly research on migrant workers—a discernibly upbeat tone has shaped the production of knowledge about cross-class relations in recent years. As a ballast to this, the case studies here quite deliberately work with a darker data set. I also document these fractious forms because they demonstrate that cultural practices do more than simply represent social strain under the regime of zombie citizenship. As orchestrated encounters between different class actors, these practices actively combust tension in interventionist and immediate ways. They are sites in which art and politics collide fractiously, even transformatively. As such, they often take novel or unconventional form because the vehement encounters they stage are not always easily containable within established formats. Full of friction and unorthodox in form, these works unsettle harmony, and for that reason, they are often subject to discipline or regulation. But plenty also enjoy success, and those successes suggest that audiences have a felt need to witness the playing out of the person-to-person conflicts these practices perform. Indeed, these conflicts are tellingly horizontal in the sense that the sentiments to which they give cultural voice are directed not at the state—wherein much responsibility for the cliff edge surely lies—but at fellow members of society. This directionality may appear counterintuitive. But it makes more solid sense when we consider that a certain tolerance for the logic of sacrifice—in particular, the forced martyrdom of the powerless—is a core feature of societal understandings of China’s rise and its human costs. And in the struggle not to be culled, those nearest to hand are one’s most obvious opponents. Yet this antagonism is also multivalent, and although the cultural practices I explore are often bleak in their symbolic or actual violence, I conclude that their force of feeling asserts the vivid agency of precarious people—and their inalienable, furious right to resist that precarity.

[ 6 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

All in a Name Whatever their aesthetic form, the works I discuss here all stem from the same precondition for zombie citizenship and the angst it generates: the carving out of a de facto underclass in China. The creation of this underclass—even though it tends to go by other, more socially acceptable names—shows that a cliff edge divides those who are citizens from those whose hold on rights is tenuous. Moreover, this precipice is not a naturally occurring geological formation so much as it is an artificial edifice constructed in significant part by governmental policy since the 1990s. China’s underclass, as I define it here, consists of laid-off workers dismissed from state-owned enterprises; landless peasants; those with disabilities and unable to work; unpensioned retirees; others who have fallen into homelessness or indigence, including recipients of the minimum livelihood allowance (dibao 低保); and, perhaps most important, the rural-to-urban migrants who work in factories, on construction sites, and in various branches of the service industry.7 In Chinese-language discourse, both official and academic, these social groups are often collectively dubbed “lowest stratum” or “subaltern” (diceng 底层), although the euphemism “disadvantaged communities” (ruoshi qunti 弱势群体) has gained traction since the millennium.8 Rural-to-urban migrants, who numbered more than 290 million in 2019 according to the National Bureau of Statistics, are known by several further monikers: “peasant workers” (nongmingong 农民工), “those who sell their labor,” mostly as migrants (dagongzhe 打工者), and “new workers” (xin gongren 新工人), each with specific socio-semantic connotations.9 To argue that these varied and amorphous groups constitute an underclass is inevitably a contentious claim, and not simply because this terminology chafes against the naming grain in China itself. Just as significant, the usage is controversial because of the taint of infamy that routinely sticks to the word “underclass.” As Michael Katz notes of the U.S. context, the term conjures “a mysterious wilderness in the heart of America’s cities; a terrain of violence and despair; a collectivity outside politics and social structure, beyond the usual language of class and stratum, unable to protest or revolt.”10 It is a shadowland in which hustlers, criminals, drifters, addicts, and dropouts loiter. By close association, it is the natural habitat of the lumpenproletariat as Marx defined them in The Eighteenth Brumaire: “vagabonds, discharged

I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 7 ]

soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzarone, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux (pimps), brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass.”11 As Charles Murray, controversial new-right proponent of the term, puts it, “underclass is an ugly word,” in large part because of this “whiff of Marx and the lumpenproletariat.”12 Underclass implies an ill-assorted horde, disconnected from productive activity, devoid of class consciousness, in thrall to whim rather than driven by political agency. It is not surprising that the term has been variously critiqued, and perhaps most salient is the accusation that it has lost its socioeconomic structural valence and become instead a cipher or dog whistle for behavioral “deviance,” often with a racist tinge.13 But it is precisely this waylaying of the term from its origins in social structure that provides the path to its reclamation, and most strikingly so in the case of China. The much-circulated usage of diceng (subaltern) is in its own way another weasel word for the realities of systemic socioeconomic disenfranchisement. This phrase deploys the character ceng, meaning stratum or layer, to imply an inclusive social escalator in which the prefix di, meaning low, is merely a current predicament. In a society organized into interconnected tiers, mobility is the organizing doctrine. There is no such thing as being outside, let alone beneath, the system; everyone belongs on the inside and can move up if they try hard enough. In lived reality as opposed to official discourse, however, a state of quasi-permanent externality is precisely the fate endured by the groups I have mentioned to whom even the bottom rung of the ladder upward can seem structurally foreclosed. It is in this sense that the term underclass is not just appropriate but in urgent need of rehabilitation, because it is the only descriptor that both acknowledges the hard logic of expulsion and does so on the basis of class as a mechanism for discriminatory segregation—a notion that, as I will discuss in more detail later, has been effectively outlawed in contemporary China. If social stain can be expunged from underclass as a term, its blunt descriptive realism—its refusal of euphemism in a discursive context determined by doublespeak—may possess exactly the utility required to begin to investigate zombie citizenship as both fact and fear. This is because underclass, if parsed literally, captures the anomalous condition whereby certain people can be “of ” society without being “in” society. Unlike other semi-equivalent terms, underclass brings the cliff edge into view. Small wonder that the [ 8 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

closest Chinese equivalent for the term underclass (xiaceng jieji 下层阶级) is not in common use in state and public media. But this lexical squeamishness makes the space below, a zone under the rest of society, no less fearsome. As Li Qiang 李强—a leading sociologist based in China who does frequently deploy the term underclass—has noted, this group forms an inverted “T-shape”: an orthographic figure whose right angles recall the cliff edge, even if Li’s meaning is rather different. Using data from China’s fifth national census of 2000, Li argues that as much as 64.7 percent of China’s working population occupies “an extremely low” socioeconomic position, thus creating not the standard “pyramid” or “olive” social structures familiar elsewhere but a tense formation consisting of a narrow pillar of people with rising privileges and a vast underclass below bleakly differentiated from the favored few (figure I.1).14 And in the years since that millennial census, inequality has only deepened.15 This leaves unaddressed the other major criticism leveled at the term underclass: namely, that it performs a blanket homogenization of marginalized groups who are too disparate to group meaningfully together. China’s migrant workers, for example, subdivide into many smaller groups whose access to citizens’ rights shuffles down a sliding scale: from long-term urban

Figure I.1  Li Qiang’s inverted T-shape, aka the cliff edge. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 9 ]

residence permit holders, to legitimate temporary residents, to so-called ghost workers (youling gongren 幽灵工人)—“either unregistered in the local population governance system and/or uncovered by the social insurance system”16—to those who are downright illegal, sans papiers, or falsely registered. On this basis, Jieh-min Wu argues for the notion of “differential citizenship” among migrants, or a “pattern of segmented . . . allocation of citizens’ rights and entitlements.”17 Just as pertinent, migrant workers and the long-term urban indigent hardly share a seamless identity, and they may even nurture hostility toward one another. Mun Young Cho, for example, has explored the volatile tensions between these two groups on the streets of Harbin and argues that their increased intermixing and shared privation have mostly proved divisive.18 What’s more, they “voice their grievances not against the state but against one another.”19 This friction is rooted in difference and the threat it carries. Unlike laid-off workers, retirees, and the disabled, many rural migrants are employed, young, and without disabilities. They travel to the cities full of hope and energy and labor power.20 They are as many as 300-million-people-strong and thus surely harbor the potential for class formation. Indeed, it is partly in realization of this fact that one of the descriptors for rural-to-urban migrants—“new workers”—has gained ground in certain circles over the last decade or more. As promoted by worker/scholar-activists such as Sun Heng 孙恒, Lü Tu 吕途, and Wang Dezhi 王德志, the term is linked to self-empowerment, the dignity and sovereign value of labor, and the desire to foster class consciousness—as well as marking a clear semantic break with both the pejorative overtones of other terms and the “old workers” of the command economy.21 But despite this heterogeneity, the constitutive presence of new workers within the underclass remains central to my argument about civic dispossession. Migrants may not experience the denial of rights identically, but they are alike in that they endure the exclusionary bent hardwired within citizenship regimes in China. As Wu puts it, the “differentiating principle serves as a driving force in lieu of the universalizing principle widely recognized in the context of typical market capitalist societies” (emphasis in the original).22 This means that “it is a long, bumpy road for a migrant to achieve full urban citizenship, a road that few travel.”23 Furthermore, a major part of the tension between newcomers and the impoverished urban old guard stems from the intense struggles they experience precisely because they are castaways from the circle of rights. Cho argues, in fact, that their pauperization is managed on the ground by municipal policies that actually, if [ 10 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

not always purposefully, divide these people from one another as a strategy of rule.24 And last, new workers should arguably be counted within the underclass not despite but because of all the visibly potent attributes they possess—qualities that so far have proved unable to lift them securely and consistently over the bar into full civic belonging. As such, it might even be argued that the new workers most starkly emblematize zombie citizenship in all of its paradoxes: they show how some of the nation’s most vigorous people can still routinely be made surplus—kept external to the system— even as that system keeps on extracting blood, sweat, and tears from them. This, after all, is the insistent antilogic of the zombie, who toils for others while being denied the stable civic rights labor should entail. And when catastrophe strikes, it is China’s migrant workers who find themselves instantly cast adrift, their small gains wiped out—whether this is in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when unemployment in this group skyrocketed;25 or during the Covid-19 pandemic, which exposed “a serious mismatch between workers covered by the social safety net and those who really need it . . . [and] exacerbated the preexisting inequalities along the household registration system line.”26 No doubt other arguments could be marshaled against the term “underclass,” and I use the descriptor in full awareness of that fact, despite the rationales previously set out. Part of the reason euphemisms, contested nomenclature, and new coinages abound in the description of marginalized people in China is because no term exists that can encompass these groups in fully satisfactory ways. Any portmanteau descriptor can only falter in the face of such dense demographic complexity. Ultimately, the term underclass may commend itself not because of empirical or theoretical accuracy but because it captures the affective tenor that the presence of so many disadvantaged groups in a given society summons during an era in which many others sense the tenuousness of their own hold on rights and livelihood. Partly because it is evidentially flawed and emotionally inflammatory (rather like “zombie,” in fact), underclass catches that visceral fear of falling, the shaky sense that a space yawns below. That fear may not seem entirely rational, not least because state rhetoric of upward mobility and the Chinese dream explicitly denies it. But it is no less intense for that, as the case studies I explore attest. For a project such as this, which explores how civic threat and social strife reach for expression within the more free-form spaces of culture, a term is required that can gauge or grasp at this freight of tense, unpredictable feeling. Indeed, as I discuss next, both cognitive disjuncture I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 11 ]

and emotional strain are crucial to the experiences of zombie citizenship and its passage into culture.

Untermensch, Übermensch At the core of this sense of tension is the strategic illogicality through which China’s underclass experiences its disenfranchisement. I argue that the government policies that have helped to create the cliff edge—in particular, the rolling back of the command economy and the inequities of the household registration system—have not simply resulted in what Sassen calls a “savage sorting:”27 that is, the division between the “haves” and the “have-nots” of material wealth and, more tellingly, the “ares” and the “are-nots” of full citizenship. This partition is, of course, the core determinant of zombie citizenship. But it is not, in itself, enough to explain the latter as a divisive structure of feeling. Zombie citizenship is not simply about the withholding of rights; it is also shaped by the implementation of that denial—by the sometimes disingenuous ways in which the excommunicated are made to process their exile from the law and its protections. These make zombie citizenship very much a matter of mind and emotion. This is why it can readily catalyze into interpersonal strife and distrust, and this is also why it is insufficient to document state policies in empirical terms alone. In this connection, I argue that the cliff edge has been constructed in ways that militate toward states of cognitive dissonance: the condition of jarring mental instability that results when a subject holds beliefs or values that clash with one another, or when personal convictions and lived actions or experiences do not align with one another. This psychic disjuncture, consistently applied, intensifies the impact of zombie citizenship. In this section, I sketch the state policies that have carved out the cliff edge and focus, in particular, on the cognitive dissonance these policies induce. As is well known, the era of reform and opening up that began in 1978 created a nexus of push-and-pull factors that, over the following decades, caused Chinese peasants to surge to the cities in sustained waves of migration unparalleled in human history.The journeys these rural people made to the megalopolises of the eastern seaboard seemed to be a stunning affirmation of their freedom of movement and were undertaken with that express purpose in mind. But the realities of China’s household registration system cracked open a chasm between physical kinesis and its social variant. Under [ 12 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

this system, most migrants have been historically unable to access employerprovided health care; many do not receive pensions and other work-related benefits; their children cannot attend local schools; they cannot settle meaningfully in the city.28 Thus, although permitted and indeed encouraged to leave the countryside en masse, most rural migrants have found their new workplaces—urban factories, mines, construction sites, and so on—to be sites of social stasis in which prejudicial policies prevent them from substantively improving their life chances. Enticed to the cities by a welter of state messaging about the promise of a modern identity deliverable only in the cities,29 migrants have experienced cognitive dissonance as a sharp disjuncture between physical and social mobility, between the bait of middleclass belonging and the steel trap of underclass drudgery. Their determined quests for personhood overwhelmingly end in actualized nonperson status. This disjuncture is registered in the name most commonly used to describe China’s migrant workforce: peasant worker. This term is a brazen oxymoron, a hybrid of peasant/rural and worker/urban that once again seems tailored to entrench cognitive dissonance—this time via repeated semantic befuddlement—because it is impossible to till the soil in one’s native village while at the same time assembling parts on a Foxconn short-cycle production line.30 The oxymoron is even more grating given that the peasant hinterland is now so often a place of no return: devoured by land grabs while simultaneously slip-sliding into what Miriam Driessen calls “rural voids,” places “denigrated in people’s minds as being empty of significance and meaning . . . [that] signify the contempt for, and neglect of, rurality in an urban-centered world.”31 Below this lies a deeper split that touches on the very project of statestewarded mass migration from the countryside. Ann Anagnost skewers the dilemma as follows: “Uprooted from collectivized agriculture, China’s migrant labor becomes the condition of possibility for capitalism’s renewal even as it represents the antithesis of development.”32 Put another way, migrant workers in China labor under the joint burden of intense market demand and acute social disdain. They are both wanted and unwanted, essential and supernumerary, useful because of their vast numbers yet for that same reason individually nugatory within the grand calculus of worth. More than this, they emblematize the problem of zombie citizenship because of a split between cost and profit in which “the undervaluation of migrant labor is what allows for the extraction of surplus value enabling capital accumulation.”33 This is Kam Wing Chan’s point when he calls rural I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 13 ]

migrants China’s “special forces” but also a group whose labor has been “super-cheapened.”34 This is a double-vision, split-screen reality in which cognitive dissonance thrives. To complete the picture, migrant workers are the long-standing target of twin propaganda drives seemingly contrived to enhance this already existing sense of disorientation. On one hand, migrants have low “human quality,” and so must do the nation’s “3D” jobs: dirty, dangerous, and demeaning. But on the other, they are the titanic master builders of postsocialist China, the workforce on whose superhuman strength, endurance, and selflessness the nation’s ascent to superpower status relies. Cognitive dissonance for migrant workers, then, is the state of being both mobile and gridlocked, neither rural nor urban, simultaneously crucial and surplus, at once Herculean and abject. Collectively, these symptoms flesh out the central paradox of zombie citizenship, in which workers are granted certain attributes of life in the polis—principally the right to toil—but are deprived of the agency required to make that life “full,” in Giorgio Agamben’s terms.35 In a sense, therefore, they are natural successors to the cognitive dissonance China’s laid-off workers endured in a slightly earlier epoch. The tens of millions of urban workers who were dismissed from their positions in state-owned enterprises during the 1990s became disadvantaged, as Dorothy Solinger has noted, “not by chance or by any fault of their own, but intentionally as a result of state decree” (emphasis in the original): they were “officially appraised as unsuited to participation in the modern industrial giant China is striving to become, and so were deliberately severed from their work posts in the interest of industrial restructuring and upgrading.”36 But Solinger is also correct to note that these former workers have acquired, as a kind of sour compensation for their many losses, a truer sense of where they really stand in the polity. Once upon a time in the Maoist era, these workers were “manipulatively socialized”37 into believing that they were the rulers of the socialist universe, even though they were living and laboring under conditions that blatantly gave the lie to that conviction. In the postsocialist present, in contrast, they have been liberated not just from their livelihoods but from false consciousness too—cognitive dissonance by any other name. These two large groups within China’s underclass—the vast migrant workforce and the legions of the laid-off—show that there is a road map to cognitive dissonance, with the fate of the latter foreshadowing the even bleaker future of the former. We see this path unfolding in recent incidents such as the Daxing fire, in which migrants were physically expelled from settlements because they had outlived their usefulness, in a move even more [ 14 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

brutal than the laying off of workers from industrial plants in the 1990s when their value to China’s modernity had expired. Indeed, laid-off workers now endure “enlightened” destitution, as the illusion of political supremacy that once sustained them has been snatched away, while migrants whose labor has been accorded almost no quantifiable dignity at all are expected to swallow dogma in state and public media that eulogizes them “as willing, docile, laboring bodies contributing to urban development.”38 Meanwhile, those who watch the evolving fate of migrant workers from their own unsteady perches in the middle classes—subsisting in the gig economy although possessed of advanced degrees they were told would bring steady, wellremunerated employment—can glimpse their own expendability ahead. Cognitive dissonance, as a condition with a genealogy that reaches back into the socialist period, arises initially from a sense of trust in the powers that be. But as belief and action begin to bifurcate, and split consciousness sets in, that faith can oxidize into the sense of social threat that animates the cultural practices I investigate here.

Surplus-ing as Strategy Ultimately, that threat solidifies around the knowledge that underclass status in contemporary China can sometimes bring outcomes more extreme than inequities in health care, benefits, education, unemployment, and poverty. These injustices brought about by the household registration system and the brutal shift to the global market unquestionably disqualify members of the underclass from full citizenship, but they still arguably belong with the recognizable remit of inequality and exclusion. What’s more, as Xiang Biao has pointed out, workers in China would never have left their rural homes in the first place unless they both anticipated and later realized at least some value from that risky endeavor, however limited or unpredictable such benefits might turn out to be.39 But for some, the risk does not pay off. And to gain full purchase on zombie citizenship, we need to move beyond the familiar landscape of inequality and exclusion to the spaces below. These are the zones of expulsion, into which many Chinese workers—already marginalized, long beset by cynical mixed messaging—find themselves cast. These domains of expulsion may be temporary or permanent, but their most salient feature is their range and the pressure this variety applies to standard definitions of casting out. In this section, I set out some examples I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 15 ]

of expulsion, with a view toward offering snapshots of this state rather than an exhaustive panorama. In some cases, expulsion in contemporary China occurs along the standard spatial axis, as the events in Daxing show all too clearly. In one sense, those evictions of 2017, newsworthy though they were, can be seen as yet another iteration of what has become a perennial policy of upheaval enforced on marginalized people in China. Demolition and relocation, or chaiqian 拆迁, is a state-endorsed process of aggressive gentrification in which lowincome residents—laid-off workers, street vendors, service workers—are “cleansed” from poor-quality accommodation often situated in high-value urban locales. These dwellers receive notice that their homes have been earmarked for demolition, and they are offered either financial compensation or the chance to move to alternative housing. In practice, chaiqian all too often exemplifies Sherry Ortner’s point that “neoliberalism seems to foster a kind of contemptuous attitude toward the working classes and the poor beyond the necessity for profit.”40 Thus the compensation offered is unduly meager; the alternative accommodation is half-built or lies many bus rides away; and most troubling, those who resist are subjected to the threat or reality of violent removal (yeman chaiqian 野蛮拆迁): cut off from water, electricity, and gas, dragged from their homes, even assaulted by wrecking crews. As You-Tien Hsing has noted, residency never simply denotes one’s place of dwelling. Rather, it is “the physical anchor for the quotidian support networks of job, family, community, and urban services”—what Hsing describes as “life-worlds.”41 The loss of residency through chaiqian is, therefore, to bludgeon that delicately veined human ecology. The urban historian Qin Shao is gesturing toward the same kind of tragic liquidation when she coins the term “domicide” to describe chaiqian in Shanghai since the 1990s,42 as is Harriet Evans when she dubs it “a process of physical, spatial, and social erasure of local lives.”43 To an extent, these interventions pick up Saskia Sassen’s gauntlet that “the spaces of the expelled cry out for conceptual recognition.”44 But the Daxing evictions also shine a light on chaiqian as a specific, although not exclusive, migrant experience. As is amply documented, much migrant housing in China is already marginalized, hazardous, and marked by social stain. It is situated mostly on the ragged urban fringe; basement, tunnel, cellar, and other forms of damp, dark, and crowded underground dwelling are common; and scarcity has even forced some migrants to make their homes in shipping containers or civil air defense shelters transformed into [ 16 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

ad hoc rental units.45 These factors collectively induce a sense of territorial displacement among residents at the same time as they inevitably incur stigma from other quarters of society. Just as grievous, housing of this kind also invites aggressive cleansing campaigns. In her work on migrant workers in Guangdong province, Helen Siu notes that incomers “typically congregate in village neighborhoods where factories and construction sites are located,” but that municipal governments “have repeatedly conducted campaigns to ‘cleanse’ these areas of ‘backward, uncivil’ elements.”46 As such, migrants experience “traumatic rounds of dislocation”;47 their life-worlds face the wrecking ball repeatedly as local authorities engage in a game of whack-a-mole with populations that are only intermittently useful. Chaiqian for migrants, in other words, often marks the specific shift from eviction to expulsion. It orchestrates the move from dwellings that are “virtually uninhabitable”48 to the bleak open air. Just as significant, cleansing campaigns often involve the demolition of schools specifically set up for the children of migrant workers. This violent denial of education is germane to the logic of expulsion, both because schooling is so fundamental a citizenship right and because its lack fast-tracks children down what Miao Li calls the “pathways to the urban underclass.”49 Further to this point, a more sustained effort is also required here not just to theorize chaiqian-on-repeat as a novel or at least systematically steppedup form of expulsion—even as its methods invite precisely that kind of conceptual work—but to link it at a “subterranean” level with other modes of banishment that have been taking shape in China, even if these do not at first sight look like instances of physical exile from the polis. Expulsion has a broad playbook; it can be both brazen and indirect. Yet it follows recurring patterns that, whatever their site-specific permutations, pivot on the same defining axes: the denial of access to life-worlds; the entrenchment of the unheimlich, not as something uncanny but as a hard norm; the loss of the past, together with its partner plight, the foreclosure of futurity. In this sense, a key parallel to the shift from eviction to expulsion outlined here are the battles over wage arrears endured by many workers in China’s construction industry. As I discuss in more detail in chapter 4, these workers, who are predominantly migrants without proper labor contracts, often struggle to secure their earnings as employers exploit their legal vulnerabilities to withhold pay. This shift from a low-wage to a no-wage regime registers an explicit crossover from the grim-but-familiar ground of exclusion and inequality to the more savage terrain of expulsion. These migrants I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 17 ]

face banishment as a multipronged assault: wage arrears mean estrangement from the life-world of now (in which they cannot materially subsist), from the home and family of the past (who cannot be visited and to whom remittances cannot be sent), and from any meaningful future (from which they have been summarily ejected once the skyscraper they are building is finished). Ann Anagnost has described how industrial injury can constitute a further core form of body-based excommunication: “The loss of a hand is the taking away of a part so as to impair. It is a brutally concrete expression of the severing of the laboring body from its capacity to engage in manual labor—a form of annihilation.”50 Injuries of this kind are so horribly prevalent in China that the migrant workers’ museum in Picun, an urban village near Beijing, contains a display case full of X-rays of amputated fingers. In an important essay of 2019, the migrant worker poet Zheng Xiaoqiong— whose work I discuss in detail in chapter 3—sets out the stakes of this kind of maiming, in all its finality: Once, my finger accidentally touched the lathe cutter, and half of my nail disappeared soundlessly. . . . At the hospital, I discovered so many injured workers, mostly like me, from elsewhere, stranded there. Some had injured half a finger, some the whole hand, the leg, the head. . . . The man on my left, with a head injury, worked in the plastic factory; the one on my right, with three severed fingers, worked in the molding factory. Their families surrounded the beds, anxiety written all over their faces. The one on the right moaned, his three left fingers completely severed. . . . For his family, the man’s pain was . . . violent, cacophonous, penetrating their bones, their souls, and they were to live with this pain forever hanging over them. He had come from rural Xinyang in Henan province. I couldn’t imagine, back in the Henan countryside, how he was going to lead his life with three severed fingers.51 Unlike the calculated predations of chaiqian or wage arrears, industrial injuries such as these are accidents; surely, therefore, they should count as nondeliberate forms of expulsion. Yet in 1998 alone, approximately 3.7 million traumatic workplace hand injuries were treated in China, and as Fitzgerald et al. have shown, migrant workers “account for a disproportionate burden of occupational injury morbidity and mortality in China.”52 [ 18 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

Despite “evidence of the vulnerability of migrant workers in the workplace,” and in the face of the stringently watchful personnel management that is commonplace in Chinese factories, these medical researchers found that there was “little systematic surveillance of occupational injury and few evaluated interventions.”53 Injury of this kind emerges as a classic accidentally-on-purpose move, whose immediate impetus may be random but whose preventable impact—from the confiscated future to the eerie missing limb—marks it as a submerged form of expulsion. Industrial injury is rife among certain populations precisely because they have been designated as surplus. Hence the remark by a factory manager, quoted by Anagnost, “that it is easier to replace workers than to upgrade the safety features of the machinery they operate.”54 Furthermore, these annihilating workplace injuries take place within an industrial setting that itself operates as a far more overt mode of expulsion. This is the dormitory system that prevails in many of China’s privately owned factories. Sited firmly within the very heartlands of industry, the factory dormitory is a prime example of how expulsion can operate via nonterritorial means. On these sites, working and living spaces are strategically fused, day and night, all week long, and for almost all the year. Exceptionally quick turnover means that these complexes are populated by strangers, and because of dialectal differences they may not even speak the same mother tongue, even as they live and work cheek by jowl. Strict discipline, constant surveillance, and intense competition further alienate members of the community from each other.55 This form of “paramilitarized factory system” (zhunjunshihua gongchang tizhi 准军事化工厂体制),56 exemplified by the Foxconn plants, creates what is effectively a quasi-carceral environment— what Helen Siu calls an “intense form of displacement without the subjects moving anywhere.”57 As I discuss extensively in chapter 3, expulsion here means estrangement from family, friendship, hope, and future in an expansive riff on the original meaning of that term. Disaggregating expulsion from the idea of uprooting—recognizing, in fact, that it can also be enacted through processes of aggressive embedding—allows the systemic character of human “surplus-ing” to emerge, and in ways that insist on more syncretic analysis. To date, chaiqian has been researched principally by anthropologists and scholars of urban studies; industrial injury is typically a topic for medical research; and studies of pay disputes on construction sites and also the dormitory regime in factories have been carried out for the most part by sociologists of labor. These disciplines do not necessarily converse with one I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 19 ]

another. Yet all four cases, precisely in their undisclosed interaction, throw into relief the structural processes whereby certain groups are more radically decitizenized. Surplus-ing as strategy, in other words, only reveals its methods through a wider-angle lens. The examples I offer here show how a civic belonging already only half alive—hollowed out by long-term policies of exclusion and inequality—is deadened still further as many migrants have their life chances eviscerated in zones of expulsion that at first sight do not appear as such. Indeed, part of the uncanniness of zombie citizenship emerges from this lack of transparency. The stripping away of rights and belonging occurs in mutually distant, seemingly unconnected sites that reveal their deep underground linkage only when the semantic remit of expulsion is expanded and its relationship to multiple, overlapping states of half-living—the denial of a stable home, a safe place to work, a steady means of subsistence, even protection from bodily dismemberment—is explicitly mapped out. Cultural practices, I argue in this book, are a vital space in which these dots are figuratively joined, just as cultural studies offers a method through which the submerged nexus of expulsion power can be drawn into a more visible web. This is because cultural forms, with their propulsive narrativity, are always about world making. By transmuting what cultural makers either know or fear into representational form, they move, of necessity, across a wide terrain. Similarly, cultural studies, with its in-built interdisciplinarity, can arguably track these movements more expansively than single disciplines with their inevitably siloed approaches and findings. After all, zombie citizenship is a state predicated on forms of social, economic, legal, emotional, and corporeal excommunication. It mandates a wide interpretive net. But as a process of physical casting out, it is also stymied by the off-and-on use value that the decitizenized frequently retain, and this is an anomaly that cultural forms are imaginatively capacious enough to catch. This is exactly the processual glitch that Hao Jingfang nails elegantly in Folding Beijing via her conceit of temporal warehousing—the notion that people can be put to sleep or placed in cold storage until the voodoo of market forces animates their insensible beings for drudgery once again. The difficulty, of course, is that real life is not sci-fi—not quite yet, anyway—and those who have been consigned to zombie citizenship cannot simply be magicked in and out of visibility. As such, they terrorize the fantasy of social harmony in the era of the Chinese dream.

[ 20 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

Where Have All the Zombies Gone? The cultural proxies of zombies, however, can be rather more readily managed. Thus it should come as no surprise that, far from trudging openly through cultural spaces as morbid markers of alienated labor and the occult cruelties of hypercapitalism, zombies and other figures of superstition are subject to policing within the popular terrain in contemporary China.There are, for example, no substantive parallels with the zombie fixation that Jean and John Comaroff note of millennial South Africa, where “public culture is replete with invocations of the living dead, from popular songs and primetime documentaries to national theatrical productions,” and where “reference to them permeates everyday talk on the street, in private backyards, on the pages of the local press, in courts of law.”58 As the Comaroffs point out, zombies rise as symbolic tropes because they “give voice to a sense of dread about the human costs of intensified capitalist production; about the loss of control over the terms in which people alienate their labor power; about the demise of a moral economy in which wage employment, however distant and exploitative, had ‘always’ been there to support both the founding of families and the wellbeing of communities.”59 Zombies are, in this sense, the Marxist metaphor par excellence for the unholy estrangement between workers and the product of their toil: legions of mute chattels, conjured into half-being by technocratic wizard-masters, who slave mindlessly and without cease beyond the grave while wearing the ravages of exploitation as their own putrefying flesh. As Marx put it in sepulchral fashion, “Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”60 More than this, the origins of the zombie in the sugar plantations of eighteenth-century Haiti,61 where slaves transported from Africa were routinely worked to death in a few short years, give this ghoulish metaphor for servitude a distinctly racialized dimension. Such links make the peril of zombie citizenship a still more agonizingly pertinent trope for China’s migrant workers, who have endured discrimination in the cities arguably tantamount to apartheid, from outright shunning by locals to official policies of segregation.62 Given this, the restrictions on “cults and superstitions” imposed in the state law “Interim Measures for the Administration of Online Games” (Wangluo youxi guanli zanxing banfa 网络游戏管理暂行办法) of 2010 should

I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 21 ]

provoke a certain hermeneutical suspicion. Rather like the bleaching of the zombie’s origins in slavery that has taken place in American popular culture—where the walking dead are now mostly white and the oncestark metaphor of race-based body-snatching has been diluted into entertaining apocalypse at the multiplex63—figures of superstition are banned from video games because they are politically dangerous. A still more vivid sign of the state’s fear of zombie-as-metaphor came in 2020, when the video game Coronavirus Attack—in which players shoot selfish zombie virus carriers—was removed from streaming platforms in China.64 But this predictable Covid-19 censorship also shares a lineage with earlier bans that have kept several major zombie releases from Chinese audiences despite a worldwide boom in the genre. As the CEO of Solstice Studios, Mark Gill, put it in an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, “it’s not cultural, it’s government policy. . . . And the reason it’s government policy is you have got a government that is trying to keep control of a population where there is a fair amount of unrest. One of the things that seems to particularly stir revolts or riots is superstition.”65 This is not to suggest that zombies are missing from China’s culturescapes. From arthouse depictions of the undead such as Cao Fei’s Mist and Fog (Wu yu mai 雾与霾, 2013) to numerous low-rent short videos on Tencent, zombies have proved hard to suppress—in part, perhaps, because of China’s rich indigenous tradition of the undead. Yet they stir official disquiet, as shown in 2014 (and again in 2015) when the municipal governments in Beijing and Guangzhou sought to prevent the wearing of Halloween zombie masks on the subway on the grounds that they might trigger flash mobs of the walking dead and provoke a panicked stampede.66 Beneath the kill-joy surface here frets the last and worst fear stirred by the zone of the undead: namely, that of contagion, a point to which I return more substantively in the conclusion. The notion of zombies as “epidemiologic avatars”67 was entrenched well before the Chinese state banned Coronavirus Attack, of course, but since the millennium the conjunction between zombies and apocalyptic contagion has noticeably tightened. Kyle Bishop argues that “post-9/11 anxieties about potential terrorist attacks via anthrax, avian influenza, swine flu, and other forms of biologic warfare”68 explain this renewed pestilence of the undead, and Verran and Reyes suggest that, “With no subclinical manifestation, zombies make the apocalypse visible, enabling us to physically map the spread of infection,” while their “hordelike structure” enables them to “operate metonymically, standing in for large swaths of the population.”69 For the most part, commentators who have reflected [ 22 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

on the zombie as a grossly visible vector of infection have indeed medicalized this metaphor, and this tendency is likely only to harden in the age of Covid. As I made clear in the preface, my concern is not to press for some grotesque identitarian connection between zombies and China’s underclass but rather to scope out the domain of zombie citizenship—the spaces in which forced exile from normative belonging happens. My interest here is in the role of zombie citizenship as avatar for contagion of a nonetiological kind. This is the infectiousness of what I referred to earlier as surplus-ing: the rampant spread of decitizenization from the cordoned-off colonies of the afflicted into previously sequestered spaces. If the undead make the Chinese state nervous, this may also be in part because zombie citizenship is on the march and those threatened by it need no visual reminders of the fact. Anxiety over the zone of the undead is, in short, an acknowledgment that the fears it makes incarnate—of latter-day vassaldom, of a life without rights, of expulsion from the polis—are not night terrors that vanish at dawn so much as clear and present possibilities. Zombie citizenship in its complexly gradated forms is a reality for a substantial minority of China’s workers and a precipice at the edge of which many others teeter, or fear they do. In an era when the disposability of personhood has become a hard market logic, as waste shifts from “something produced bodily or socially by humans . . . [into] the human itself” (emphasis in the original),70 Chinese society has for some time been facing the tensions that pitch and swell when—quite paradoxically—all this living surplus cannot simply be scrapped. The notion of the throwaway human is now well understood among theorists working across several domains. But the case of China forces a deeper consideration of a related conundrum: the logistical indisposability of the disposable, and the fraught tensions to which this gives rise. In a society where access to secure employment, affordable housing, and social welfare has been steadily narrowing, this intractable visibility of the nation’s vast human surplus creates the conditions in which already existing states of precarity—familiar from so many other places and spaces—take on the more intense lineaments of social vertigo.

Precarious China This brings me to the central question I ask in this book: What might it mean to feel precarious in contemporary China? To ask this question is I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 23 ]

to take aim at two separate targets. The first is to locate Chinese experience much more solidly within long-running debates from which it has often been absent or peripheral, even as precarity itself has increasingly been called an everywhere condition, a master concept for the contemporary, a standard protocol for life now across the globe. But to pose this query is also to consider the ways in which China may refine or redistribute the parameters of these debates. To date, definitions of precarity have tended to divide between writers who take the condition as an inalienable aspect of our humanity, a descriptor of our constant susceptibility to pain and dependence on others, and those who tie the term specifically to experiences of labor and life under a neoliberalist system that has grown increasingly pitiless.71 Over the last fifteen years or more, this second strand has grown denser in conceptual heft as the informal economy has continued to expand, job security has been shredded, and the dream of “decent work for all” has faded still further from view. But in a world rife with precarity, in which “we are all precarious now,” China has remained mostly missing from the vast academic literature that has built up around the theme of fragile life and labor since the millennium. China is in many ways prime precarious, yet only in the last few years has it been explicitly and more extensively named as such.72 In this section, I ask why this knowledge gap has opened up, and I set out some reasons it is now untenable. More than this, in fact, I argue that China should be a core crucible for current thinking about precarity. To suggest this is not to claim that the cliff edge is exclusive to China; quite patently, it is a formation found everywhere.Yet conditions in China’s recent past and present moment arguably give that sheer drop a heightened sense of menace, making China a case study with scant parallels for how precarity as a structure of fearful feeling can permeate the social world. First comes the question of why China has so far failed to register fully in the now seemingly ubiquitous discourses of precarity. Perhaps the first explanation for this belatedness is that the term itself—and most particularly its partner political concept, the precariat73—has struggled to throw off its origins in the European protest movements of the early 2000s. Thus to apply it to China may seem at first sight historically and politically anachronistic, or worse. Certainly, precarity to date has most commonly been taken to mean “economic and existential experiences of risk and uncertainty” within post-Fordism,74 most specifically within liberal-democratic experiences of the contracting welfare state, where its pain is felt as a sharp “adjustment” against a long backdrop of stability. Protest against precarity, [ 24 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

born as a justice movement to battle so-called flexploitation, was rooted in a deep sense of rupture—in the notion that a once tightly woven social contract was being unpicked and workers were being cast into freefall. The problem here, as Neilson and Rossiter note, is that “precarity appears as an irregular phenomenon only when set against a Fordist or Keynesian norm.” They argue further that “if we look at capitalism in a wider historical and geographical scope, it is precarity that is the norm and not Fordist economic organization.”75 This recognition that labor security within the welfare state was just a spatiotemporal blip has gained broad currency as scholars have begun to argue that the precarious worker is essentially the new subaltern: a broad personhood encompassing all those whom power excludes and betrays, and whose existence long predates the coining of the term. Yet this notion of precarity as an ineluctable historical norm often hits the theoretical buffers precisely as researchers seek to apply it in more lateral ways across wide global spaces. As Ronaldo Munck puts it: “is the term novel or even relevant, for the millions of workers and urban poor in the global South for whom precariousness has always been a seemingly natural condition?”76 Precarity, for Munck and others, is a term overdetermined and undermined by “a totally Northern sensibility” that is narcissistically blind to the fact that work in the global South “has always-already been precarious.”77 The axe this argument grinds is about the “breathless” sense of the new on which discussions of precarity seem to rest. Precarity has many asynchronous modes, and for Munck and others the discourse that grabbed attention in the early 2000s was not novel so much as unacceptably tardy. For the “global informal working class” that stands a billion-people strong, what can this sudden attention to a perennial reality offer? Even when theorists of precarity recognize—as do Neilson and Rossiter, among others—that precarity is the standardized and age-old reality for so many of the world’s workers, its discursive roots as a term that articulates nostalgia for an era that the Global South never got to enjoy excludes it from real political consequence. But does this hold entirely true of China? Here, it might be argued, the notion of precarity does carry at least some palpable novelty power. The rolling back of the socialist era command economy that occurred during the reform period in China is, of course, not a precise parallel for the passing of Fordism. But it was a bonfire of the certainties for many Chinese urban workers nonetheless—even if the ructions of repeated political campaigns meant that not everyone who experienced the Maoist era felt nostalgic I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 25 ]

at its passing. As free market economics took hold, the iron rice bowl was smashed, factories were decommissioned, and their workers were laid off en masse. This process and its ructions have been researched exhaustively, but until very recently little space has been given in the vast literature on this topic to the idea that such conditions make precarity not just a plausible but a necessary conceptual construct through which to read the experiences of significant groups in Chinese society. What gave the term “precarity” its edge and its rallying power in early millennial Europe was precisely a sense of incinerated sureties, of a security blanket gone up in smoke as one era gave way to another. This mood of change has been felt as pain among city-based workers in China too, and to an extent it challenges Munck’s broad-brush claim that work outside the North has “always-already been precarious.” A key stumbling block here is that this sense of aftermath quickly acquired the name “postsocialism,” and as such it has gone on to dominate the theoretical landscape entirely, eclipsing from view the precarity that should arguably be its core partner term. Indeed, if one of the implied arguments of Nancy Fraser’s work on postsocialism is that this condition goes far beyond the Soviet Union and other former communist states in its scope—that we are all postsocialist now78—then the same is self-evidently true of precarity, which in many ways is as pertinent to China as postsocialism is to the contemporary United States.79 Precarity and postsocialism are twin conditions, but for the most part they have been theorized as discrete entities across a stark spatial divide.80 A quantity of scholarly work has been produced over the last twenty years to explain China’s long goodbye to socialism within multiple domains. But in overlooking the fundamental intersection between this condition and the state of precarity, which has been theorized so extensively in Europe and America over the same approximate period, postsocialism as a method for making sense of life-worlds in contemporary China lacks full intellectual coherence. A two-way conduit is needed, one that not only opens up precarious Euro-America to its identity as postsocialist but also expressly names postsocialist China as precarious. As part of this process, precarity itself requires theoretical modification; it will need to be decolonized and “provincialized” so the experiences of precarious people in China can feed into and refine how this crucial experience of our present time is understood. A crucial pivot for this process of scaling down and then up again is zombie citizenship, both as a conceptual threshold and an encroaching reality. Zombie citizenship allows us to grasp postsocialism [ 26 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

in China anew, principally because the “post” in that latter term resonates potently with the notion of the living dead, with the corpsification of rights that once appeared in rude health but that now, in precarious days, eke out a most wretched afterlife. This is by no means to suggest, however, that experiences of this afterlife are uniform in China. Against the decisive sense of an epochal shift identified by many Euro-American theorists of precarity stands, most notably, the argument that as China’s vast migrant workforce has streamed into the cities from the countryside it has simply swapped older forms of uncertainty for newer variants. Rural conditions under Maoism were predicated on systemic risk and poverty rather than on the iron rice bowl associated with much urban work, and famine was an ever-looming hazard. In this sense, migration to the cities promised a measure of relief—even the whisper of deliverance—from the still more acute uncertainties of rural life. At the very least, the risks of relocation may have seemed more bearable because they also contained the kernel of hope. But to argue that precarity as a construct for understanding China’s “floating population” is invalid because there was no “good life”—no iron rice bowl—for these migrants to mourn is to assume that the anguish of precarious experience is mostly rooted in longings for paradise lost. On the contrary, such fantasies are projected into the future as often as they linger on the past, as Lauren Berlant has argued,81 and the chimera of the good life may be all the more seductive to those who have never seen and felt it in the flesh. This chimera has, however, infamously failed to take full concrete shape. Under the iniquitous household registration system, China’s new urban workforce has found itself forced to endure degrees of exclusion from core benefits that those with an urban birthright enjoy, while working in industries that often lack safeguards, contracts, and guaranteed wages. For many migrant workers, precarity is precisely the nervy apprehension that their hopes are brittle, which is, of course, why oneiric propaganda— the China dream—is plastered all over the building sites where many of these migrants work (figures I.2 and I.3). More than this, rural life, however grueling, was a life determined (or even overdetermined) by roots. In contrast, a lack of place-based identity, aggravated by prejudicial outsider status in China’s big cities, induces in China’s migrants an embodied sense of drift and dislocation that once again brings the meaning of the term “precarity” back to its own etymological roots: not securely held in position, liable to fall, unmoored. Indeed, rather than being mostly peripheral I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 27 ]

 Figures I.2 and I.3  Dream propaganda decorates a building site. Reproduced with permission from Dan Macklin, independent researcher of Chinese politics.

to the Euro-American discourses of precarity that have gained hard currency across the world since the millennium, Chinese migrant experiences of being and feeling precarious should by rights be at the very core of those discussions. What we see in China is a vast experiment in the strategic incitement of unrealizable desire—“cruel optimism,” in Berlant’s terminology—within a context of mass territorial-emotional displacement. [ 28 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

In short, precarity as defined by a range of standard indicators is already an existing reality for hundreds of millions of Chinese people, from longimpoverished rural migrants to the more newly immiserated urban unemployed.Their experiences belong at the heart of our global understanding of the precarious condition because they reveal how variants of neoliberalism have dissolved old certainties in postsocialist states like corrosive acid. As such, they add vital texture to the established post-Fordist paradigm. But incorporating China fully into discourses of precarity also requires a more open computation of the relationship between shredded certainties and still deeper fears of expulsion that have the traction to unsettle society across its span. Life without a home, without a wage, without a hand, without rights is life lived not on a ledge but in the darkness of civic death below. Although the fall is steep, it can happen in the interval of a heartbeat and in full view of onlookers whose own toeholds are far from steady. Registering the affective tenor of precarity today means apprehending this fear of the plummet downward into states of unbelonging, and also reckoning with the impact of that imminent menace on social relations as people back away in panic from the cliff edge, pushing and shoving as they go. And insofar as the cliff edge is ubiquitous, so too are the fears it stirs. But despite this ubiquity, my contention is that Chinese experience offers highly specific, brutally salient insights into this condition, and for a linked matrix of reasons. As mentioned earlier, China is the current home of the largest underclass in human history, 300-million-people strong and thus unnervingly prescient, through sheer force of numbers, in its state of gradated but endemic dispossession. It is much harder to self-soothe about the proximity of the cliff edge when those already exiled are so quantifiably visible. Yet China is also, and in a sour irony, the quite recent site of humankind’s most intensive macro-scale experiment in social equality, wealth redistribution, and class struggle; it is the place where Maoist doctrine bloodily humbled the bourgeoisie and in which, according to Mao, “everyone lives as a member of a particular class, and every kind of thinking, without exception, is stamped with the brand of a class.”82 Memories of that class violence, although they grow fainter today, are still sharp enough to make the squeezed and straitened conditions on the cliff edge feel more frightening. Postsocialist China, in other words, is an uncanny palimpsest of class-driven ideologies of proclaimed equality in the past and practiced inequality now. What’s more, the shift the nation has undertaken during the reform era and beyond from a society with a strikingly low Gini coefficient, I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 29 ]

which was nonetheless fixated on the righteousness of constant class warfare, to one with scorching disparities in which the very word “class” is discursively off-limits strengthen its status as a prime case study for the cliff edge and the caste tension it foments. Fear often mounts when its source and expression are stifled, and the suppression of social strife, in word or deed, arguably makes this tension roil more angrily. China’s blend of authoritarianism and neoliberalism also permits unusually intensive forms of population management, even as the Chinese state has publicly committed itself to greater social care for the disadvantaged. In practice, this means a heightened vulnerability to the travails of precarity, zombie citizenship, and the cliff edge because protest is blocked or defanged by China’s gargantuan “stability maintenance” (weiwen 维稳) apparatus. Meanwhile, Chinese-style neoliberalism shows its face via the discourse of “human quality” I have alluded to briefly, which justifies hierarchies in wealth and status at the same time as disencumbering the state of its duty of care toward the disadvantaged and putting the onus for improving their life chances on the decitizenized instead. As Andrew Kipnis puts it, “The language of suzhi (human quality) has become the politically correct language of social snobbery.”83 This home-grown mode of social sorting promotes segregation, incites prejudice, and disables citizenship chances. It also links up with another factor: China’s rollout of algorithmic governance via the social credit system. Although hysterically misunderstood by many foreign media outlets,84 this system has unquestionably instituted new codes and criteria for citizenship at the same time that it renders the Chinese people subject to potential data breach, data error, or data harvesting—any of which might suddenly and terminally erode their civic standing.85 Finally, social credit is partnered by increasingly wraparound systems of surveillance—from Skynet, Police Cloud and the Sharp Eyes Project, to grid-style social management and Zero-Covid monitoring—that turn citizenship and belonging into a still more performative high-wire act. As this nexus of factors interact in contemporary China, they create effective laboratory conditions for research into how and why the cliff edge is a looming threat that corrodes the fabric of the social. In certain ways, therefore, the cliff edge that has taken shape in China constitutes a correlate or partner term for the notion of suspension (xuanfu 悬浮) as Xiang Biao has defined it: “a typical image of xuanfu is one of a hummingbird frantically vibrating its wings, striving to sustain itself in the air. The bird [ 30 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

struggles hard but moves nowhere, yet it is incapable of landing. People keep moving, but do not engage with the present critically . . . what does it mean when most of the working population in a society live in a liminal state: temporary, transient, exceptional?”86 Xiang is quite specific in stating that suspension, “first and foremost, is a lived experience where migrants halt important parts of life to pursue particular goals  .  .  . it reduces the present to an empty vehicle to the future.”87 But the flipside to this state of perpetual abeyance surely is the fear that to cease the constant vibration of one’s wings might not simply entail the failure to progress. It might also mean a hard plummet down to earth, a stumble from the ledge into the zone below.

Not Legally Binding Central to this structure of fearful feeling are the gaps that open up between the law as it exists de jure and the law as it is applied de facto in contemporary China. Indeed, in a key sense these gaps are themselves the precipice mentioned earlier. Matthew Erie calls this process “legal surrealism,” arguing that the gulf between “law’s promise and social reality” yawns so deep and wide that “the relationship between discourse and practice becomes one of radical discontinuity” in which “ ‘law talk’ is severed from law’s operation.”88 In an authoritarian state that has the ways and means to enforce the law right down to its most microscopic fine print, this frequent caprice of the system often acts as the final push into the void: citizenship rights are abraded within a juridical economy that informalizes the actual application of the law. The experiences of rural-to-urban migrants illustrate this chasm in its devastating two-way logic. As Pun and Lu note, “Rural migrant workers have been barred de jure, but not de facto, from living in urban centers by the hukou system and by class barriers that have ensured that migrant workers with meager wages are unable to settle down in urban communities.”89 Yet this slippage between the letter and the spirit of the law flips around once migrants begin laboring in the cities. There they find that they are protected de jure from the rapacity of their employers but are left de facto without meaningful safeguards against wage arrears, industrial accidents, and punitive working conditions. In other words, migrants experience the slipperiness of the law as a boon on their outward journeys, but they encounter that same slipperiness as treachery once the bait has been swallowed. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 31 ]

Treachery is far from a misnomer here when we consider the Labor Law of the People’s Republic of China, a densely detailed piece of legislation first enacted in 1995, that states, inter alia, that workers must have “the right to remuneration for labor, to rest and vacations, to protection of occupational safety and health, to training in vocational skills, to social insurance and welfare, to submission of labor disputes for settlement and other rights relating to labor stipulated by law.”90 Reflecting on the Labor Law, Ching Kwan Lee asks: “Why has such a stringent state-initiated labor code failed so spectacularly in a country known for top-down authoritarian rule?”91 She concludes that the reasons are “arbitrariness and selectivity in law enforcement” and the repeated tendency of the Chinese state, both central and local, to use the law as an “opportunistic instrument to achieve policy and political goals”92—and most particularly “the structuring and reproduction of precarity.”93 This gulf between the law and its consistent enforcement in China is no secret.94 Yet Lee’s work is rather unusual in making the case in China for what Isabell Lorey has elsewhere called “governmental precarization,” or the process whereby societies are rendered governable through laws that militate quite consciously for precarity.This precarization is typically masked by neoliberal rhetoric suggesting that gutsy individuals are the sole authors of their own destiny,95 or by a detached emphasis on vulnerable workers rather than on the institutional structures that cause them to be wounded.96 According to Lorey, “precarization is a steering technique of the minimum at the threshold of a social vulnerability that is still just tolerable.”97 Beyond this threshold, presumably, lie domains of social vulnerability that are intolerable, which exceed calibrated policies of precarization and might induce unmanageable civic unrest in liberal democratic states. As such, Lorey’s threshold of tolerability begs the question of not just what lies beyond that brink— namely, decitizenized expulsion—but of how we should conceptualize the impact within authoritarian settings of a governmental use, or rather nonuse, of law that effectively pushes many into that space. It is necessary at this point to reiterate that the Chinese state has also engaged in multiple efforts to mitigate the serial disadvantage suffered by the nation’s underclass.98 From the provision of a social security safety net (dibao) to attempts to reform the household registration system to the recent program for “common prosperity” (gongtong fanrong 共同繁荣), China’s rulers have made high-profile commitments to level up the life chances of marginalized people—not least because their continued [ 32 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

mandate depends on showing that they care.99 And to the extent that these moves have stalled, it is equally crucial to recall that the Chinese state is far from monolithic and that centralized drives to enforce and extend labor legislation, for example, have been stymied at the local level by “procapital” bureaucrats who sometimes collude with rapacious companies.100 Furthermore, intensive neoliberal globalization of the kind that China has undergone always hurts the weakest, and not necessarily because states wish it so. As Pierre Bourdieu observes, “Social mechanisms are not the product of a Machiavellian intention. They are much more intelligent than the most intelligent of the dominant agents.”101 Governments sometimes flounder in their wake, pincered between intolerable pressures. But the notion of governmental precarization also forces us to consider that alongside or underneath concerned policy making lies a competing and covert belief in the utility of the underclass as a social body—and in the social utility of the violence that is done to that body. This, ultimately, is the point toward which Irene Pang is gesturing when she notes that “in contrast to existing accounts that equate precarity with  .  .  . the lack of state regulation and protection, precarious conditions faced by construction workers in Beijing and Delhi are in fact structured by the Chinese and Indian states through the law.”102 To put this another way, expulsion as I have described it here does not merely cover acts of dereliction by a deregulatory state. It is not simply an expedient, intermittent, or casual take on the law and its enforcement. Informal expulsion of this kind, even as it remains technically “unofficial” because it does not avail itself of strategies such as cross-border deportation and denationalization, can nonetheless occur in and through the law when that law knowingly renders its subjects precarious. And this process of inducing vulnerability—precisely because it is official, even if it does not flex formal expulsion power as such—reveals a quota of state investment in keeping the underclass down and out. It shows that the deliberate “development of underdevelopment”103—or the notion that “forms of poverty that are neither residual, nor cyclical or transitional, but inscribed in the future of contemporary societies” precisely because they boost growth104—are lowkey but accepted aspects of policy making. This awareness, coupled with the sheer size of China’s underclass, gives the fear of zombie citizenship and the cliff edge a character close to social vertigo, and it is a phobia that reaches well beyond the most marginalized, as the case studies set out in this book make manifest. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 33 ]

Solidarity Rules? Using cultural forms as my evidentiary base, I suggest that this social vertigo breeds social poison. It causes discord between different groups to take root and fester. To make this argument, however, is to push against a strong current in recent discourses on the relationship between precarity and fellowfeeling in both the Global North and China itself. For some researchers in Euro-America, precarity can be a means of making common cause: it melds cohesion amid shared experiences of brittleness.105 Anne Allison argues in a similar vein about uncertain times in Japan, pointing out that “precarity can also be the conditions for social change, new forms of collective comingtogether” and that “resistance to social precarity springs up in unpredictable places and forms.”106 This notion of solidarity has also proved to be a beguiling idea among many researchers who work on China, both in terms of in-class and cross-class solidarity. Thus a vocal but minority strand in current sociological work holds that China’s new workers—most particularly the second- and third-generations born and raised in the cities—now possess genuine class agency and consciousness and have made the crucial Marxian shift from “class in itself ” to “class for itself ” as a direct response to rampant uncertainty in their experiences of life and labor.107 Others again have focused on how people experiencing precarity rely on informal social networks to bolster “hope and survival, strategic management and pragmatism.”108 Yiu Fai Chow, meanwhile, takes this point further to argue convincingly that states of precarity among urban women in China’s creative industries not only foster self-care but may even be intrinsically “suitable” for the free, private, and unpredictable lives this group chooses to live. As Chow puts it, “They experience precarity, they know it, and they are fond of it.”109 Some of these same scholars—and others as well—also argue compellingly for the role that cross-class cooperation plays in the fight against vulnerability, against precarity as a fate rather than a choice. Their historical model and muse for this kind of transversal collaboration is the May Fourth period, when radical students and intellectuals became factory workers, promoted unionism, fomented strikes, conducted labor surveys, and crossed class lines to forge new political bonds. Wang Hui calls this class “vagabondage”:110 the process whereby well-born social actors in the 1920s and 1930s dropped down the ranks and linked up with the aspirant poor to foment [ 34 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

first agency and then insurrection. According to Pun et al., this kind of activist alliance has crystallized again in China as precarity bites: Reigniting the tradition of intellectual-worker unity, more mainland Chinese university students are working on production lines during their summer vacations to understand and document the life-world of workers’ hardships and struggles. A number of sociology students have departed from their elite career paths by moving to live in local industrial communities, offering education programs and organizing cultural activities for Foxconn workers.111 Since at least the millennium, pacts of empowerment between workers and students, activists, lawyers, and academics have bloomed, if only intermittently and under increasing duress.112 A particularly striking example of such solidarity in action is Migrant Workers Home (Gongyou zhi jia 工友之家), a multilateral NGO based in Picun, an urban village on the outskirts of Beijing. The Home was established in 2004 by Wang Dezhi, Sun Heng, Xu Duo 许多, and Jiang Guoliang 姜国良, migrant workers who had made the journey to Beijing only to find themselves mired in no-hope labor. From the outset, the Home promoted self-help, grassroots advocacy, and strategies for resilience among migrants while also drawing on broader sources of support: leftist academics, student volunteers, media personalities, and local bureaucrats.113 As such, the Home has concretized for some years now the ideal of solidarity as a social good that flowers in the soil of both in-class and cross-class activism. Just as crucial for my purposes here, the Home has also steadily consolidated itself as a center of culture and education through culture (wenhua jiaoyu 文化教育)—and more specifically, as a place in which activism is expressed through a creative praxis substantively enabled by a cross-class camaraderie that once again echoes the May Fourth era.114 Over the last two decades, the Home has served as the base for a band called the Young Migrant Workers Art Troupe (Dagong qingnian yishutuan 打工青年艺术团),115 a literary salon known as the Picun Literature Group (Picun wenxue xiaozu 皮村文学小组), a Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art (Dagong wenhua yishu bowuguan 打工文化艺术博物馆), several Migrant Workers Spring Festival Galas (Dagong chunwan 打工春晚), a New Workers Theater (Xin gongren juchang 新工人剧场), a school, a cinema, and a library (figures I.4 and I.5). These sites have flourished because of the talent and tenacity of migrants, often I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 35 ]

 Figures I.4 and I.5  Exemplary solidarity: the Migrant Workers Museum at Picun. Reproduced with permission from Jady Liu.

working in conjunction with allies from different social cohorts.The blistering potential of this kind of solidarity was showcased in 2017 when an essay by a writer whose talents had been nurtured by the Picun Literature Group and its academic mentors became an online sensation, first in China, then globally. Titled “My Name Is Fan Yusu” (Wo shi Fan Yusu 我是范雨素), the essay described the ordeals in precarity endured by its eponymous writer, a rural migrant and domestic helper exploited by her employers. Its significance stemmed both from its stunning virality and from the role played by interclass mentoring in its literary inception, incubation, and release into the world.116 Mentoring of this kind has also proved crucial for the work of migrant worker poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (see chapter 3). Picun urban village and the vibrant cultural hub it hosts have rightly become the focus of quite intense academic and media attention.117 As a beacon of progressivism, ignited by culture, Migrant Workers Home has acquired a long-range visibility that is politically mesmerizing. It has drawn international cultural and intellectual figures into its ambit and has spread its light into other parts of China: the band, for example, has performed in galvanizing ways all over the country. Offering, as it does, a longitudinal case study in culture-based social activism, the Home has exerted such a strong pull because it proves conclusively that solidarity can take root even in the most unpropitious terrain. As such, the Home and its activities also present an uplifting challenge to the shibboleths of “dark anthropology”: the bleak turn that much academic work has taken since the 1990s as it tries to process surging social inequality, privation, and misery. Conditions in China have inevitably fueled knowledge production of this kind, and plenty of the academic work referenced in this chapter—about carving out an underclass and the conditions its members endure—clearly fall into this category. This “miserabilist” tradition, which Joel Robbins dubs the “suffering slot,”118 may be necessary, but it can also breed habits of despair and disengagement as well as an awkward species of voyeurism on occasion. Against this morbid backdrop, Picun and its activist culture stand out so vividly that it is perhaps just as inevitable that they should have seized the attention of cultural studies scholars who see cheering redemptive power in that dialectic between art and direct action. Academic work on Picun, quite a bit of it protoactivist itself, is inspiring, and the work of the scholars referenced here has blazed new paths in the study of solidarity in action within the Chinese context at the same time as it counters thick ethnographic descriptions of wretchedness with narratives of hope. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 37 ]

Yet as part of this same logic of extreme visibility, Picun also stands out because of its singularity. Even the most vocal spokespeople for its extended experiment in communal cultural activism acknowledge that in many ways the Home remains a one-off, that its luster is so bright because it is almost unique.119 Although other cultural collectives fired by a strong social mission exist, they are thinly scattered. Far more common than the tight support network that fostered Fan Yusu is the paradigm of the solitary migrant worker poet who writes in isolation and does not even expect to be read by her fellow workers.120 As Maghiel van Crevel observes, most migrant worker villages do not have a Migrant Workers Home, and although the NGO is “locally successful, it is not a magic wand that will make the specter of growing inequality in postsocialist China disappear.”121 Just as relevant, Picun itself exists in a state of more or less permanent peril. It was initially placed on the condemned list during the Beijing eviction program of 2017, and although the Home escaped demolition during that campaign, other parts of the area were cleared out. Its residents and supporters know that the settlement, and therefore the NGO, are perhaps living on borrowed time.122 This point was made brutally clear on May 17th, 2023, when members of the Picun community announced on WeChat that the Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art had been slated for demolition.123 If other elements of Picun do survive, this may well be because its core personnel continue to cultivate an activist persona that is at the very least tolerable to the authorities, and that may even refrain quite consciously from protesting zombie citizenship in ways that might destabilize the status quo. Accommodations of this kind, as van Crevel notes, have boosted the Picun brand: “As the key to success, it identifies initiative, perseverance, faith in the future, and the supportive companionship of fellow workers rather than, say, systemic social change.”124 Compromise may now be essential given the increasingly squeezed environment for NGO and other activist support in China since 2015.125 But it also has equally ineluctable implications for radical solidarity. This latter point was made brutally clear by the crackdown in 2018 on an interclass justice campaign centered on the Jasic plant in Shenzhen where a labor dispute over low pay and long shifts escalated into industrial action (figure I.6). The protesting workers, some of whom were fired and arrested, were joined by a determined phalanx of Maoist-Marxist students drawn from as many as twenty universities, who also openly invoked the May Fourth cultural legacy as they mobilized the “Jasic Workers Solidarity Group” (Jiashi gongren shengyuantuan 佳士工人声援团). State response was [ 38 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

Figure I.6 “Solidarity is Strength” (团结就是力量), the slogan emblazoned on T-shirts worn by the Jasic Workers Solidarity Group as they strove for interclass unity.

uncompromising: riot police stormed the apartment where the students were living; some activists were detained; and universities began strenuously suppressing Marxist groups.126 As Au Loong Yu argues, “though Xi Jinping continues to demand the people learn from Marxism-Leninism and Mao’s thought, the state continues to crack down on any independent and collective effort at seriously studying left classics—and to crack down even harder when these efforts carry an aspiration to sympathize with working people.”127 Indeed, the state clampdown on the Jasic protests is telling above all, perhaps, because of its explicit prohibition on this “aspiration to sympathize” across class lines.128 Within the emotional economy of contemporary China, harmony is de rigueur, but sympathy—when it leads to action—can be punishable under law. Harmony is the logic of knowing one’s present place on the stratified social ladder, while looking resolutely upward for future boon and opportunity—and only when this harmony is disassociated from social care can it serve its role as political good. Sympathy, as an affective force that inevitably reaches sideways and downward, has no place in this schema. On the contrary, it is disruptive and must be disciplined. In short, the scholarly focus on solidarity in recent years is laudable but also potentially misleading. Indeed, the successes of these high-profile outposts may even inadvertently serve as smokescreens that mask the realities of interclass discord elsewhere. Picun and related movements constitute a classic instance of the charismatic exception that proves the rule—and this is not I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 39 ]

simply the chastening fact that solidarity is seldom hugely scalable, whatever its social context. Most particularly in neoliberal times, the “rule” is lifeworlds in which atomization and technologies of the self, rather than the glue of solidarity and concern for the other, constitute the harder norm. But the punitive disciplining of sympathy seen in the Jasic incident also shows how solidarity can become stigmatized when the state has the will and the power to do so.129 Activating concern over the civic plight of others—behaving as a responsible citizen, one might say—can even lead to the zombification of a person’s own rights to citizenship, as shown by the summary detention of leading Jasic activist Shen Mengyu 沈梦雨, who was “disappeared” in August 2018 and whose fate remains unknown.130 This public prohibition on active sympathy between different groups is not a zero-sum game; it is not a solitary, isolated negative. It comes at a time when class slippage—the tumble over the edge—is a palpable reality for many in China, with the result that the suppression of solidarity as a political move crashes hard into downward mobility as a social fact. Zombie citizenship, true to form, is spreading outward from the underclass as contagion, and this proliferation makes fellow feeling harder to muster even as it has become more socially necessary than ever.

Zombie Contagion As noted in the preface, a growing corpus of scholarship has emerged in recent years on the spread of casualized labor, punitive working conditions, insecure housing, forced eviction, and vagrancy among those who would not readily call themselves members of the underclass in China. These groups include dispatch workers, rush-order workers, agency workers, and care workers, as well as micro-entrepreneurs, student interns, unemployed graduates, tech workers, and cultural creators. These groups feel the cold breath of zombie citizenship at their backs, not least because that chill blows in many cases from a lack of legal protection: student interns laboring in factories and workshops who are not recognized as workers under the Labor Law;131 skilled and experienced “rush-order” workers who fulfill ondemand orders in unregulated workshops;132 online fiction writers who are robbed of their copyright by sharp practices in the industry and forced to work in sweatshop conditions;133 unemployed or underemployed university graduates living in illegal settlements;134 and tech workers who labor in China’s punishing “996” working culture. In this latter regime, employees [ 40 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

Figure I.7  Flatlining: logo of the 996.ICU movement.

are compelled to work from 9 a.m. until 9 p.m. six days a week in flagrant contravention of the Labor Law. In March 2019, the so-called 996.ICU movement was launched, with the slogan “Developers’ Lives Matter,” to protest these working practices, whose unremitting demands threaten to send workers to hospital intensive care units (figure I.7).135 Linked to this spreading sense of dispossession is the affective state Anne Allison, writing of post-bubble, post-Fukushima Japan, dubs “ordinary refugeeism.” This is a precarity of the soul: “a condition of being and feeling insecure in life that extends to one’s disconnectedness from a sense of . . . community,” and it afflicts the swelling number of people who feel exiled from the secure social citizenship they thought was their due.136 In this sense, it tallies in some key ways with the rise in China since 2016 of so-called sang wenhua 丧文化 (a culture of despondency and defeatism). An understated countercurrent to the obligatory optimism of state messaging during the era of the Chinese dream, sang culture registers the downward drift of those who are left deflated by the pressures of 996 work or demotivated by their failure to secure decent employment of any kind. Heavily influenced I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 41 ]

Figure I.8 “Slouching Ge You,” a dominant meme in the slacker subculture of sang. The Chinese text reads: “Don’t mind me, I’m a loser.”

by Japan’s own tribes of the disaffected,137 sang culture has a strong zombie undertow, as shown by memes featuring wordplay or visuals of corpse-like people and animals, drained of vitality and suggestively abject (figure I.8).138 And rather like the zombies banned from videogames, sang culture and its intimations of the undead have stirred official anxiety and censure.139 Amid governmental precarization, the Chinese state continues to plug the mantras of ambition and aspiration, particularly among young people. Sang culture skewers these mantras as myth, demonstrating instead that it is a psychic state of half-life rather than the positive energy touted in propaganda that the sustained push toward flexible labor perpetrates through the social world. It is telling that this contagion works in inverse proportion to the size of China’s formal economy, whose rapid shrinkage propels increasing numbers into the precincts of shadow labor. As Wang Hui notes, “Statistics show that the ‘formal economy’, in which workers (including those of the middle class) enjoy the protection of labor laws, accounts for 16.8 percent of employed people.”140 Smith and Pun, in a study that tests the workability of precarity as a key word for understanding contemporary China, take this point some way further: The idea central to the precariat thesis, that there is a class divide in terms of the employment conditions of the salariat and precariat, falls at the first hurdle. All workers are insecure in China, and precariousness [ 42 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

is not evidence of a separate class, but part of the general condition of waged labor in the country . . . non-standard forms of employment are recognizable across work with different forms of status, from unskilled to more white collar and professional occupations.141 Their point that precarity is also “white collar” and professional is hardly specific to China, even as the country’s vast insecure graduate class gives this notion of cross-class labor volatility a sharper theoretical edge. But the broader argument here—that precariousness is “part of the general condition of waged labor in the country”—is in many ways a still more essential one. It alludes, through its sheer scope, to precarity as an ambient, wraparound experience. If all waged labor in China is insecure and all workers are precarious, then the fear of zombie citizenship becomes a force profoundly constitutive of Chinese social reality. In particular, it is a force with the capacity not just to disunify but to sow active interclass division because, as Ann Anagnost notes, “even those who hold relatively privileged positions within the new economic order are no less caught up in a competitive struggle for survival that puts the subject permanently at the brink of a chasm.”142 The struggle for survival directly pits different cohorts against each other, as members of the underclass desperate to get a foot on the bottom rung square up to a middle class seeking to pull the ladder up behind them for fear they will tumble down it themselves. Small wonder that walled and gated residential complexes have become the norm for those who can afford them in urban China: this Balkanization of space makes the “haves” feel subjectively safer even as it objectively breeds inequality and pits people against one another.143 This is not the natural habitat of solidarity. Rather, this chasm—the cliff edge—creates the laboratory conditions within which social toxins can breed and multiply. It is unsurprising, then, that the last few years have seen an upswing of studies that explore the concrete affective fallout of zombie citizenship as a threat or reality, and these form an important complement to the findings from the cultural domain I present here. Jie Yang has investigated “genres of anger expression” in Beijing and demonstrated how members of the underclass consciously harness rage “to seek redress for injustices and legitimate their moral indignation.”144 Lian Si and Zhang Linna, in a study of affective responses to social injustice and thwarted opportunity among unemployed university graduates—the so-called ant tribes—note that when attempts at psychological self-soothing fail, many in this group use internet “venting games” (faxie youxi 发泄游戏) as a “decompression valve” (jieyafa 解压阀), I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 43 ]

or even consciously stoke rage and resentment by taking part in online discussions about nepotism in high places.145 In a parallel vein, Li Zhang’s study of middle-class angst in contemporary China explores how market-driven rivalry within an insecurely bounded cohort has turned pathological, leading to a welter of medicalized therapeutic interventions.146 Xiang Biao has further probed this virulent social contest via the notion of “involution” (neijuan 内卷)—“the experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless”147—while fearing all the while that a tumble downward constitutes a moral betrayal of immediate family and their hopes and investment. These studies, and the social conditions they document, are intriguing in part because of their implicit identification of class status and class strife as major metrics in the etiology of dark feelings. As Yang notes, “none of these genres of anger explicitly articulate collective class-consciousness in political terms, but they are part of workers’ ongoing struggle for a livelihood, as well as expressions of their desire for the entitlement and identity that were the norm in employment they once enjoyed in state enterprises. Their anger is thus partly class issues.”148 Just as pertinent is the suggestion that class-based anger cannot easily be voiced outright, a point Yang develops when she argues that public ranting is a proxy vocal channel for “suppressed emotional responses to class-based injustice.”149 Li Zhang makes a cognate claim when she argues that China’s therapy craze works as an antidote for the poison planted by rivalries over access to opportunity in an increasingly pinched working world. Ultimately, what these studies point to is the fraught relationship between social vertigo and social toxin within a body politic that has outlawed class as a category of analysis while legislating tirelessly for harmony. The proscribing of the term and its replacement in Chinese-language discourse with the more innocuous jieceng 阶层 (stratum) is an epiphenomenon of China’s sharp swerve to the market that several commentators have discussed.150 The reasons for the disavowal of class are split across state and society. On one hand, as Lin Chun notes, the CCP has sought to eliminate class discourse because of the potential for a vigorous working-class politics to scupper the scale and speed of market growth.151 On the other hand, Chinese society, parts of it still traumatized by the Cultural Revolution, has grown both wary and weary of class struggle and so has been willing to accept the shift to the smoother rhetoric of social stratification according to wealth, assets, education, consumer taste, and opportunity-as-ladder.152 The ideology of strata, as observed by the sociologist Lu Xueyi 陆学艺, one of its major conceptual [ 44 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

architects in China, is inherently stabilizing, motivational, and conducive to harmony—unlike class, which has become semiotically inseparable from struggle.153 Stratification feeds the logic of self-betterment; it displaces the focus for change from the ambient world to the striving self and thus further works to depoliticize social relations. In China, the discursive gagging of class has occurred alongside a sustained multilateral propaganda push around the “harmonious society,” the “China dream,” “positive energy” (zheng nengliang 正能量), and injunctions to happiness. Indeed, these two processes are not so much parallel as ideologically intertwined. Public messaging about upbeat cordiality as a civic duty and the accessibility of a bright future seeks to create a manufactured consensus within which class-based antagonism is forcibly naturalized as redundant or passé, and “negative emotions like sadness, anger, suspicion, and frustration” are publicly stigmatized.154 But the very suppression of conflict can also, of course, make tensions bristle more fiercely. This begs the question: How does this tension show its face in a society with the governmental firepower to keep it mostly tamped down? How is taboo social strain concretized in an authoritarian state? To an extent, the work of Jie Yang and others offers answers to these questions, and they do so via the specific methodologies of their disciplines: sociology and anthropology, in particular.

Management Cultures Even as I draw on such work, in the central chapters of this book I undertake something rather different. These case studies explore a range of aesthetic practices—delegated performance, waste art, poetry from the factory floor, suicide shows, and short video apps—to show that cultural forms can serve as vessels within which the fear, resentment, strife, and distrust stirred by zombie citizenship crystallize in material ways. Across these case studies, the core methodology I pursue is close reading of cultural artifacts, both visual and textual, complemented by recurrent dips into popular responses within the online domain, especially social media. Inevitably, this is not an all-encompassing method, and certain aspects of the artifacts explored here remain in somewhat more blurred or distant focus. An example is the role that gender plays in the febrile arts of precarity, a theme referenced at points in what follows (especially chapters 1 and 4) rather than plumbed in depth, not least because it requires its own monographic treatment. With that I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 45 ]

caveat in mind, my aim throughout is to practice a form of cultural studies that not only adheres to the foundational precepts of that field of inquiry— in particular, its attention to marginalized voices, overlooked or disregarded sources, and the aesthetic practices of the powerless—but also attests to the capacity of culture to intervene palpably in social experience. In making the case for cultural practices as an illuminating portal on precarious feeling in China, I’m not simply staking claims for culture as a structure of feeling in the manner argued so evocatively by Raymond Williams, although his ideas remain resonant here.155 Rather, my core point is that aesthetic practices, broadly construed, can also serve as actual zones of encounter between different social actors who are menaced by zombie citizenship as a looming threat or an existing reality. When avant-garde artists hire migrants to perform in live installations; when photographers and sculptors masquerade as garbage pickers to make waste art; when factory workers write shop floor poems of drudgery and exploitation that rail against diminished lives; when construction workers turn to suicidal performance to seek wage arrears; and when economically vulnerable people in lower-tier cities monetize their “vulgarity” through sensation-seeking livestreaming videos, a framework in which cultural practices are more than “merely” representational becomes discernible.The works I explore are, in fact, better understood as politically situational. Set up, either directly or implicitly, as charged encounters between opposing social actors, these cultural forms enable fraught feelings to bridle and flare. They are aesthetically contrived situations that incite the political to unfold and in which class as a category forcefully reasserts itself. What’s more, they stand alongside a range of other fractious forms—rap, folk music, exhibitionary culture centered on migrant workers, public art projects, confrontational documentary film—which I mention from time to time in the pages that follow but cannot explore in dedicated chapters due to limitations of space. Ultimately, I read such works as oppositional others to the strategies of soothing psychotherapeutic intervention that have boomed in China as status anxiety, rivalry, and resentment have proliferated. Just as what Li Zhang calls China’s “psy fever”—counseling, therapeutic language, mental health care—has tried to leach the venom from this surge and emotionally discipline the disaffected into states of managed calmness, so do certain cultural forms create spaces in which rage and panic about living on the edge can run riot. Not coincidentally, the practices I discuss here are subject to various forms of finessing. In some cases (migrant worker poetry, suicidal performance, [ 46 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

short videos), it is the status of a given practice as genuinely cultural that has been contested by critics and commentators. In others (such as delegated performance and waste art), it is the actual or symbolic violence of the art form—however startling and unmissable—that has been overlooked, perhaps strategically. Either way, these suppressive moves reveal that the genres discussed here lie at awkward odds with the prevailing tenor of harmonious society in the age of the Chinese dream. Nor is it an accident that conventional cultural forms are relatively underrepresented in what follows. The five case studies in this book do touch on fiction, cinema, painting, and so on. But work that can agitate the confrontational impulses just described tends to require a form and staging better tooled for dissensus. It needs liveness, extreme embodiment, on-site locations; it requires risk, shock, and actual or imminent violence. Even when the cultural forms examined here are less openly cued to conflict, they typically take a settled aesthetic form such as poetry or sculpture, and then refashion it—on the assembly line or using filth and trash—in ways that make these genres better calibrated to a scene of class-on-class antagonism. Citizens of democratic states might well wonder why such sentiments are not simply funneled upward toward the state power that possesses at least some of the capacity required to level out the cliff edge, vivify zombie citizenship, and readmit the expelled. Certainly, precarious people in China do challenge or petition local and national government, in variants of the dissident-versus-state paradigm on which the liberal commentariat has come to rely so heavily when trying to make sense of how sociopolitical tension is processed in China.156 In particular, they do so in protest at bureaucratic injustice, as Martin Whyte has demonstrated via significant survey findings, which show that “The average Chinese citizen is less angry about current income gaps (across different social groups) than citizens in many other societies. . . . The primary drivers of popular anger lie elsewhere—primarily in power inequalities, manifested in abuses of power, official corruption, bureaucrats who fail to protect the public from harm, mistreatment by those in authority, and inability to obtain redress when mistreated.”157 Horizontal, person-to-person antagonism—even when it flares up quasi-vertically across lines of rank and class—might seem a digressive move given that ultimate responsibility for the cliff edge and the precarious feeling it induces lies with those at the top. But as Ann Anagnost points out, many also share a “belief in the necessary violence of development,” in the Darwinist credo that some must be offered up to “improve the life chances I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 47 ]

of the rest.”158 Just as waste is a by-product of growth, so too must some be martyred, nobly or otherwise, as China’s star soars and the nation reaches for its long-elusive destiny. This selective victimhood “takes ‘every form of indirect murder’: increasing the risk of death for some, including political death through expulsion or loss of citizenship.”159 Amid anger at specific instances of official malpractice, graft, and dereliction, a broader tolerance of this scapegoating logic may well be societally baked in. This notion of sacrifice as ineluctable, even edifying, arguably fits within a broader “narrative of suffering” (kunan xushi 苦难叙事) in reform- and post-reform-era China, a developmental discourse which pronounces that pain, struggle, and perseverance—even in the face of natural disaster—are constitutive components of Chinese identity.160 As the state has tacitly committed to the conscious precarization or nonprotection of certain groups, and media discourses about migrant workers steeped in the rhetoric of sacrifice continue to proliferate,161 society is encouraged to view progress as an evolutionary fable in which the blood, sweat, and tears of some must be extracted to grease the wheel of history as it turns. Cynical minds might even wonder if the public and highly punitive treatment meted out to China’s already existing decitizenized people in Daxing and other sites has a spectacular function: a version of épater la bourgeoisie that shows state strength at the same time as sowing strategic seeds of dread. The key question is how to end up on the right side of the “savage sorting.” In that race, one’s opponents are often those nearest to hand, which is why tension and distrust flare up horizontally—and it is tempting to pathologize those feelings. In recent years, important work has emerged on the agency that precarious people in China, whatever their social class, exercise in tending to their inner lives. In their exploration of how rural migrants in Shanghai process precarity as “pressure” (yali 压力), for example, Ash Amin and Lisa Richaud argue that severe tensions “seem to be moderated through varied forms of respite, slowing-down, and ‘moments of being.’ ”162 Significantly, the sites for these moments of reflective and pacifying pause are cultural—“a public library, a large bookstore, and a café”163—and their aim is to replenish drained stores of resilience through conscious practices of “de-stressing.” What I suggest in the following chapters is by no means a manifesto for cultural “re-stressing.” But I do try to show that confrontation, speeding up, and “moments of being” that sharpen rather than allay feelings of intensity may also bolster agency among those who are menaced by the cliff edge. This is not simply the ancient hope that art and literature might change the world, [ 48 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

nor the newer one that subaltern cultures may even overturn it, although at times the practices discussed here do have palpable impacts in real time. My suggestion is rather that the antagonism which precarity and the cliff edge rouse is creative as much as it is destructive, and that from this wellspring can flow a sense of individual capability in unsettled, uncontrollable times. Managing precarity, in other words, does not simply require technologies of the self centered on mood regulation, emotional discipline, and community negotiation—crucial as those things are. In a nation where harmony is state diktat, the cultural forms explored in this book stand out as spaces in which socially unacceptable discord can break aggressive and creative cover. They are not reflections, or even refractions, of quotidian life and its more modulated human interactions. Nor are these fractious forms mere valves through which class tensions can escape and then dissipate into neutrality in the open air. Instead, they are breakout zones in which tamped-down fury and dread speak their mind and trouble the borders of the political. These practices—at times disturbing in their hostility, desperation, or disdain—affirm the right of precarious people to feel angry and afraid.They afford a zone in which those justified emotions are culturally validated and validated by culture. Agency of this kind, in which the self gives free rein to darker feelings, requires naming and attention just as much as agency that is intent on self-pacification and making the best of difficult or impossible circumstances. Agency-as-antagonism is important both because it takes solid shape in cultural form, rather than evaporating like emotion vented into the ether, and because it acknowledges that the strain of difficult or impossible circumstances cannot—should not—always be mastered by obedient dint of will. By shrugging off conventional civility—the injunction to harmony— precarious people can, paradoxically, stake claims to a more vibrant civic self.

Charting the Cliff Edge To trace the contours of the cliff edge and the tensions it stirs, the book is divided into five chapters, each of which explores a specific fractious form. Chapter 1, The Delegators, zeroes in on a widespread but underexplored practice in the Chinese art world: recruiting, pay, often with little or no members of the underclass to perform within art installations presided over by a charismatic artist. The professed mission of these delegated performances is to broker interclass bonds in a fragile age. But the practice remains I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 49 ]

a controversial branch of participatory art, mostly because it risks reifying its subjects. Indeed, such works typically involve choreographing precarious people into situations of duress, jeopardy, even degradation—while the artists themselves accrue significant benefits from these callous scenes. In this chapter, I explore a core set of delegated performances by well-known Chinese artists to argue that this art practice plays out awkwardly within an authoritarian state where outright social protest is taboo. These performances directly address precarity in their visual language at the same time as engineering scenarios that incite interclass conflict, even violence, to erupt. Artists actively maltreat their subjects in these works: they willfully zombify them, deploying them en masse, denying them agency, making them toil. Mostly overlooked by scholars thus far, perhaps because of the dark feelings they vent, these performances ask to be read as spaces in which artists’ own fears of the cliff edge are acted out contemptuously on class others in a social world in which grievances against the state are stifled. Chapter 2, The Ragpickers, further pursues this idea that avant-garde art practices can harbor overt or covert hostility. I explore the nexus between expulsion, waste, zombie citizenship, and precarity in contemporary Chinese visual culture, opening with a rare example of a documentary that places the ragpicker at center stage. I then show how some of China’s leading artists now work eloquently with detritus; but I note the strange anomaly that their works offer up scant if any space for the underclass who actually process the nation’s refuse. The artist, instead, has taken over the mantle of the waste picker as sifter and sorter of garbage. This missing human figure matters, in part because waste is always about people, and their absence from aesthetic space suggests that art is responding to a felt sense that personhood is coming under assault as basic life sureties fray. But I also argue that the garbage takeover is part of a sustained practice of appropriation and effacement in the artistic representation of the cliff edge in China. China’s waste works are art forms born at the tense interface between elite artists and those consigned to zombie citizenship, and they disclose fraught fears over where brittle life experience begins and ends in a society that has tried to eliminate class as a category of political action and analysis. Chapter 3, The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists, investigates the limits of literary articulation among China’s underclass, in particular the nation’s vast cohort of migrant workers. I begin by sketching the multiple precarious pressures that beset the factory worker who writes poetry, a figure who for some is merely a curious oxymoron. Next, I close-read a long poetry [ 50 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

sequence by Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, whose howling lamentations about life on the cliff edge in the Pearl Delta factory regime have drawn comparisons with Allen Ginsberg, and whose verse registers rage and dissensus through its sustained use of repetition. Over time, however, Zheng’s success as a poet has smoothed over the abrasive timbre of her verse, which has turned more honeyed in theme and tone as she herself has leveled up. I then turn to an entirely overlooked state-endorsed magazine for migrant workers, Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend (Dagong zhiyin 打工知音). This publication also hinges on repetition as a strategy of rhetoric, as it enjoins the mantras of self-reliance and class-based humility on its readership via socalled tales from life. These reiterate the same storytelling motifs in relentlessly cookie-cutter form. Equally pertinent are the magazine’s experiments with narrative voice, in which elite journalists use free indirect discourse, fake oral accounts, and unsourced interviews to ventriloquize those blighted by zombie citizenship. These two textual corpora—the poetry and the magazine—reveal themselves as fractious forms in which interclass strife is either shouted out or shouted down. The protest potential of China’s underclass comes to the fore again in chapter 4, The Cliffhangers. Here I explore resistance in China’s vast and poorly regulated construction industry, where workers turn to suicidal performance as a radical means of securing wage arrears. Thus far, these suicide shows have mostly caught the gaze of political scientists and sociologists, who read them as extreme exemplars of labor unrest. But these displays, precisely in their status as “shows,” also require aesthetic analysis. They both draw on and depart from diverse legacies of remonstrance, from the Chinese tradition of suicide as protest to more recent forms of public showdown that deploy the body in extremis. Exploring an empirical base of two dozen suicide shows posted on video-sharing sites, I argue that these performances propel China’s shadow workers into arresting and unprecedented forms of visibility, as protestors defy the doxa of the contemporary megalopolis— which ties high altitude to high status—by commandeering the rooftop to rail wordlessly against expulsion, stratified citizenship, and the denial of rights. Literalizing the queasiness of life on a ledge, China’s cliffhangers move beyond mere analogy for the experience of freefall and grapple head on with the abyss, while seizing the experience of urban verticality from elite artworks on the theme. As such, cliffhanging in China exemplifies how tense encounters on the brink can become the genesis for a new and volatile cultural practice. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 51 ]

Chapter 5, The Microcelebrities, investigates digital self-expression among China’s underclass. Its focus is the short video and livestreaming app Kuaishou, which by 2017 had already acquired more than 350 million daily active users, mostly concentrated in lower-tier cities and rural areas. Many are also producers, whose creative content celebrates vulgar manners, poor hygiene, crass customs, and uncool ways via a cultural mode known as tuwei—a hard-to-translate term denoting all things earthy, lowbrow, bawdy, and awkward. I explore the tuwei vibe via close analysis of some of its most outrageous exponents, performers who will eat excrement or set their genitals alight in their quest for fame and fortune. Predictably, Kuaishou has provoked a backlash, both from the state and from middle-class netizens who are affronted by its earthiness and threatened by the specter of underclass mobilization that the app portends. I discuss how these netizens have lashed out via online hating that makes risible the idea that China is harmonious at a time when the cliff edge looms and the abjection Kuaishou owns so proudly is a reminder that we are all base beings.To explore this classist angst further, I look at a found footage documentary that splices together the livefeeds of outcast citizenry in ways that stir compassion but also mitigate their raw charge. I conclude the chapter by arguing that the precarity of Kuaishou—beset by both the pressures of the platform economy and the vagaries of state censorship—requires its users to become hustlers, a habitus showcased in a recent genre of sardonic skits that reveal social strife is still very much alive on the app. The book’s conclusion, Viral Precarity, begins by exploring artistic responses to Covid-19 in China, asking whether a crisis on the planetary scale has sparked artworks animated by true communitarian spirit. The evidence from China is mixed. Pandemic art has flourished, but its visual economy is marred by the familiar logic of expulsion. Middle-class doctors, often in angelic garb, dominate these works, and migrant delivery drivers are effaced in ways that mirror the social violence they suffered on the streets of urban China as so-called carriers of the virus. I argue that the delivery drivers who trekked across the locked-down city invoke the notion of zombie contagion, making “real” the fear that civic death is somehow infectious. The pandemic certainly ramped up the necropolitics of martyrdom in China, but the discrimination endured by delivery drivers as they kept society going forms part of a broader pattern of expulsion by another name—a pattern by no means exclusive to China but which that country illuminates harshly nonetheless. At a time when China’s blatant policies of internal exile [ 52 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

in Xinjiang are grabbing attention, the norms and forms of informal expulsion should not slip beneath the radar: the damage they wreak is so grievous precisely because this mode of expulsion is harder to name and thus resist en masse. Yet even when the cliff edge fails to become a site of concerted action, it remains a social zone in which people must face each other in the intense encounter that comes from shared plight. I conclude by suggesting some reasons why such stand-offs, hostile as they are, may harbor the seeds of transformation and a revitalized civic self.

I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 53 ]

CHA P T E R I

The Delegators

When Mr Pecksniff and the two young ladies got into the heavy coach at the end of the lane, they found it empty, which was a great comfort; particularly as the outside was quite full and the passengers looked very frosty. For as Mr Pecksniff justly observed—when he and his daughters had burrowed their feet deep in the straw, wrapped themselves to the chin, and pulled up both windows—it is always satisfactory to feel, in keen weather, that many other people are not as warm as you are. And this, he said, was quite natural, and a very beautiful arrangement; not confined to coaches, but extending itself into many social ramifications. “For” (he observed), “if every one were warm and well-fed, we should lose the satisfaction of admiring the fortitude with which certain conditions of men bear cold and hunger. And if we were no better off than anybody else, what would become of our sense of gratitude; which,” said Mr Pecksniff with tears in his eyes, as he shook his fist at a beggar who wanted to get up behind, “is one of the holiest feelings of our common nature.” —CHARLE S D I CK E NS, TH E L I FE AND ADVENTURES OF MA RTI N CH UZZLEWIT

I

n August 2001, the Gao Brothers 高氏兄弟, a duo of avant-garde artists based in Beijing, traveled to a migrant labor market in their hometown of Jinan, the capital city of Shandong province, in search of human subjects for a piece of performance art. As soon as their car came to a halt, the brothers were mobbed by migrants desperate for work. In an article they wrote later for a special issue on body art for the journal Eastern Art (Dongfang yishu 东方艺术), the brothers offered a transcript of the negotiations that followed: “Have you got some work for us?” “No work, just money for nothing.” [ 54 ]

“No kidding, when do you ever get a deal like that!” “Do you know what performance art is?” “Seen it in the newspaper, but I didn’t really get it. Do you need models?” “Yeah, more or less. Are you up for it?” “Sure, how much?” “How much do you reckon we should pay?” “We charge 40 yuan a day. How long’s the job?” “Half a day.” “That’d be 20 or 30 yuan then, maybe?” “How about 25 then?” “How many people do you need?” “20, male or female, any age. But we need to tell you upfront that you’ll have to get naked. Are you up for that?” “Yeah, that’s fine. But there won’t be any women, right?” “If any women want take part we’d be happy to hire them too.” “But no-one will see, right?” “That’s right, no-one will see—we’re doing it on a rooftop.” “When?” “Tomorrow morning at 6:30.”1 The next day the migrant workers showed up at the allotted hour, and the artists led them to the performance venue. It was a disused auditorium, whose walls grew thickly with vines: a place, the brothers put it, in which “time seemed to flow backwards.”2 Assembly halls such as this have a distinct affective resonance in contemporary China. In fact, the term the brothers use to describe the locale—da litang 大礼堂 [assembly hall]—is also the title of a major photographic series by the artists Shao Yinong 邵译农 and Mu Chen 慕辰, who journeyed all over China at the turn of the millennium to capture the mixed-use afterlives of these public spaces. During the Cultural Revolution, such halls clamored with the sounds of collective fervor as they staged the vaunting of the proletariat and the humbling of their bourgeois betters. In the years since that strenuous heyday, these sites have been reborn as warehouses, community centers, even karaoke bars.3 Others have tumbled into states of dereliction (figures 1.1 and 1.2), which show spaces musty and forsaken, yet still visibly stalked by their grander past. The Gao Brothers might almost be talking about just this kind of place when they describe the site of their performance: T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 55 ]

 Figures 1.1 and 1.2  Shao Yinong and Mu Chen, Assembly Halls, 2002. Forlorn relics of a more heroic time. Reproduced with permission from Shao Yinong and Mu Chen.

The interior space of the assembly hall was huge. Looking out from the large red curtains which hung on either side of the stage, all that could be seen was row upon row of dust-covered chairs. Apart from some basic acoustic equipment, all that was left on the stage were a few tables and chairs piled up in the corner . . . the staircase by the wall, mottled with rust, refracted the light flooding in from the window toward the roof.4 As a temporally textured locale, the space is scattered with the shards of broken proletarian visions, and its current dilapidation cannot but summon an eerie sense of how ideological empires rise and fall. As such, it’s a fraught site in which to stage the particular performance that the Gao Brothers went on to choreograph on the hall’s rooftop: 20 Hugs for Hire (20 ge guyongzhe de yongbao 20个雇佣者的拥抱). The performance was the latest iteration of a long-term hugging series the brothers inaugurated in 2000 that had previously featured unpaid, fully clothed volunteers who aimed to stir touchy-feely sentiment of the feel-good variety. This new version—paid, naked, awkward—began with a ten-minute-long session in which the migrants hugged each other in pairs, an action perhaps already discomfiting for them given the traditional reticence about physical displays of affection in Chinese society (except more recently among some urban cosmopolitans). The brothers then “issued the order” (zhiling 指令) for the migrants to strip naked, but they balked and stood rooted to the spot. More tense negotiations ensued, in which the workers refused to remove their clothes unless the Gao Brothers raised their fee to 50 yuan. The brothers reluctantly agreed while making acerbic asides about workers’ strikes: “So now you’re the Solidarity Movement, yeah?”5 In a spasm of self-consciousness, the workers then stripped, closed their eyes, and hugged each other. They were visibly “overwhelmed” by the task: some muttered about how a day of manual labor would have been far preferable; others still refused to get naked and settled for the lower fee. Finally, the brothers led the workers downstairs to the main assembly hall, where they staged a so-called Last Supper, in which the migrants were instructed to stand atop two long tables, laid with a white cloth, and perform one last nude embrace. The brothers officiated over the scene from a seated and (mostly) clothed position at either side (figure 1.3). At the end of the performance, they paid the workers and headed out for an actual supper with a small group of personal friends who’d helped out with the day’s events. T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 57 ]

Figure 1.3  Gao brothers, 20 Hugs for Hire. The brothers are seated on either side of the table, lording it over the help.

I begin this chapter with the backstory of 20 Hugs for Hire in part because the Gao Brothers’ account presents such a detailed and candid self-narrative of a site-specific performance piece that otherwise would exist only in the ephemeral form of a few scattered photographs. More important, however, this narration and the performance it describes capture with the concise economy of a screenshot the fraught landscape of art making between different class actors in an age of rising precarity. Indeed, 20 Hugs for Hire and works like it have much to tell us about the supposedly salvationary powers of participatory art in a fractured world, both in China and beyond. In this chapter, I explore a range of so-called delegated performance works from China in which avant-garde artists stage-manage migrant workers into tensely contrived situations of servitude, jeopardy, exposure, bodily shame, and alienated labor. Works such as these mushroomed at the cusp of the century, but very few have been documented properly, let alone analyzed for their illuminating political import in a society grappling with precarity’s steady march from the subaltern margins into the so-called center—by which I mean the lived experience of the “haves”: those social cohorts who still cherished higher hopes of the good life and wished themselves [ 58 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

far from the cliff edge. Although interest in China’s worthy and progressive socially engaged art has burgeoned in recent years, the works of delegated performance I discuss remain almost deliberately overlooked.6 These are uneasy, sometimes unpleasant pieces: fractious forms, par excellence. With some important exceptions, they intentionally traffic in ugly feelings. I begin by positioning China’s delegated performance within international art historical thinking about modes of participatory practice. The term “delegated performance,” coined by Claire Bishop, refers to artwork in which nonprofessionals are recruited to perform at the bidding of an artist in site-specific installations.7 Work of this kind often courts controversy, and its reception has been mixed, at times acrimoniously so. For some critics, most notably Nicolas Bourriaud, collaborative work makes art from the very substance of human encounter, and it can salve societal wounds or broker bonds between the divided.8 For others, and Claire Bishop most especially, the point and purpose of delegated performance is to generate the surge of bad affect that makes us see and feel anew what is institutionally savage about our societies. I argue here that neither of these binary paradigms is fully fit for purpose in the case of China, and that this mismatch has clear ethical-political implications for any Chinese artist’s decision to work in the medium. This is because both delegated performance and the socially engaged art under whose larger rubric it belongs have mostly been read within the frame of atrophying democratic norms in Euro-America. Whether such art helps piece together a fractured body politic or acts out the contests and conflicts Chantal Mouffe argues are the true lifeblood of democracy,9 delegated performance in democratic settings often seeks to mainline adrenaline into the people-led political process. This existing norm tells us little about how delegated performance might work in an authoritarian state such as China. A different theoretical rubric is required if we are to conceptualize the meaning of this provocative art practice within a society that is both intransigently controlled and tensely precarious. Does this art want to protest and repair the conditions of the present? Are its practitioners, as Meiqin Wang argues of China’s socially engaged art, “citizen intellectuals who are doing small-scale work in their effort to live in truth and to create parallel structures”?10 Or is Chinese delegated performance in deep mimetic league with the neoliberal governmentality that divides and rules, which fosters inequality the better to control its people? Might it even create a “safe” performative zone in which threatened class actors, unable to protest their existing or imminent precarity T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 59 ]

openly against the state, turn on social others in cheaply cathartic fashion? Indeed, does delegated art in a polity where participatory politics are almost impossible, precarity is rife, and zombie citizenship looms ultimately make a mockery of the very notion that the power of art, as Grant Kester puts it, has always “rested in its ability to evoke utopian possibilities . . . [in] its struggle to develop a compensatory cultural response to the dehumanizing effects of modernity”?11 To explore these questions, I dig deep into some core case studies of delegated performance from China’s millennial turn. I show how these works openly address the condition of precarity, in both thematic and formal terms: these are performances that work the hinge between risk, transience, grind, and the workaday tedium of labor. I go on to argue that China’s delegated performances are also intensely relational and fractious forms. Indeed, they demonstrate that precarity is not a glib and inclusive political identity—a one-fits-the-99 percent, “we are all precarious now” hashtag under which the disenfranchised can cluster and find common cause. Rather, it is a state of relating grounded in antagonism, even violence, between different class actors who sense the specter of exile from the fold. This is an antagonism that delegated performance from China frequently stages in flagrant, even incendiary ways. As previously suggested, artists mistreat their performers in many of these works, crafting a visual language rooted in predation and cruelty. Moreover, this is a language that vaunts the supremacy of the conceptual artist (who need demonstrate little if any technical virtuosity) while reducing that artist’s migrant subjects (who mostly practice a proper trade) to the status of deskilled lumpen extras. It deliberately zombifies them. It’s a language based—with little concealment of the fact—on feel-good for the artist and feel-bad for the hired hands. Created in and for an era of expulsion, it’s an artistic practice that seems almost willfully to make a bad situation worse. The defenders of feel-bad or feel-uneasy delegated performance outside China—work by artists such as Santiago Sierra, Dora García, and Tino Sehgal—argue that viewers must hone their acumen when considering such works. In particular, critics and spectators need to distinguish between poortaste performances that seek merely to épater la bourgeoisie and “work that reifies precisely in order to discuss reification, or that exploits precisely to thematize exploitation itself” (italics in the original).12 But Chinese delegated performance unsettles this neat schism between art that seeks to expose cruelty and art that is just cruel and plays sadistically for kicks and giggles. Indeed, [ 60 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

its particular praxis, reiterated over many works, suggests that art deriving its vim from crossing class lines in this way is itself highly permeable in meaning. In this chapter, I show that some delegated performances from China are steadfastly set on justice and solidarity and create aesthetic situations in which members of the underclass in China can make art—if only momentarily, and under the close tutelage of an art world professional. Other works, meanwhile, enable a darker gaze: one that can harness the feel-good factor of participatory art to derive a more illicit sense of comfort as class others are kept visibly over the edge and in the space below. Other works again recruit troupes of migrant workers, at rock-bottom rates, to perform in installations which are then garlanded by artist statements that elide tough questions about class, labor, and the zombification of life, proffering instead abstract arguments about freedom, will, and the artist’s own capacity for endurance. Such performances choreograph febrile situations of conflict only to defuse, quite perversely, their own overt political charge. I conclude this chapter by suggesting that the peculiar dynamics of delegated performance can even play host to actively articulated contempt. Grant Kester observes that although the art world is “very comfortable with ironic distance, it has a much more difficult time understanding sincerity as anything other than a sign of naivete or intellectual weakness.”13 Yet outside the domain of propaganda—such as the work of Leni Riefenstahl and other fascinating fascists, to borrow Susan Sontag’s term14—critics may struggle even harder with the notion that art can be cruel. Delegated performance from China’s cliff edge, I suggest, forces the viewer to confront this possibility head-on.

Delegate, Delegate, Delegate Delegated performance, an art practice that first emerged forcefully in the 1990s, has split its observers. This is because, whatever its provenance, it is always a divided form: prone to both utopian and dystopian expressions. Seen through a happy lens, it breaks art wide open, creating spaces in which amateurs—anyone, in fact—can take up the exhilarating practice of making art in the golden age of Web 2.0. Defying institutional gatekeeping, delegated performance—like all participatory art—has the power both to democratize gallery spaces and to turn the precincts of the people into art zones. It can enable massive, sometimes marvelous collaborations between artists and artisanal or technical support teams that a solitary practitioner T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 61 ]

could only ever map in the mind.15 Ai Weiwei’s 艾未未 collaborative sound installation Remembering (Nian 念, 2010) is a notable example from China. To kick-start this work, Ai posted a call on Twitter, inviting Chinese citizens to read out one or more names from the horrifically long list of students killed in the Sichuan earthquake of 2008 and then send the audio file to his studio. Ai’s technical team compiled these separate voices into an MP3 file subsequently distributed via various online channels.16 From these often counterintuitive collaborations comes the belief or hope, as Nicolas Bourriaud argues, in collaborative art as “a site that produces a specific sociability”; a “social interstice” that encourages “an inter-human intercourse which is different to the ‘zones of communication’ that are forced upon us”; a set of spaces “where we can elaborate . . . critical models and moments of constructed conviviality.”17 In precarious days, when the threat of expulsion can prove divisive, aesthetic teamwork promises to be both social glue and affective solace. Delegated performance, as one of participatory art’s leading genres, comes freighted with this kind of aspiration. Backlashing against this most fiercely is Claire Bishop, who rebuffs the notion of cozy conviviality in participatory art, and replaces it with one rooted in the power and value of contestation. Drawing on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Bishop argues that “a fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate—in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased.”18 In this context, participatory art is most politically potent when it models the thrusts and parries of antagonism, and perhaps no branch of art is better tooled for such tense display than delegated performance, precisely because of its in-built, in-your-face, power-based division between artist and performers. Bishop does reject the kneejerk argument that practitioners of this art are classically exploitative, battening on subaltern pain and drudgery to pique the jaded tastes of artworld glitterati. Instead, she makes the case for the “best” delegated performance as a practice that forces spectators to question why they axiomatically expect art to decry the capitalist machine, and even to consider the extent to which they might covertly enjoy their own masochistic, coglike subjection within that apparatus.19 Bishop’s argument relies on a special category of spectator/performer, one who both reflexively conforms to the system but can also self-reflexively recognize that fact, and one for whom morbid bodily commodification can be a topic for cool-headed deliberation. The [ 62 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

self-selectiveness of this category opens her take on delegated performance to challenge, even within “a fully functioning democratic society.”

In It Together? In a hard-core authoritarian polity, however, this position struggles to sustain itself. Indeed, it might at first sight seem that the benevolent take on delegated performance—in particular, the claim that it offers a representational space in which the broken politics of the precarious present can be mended—is more tenable in China. A useful example here is a work by the artist Shu Yong 舒勇, titled Building Dreams (Zhu meng 筑梦), that was staged in the city of Foshan on April 25, 2010. Shu’s chosen performers for this two-part piece were a large group of migrant workers engaged in the construction of a high-rise building in the city’s downtown area. In the first stage of the performance, directed by the artist, each worker put on a bright red hardhat and had his portrait taken against an identical backdrop. Every worker received a 20 yuan fee for the use of his portrait. These headshots were then suspended like advertising hoardings from the sides of the building (figure 1.4), thus creating a bespoke and one-off billboard of the contractually dispossessed. As the artist pointed out: “The contract they signed for taking part in the Building Dreams project is probably the first formal contract they’ve signed in their lives. And the 20-yuan fee they received for their portrait probably marks the first time they’ve ever even heard of portrait rights.”20 In part two of the performance, Shu Yong led the workers in a graffiti session, in which workers “who had probably never touched a paintbrush before” were encouraged to express their dreams in word and image (figure 1.5). These linked parts of the performance were duly photographed and the images posted on Shu Yong’s website. Shu Yong’s various commentaries on the work, in the form of media interviews as well as artist statements on his website, focus on the intractable question of the visibility of migrant labor in contemporary China.21 By plastering public space with the visages of the underclass, he aims to unsettle an ocular regime glutted with standardized celebrity iconography in the hope that this détournement can make us “truly feel the meaning and existence of those who labor in society’s lower stratum,”22 thus making the downtrodden masses individually seeable.This messaging is made sharper by the showy political theater, also photographed, of migrant workers signing T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 63 ]

 Figures 1.4 and 1.5  ShuYong, Building Dreams. Mixed messaging at a site-specific installation /building site.

labor contracts for their work with the artist and holding up the banknotes he paid them for their image rights.This element of the performance swipes bluntly at the state of exception in which China’s construction workers mostly eke out their lives (see chapter 4). As such, Shu’s piece seems to take on the lineaments of a “social interstice,” in which a critical stance meshes with “constructed conviviality.” It is feel-good for the workers at the same time as it strives to use their participation in art—and their intellectual property rights as coproducers of that art—as a mild mechanism of political protest. At the very least, Shu Yong’s transparent effort to document that he did actually pay his performers throws into relief other delegated pieces that throw a veil of obfuscation over matters of money and the performative bottom line. Building Dreams also exposes the crimping limitations under which delegated performance inevitably chafes within an authoritarian state. These are made manifest in the graffiti component of the performance. A closer look at the primary-color characters migrants splashed on canvas reveals that these scribblings of aspiration conform precisely with the state’s ascendant ideology of the China dream. Rather than contractual employment, access to health care, and registration-based rights to housing and education— surely the true goals of China’s indigent sans-papiers workforce—the graffiti is all about “dreams come true” (mengxiang chengzhen 梦想成真), “good people cherish good dreams” (haoren you haomeng 好人有好梦), “Go China” (Zhongguo jiayou 中国加油), “a peaceful life” (yisheng ping’an 一生平安), “in it together” (qixin xieli 齐心协力), “we’ll make it through” (gongdu nanguan 共度难关), and “peace and prosperity” (xingfu ping’an 幸福平安). This switch to the anemic by-rote phraseology of state messaging saps the performance, midway through, of the buzzing political charge it had been steadily building. It also deindividualizes the workers because the parroted slogans, rather like the identical hardhats, undo the effort to reinstate their subjectivity. In this sense, Building Dreams showcases the in-built constraints of feel-good delegated performance in a suppressive political environment. Shu Yong’s well-meaning gestures cannot withstand the ambient winds of political pressure, and the work almost seems to meta-stage its own caving to those forces as it segues from a fledging protest over rights to the literal transcribing of state propaganda by the very people disciplined by those diktats. Particularly pertinent is the way in which the work shows how political obedience seems ultimately to mandate the massification of China’s itinerant workforce. What begins as an attempt to assert subjectivity—the T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 65 ]

individual headshots, the image rights—declines into an exercise in groupthink, even group dream among those consigned to zombie citizenship. A cynic might even suggest that the draped headshots, colored blood-red, allegorize the tumble over the cliff edge that the suicidal performers discussed in chapter 4 act out with dreadful literalism.

Dirty Works But these feel like small-scale problems when contrasted with the altogether thornier kind of affect generated by openly or covertly antagonistic delegated performance in authoritarian China. As a transactional practice in which an artist hires human labor to carry out specific tasks, delegated performance has an inherent potential for friction that makes some solid social sense within the context of democracy-as-contestation, where it can model the clash and conflict that arguably keeps government by the people on a buoyant path. But what happens to antagonism without that utopian mitigation? If delegated performance can be seen as an experimental micromodel of its host political system, then the arrogation of absolute power by artists over members of the underclass in a nation such as China might logically suggest a mimicry of neoliberal authoritarianism. Unless carefully managed, antagonism may become less contestatory and more openly inimical. To avoid that outcome, delegated performance in China would need to hedge warily around the kind of melodramatic power plays between artist and hired hands that replicate extreme social inequality and the will to expulsion. Otherwise, such hypervisible disparities in power, class, and cultural cachet will not exploit “precisely to thematize exploitation itself ” but rather hold up a dark mirror to the kind of rule that mobilizes precarity, zombie citizenship, and systemic inequities as a mode of government. As Maurizio Lazzarato states, “Neoliberal logic has good reason to want no reduction, no end of inequality, because it plays with these differences and governs on the basis of them.”23 True enough of democratic settings, Lazzarato’s point acquires a still more jagged edge in polities where neoliberal moves are served up by autocrats. Delegated performance within such settings harbors possibilities that are at once toxic and bleakly illuminating. Perhaps it is for this reason that commentators on Chinese art both domestic and international have mostly given the category of works I discuss in this chapter a wide berth, with the result that their noxious affect [ 66 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

as a genre has been barely conceptualized.24 Madeline Eschenburg, one of the few scholars to have written on delegated performance from China that recruits underclass subjects, observes that such pieces “are rarely included in either Chinese- or English-language surveys of Chinese contemporary art (in general) or performance art (more specifically). Furthermore, during my fieldwork, I observed a reticence on the part of the artists and some curators to discuss these works.”25 Certainly it is true that a tiny clutch of delegated performance works from China have achieved a degree of fame, even mild infamy, on the global circuit: Zhang Huan’s 张洹 To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (Wei yutang zenggao shuiwei 为鱼塘增高水位, 1997) is the standout case, and precisely because it has garnered at least more attention I have chosen to focus on other examples of delegated performance here. But the absence of even better-known pieces from standard accounts (even if they are occasionally the subject of shorter treatments) suggests an unease about where, if anywhere, such works belong. Perhaps still more to the point, a significant tranche of delegated performances from China have simply slid from scholarly view altogether, even works by otherwise prominent figures such as He Yunchang, 何云昌 the Gao Brothers, Wang Qingsong 王庆松, and Cao Fei 曹斐. Eschenburg argues that such art should be read as “a precursor to the rural-based social practice works” that have become modish in more recent years.26 These works, which I discuss in more detail at the end of this chapter, try to spark positive energy even though they are often studiously cautious or neutral in their political tone. Possibly so, but the reasons behind China’s “disappeared” delegated performances are worth digging into more deeply because the disquiet they stir is a direct effect of social strain and friction. These works cut to the quick of class relations in an unsteady age, and they do this by engaging with precarity and the cliff edge across both formal and thematic axes.

Tilting Ground Artist-photographer Wang Qingsong hires a construction team to build a temporary wooden skyscraper in an arid urban desert but erases their presence from the resulting artwork; documentarist Zhao Liang 赵亮 patrols a cramped workers’ dormitory with a camcorder, recording the exhausted migrants as they sleep back-to-back on the floor; multimedia artist Cao Fei choreographs a utopian installation in an Osram light bulb factory, in which T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 67 ]

workers shake off their shackles and dance with abandon, only to return to the factory floor when the project is over while the artist picks up a major prize and has her piece bought by the Guggenheim;27 calligraphy and video artist Qiu Zhijie 邱志杰 sets up a table laden with platters of meat products among which protrude the heads of three migrant workers—these rest on the table surface while the bodies of the men hunker below.28 Quite aside from the tense politics of class in which such works operate, all of these projects directly engage the precarious state of zombie citizenship in both thematic and formal terms. The constant presence of migrant workers; the dominance of grueling, dangerous, or sweatshop labor settings; the preoccupation with the monotony of laboring life, from washing feet to sleeping to standing on the assembly line—these features mark out Chinese delegated performance as a form that seeks to engage with underclass vulnerability in almost definitional ways. Indeed, the practice may have arisen in China not merely because local artists wished to ride a modish global wave but because this mode of performance is so deftly tooled for the exploration of the often ugly politics of fragile life and labor. In this chapter, I do not discuss in detail the performances just mentioned; but these works, along with others—Wang Jin’s 王晉, 100 percent (100 percent, 1999), Wu Wenguang 吴文光 and Wen Hui’s 文慧 Dancing with Migrant Workers (He mingong tiaowu 和民工跳舞, 2001), and Song Dong’s 宋冬 Together with Migrants (He mingong zai yiqi 和民工在一起, 2003)—show both that delegated performance was a significant genre in Chinese art practice in the early years of this century and that this work operated within a tight nexus of precarious subjects and scenes. If, as Lauren Berlant has argued, uncertain times are extinguishing certain genres (such as melodrama) while they fire up new ones (the “situation tragedy” in lieu of the sitcom, for example),29 then delegated performance may well mark a further instance of how a specific aesthetic category can register epochal change at the most cellular level of culture. This thematic preoccupation with life on a ledge is more than matched by the physical ephemerality of these artworks. In the most self-evident sense, these are performances with evanescent half-lives. They exist as contextually dislocated photographs, reprinted on an artist’s webpage, media review, or auctioneer’s catalog; they live on fitfully as low-res YouTube videos or brief clips available from a gallery website; they survive as textual accounts such as the Gao Brothers’ article or as discussion points in a magazine interview with an artist. Their own hereafters are, in other words, as precarious as the lives they depict. In part, of course, this fast-fading materiality is entirely [ 68 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

commensurate with the status of these works as performance pieces, even as their intense corporeality—the sheer mass of laboring bodies on display— attests to a different mode of somatic solidity. But the transience of these works may also stem in part from their ethically grubby character. A particularly egregious example of delegated performance in China occurred in 2009 when an artist paid a group of migrant workers 15 yuan to eat a meal in front of a naked young woman while daring them not to glance up from their lunchboxes at her nude body. Picked up by bloggers and later by local media outlets, this performance provoked distaste, even outrage. Although these online accounts featured several photographs of the piece, the identity of the artist(s) inexplicably escapes mention, perhaps because they took steps to disown the project.30 This sort of anomaly—a work without a named creator that lurks in the interstices of provincial news media—emblematizes the precariousness of Chinese delegated performance in institutional terms. As a practice that mostly occurs outside any official artistic apparatus, cannot ensure its own durability, barely registers in art historical accounts, and that its own practitioners may find it expedient on occasion to disavow, delegated performance art in China is precarious in ways that far exceed its thematic topos. As Anna Dezeuze describes it of “the field of precarious practices” more generally, this is a form of artwork “ ‘at the point of imperceptibility’, on the verge of disappearance, (it is) an action that risks passing unnoticed, an object that teeters on the point of destruction” (emphasis in the original).31 This instability also takes artistically formal shape. In crucial ways, these works exemplify the role of what Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese call “precarious balance” in making real-time performance meaningful and “scenically alive.”32 Many of these performances rely and thrive on heartin-mouth tension: can the artist possibly withstand a hundred successive wrestling bouts with so many strapping opponents? Will the filmmaker rouse the slumbering workers from sleep as he tiptoes around them with his camera? Will the migrants sneak a glimpse at the naked woman? These works seem to have absorbed the ambient mood of risk that surrounds us in the era of the cliff edge and transmuted it decisively into aesthetic form: hazard is the foundational unit of their visual language. Mobilizing so many amateurs doubles down on this sense of jeopardy because even the most tightly choreographed troupe of nonprofessional performers is liable to veer off script at any moment. This, of course, is precisely what occurred in the Gao Brothers’ hugging ensemble as the sudden refusal of the migrant T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 69 ]

workers to stick with a loose verbal contract when they discovered precisely what it entailed—stripping naked in broad daylight on an urban rooftop— brings a moment of crackling tension that threatens to derail the entire performance.33 At a macro level, these performances, which ply such an obvious trade in risk, are also imbibing a strong surrounding sense that imminent dread is the affective tenor of a precarious world. Such works also project that looming sense back outward into the world. As Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider observe: “in this strange and potent mix, ‘creativity,’ also now synonymous with neoliberal ‘innovation,’ has become oddly twinned with a circulating, affective reliance on terror and threat—the ‘risks’ in artistic and critical innovation strangely linked to increasing economic and environmental unrest. . . . Thus creativity and terror, art and structural insecurity, become uncomfortable affiliates.”34 Art, in this understanding, does not merely conquer new domains of possibility through coining novel modes of culture—delegated performance, for example—whose endangerment and “edgework” befit a precarious world in which exile beckons. It may also partake, at a structural level, in the standardization of risk as the central experience of the present. If governmental precarization requires citizens who “are supposed to actively modulate themselves and arrange their lives on the basis of a repeatedly lowered minimum of safeguarding,”35 if the state rules through normalizing economic risk for the populace, if our fragility is our problem and ours alone, then an art form that is premised on precarious balance may end up performing, as suggested earlier, a kind of modeling function. With its quota of risk, its open power plays, and its deployment of underclass bodies massified like zombie hordes, delegated performance can easily become a miniaturized simulacrum of the present, an art form that reifies even as it wants to discuss reification.

Good Intentionality This boundary line is a treacherous one, as a work by the new-media artist Yang Zhenzhong 杨振中 makes manifest. Spring Story (Chuntian de gushi 春 天的故事, 2003) is a delegated performance in which the artist recruited 1,500 workers at a Shanghai Siemens plant to recite robotically—one semantic unit per person, one after the other—the entirety of Deng Xiaoping’s 邓小平 crucial “Southern Tour” speech of 1992.36 Yang’s website, and the [ 70 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

interviews it collates, contains information about the genesis and execution of this work, which is telling enough to merit extensive quotation. Here, for example, is Yang’s close description of his art-making process: The Siemens factory  .  .  . had a massive isolated section with strict rules against entry from outsiders. There were over 1,500 employees working three shifts, day and night. Since we were working in collaboration with the Siemens main office in Germany, our film crew was authorized by the factory boss. His orders went down level by level to the factory floor, the artistic mission becoming something like a magic sword I could wave around to gain access to their busiest production areas, offices and even the canteen during working hours. Their HR department maintained a personnel chart to ensure I filmed every single worker without any repetition. I strictly followed the chart and gave speaking lines to each of the more than 1,500 employees, each one speaking two or three words into the camera.They were only told to speak certain words, and had no idea what they were saying. In the editing room, their words were strung together to form the content of Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour speech. It was just like the production line work they did every day in the factory. Each person is instructed to repeatedly tighten a particular screw, without having to know what they are all working together to produce. It’s a violent filming method and a violent post-production editing method.37 Yang makes clear elsewhere that he intends Spring Story to be a charged political intervention: “This labor-intensive production method under the liberal-capitalist industrial chain has absurdly meshed in perfect ways with top-down ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics.’ ”38 This, to be sure, is an ungodly alliance, and Yang captures it elegantly via the forced recitation of developmentalist CCP dogma against the performance backdrop of a German-owned multinational cell phone factory. But a work such as Spring Story also shows that delegated performance is all too often the art form where good intentions go to die. Ultimately, the conscience of this work is lightly worn since its conception remains almost irretrievably caught in the snarls of Marxist reification—and not simply because the project was sponsored by the Siemens Art Program, the company’s in-house culture wing. This state of entrapment is also plain enough to T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 71 ]

see in the dynamics of power that structure human interaction in the piece: the rigid in-factory hierarchies that keep the workers in effective lockdown, policed by HR’s “personnel chart” (shown in figure 1.7) even when they participate in art making, while Yang himself glides with impunity across

 

 

 

Figures 1.6 and 1.7 Yang Zhenzhong, Spring Story.     Automated art-making on the assembly line. Reproduced with permission from Yang Zhenzhong.

[ 72 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

 

 

 

 

 

Figures 1.6 and 1.7  (cont.)  

 

 Figures 1.6 and 1.7  (cont.)

the premises, enabled by his artist’s “magic sword” that make barriers disappear. Indeed, the problem with this and other artist testimonials that Yang has made about Spring Story is that they disclose too much but seem oddly unaware that this information may be compromising.39 This may be because the artist does not see it as such. Statements such as “They were only told to speak certain words, and had no idea what they were saying,” and “It’s a violent filming method and a violent post-production editing method” make it clear that the artist understands full well that the logic of the work apes the assembly line and its assault on personhood. But the additional step—that of a stern self-reflexivity—is missing. Curator Jonathan Watkins suggests that “the medium and message of Yang’s work are conflated to an extent that makes them inextricable and perfectly matched.”40 But this is another way of saying that the artist has created an aestheticized microSiemens, and it is precisely this tidy seamlessness between life and performance that makes the work less an antagonist of the factory regime than something closer to its art-world ally. This point is thrown into relief by the fact that there was presumably no need for Yang to pay the workers for their artistic contributions because Spring Story was sponsored by Siemens and took place on company time. A delegated performance such as this enables what I referred to earlier as a conflicted gaze. This is a regard that ostensibly turns the full-wattage glow of its concern on underclass or subaltern others in a compassion that may well be heartfelt. But the visual language of Spring Story also tightly scaffolds that affect by confining the workers within the remit of already existing reality: a status quo without political agency in which “each person is instructed to repeatedly tighten a particular screw, without having to know what they are all working together to produce.” As such, the performance possesses a double valence, and in ways that disrupt the binary thinking that so often attends delegated works.41 It can extend empathy at the same time as it reinforces the immutability of the political present in ways that some observers may find quietly comforting. For those who are menaced imminently rather than immediately by the cliff edge, for whom uncertainty over livelihood, status, or rights lies as a dark yet still formless shape on the horizon, artworks that seem to evince deep care but also present a strictly settled distribution of threat may perform a soothing function. Indeed, the factory workers who deliver this solace via delegated performance recall another kind of outsourcing: the employees of call centers in the Global South whose “work tasks are repetitive” and who “perform the social labor T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 75 ]

of reassuring and placating strangers who may be angry and frustrated.”42 More than this, an artwork such as Spring Story may also speak to—and pacify—fears about the risk to the social order that widespread zombie citizenship inevitably poses. After all, the alternative to obedience on the factory floor, modeled so ritualistically here, is insurrection, and for all its stated and implied empathy, Spring Story also unabashedly keeps workers in their subaltern place. The Siemens workers are not simply anonymous cogs in a machine.They are also potentially political subjects whom the assembly line, and the artwork that mimics it, keeps carefully spaced apart as if in recognition of what the alchemy of their togetherness might forge. They offer, in this sense, a vision of worker passivity that neatly complements state policies of ultra-stability. Enacting the docile atomization of the workers so slavishly, Spring Story begs questions about what forms participatory art can reasonably take if it hopes to become “a site that produces a specific sociability,” a “social interstice” in which different futures can be imagined.

Combustible Relations At the same time, however, a work such as this may also act out the cruel truth that for all its new blanket normativity—its status as a blight that spares only the few—precarious experience remains a shaky crucible for solidarity, and perhaps most particularly in China. As discussed in the introduction, the chimera of unity has been something of a lodestar for several thinkers on precarity across the Global North. As Judith Butler argues, “is it any wonder that students and workers are taking to the streets, finding alliances with one another and with the unemployed and the homeless?”43 Even if these alliances do not necessarily cohere into solid political action, at the very least they belong to what Tavia Nyong’o calls “an undercommons whose proper location is missing from any map that still relies on the crumbling division between town and gown, between the philosopher and the poor.”44 As I have suggested, these models of coalition, already somewhat brittle in democratic climes, are barely workable in rigidly authoritarian states, in part for a reason Butler alludes to indirectly. In her work on Occupy, she argues for the indispensable role of public performances as a site and mode for articulating our shared vulnerability.45 Precarity as a joint affliction may prompt people into activism, but collectivism alone cannot deliver political agency. Publicness is crucial too. As a condition that threatens to atomize [ 76 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

and drive people asunder, precarity arguably needs the ritual of public gathering for the affective work of social healing and pact-building to take root. Protest, as the keenest form of performative politics, may even be an obligatory mechanism for forging esprit de corps among those whom the sliding scales and relentlessly differentiating drive of inequality would otherwise keep divided. China forces us to consider the question of what happens to this dream of unity-in-precariousness within a state that puts strict checks on social mobilization.To raise this point is not merely to opine that China constrains rights of public assembly and puts down protest, from Tiananmen in 1989 to Hong Kong in 2019. It is also to reflect on some of the collateral damage of curbs on collective action, especially within the domain of affect. We understand all too well that a precarious labor market is one long audition. The whittling away of long-term, contract-based, benefit-bolstered employment has made the search for the next gig a ceaseless feature of working life, and one with a harshly Darwinian flavor. This systemic competitiveness, together with the state’s outsourcing or offloading of care duties onto the individual, has forced precarious people to refashion themselves as microbusinesses: self-reliant, self-improving, self-oriented.46 This atomization is sped along further by the strategic individuation governmental precarity requires and on which it depends. As Butler puts it, “every political effort to manage populations involves a tactical distribution of precarity, more often than not articulated through an unequal distribution of precarity, one that depends upon dominant norms regarding whose life is grievable and worth protecting, and whose life is ungrievable, or marginally or episodically grievable.”47 These triple forces—rivalry, mandatory individualism, and the “tactical distribution” of risk and inequality—imperil the notion of the commons, the ideal of a unified battalion against precarity, in China as elsewhere. They constitute a triad of traits that erodes communitas irrespective of political setting; they are visible in illiberal, still-statist China just as they are in Euro-America. Of course, it would be rash to argue that protests, marches, strikes, union activism, and orchestrated workplace conflict will necessarily mitigate the grievous impact of this triad in places where such activities are more freely permitted and happen apace. But it seems less preposterous to suggest that these traits operate even more corrosively on solidarity in a state such as China, which fears spontaneous collective action more than any other aspect of the social—far more, in fact, than the sharpest, most targeted of citizenly T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 77 ]

critiques48—and moves against it via a repertoire of suppressive tools. Civil disturbance remains, of course, a routine event in China. As the China Labor Bulletin’s strike map shows, strikes, walkouts, and protests occur at least daily in the PRC, and sometimes much more frequently.49 Yet an examination of the strike map’s data also reveals that these are mostly small-scale, localized eruptions of industrial action (fewer than one hundred sanitation workers protested against wage arrears at a hospital in Xinyi, Guangdong province on May 28, 2020; the same sort of number protested against wage arrears of an auto factory in Suzhou, Jiangsu on May 3, 2020; and so on). Perhaps more to the point, these forms of protests are also highly trade-specific. Workers in a particular plant, company, hospital, or construction project, who presumably know each other already, coordinate an action that targets grievances that are, once again, highly group-specific. What remains absent in this socio-industrial context are opportunities for larger, more socially and industrially differentiated groups to connect with one another via the passionate experiences of protest, mass activism, and public assembly. In a sense, this is to revisit the fundamental question posed by Wang Hui that I raised in the previous chapter: “Why has China today, the ‘world’s factory’ with almost 300 million workers, been unable to generate a working-class politics of the sort produced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?”50 One response might well be that precarity atomizes, and China’s workers do not at present possess sufficient binding agents to repair that devastating molecular division. Just as pertinent, the dearth of banners under which the precarious can cluster to protest their state begs a further key, but mostly unasked question: What is the affective corollary of enduring endemic risk mostly in isolation? One upshot is surely the grim spectacle of the solitary suicide show (see chapter 4). Another, however, is the prospect that risk and dread catalyze toxically into forms of social antagonism. As I argue in the introduction, cross-caste strife is not just robustly alive in contemporary China, despite now-routine homilies about the “harmonious society.” It has also curdled into a broad spread of bad feelings as precarization has turned China from a strikingly equal society obsessed with class struggle to one with a soaring Gini coefficient in which the very term “class” has become a dirty word, and in which hostility toward social others has many more reasons to simmer but is now politically required to mask itself behind a rictus of cordiality. Gatherings that transcend small units of coworkers, in which assorted class actors publicly perform the grievances they share, can both [ 78 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

foment stouter forms of activism and also draw some of the poison that the “tactical distribution of precarity” has spread into the social body. This is by no means a crudely harmonizing move. But forms of coalition arguably do have the capacity to foster the kind of “deliberative empathy” that considers the causes of another’s suffering while considering one’s own complicity in it.51 Or as Jean-Luc Nancy observes, “Compassion is the contagion, the contact of being with another in this turmoil. Compassion is not altruism, nor is it identification; it is the disturbance of violent relatedness.”52 Nancy’s meaning here is that it is precisely under the imminent threat of physical antagonism that we realize most intently our closeness to each other in a situation of plight or peril—and this, like Barba and Savarese’s definition of balance, is a position of extreme precariousness. Nancy’s notion of “violent relatedness” captures the emotional texture of social relations on the cliff edge, where a simultaneous state of severance from and togetherness with others produces volatility that can turn easily to harm. Levinas puts this point the other way around when he writes that “the face of the other in its precariousness and defenselessness, is for me at once the temptation to kill and the call to peace, the ‘You shall not kill.’ ”53 It is within this framework of violence-on-the-cusp that delegated performance in China needs to be situated because it is a practice that responds overtly to the ethical dilemmas posed by the face of the other. More than this, it is a practice that asserts the crucial role of performance in working through this tension that lies all around and significantly constitutes the social world. In her work on “local genres of anger expression in Beijing,” anthropologist Jie Yang observes how marginalized workers have mobilized ranting (majie 骂街, literally “cursing the streets”), silenced rage (becoming a xiangpi ren 橡皮人: a “plasticine person” or a human punching bag), and even sham stupidity to enunciate states of fury about human lives that have been depleted under China’s marketization.54 Yang’s findings are intriguing not merely because they offer yet more evidence of the surfeit of dark feeling that has backwashed over China in the wake of its postsocialist reforms, in which Maoist-era sentiments mingle tensely with thrusting marketization. Also richly suggestive is her use of the term “genres” because it crystallizes the point that these ramped-up displays are fundamentally performative. Indeed, many involve the tight choreographing of explosive encounters with former factory bosses, government bureaucrats, and other local powerbrokers to achieve certain predesigned outcomes. These “embodied performances that emerge in eruptions of anger”55 reveal that staking claims in precarious China is an T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 79 ]

inventive process (a point I explore in chapter 4). Just as important, these shows of rage contest a sustained state-led effort to tamp down flammable class tension by recasting it as a problem of masculinity. This is the notion that “instability in China has become embodied in the image of the unemployed male.”56 If he can be managed, peace and stability will reign.

Artistic Supremos In many ways, Chinese delegated performance operates as an unnerving alter ego for grassroots performances such as “cursing the streets” and acting as a human punching bag. Like these staged displays of underclass fury, this art enacts class struggle and often does so in overtly gendered ways.Yet “violent relatedness” in a number of notable delegated performances is neither grounded in nor productive of compassion. Rather, it actualizes what I referred to earlier as violence-on-the-cusp by consciously stage-managing scenes of cross-class cruelty in which migrants, often male, are forcibly subjugated by those higher up the social scale. In these performances, we find brutal realization of Isabell Lorey’s argument about precarity’s march from the margins inward: “The imaginary centre of the normal is not simply threatened, nor is it merely unsettled. Instead, it becomes itself increasingly insecure and threatening.”57 This point is on full display in the performance mentioned previously by He Yunchang titled Wrestling: One and One Hundred (Shuaijiao 1 he 100 摔跤1和100). In this video-recorded work, which took place in Kunming in March 2001, the artist wrestled with one hundred men, most of them migrant workers, in consecutive fashion over a period of sixty-six minutes (figure 1.8). Like the Gao Brothers, He Yunchang hired the workers at a labor market, offering them 25 yuan apiece, just as the brothers would do a few months later on the other side of the country in Jinan. In an interview about the work, He’s interlocutor probes him on this subcontracting process, asking: “What did you say about (the project) when you went to the labor market to hire the men?” He Yunchang fudges his answer. He replies: “One of my former classmates helped me recruit them,” before switching topics to the location of the performance.58 This avoidance of direct verbal interaction is significant in light of what follows. Incentivized by the promise of extra cash if they win their individual bouts, the workers enter the performance space primed for aggression. As He Yunchang recalls in another interview, “the relationship with the audience was [ 80 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

Figure 1.8  He Yunchang, Wrestling: One and One Hundred. Aesthetic machismo, down in the dirt.

definitely tense and antagonistic. People really wanted to hurt me and to win!”59 Inevitably, given the vast numerical disparity between He and his opponents, the migrants do mostly prevail—eighty-two of them, in fact, although He manages a total of eighteen victorious bouts. Unlike some of the other works I discuss here, Wrestling: One and One Hundred has elicited a fair amount of critical attention. For some, the forceful tactility of the work demonstrates the artist’s desire for “close interaction with migrant workers”60 and a “plea for migrant groups not to be overlooked.”61 Other commentators hail He’s fortitude and aesthetic élan. This is the take of Meiqin Wang, for example, who writes: A small and lean person who did little routine exercise, (He Yunchang) vomited when wrestling with the fifth participant, and after wrestling with a dozen he was out of strength. A feeling of desperation conquered him the moment he looked up to see the long ling of waiting volunteers, but he nonetheless endured the increasing injuries each time he wrestled with a new participant and completed the performance as planned.62 In particular, He’s own reckless endangerment in the work seems aligned with his long predilection for making self-harm the main medium of his art. In 2008, for example, he persuaded a surgeon to remove part of one of his ribs under anesthesia and turned the excised bone into a necklace; and in 2010, he conducted a straw poll among a gathered crowd of twenty-five people on whether he should undergo a one-meter incision from his shoulder to below his knee, repeating the question until a majority had voted “yes.” Possibly it is this readiness to apply madcap pressure to his own personal pain threshold that has dimmed the focus on He Yunchang’s treatment of the migrant other in Wrestling: One and One Hundred. In his declarative manifestos, He himself encourages this artist-centric view: I have no reservations in my art practice. My only requirement is to stay alive. . . . I recognize the imperfections and ugliness of our time, and I show them as clearly, sharply, and deeply as I can. . . . I am not immune to fear. But when I create my art, I choose means that are beyond what we all can bear under normal circumstances. I need to bear all the worry, fear, and discomfort of regular people. . . . In such circumstances, I must bear any fear and risk.63 [ 82 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

In several ways, Wrestling: One and One Hundred forms something of an unholy double act with the Gao Brothers’ 20 Hugs for Hire, and not simply because the artists of both works recruited their performers in migrant labor markets on a shoestring budget. A more telling shared feature is the numerical nomenclature and the massification of individual workers that this arithmetical take inevitably entails. The zombie migrant throng is made to contrast with the auratic, even autocratic, presence of the artists themselves, whose role as the presiding intelligence of the piece becomes an almost fetishistic feature. This move is all the more notable for the fact that delegated performance is, as noted earlier, an offshoot of the larger genus known as participatory art, whose world-making rationale is rooted in the idea of an artistic practice that is democratically leveled out and in which aesthetic agency is distributed between all players. To an extent, delegated performance will always partially reinstall artists as the conductors of their own orchestra. This is, after all, in the very nature of delegation, and it cannot help but make such performances a faintly counterintuitive branch of the participatory project. As a global practice, however, delegated performance far more commonly sees artists operating backstage or from the wings, visually occluding their role as creative impresario in some way. Santiago Sierra, probably the world’s most famous practitioner of the form, routinely refrains from participating in the performances he choreographs, preferring the role of behind-the-scenes master of ceremonies. Such effacement of the artist’s presence throws the photographic tableau in figure 1.8 into arresting relief. This collage of shots depicts He Yunchang as the dominant pictorial constant of every frame. Something very similar happens, moreover, with the Gao Brothers’ image-making of 20 Hugs for Hire, in which the artists become self-anointed hosts of their “Last Supper” in the nude. This stark self-positioning of the artist at the visible helm of performance takes on a particular freight in the context of China in an era of expulsion. Wrestling: One and One Hundred does not merely pit one centurion’s bravado against a company of one hundred angry men. It also blatantly sets the conceptual genius of the artist against the apparently de-skilled state of the migrant workers to whom performance is delegated. But this is in many ways a spurious distinction. As Shannon Jackson points out, “one can claim to have mastered virtuosity in the conceptual sense; one can secure high fees and commissions to use de-skilled bodies (or to mask the skills of skilled ones) to produce an immaterial product. The result might be ‘mediocre or T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 83 ]

awkward’—it might even be ‘boring’—but it contains aesthetic value. . . . Mediocre dancing can be good conceptual art.”64 Jackson’s point about who is and isn’t skilled assumes an excruciating rhetorical charge in a political order that has first dethroned and then disenfranchised the worker with the grim dispatch seen in China since the days of Mao. Just as artists, once upon a time, were technical virtuosos, adept across media and materials, so too were Chinese workers the vanguard of the revolution, their expert labor prized both technically and politically. Wrestling: One and One Hundred is, of course, a coproduced work: it’s as reliant on the performative fists of the workers as on those of He Yunchang. But its visual economy is one in which the antivirtuoso artist, whose blue-sky thinking is his sole aesthetic stockin-trade, delegates/dominates a hundred men who presumably practice a trade but who are reduced to nameless fighting puppets in the show. The fact that He Yunchang manages to win eighteen of the bouts drives home still further this apparent “skills gap.” Unlike the painstaking collaboration that characterizes China’s later participatory art—in which investments of time over the longue durée forge an intimate rapport between coproducers and can result in mutual upskilling—works such as 20 Hugs for Hire and Wrestling: One and One Hundred are thrown together hastily.65 This rush and its lack of personal touch can only stymie creative engagement among the performers. As Jen Harvie notes, they may become “supernumerary extras” more than true collaborators,66 whose extreme flexibility—their readiness to do anything for the most paltry of wages—makes them bots, minions, or zombies in a neoliberal charade.

Deliberative Nonempathy This decentering of the migrants is extraordinary within a work that pulsates with social conflict, all of it so expressly contrived. As He Yunchang points out, the mood in the gladiatorial arena was “tense and antagonistic” as the artist squared up to a band of opponents eager to thrash him. Indeed, Wrestling: One and One Hundred sets a crassly literal stage for the rehearsal of class strife, for the reenactment—and possibly also the redress—of exploitation and its attendant grievances. The migrant workers are first financially drafted into physically unsafe labor in a workspace controlled by elite others, just as they are in the real world of construction sites, mines, and factories that often lack robust safety regulations. Once inside the wrestling ring, the [ 84 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

migrants then endure a stagey process of emasculation, lining up to spar with a man who, despite his “small and lean” frame and the melodramatic disparity in numbers, succeeds in besting no fewer than eighteen of them. Acting out scripted forms of rage, the migrants—like those who curse the streets or turn into human punching bags—find themselves suckered, under the artist’s direction, into the prevailing dogma that class strife is merely a problem of dysfunctional masculinity. All that is required by way of solution is a strongman willing to brave the unruly zombie horde. Even those migrants who do win their bouts have effectively been bribed into further injuring an already wounded man and are thus suborned into a measure of moral turpitude. There is politics aplenty in this piece, as well as significant potential for empathetic critique. But for that politics, empathy, and critique to happen, a performance such as this would need to recognize far more overtly that it is engaging in what Claire Bishop calls the “outsourcing of authenticity.” For Bishop, delegated performance is all about hiring people “to perform their own socioeconomic category, be this on the basis of gender, class, ethnicity, age, disability, or (more rarely) profession” (emphasis in the original). “By relocating sovereign and self-constituting authenticity away from the singular artist  .  .  . and onto the collective presence of the performers, who metonymically signify a solidly sociopolitical issue (homelessness, race, immigration, disability, etc.),” Bishop writes, “the artist outsources authenticity and relies on his performers to supply this more vividly, without the disruptive filter of celebrity.”67 It is through this outsourcing, undertaken in acutely aware ways, that delegated performance can flex its interventionist powers. Whether viewers recoil from this art because of the way it replicates inequalities in life and labor, or applaud it for critiquing that exploitation from the inside out, the notion of outsourced authenticity remains the bedrock of the practice. Delegated performance harbors radical import precisely because it is rooted, via the very bodies of its performers, in “a solidly sociopolitical issue.” In contrast, Wrestling: One and One Hundred presents the conundrum of a delegated performance that “outsources authenticity” while underplaying or even obscuring that fact and, what’s more, via the reassertion of artistic celebrity. This tension around authenticity has been noted by Madeline Eschenburg, who argues that because many Chinese avant-garde artists in the early years of the millennium were themselves precarious—living handto-mouth in makeshift settlements at the urban perimeter—their hiring T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 85 ]

of migrant workers could not generate the frisson of cold, hard, socially othered “realness” that their presence might evoke in the work of a practitioner such as Santiago.68 In chapter 2, I discuss some of the political difficulties that arise when relatively short-term and permanent experiences of precarity are finessed under the same banner, and when those who have an exit plan from indigence are placed on a par with those who don’t. But perhaps more relevant to this question of the echt is the fact that established artists—as He Yunchang already was by 2001—sometimes subcontract performance work to members of the underclass with little or no authenticating motive. He Yunchang states in interviews that he recognizes “the imperfections and ugliness of our time”; his aim, he says, is to “show them as clearly, sharply, and deeply as I can.” But this is a language of generality He goes on to articulate via the very particular bodies of migrant workers within a work that acknowledges only lightly their corporeal specificity. Of course, those who observe, follow, or comment on delegated performances by avant-garde Chinese artists are all too well aware that the performers in such works are usually migrant workers. This is because residents of Chinese cities know what these workers “look” like: they are identifiable by a well-understood but mostly unspoken set of visual cues related to dress, disposition, and habitus. Within this context of immediate intelligibility, the artist’s lack of emphatic recognition starts to become, instead, a problem of empathetic recognition. At this point, it seems fair to ask whether migrants are recruited to perform in a work such as Wrestling: One and One Hundred not because they symbolize “a solidly sociopolitical issue” but rather because—as migrants— they offer low-cost labor to artists who are short on funds and institutional support but who want to realize grandiose aesthetic visions. As such, they enable large-scale performance art at knockdown prices, without much likelihood that migrant coproducers will insist on accreditation and demand a shared intellectual copyright.69 Rather than toying with notions of Marxist reification, in other words, such works may in fact reify quite ruthlessly. This, as Bishop observes, is not a theoretically sophisticated accusation.70 Yet in a society that has outlawed the term “class” while pursuing a highly statist form of marketization that operates by weaponizing distinctions between bare life and full life, the spectacle of celebrated artists offering low-rent roles to those mired in zombie citizenship actually matters rather a lot. What’s more, the stakes rise higher when artists both employ migrant workers as performers and then take discursive steps to disown the fact. Noting [ 86 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

the reluctance of artists to dwell on the social class of their coproducers, Eschenburg suggests that “when artists did open up about them, they always downplayed the identity of the migrant workers as integral to the meaning of the work, instead focusing on more general abstract concepts such as the experience of space, the relationship between humans and nature, and global conflict.”71 This, more or less, is He Yunchang’s intended move when he says in an interview that “I need to bear all the worry, fear, and discomfort of regular people.” But perhaps the more wicked problem here is the question of spectatorship.Viewers of works such as these understand full well that their performers are migrant workers. That process of identification is stable and assured; it runs along normative tracks, and as Butler notes, such “normative schemes of intelligibility establish what will and will not be human, what will be a livable life, what will be a grievable death.”72 The role and function of socially engaged art should surely be “to find and forge a set of bonds that can produce alliances over and against this grid of power that differentially allocates recognizability,”73 and via that process generate a spectatorial gaze that looks rather than sees, that does not merely clock the migrant as a set of supposedly ready identifiers—inexpensive clothes, calloused hands—but grants that person’s life grievability. A work such as Wrestling: One and One Hundred, in short, sets up a friction between knowledge and acknowledgment that could perhaps electrify into a full coursing voltage. But He Yunchang’s delegated performance conducts the opposite operation. It trip-starts a current of conflictual awareness between the man and the many, artist and underclass, only to deactivate that tension by inviting audiences to register the presence of the migrants rather than to recognize their personhood—just as the artist does himself.The work asks those who watch it, either on the day or in its photographic traces, not to query the uncanny dialectic between quotidian ubiquity and political invisibility that circumscribes life and rights for those cast into zombie citizenship but to accept it as doxa.This dialectic, it should be noted, is never just about looking straight through a migrant on a street corner. It is also, and just as important, about looking straight through the face of the other who might soon be myself. It is a disavowal of the precarity that menaces us all—and thus a turning away from the potential for solidarity that same shared frailty also harbors. It is in this sense that delegated performance from China can be seen as a form of mockery, calculated or otherwise, of the notion that art possesses socially transformative or salvationary power. T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 87 ]

Insult to Injury This mood of mockery reaches something of an apotheosis in the final delegated performance I discuss in this chapter. This is Yu Ji’s 余极 Records of Foot Washing (Xizu tuzhi 洗足图志). The work is an hour-long performance that took place at a Chengdu bookshop in 2002, in which the artist recruited fifty-six young migrant women to wash his feet while he lobbed off-color comments at them. There is an uncomfortably braggadocio feel to this piece. In part, this stems from the very practice of performing ablutions on the foot of another. As Zhu Dake 朱大可 notes in connection with the work, washing feet is “the attentive way to express submission,” and those who wash are “woman,” “children” and “slave,” whereas those who receive the service are “father,” “husband,” “ruler” and “king.”74 It is this hierarchical patterning, no doubt, that led to an invention of tradition around the practice as an ageold—but in fact new and also somewhat specious—cornerstone of filial piety from the early 2000s.75 The flipside to this reverence is the faintly verboten nature of foot-washing when it occurs in public and outside the family nexus. Indeed, the artist Li Shan essentially cemented his avant-garde credentials when he performed a public foot-bath in 1989 and invited his audience to join in. As Thomas Berghuis observes, “All this was seen as a witty and taunting gesture.”76 Yu Ji, however, pushes the provocation far further. He does this by hiring a large group of female migrants to tend to his feet in turn, thus deliberately invoking another connotation of this service: its status as a cipher for sex work among subaltern groups. As Elaine Jeffries notes, “blue-collar workers are associated in stereotypical fashion with the purchase of quick, cheap sex from poor migrant workers in the streets or in low-grade venues, such as foot-washing salons, massage parlors and barber shops.”77 By choreographing a performance in which fifty-six separate women “service” him in barely coded ways,Yu Ji coordinates a power dynamic that cuts intersectionally across gender, class, and even ethnicity (China has 56 official ethnic groups) in brazen ways.This is borne out in the several photographic versions of the performance that survive and can be accessed online. The first is a scroll-like collage featuring all fifty-six women (figure 1.9). At first glance, this version seems to set the individualized faces of the women against the disjointed body part of the artist—his foot—which features in all. But the slightly downward angle of each separate shot undercuts this democratizing dynamic, and ultimately it is the interchangeability of [ 88 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

Figure 1.9 Yu Ji, Records of Foot Washing. Disturbing catalog of a semisexualized service economy.

foot-washers that comes to dominate the visual economy of the image as the viewer’s eye spans the scroll. What’s more, no fewer than nine of the women cover their faces from the camera with their arms, hands, or hair, suggesting unwilling or coerced participation in the piece. Another category of extant images (not reproduced here) focuses on the artist himself, in which he strikes lordly poses and grins wolfishly at the women ministering to his feet while stroking a small dog. A final set of photographs show magnified details of the scroll, featuring individual women captioned with speech bubbles (figures 1.10–1.12). As with He Yunchang, critical commentary on this work and on the artist more generally tends to applaud his compassion and daring.78 And to an extent, such an appraisal is accurate because only a buccaneering spirit could choreograph a performance that confects such a surfeit of ugly feeling. In common with much delegated performance, from wherever it hails, Records of Foot Washing sets out its stall in the awkward zone between “work that reifies precisely in order to discuss reification” and work that is simply exploitative.Yet in a nation in which precarity is as ubiquitous as opportunities for concerted participatory action are scant, Yu Ji’s performance shows how the push and pull of these twin conditions opens deep chasms between social actors even as those fissures manifest themselves in the most intimately embodied ways: via the washing of another’s soiled feet for money. But the artist’s lewd comments also reveal that this state of being cannot be affectively neutral, that if people on the cliff edge cannot enter into what T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 89 ]

Figure 1.10 Yu Ji, Records of Foot Washing. “You’re so juicy—I’d love to take a bite out of you!”“Stop messing around! What are you talking about?!”

Figure 1.11 Yu Ji, Records of Foot Washing. “Are you married?” “Yes, and my kid’s already old enough to go out and do the shopping. What are you on about?”

Figure 1.12 Yu Ji, Records of Foot Washing. “You have such great style, really cool!” “Not so much, you’re the cool one.”

Nancy terms “being singular plural” with others, the alternative may not merely be hostility but also contempt. To enshrine this bad feeling in art constitutes the rudest kind of rebuttal of the old notion, so earnestly revitalized in participatory art all over the globe, that the aesthetic realm can be a space of utopian promise. Indeed, to choose delegated performance—and a show featuring subaltern women with such rhetorical insistence—as the mode through which to stage this snubbing of hope is, at a structural level, to mock that very project of aspiration.

Artistic Shamans, Sacrificial Rites Over the last decade or more, China’s socially engaged art has cast into shade the delegated performances that had their sometimes poisonous flowering earlier in the millennium. Works such as the Bishan Project (Bishan jihua 碧 山计划, 2011–16) of Ou Ning 欧宁 and Zuo Jing 左靖, the Yangdeng Art Cooperative (Yangdeng hezuoshe 羊蹬合作社) set up by Jiao Xingtao 焦兴 涛 and others, Qu Yan’s 渠岩 Xucun International Art Commune (Xucun guoji yishu gongshe 许村国际艺术公社, 2010-), Weng Fen’s 翁奋 Chaile Travel Agency (Chaile lüxingshe 拆了旅行社, 2010), and Fly Together— Shijiezi Village Art Practice Project (Yiqi fei—Shijiezi xiangcun yishu shijian jihua 一起飞—石节子乡村艺术实践计划, 2015–16) inaugurated by artists Qin Ga 琴嘎 and Jin Le 靳勒 have all showcased modes of collaborative artwork that seem crafted from different social matter than the toxic strife that so often screams out from the delegated performances I have discussed in this chapter. Many are essentially utopian-minded community centers in which diverse people can make art together, and although they bring different social tiers into close contact—as did postmillennial delegated performances—they do so with the express aim of undoing strict and inimical stratification. Indeed, they are often consciously convivial and educational spaces. Describing a Guangzhou-based project titled “SoengJoengToi” (Cantonese for “under the balcony”), critic Zheng Bo notes that this space has hosted everything from a bar selling locally brewed beers and a barbershop to an underground film screening group, courses for aspiring artists, and a radical lecture series.79 Even if they do not necessarily succeed, the shift such projects make from the built-in power differential of delegated performance to more fluid combinatory formats gives them a warmer, more welcoming tone. What’s more, as Meiqin Wang notes, these later works of T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 91 ]

socially engaged work also make publicness the affective mainframe of an art that wants to heal. As she observes, this art is “a form of alternative place construction that bears the potential of opening up new public civic space and fostering civic politics at the grass-roots level.”80 As such, China’s more recent socially engaged art testifies to what Zheng Bo sees as a rising interest “in communal practices, in greater tolerance for cultural, sexual, and spiritual diversity, and in participatory democracy, albeit on a local scale.”81 This work has also amassed considerable scholarly attention. Given this, it is tempting to view China’s earlier delegated performances as a clumsy misstep on the path to a collaborative art that is good, true, and beautiful, or at least tries very hard to be. As I previously suggested, the failure of this surprisingly substantial corpus of works to secure sustained attention for itself probably stems from a sense of mortification or awkwardness in some critical quarters at its bizarre cruelty. But it is worth considering that most of the participatory projects just listed take root, quite literally, in different soil from their delegated predecessors. Indeed, almost all of China’s participatory projects of recent note take place in the countryside, where the urban artist typically arrived only after the 2008 global financial crisis made living and working in the city far tougher for avant-garde experimentalists. Such places are often sites so stripped of personnel and possibility that the very purpose of the artwork is to put them back on life support and from there build what Nato Thompson calls “infrastructures of resonance” that recognize the dignity of rural life.82 In other words, the impassioned efforts of artists to work closely with local people in projects of rural reconstruction form part of a decisive palliative turn in Chinese participatory art. And even when these projects do take place in urban space, they are deliberately extended projects in which the seedlings of cross-class rapport are carefully nurtured by heavy inputs of time, as Yi Gu has observed.83 I noted in the introduction to this book that precarious experience in China has regularly flouted the doomsayers to generate precious scenes and sites of unity where what Bourriaud calls a “social interstice” can bloom on arid ground. The standout example is, of course, the rich nexus of activities fomented by workers and cultural professionals at Picun village outside Beijing.84 Part of what makes these regeneration projects so compelling is that, consciously or otherwise, they dismantle the cruel apparatus through which China’s delegated performances have viewed people from the underclass and reassemble it into a different kind of gaze.

[ 92 ]  T H E D E L E G AT O R S

Precarious experience is by no means in short supply in rural locations. Nor, for that matter, is social friction, as commentators on the apparently ultra-idealistic Bishan project have demonstrated.85 But left-behind villages do not seem to play host to the battles over rationed resources within the supposed land of plenty that is the urban environment of contemporary China. In the nation’s megalopolises, in contrast, the newcomers are poor migrants rather than cultured city folk; they are “interlopers” who bear significant stigmata because of that status. Despite their sacrificial contributions, they are feared as threats to social order, social services, the social weal. In other words, although the increasing scholarly attention paid to feelgood collaboration across the class divide is both necessary and affirming, the fractious forms discussed in this chapter are a reminder that the social bonds that a shared life on the cliff edge can forge are often trailed by darker shadows. These inverse avatars of togetherness are the fear, strife, and cruelty that chronic uncertainty can spawn. These bleaker feelings also require attention, even when—or rather, precisely because—the cultural forms they take seem so bafflingly cruel. Delegated performances from China allegorize the logic of sacrifice in raw ways, as charismatic artists act as shamans for the tacit societal rituals in which the powerless are zombified en masse for the benefit of their so-called betters. As such, these works, however distasteful they may be, are vital testaments to a precarious age.

T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 93 ]

CHA P T E R II

The Ragpickers

One day we may face trash that is untransferable, unavoidable, and unrecyclable. By then, we would all become waste people. —CHE N Q I UFAN

A

n eleven-year-old girl, small for her age, cuts out a picture of shiny red ballet flats from a French fashion magazine. She displays them on a grubby cushion at her feet, alongside a dozen other pairs of pink, red, and gingham-checked paper shoes, similarly scissored out of glossy magazines (figure 2.1). Her own sandals, made of dirty yellow plastic, are several times the size of the sleek magazine cutouts. But they don’t fit her feet properly anyway. The magazine, with its fashion spread of high-end footwear, is rare bounty for the girl, scavenged from the vast plastic dump in which she lives and works alongside her parents and four siblings.1 The family are migrants from Sichuan casually employed at a plastics recycling workshop in Shandong, one of hundreds of informal businesses that process the mounds of plastic waste China imported from Japan, Europe, and the United States until 2018. They sift through the mass of the identifiable (butter cartons, mineral water bottles, DHL banners, dog food sacks, hospital IV drips, and blood bags) and the far vaster mass of the unidentifiable to claim the plastic matter that can be shredded, rendered into slurry, and finally kerneled into small hard pellets that are then sold to local plastics manufacturers. As her special “find” shows, the girl—whose name is Yi Jie 依姐—is both a recycler and a ragpicker: a chiffonière of the kind that Baudelaire romanced in Les Fleurs du Mal, the scavenger who is bent double by “the jumbled vomit of enormous Paris” but still able to “bring glory to the love-drunk folks at home” with tiny treasures foraged from the mire.2 [ 94 ]

Figure 2.1  Screenshot from Plastic China. Yi Jie can only experience fashion via paper simulacra. Reproduced with permission from CNEX Studio.

More than this, Yi Jie is an artist of the dump. She is just as creatively alive as the activist documentary maker Wang Jiuliang 王久良, whose film Plastic China (Suliao Zhongguo 塑料中国, 2016) tells her story. As Walter Benjamin observed, Baudelaire’s poem titled “The Ragpicker’s Wine” is more about the poetic process than nineteenth-century dumpster diving: it reads the chiffonier as a dirty double for the writer because both spin gold from bits of scrap. Baudelaire writes, “here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day’s refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste.”3 To this, Benjamin responds with the following gloss: This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move in the same way . . . this is the gait of the poet who roams the city in search of rhyme-booty; it is also the gait of the ragpicker, who is obliged to come to a halt every few moments to gather up the refuse he encounters.4 T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 95 ]

Benjamin goes on to observe “there is much evidence that Baudelaire secretly wished to develop this analogy,”5 but not, it seems, by broadening the metaphoric operation to acknowledge that if the poet is a ragpicker, the ragpicker may also be a poet. Yi Jie proves this point again later in the documentary when she fashions a computer monitor from a Japanese advertisement for weight-loss pills and crafts a keyboard from the tiny milk pots served at hotel breakfast. And in a stunning scene toward the end, she decorates her family’s shanty with artisanal wallpaper crafted from taped-together KitKat wrappers (figure 2.2). These activities are more than just a diligent reuse of materials, what Susan Strasser calls the appropriate “stewardship of objects.”6 They constitute focused artistic endeavor. The dump is a slur on all taxonomic systems, a “cemetery for lost objects that never made it to the world of categories,” writes Michael Taussig.7 To process garbage is to face down that affront to order through the tactile labor of sorting. As waste besieges us, hemming in whole cities like ring roads, it is perhaps not surprising that the arts of assemblage—variants on the sorting impulse—are now in the aesthetic ascendant. Many artists are ragpickers now: so much so, in fact, that some art critics wonder if the use of garbage-as-bricolage has hardened into something canonical as “rubbish becomes a strange vale of soul making and creativity” now that nature is being forced to evacuate the terrain.8 Euro-America may have reached

Figure 2.2  Screenshot from Plastic China. Improvised décor for the family home. Reproduced with permission from CNEX Studio. [ 96 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

“peak stuff,” but China, the dumping ground for so much foreign waste until recently, is still very much processing the consequences of disposability as a socioeconomic cult. This is partly why the art of waste has also become a surging aesthetic movement in Chinese art in recent years through the work of artists such as Xing Danwen 邢丹文, Han Bing 韓冰, Du Zhenjun 杜震君, Yang Yongliang 杨泳梁, Yao Lu 姚璐, Jiang Pengyi 蒋鹏奕, Xu Bing 徐冰,Wang Zhiyuan 王智远, Liu Xintao 刘芯涛, Cao Fei 曹斐, Song Dong 宋冬, and others. Their works are often taken as exemplars of eco-art because they engage directly with issues of contamination and sustainability. Ultimately, though, the scavenging impulse reigns in many works that explore waste in China. And scavenging is nothing if not a precarious practice, an occupation of the underclass. But despite China’s complicated relationship with the world’s waste—and the world of waste—the symbolically dense role of garbage in Chinese cultural production has not been probed with the same depth the theme has received in other places.9 In this chapter, I explore the relationship between precarity, waste, expulsion, and zombie citizenship in contemporary Chinese visual culture. My aim, though, is not merely to view the waste picker as a literalized embodiment of outcast experience in China. I begin instead by considering the ways in which refuse, social exile, and the plight of living with only tenuous rights are organically linked in the figure of the waste picker, who becomes a broader emblem of the age of expulsion. I go on to show how some of China’s leading artists now work profusely with garbage—building site debris, dumpster trash, e-waste—while noting the strange anomaly that their works offer scant if any space for the figure of the waste picker. The artist, instead, has taken over her mantle as the sifter and sorter of garbage, which itself has assumed a symbolic cast. This missing human figure matters, in part because waste is always about people—and never more so than now as its rising volume becomes a cipher for expulsion as a mode of existence that threatens everyone. As materiality of a grossly abject kind squeezes Anthropos out of aesthetic space, it shows, on one level, that life on the cliff edge is shaping the forms of art as much as the art form is having any measurable impact on precarity as a state of life. Even more than this, the “thingly turn”10 as it manifests in Chinese visual culture might seem to suggest that art is responding to a felt sense that personhood is coming under assault as basic life sureties fray and the informal, unregulated work waste picking epitomizes nudges toward the norm. These missing human figures are symbolic victims of a new ontological order, in which waste rules and T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 97 ]

is arrogating the privileges of subjectivity to itself. This ascendancy of the abject is art’s reflection on the inevitable telos of zombie citizenship and the pressures it brings to bear on those cast beyond the pale. In this chapter, I also seek to show that the garbage takeover is part of a sustained practice of appropriation and effacement in the artistic representation of precarity in China. Over the last couple of decades, art-world treatments of underclass experience have proliferated in China, and many have won international recognition. But what many of these works surprisingly lack, despite their sustained focus on the beleaguered body, is a discernible will to realize the subjecthood of fragile lives, both in art and through art making—as Plastic China demonstrates with its against-the-grain depiction of the ragpicker as artist. This absence is curious. Surely it should be a clear imperative for artists who publicly identify themselves as engagé to create representations that grant maximal agency to China’s swelling underclass. So why do so many fail or decline to do so? I argue that the awkwardness of China’s dump art, in which artists dabble at waste picking rather like Marie Antoinette played at being a shepherdess, speaks of more than just appropriation. It also discloses a deeper anxiety over where brittle life experience begins and ends in a social world in which the looming cliff edge is generating suppressed class strife—as opposed to the overt class struggle of the Maoist period—as much as any sense of common ground in imminent jeopardy. It is in this sense that ragpicking reveals itself not just as an artwork trait or aesthetic practice but as a method that discloses some of the fraught and ugly contours of the present. China’s waste works are fractious forms born at the tense interface between different class actors, as part of the push and pull of downward social mobility in a society that has tried to eliminate class as a category of political action and analysis. Such works do not simply register experiences of disposability, exile, immiseration, and besieged rights as artistic themes. Rather, they are places in which the cliff edge, and the wasteland below, can be felt as atmospheric trepidation, as a site that can change our social point of origin, and thus as a zone of mounting interclass conflict.

Conditions of Our Time In The Mushroom at the End of the World, a study of what the complex global trade in matsutake mushrooms reveals about ecology, capitalism, and survival [ 98 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

amid the ruins, Anna Tsing writes: “We hear about precarity in the news every day. . . . But most of the time we imagine such precarity to be an exception to how the world works. It’s what ‘drops out’ from the system. What if  .  .  . precarity is the condition of our time—or to put it another way, what if our time is ripe for sensing precarity?”11 Here, I am interested in a further connected question: What if we were to substitute the word “waste” for “precarity” in this quotation? Or rather better, what if we were to consider the ways in which precarity, waste, and the ragpicker as an avatar for zombie citizenship constitute an organically linked method for coming to terms with the present, in China as much as in other places, during an epoch in which so many are “dropping out” from the system—falling off the cliff edge, in other words? To consider these as indissociable forces in the making of the present is to notice their many zones of overlap. To be precarious is to feel futureless. It is to live at the mercy of other people and greater powers, occupying transient ground and subsisting with no forward direction except downward. This is also the space-time of the dump, whose locations shift arbitrarily and whose temporality is at best cyclical rather than teleological—and often simply stalled. When Nicolas Bourriaud writes that “an object is said to be precarious if it has no definitive status and an uncertain future or final destiny,”12 he could just as easily have been describing waste. Yi Jie’s father makes this same point in Plastic China when he describes how he and his family moved from Sichuan, where they lived at the “mercy of nature” (kaotian chifan 靠天吃饭), to Shandong, where they now live at the mercy of refuse—their futures suspended in limbo, poised just above the void. More than this, their status as ragpickers—as people sans papiers and without labor contracts who live in perimeter settlements and manually process the effluvia of their social “betters”—exemplifies in extremis the condition of zombie citizenship. As people caught in the halfdeath of bare life, the decitizenized, like Bourriaud’s precarious objects, have neither “definite status” nor “final destiny.” Unlike middle-class recyclers in today’s China, who are lauded for their citizenly virtue, ragpickers “have been pinned as intractably unmodern, undisciplined, unsanitary.”13 As the civic undead, they are fated, like waste, to move through cycles of atrophy at the “mercy of nature” until their rights decompose entirely—as occurred with the Xinjian evictions after the Daxing fire, when the already immiserated became the utterly disenfranchised. Precarity and underclass belonging are also growing.These states of being encompass ever greater numbers in their orbit of uncertainty, just as landfills T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 99 ]

swell and the oceans clog with nondegradable trash. What’s more, all are yoked in their relation to a beleaguered natural world. As waste runs wild, it heightens our precariousness as a species and deepens the need for an established class of second-tier citizens who maintain the cordon sanitaire by getting their own hands dirty. To complete the circle, precarity is also the hallmark of a society without decent stewardship of either objects or people, driven by what Zygmunt Bauman calls “the horror of expiry.”14 The contents of the dump are precarious—stuff on the verge, about to crumble, to decay, to turn effluent—just as zombie citizenship is so often characterized by a sense of waste, with talent and opportunity kept in a state of perpetual abeyance. Precarious labor—work that is casual, unwaged, informal, irregular—mirrors the lawlessness of the dump and its lack of classificatory order, which in its turn mimics the notion of the potentially insurgent zombie horde. At the same time, these parallels also work inversely: waste connotes an excess of materiality whereas precarity and zombie citizenship speak to a brittle thinness in human life-worlds. Finally, all have imprinted themselves on public consciousness more or less simultaneously as imminent perils. Thus it is that the ragpicker—a combinant identity in which waste, precarity, and attenuated rights meet—is an archetype for our age. She is not simply an icon of poverty in the Global South but a personage in which “the condition of our time” is crystallized. This idea of the cliff edge as an epochal state of mind is gathering pace wherever fragile life-worlds are studied, even when not named as such. It has long been common to argue that precarity signifies “both the multiplication of precarious, unstable, insecure forms of living and, simultaneously, new forms of political struggle and solidarity,”15 but the term’s conceptual reach has expanded as it has become widely normalized as an experiential condition. Imminent jeopardy as something systemic, which Isabell Lorey refers to as an entrenched vulnerability, means not just “destabilization through wage labor” but also a “destabilization of ways of living and hence of bodies.”16 The cliff edge, in short, is a matter of affect, and contemporary China is an exemplary site in which to explore those fraught feelings. On one level, this is the dissolution of dreams identified by Lauren Berlant17 and the incorporation of people into an emotional regime that tethers like a dead weight while giving them something deceptively promising on which to cling. But here I also explore the idea that the cliff edge and the wasteland below are invidious things, inducing a set of affects that pits class actors against one another in a climate of fear and fretfulness. I do this within the [ 100 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

realm of culture, using waste—a material and abstract force closely tied to brittle life—as a tool of illumination. In particular, I use the art of the dump and the notion of the ragpicker as artist to explore how the politics of representing the cliff edge in contemporary Chinese aesthetic practice are rife with suppressed tension.

Animal, Vegetable, Mineral What does it mean, then, for the ragpicker to declare herself an artist? To answer this question, we might usefully turn first to some artists who have declared themselves ragpickers. China has seen increasing numbers of these in recent years as waste has emerged as a major aesthetic topos. An immediately notable example is Xu Bing and his Phoenix Project (Fenghuang 凤凰, 2008–16). This work consists of a pair of giant birds, each nearly one hundred feet long and weighing sixteen tons between them, welded entirely from debris gleaned from building sites across Beijing: helmets, shovels, pliers, hammers, rivets, drill bits, broken wheels, corrugated metal, fire extinguishers, hooks, rods, tubes, cogs, and bolts (figure 2.3). Originally commissioned as a statement piece that would ornament the atrium at the World Financial Center, the Phoenix Project began to diverge from its brief as Xu Bing contemplated the fissures between the low-rent labor of the migrant construction crews and the high-spec corporate steeple they were building. These disparities, Xu states, made his “skin quiver.”18 Enlisting the help of the laborers, Xu salvaged over a thousand pieces of detritus and used this ragpicker’s feast to assemble his phoenixes from the flames, which seem to soar forth from the ashes of hardscrabble toil. The project’s backstory is compelling, even more so since the buyers withdrew the commission, finding it too uncomfortably political. Xu Bing declined to compromise and stuck to his vision of the aestheticized leftovers of neoliberalism—to very considerable critical acclaim.19 Later, the pieces were purchased by Taiwanese art collector Barry Lam, who allowed the birds to be exhibited in both Beijing and New York before adding them to his private collection. They also live on in beautiful book form, in a Thircuir edition that brings together Xu Bing’s sketches, portraits of individual pieces of scrap metal, and photographs of the phoenixes at various sites of display.20 Despite their stated humanism, the phoenixes are never anything other than birdlike: there are no actual ragpickers in this installation about the T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 101 ]

Figure 2.3  Xu Bing: Phoenix Project.Vast avian structures protest inhumane working conditions in the Chinese construction industry; but the only visible human presence are the spectators. Reproduced with permission from © Xu Bing Studio.

intersection of waste, precarity, compromised rights, and class friction. In fact, even their avian character has something formalistic or incidental about it, and the force that really defines the Phoenix Project is its fabulous materiality, both as an effect of the overwhelming size of the sculptures and of their patchwork density. Something similar is at work in another piece that offers an animalistic allegory of waste: Wang Qingsong’s installation Poisonous Spider (Du zhizhu 毒蜘蛛, 2011). In this work, Wang spins a spider’s web of barbed wire on which are suspended items of banal daily trash—a plastic cup, a scratched disc, a discarded shoe, a bunch of bananas, a wilted lettuce, plastic bags, odd socks (figure 2.4). Conceptually, the garbage might be both lure and prey, and as such it is already suggestive of unsettled ontological relations. But this point comes over more strongly when the installation is contrasted with an earlier partner piece from 2005, a digital print which bears the same name. This photograph is well-nigh identical to its threedimensional successor – except for the worker who lies trapped at the heart of the web, limbs splayed in a pose of helpless capture (figure 2.5). As the concept for the piece moves through time, transitioning from one medium [ 102 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

Figure 2.4 Wang Qingsong: Poisonous Spider, 2011. Spinning a web of mixed waste. Reproduced with permission from Wang Qingsong.

Figure 2.5 Wang Qingsong: Poisonous Spider, 2005. An earlier iteration of the work entangles a migrant worker at the heart of the web. Reproduced with permission from Wang Qingsong.

to another, it sheds its human presence, seemingly surrendering that space to proxies from the natural world. Just like the Phoenix Project, however, it’s not the spider’s web so much as the gross materiality it ensnares that provides the central logic of the installation. Whether bird or arachnid, the creatures who provide the structural morphology, the exoskeleton, of these works are simply platforms for the artistic display of waste. Both works are instances of scavenger art, in which foul or discarded matter is reclaimed to prove Claes Oldenburg’s claim that a “refuse lot in the city is worth all the art stores in the world.”21 In both, a surfeit of gross, abject materiality crowds out the animate subject of representation, and the artist is the only ragpicker whose presence a spectator might directly sense. On one level, it might seem logical to understand these works as renderings in art of the evolutionary fact that the ecology of cities is altering species at speed. As Menno Schilthuizen has shown, urban spaces do not simply serve as sites of biological extermination.They are also crucibles for genome development, as “city pigeons develop detox plumage” and the common or garden blackbird becomes the turdus urbanicus, a mildly mutated version of the original avian that is beautifully synched to the megacity habitat.22 Schilthuizen also references the work of arachnologists, who have shown that the urban spider Larinioides sclopetarius, which builds its webs in the spaces between handrails on pedestrian bridges, overwhelmingly gravitates toward spaces near fluorescent lighting, where insect pickings are richer.23 Schilthuizen doesn’t dwell on refuse in his study, perhaps a strange omission given that the dump is arguably the most materially volatile zone in urban space, and thus a locale very likely to catalyze genetic change.Viewed through this lens, Xu Bing’s phoenixes have their own kind of “detox plumage,” with red hardhats arrayed like crested feathers atop each bird’s head, just as Wang Qingsong’s light-seeking spider’s web serves to magnetize trash, pulling it by force into its orbit. But rather like Schilthuizen, who spares only a few paragraphs for the idea that urban life is changing human biology, both artists eliminate the human subject in their explorations of how waste is producing novel ontological states.

Anything but Human This tendency, I should say early on, is not restricted to China. Commentators on the so-called toxic sublime, for example, have noted the routine [ 104 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

absence of humans in these landscapes of despoliation.24 Art forms such as these, often photographic, acknowledge that the sites they represent are often contaminated beyond salvage, but cannot help but express their wonderment at iridescent oil slicks and swirling chemical spills. Humans, however, are mostly missing in the photographic work of toxic sublimists such as Edward Burtynsky and Chris Jordan.25 Viewers understand, of course, that human agency crafted these skewed environments, but people vanish from sight amid Jordan’s statistical renderings of plastic beverage bottles, for example. To an extent, this might be because the waste picker is so problematic a figure to aestheticize. As Katherine Boo notes in her personalized ethnography of waste pickers in a Mumbai slum, work of this kind “could wreck a body in very short time. Scrapes from dumpster-diving pocked and became infected. Where skin broke, maggots got in. Lice colonized hair, gangrene inched up fingers, calves swelled into tree trunks.”26 Keeping the ragpicker out of art could be construed, then, as a gesture of delicacy, a recognition of where the limit lines of aesthetic propriety should lie. Certainly, it is true that the figure of the waste picker has seemed a good deal more graspable within the hard-core documentary mode in China. Productions such as Along the Railway (Tielu yanxian 铁路沿线, dir. Du Haibin 杜海滨, 2000), Street Life (Nanjing lu 南京路, dir. Zhao Dayong 赵 大勇, 2006), Heavy Metal (Huxiao de jinshu 呼啸的金属, dir. Jin Huaqing 金华青, 2009), Ragpicker (Shihuangzhe 拾荒者, dir. Zhong Yanshan 钟延山, 2010), Trash Village (Laji de cunzi 垃圾的村子, dir. Zou Xueping 邹雪平), and When the Bough Breaks (Weichao 危巢, dir. Li Dan 李丹, 2012) all seek, with greater or lesser success, to realize the lives of waste pickers on screen. They do so, however, in ways rather different from Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China, as will become clear. These works adhere for the most part to the now canonical xianchang 现场 (on-the-spot) style of documentary filmmaking, within which a deliberate kind of technical deskilling takes place as muddy audio, clunky editing, and handheld camerawork are made to serve as tokens of authenticity. As such, these are works possessed of an almost anti-aesthetic drive; their core currency is informational indexicality.27 And by repeatedly showing that the waste picker is an acceptable subject for reportage, they obliquely draw attention to the absence of this figure from the less literalized, more evocative spaces of art. Evidently, this is a far cry from Yi Jie in Plastic China, who amply corroborates Patricia Yaeger’s remarks about “the power of waste” in American culture: “not only does detritus replace nature, but waste managers and garbage haulers are its T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 105 ]

poets and purveyors, its historians and makers.”28 Yet what makes this latter point telling is not just the usurpation of the earth by trash but the idea, once again, that garbage haulers are the poets of the contemporary. They are not just the subjects of works about refuse; they are the “purveyors” of truth about where and what we are in the present. In this sense, artworks (whatever their provenance) that deanthropomorphize waste in the age of the Anthropocene—and in which waste itself becomes the reigning presence—are suggestive of certain realities. They tell oblique stories about humans, almost despite themselves. This anomaly of the missing human figure in so much dump art from China becomes more politically pressing when we think again about the nexus between waste, the cliff edge, and zombie citizenship—and most especially about the status of the ragpicker as a personage who brings these forces together in ways that constitute a mode of being for our age. To put this another way, waste is always about people; in waste we find out exactly who we are, unfiltered and unperfumed. Waste lives right alongside us, which explains in part “the disturbing extension of its characteristics to human beings when they themselves have become disposable.”29 What’s more, the carelessness with which so many twenty-first-century people continue to discard things belies the intimate secrets refuse always harbors. Indeed, the very process of waste is predicated on a reckless suspension of disbelief. Even now many remain invested in the idea that there are no comebacks from rubbish, otherwise dumpsters would not keep on yielding bank statements, medical records, criminal evidence, plutonium, pets, and even abandoned infants. As Robert Stam observes, “the truth of a society is in its detritus. The socially peripheral points to the symbolically central.”30 So what does it mean not just when waste becomes a canonical mood in art, but when garbage emerges as a stand-alone pictorial subject, and when the waste picker—a figure crucial to understanding why detritus is so “symbolically central”—is simply an identity slipped on and off at will by the artist?

Living in a Material World In answer, it may be instructive to look briefly at the work of Chinese artist Xing Danwen. In her series disCONNEXION (Jueyuan 绝缘, 2002–3), Xing herself effectively assumes the role of ragpicker. Across forty chromogenic [ 106 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

color prints, the artist maps a taxonomy of the e-waste that until recently lapped China’s southern shores from the United States, Europe, and Japan: telephone wires, circuit boards, shattered casings, silicon chips, computer cables, defunct keyboards, cell phone cases, and obsolete chargers. Each category of e-trash becomes the subject of its own portrait, a point so obvious that critics haven’t paid it much attention, focusing instead on what the series says about globalizing China and ugly aesthetics. But the sorting impulse—gathering, sifting, dismantling, and pigeonholing miscellaneous waste—constitutes the baseline meaning of the series. Xing’s prints are the final fruits of extreme labor, the toil of the precarious waste pickers of Guangdong province who tear various electronic devices into their component parts while toxifying their own bodies. The artist’s statement about the work posted on Xing’s website reads as follows: “in disCONNEXION, her critical eye and sharp lens examine the aesthetics of technological waste, reflecting environmental concerns, but more importantly, an anxiety about changes in the lives of workers along the south coast, whose ghosts can be sensed despite their absence from the frames.”31 Perhaps these ghosts are sensed by some viewers. But the classificatory order imposed on the electronic detritus in disCONNEXION inevitably ends up looking much more like the handiwork of the artist, whose “sharp lens” beautifies the debris, thus owning it still further while conspicuously displacing the stated subject of the artwork. As part of this art-making process, the series as a whole comes over more forcefully as hostage to its own charismatic materiality than as a testimony to life on the cliff edge. The cables in figure 2.6, for example, are lithe and serpentine: they have a strong agency as they squirm around the frame; the tiny nuts and bolts in figure 2.7 look like woodlice swarming; and the smashed keyboards in figure 2.8, concertinaed up against each other, are reminiscent of Bill Brown’s point that “we begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us: when the drill breaks, when the car stalls, when the windows get filthy, when their flow within the circuits of production and distribution, consumption and exhibition, has been arrested, however momentarily.”32 These remarkable images share a lineage with Xu Bing’s Phoenixes and Wang Qingsong’s Poisonous Spider in terms of their overt materiality. They also resonate closely with the work of Han Bing, whose photographs in the series Urban Amber (Dushi hupo 都市琥珀, 2005–11) are all shot from reflections in cesspools and succeed via this technique in turning the scum and detritus that float on the surface of these waters into T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 107 ]

 

Figures 2.6–2.8  Xing Danwen: from DisCONNEXION. The thingly turn writ large. Reproduced with permission from Xing Danwen.  

the super-subjects of the images. In figure 2.9, for example, the discarded carton and foam takeaway box enjoy a remarkable aesthetic subjectivity as they hover in the middle of the frame. Han’s camerawork creates a superimposed look, as if he had literally plucked the garbage and pasted it digitally over the landscape, a sense heightened by the dark shadow that trails the objects. Once again, the artist becomes waste picker while [ 108 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

Figure 2.9  Han Bing: East Wind II, 2005. Garbage floats as delicate cumulus over the cityscape.

creating a topography populated by trash and emptied of people. This process becomes still more vivid in the many waste works of Yang Yongliang, famed for his tonally textured digital collages, which arrest the eye initially as latter day reincarnations of the Chinese landscape tradition, with mist-clad mountains and cascading waterfalls that undulate across the three grounds of pictorial space and are denuded of humans. But zoom in closer, and it becomes clear that the shanshui 山水 (traditional Chinese landscape painting) aesthetic has been subverted by ruination and garbage: the foreground of Yang’s composite photographs emerges as a terrain of demolished structures, effluent waste, tilting pylons, and rebar (figure 2.10). Yang’s identity as waste picker is, though, even more hygienically removed from the grime of e-waste than that of Xing Danwen because he uses Google Tilt Brush, a software tool, to sort and sift the detritus with which he composes the image.33 This material turn can be detected more broadly elsewhere too, as the cliff edge increasingly drives new genres of object-oriented aesthetic form in China. An obvious example is Jia Zhangke’s 贾樟柯 Still Life (Sanxia haoren 三峽好人, 2006) and its meticulous fixation with the daily T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 109 ]

Figure 2.10  Yang Yongliang: From the New World (Laizi xindalu 来自新大陆, 2014). Look closer and rubble reveals itself amid the timeless peaks and rivers. Reproduced with permission from Yang Yongliang.

emblems of a hand-to-mouth existence, the glue and grit of precarious living: the hessian sacks, thermos flasks, bottles of liquor, and packets of tea that merge into a shared object ecology for people under duress and thereby acquire an increasingly visible subjectivity. A similar elevation of object to subject is also on show in Jia’s next feature film 24 City (Ershisi chengji 二十四城记, 2008), where prosaic items—a portable IV drip, a battered ID card, a tear-off wall calendar, a patched bedspread, a strategically positioned glass on a table—join the film’s much-discussed tableaux vivants as subjects for the camera’s intent gaze. The IV drip, which character Da Li 大丽 holds above her head as she walks around her residential compound, seems to live again in the early moments of Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China, when the camera zeroes in on a similar piece of medical detritus now lying redundant on the dump. Objects, it would seem, have come to assume a kind of personhood within Chinese visual culture, tossing down a gauntlet to Baudrillard’s claim that “we have always lived off the splendor of the subject and the poverty of the object.”34 As materiality surges as a theme in art and film, and then turns steadily to waste, it begs questions about the changing form and praxis of visual culture under the regime of the cliff edge. [ 110 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

The Susceptible Arts of Precarity Indeed, the notion that art can intervene in unsteady lives—that art about precarity can provide some sort of fix for situations—needs to be overhauled, or at the very least supplemented by a closer focus on what endemic uncertainty has done to the nature of aesthetic form. I have already alluded to the ways in which a mood of endangerment has produced, in pre- and postmillennial China, a huge corpus (pun intended) of what might be called bodyworks.This is art that uses the human form in zombie postures of barely clothed duress to bid for visibility and as an apparent call to political arms. These representations of what Wang Hui calls China’s “new workers”—those who engage in dagong 打工 (working for the boss, usually as an economic migrant) rather than laodong 劳动 (the more elevated toil of working for the socialist state)—have oscillated between a range of forms.35 One category comprises the practice of delegated performance, discussed in detail in chapter 1, in which the artist enlists the “labor” of seminaked, often load-bearing, almost clonelike and undifferentiated migrant workers: supporting a massive infrastructure (in the work of Wang Jin 王晋), raising the water level in a fishpond (in the work of Zhang Huan 张洹), hung upside down from the ceiling (in the work of Zhang Dali 张大力), suspended by their fingertips from a high building (in the work of Chen Chenchen 陈陈陈), or squeezed into suffocating rabbit hutches (in the work of Wang Qingsong 王庆松).36 Another includes works in which the artist claims close kinship with the urban underclass and presents himself as one of their own, such as in Zhu Fadong’s 朱发东 work This Person Is for Sale (Ciren chushou jiage mianyi 此人 出售价格面议, 1994) and Luo Zidan’s 罗子丹 Half White-Collar/Half Peasant (Yiban shi bailing, yiban shi nongmin 一半是白领, 一半是农民, 1996). Akin to this latter category of bodyworks are the wastescapes I discuss here, in which real-life waste pickers are kept out of sight entirely while artists sift junk themselves. Indeed, if physical endangerment and the trials of zombie citizenship are keynotes of precarious experience, so too—as suggested earlier—is waste. More than this, depopulated wastescapes exist in tight dialectical rapport with lurid bodyworks in contemporary Chinese visual culture. As the human body is stress-tested to the point of zombification in art, so does refuse rise to prominence as a parallel aesthetic mode. Crucially, these shifts mark a formational change in the substance and praxis of art under the regime of the cliff edge. Delegated performance, T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 111 ]

with its intense corporalization of the aesthetic encounter in China, already counts as a remarkable move given the long-standing prudishness over the nude image in Chinese art. More telling, though, the experience of the cliff edge—internal migration, the factory regime, lives suspended over the void or jettisoned into the space below among the “low-end population”—has turned the endangered body into the subject and medium for art in ways that have little precedent in the Chinese pictorial tradition. The deployment of flesh, bone, blood, and sweat we see in delegated performance marks how precarity has changed the praxis of contemporary art a good deal more than this prodigious quantity of works has succeeded in heightening awareness of conditions among China’s underclass, let alone actually improving them. And just as the naked, imperiled body that toils in anonymous hordes is barely a feature of the Chinese pictorial past,37 so too does waste register a radical departure from the Chinese nonfigurative tradition, which finds its roots and blossom in landscape painting. The rise of waste as a dominant aesthetic signature reverses many of the conventions of the landscape tradition, which typically took nature as a place of solace rendered via the medium of paint. In waste works, the external world is more commonly represented in sculpture, composite photography, and installation: modes of art overtly concerned with relations of materiality. And in these highly materialized works, the natural world as a site of meditative succor has been usurped by landscapes of toxicity. These drives in Chinese visual culture—the menaced human subject, the rampant waste object—can be read together as tandem impacts on art by the precarious condition and de facto civic death. This resonates with Andrea Muehlebach’s point about anthropology’s changing relation to precarity: “What we have seen building in the last few years is a radically transforming discipline—or, rather, a discipline being moved into transformation by the very forces it seeks to describe.” Precarity, she suggests, “has inserted itself into the very heart of anthropology itself.”38 Although art has attempted to take on the condition of the present, often expressly with the intention of “making things right,” precarity has more forcefully worked its way into art, bringing forth new methods of making art and being an artist.

Getting Wasted But garbage is also, of course, political, and the rise of the wastescape needs to be parsed for its ideological meanings too. To an extent, the material [ 112 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

turn that Chinese visual culture has taken in recent years can be read as a symptom of the quest for solid bearings that precarious people undertake as life is suspended in a state of deferral and uncertainty, on the brink of the abyss. Objects, especially prosaic and comforting ones, can be stitched into a kind of affective safety net that offers a handhold of sorts for those tumbling through the time of the present: in small things shall we trust and have our being. As mentioned previously, we see this process at work in Jia Zhangke’s cinema, as items of sustenance take on talismanic status, operating as the last vestige of stabilizing hope for those excluded from the social safety zone. Wasteworks ramp up this process, but they also push it in new directions. Specifically, their effaced human presence begins to suggest that the enthronement of the defunct object has come as the corollary of a creeping kind of dehumanization as the threat of zombie citizenship coalesces into fact. In this sense, the interplay in Chinese visual culture over the last two decades or more—between the imperiled body and the impermanent artwork on one hand, and the exuberance of waste as a subject in projects marked by a firm materiality on the other—may also gesture toward a shifting of ontological ground under conditions of precarity. Which is to say, certain spaces of art may be responding, intuitively, rhetorically, and perhaps predictively, to a sense of menace. This jeopardy is that the central experiences of the cliff edge in contemporary China—migrancy, the factory regime, subsumption into the “low-end” of the population—are causing definitions of personhood, and who or what can possess it, to fray. The art explored here has begun to register the effects of zombification. The stress-tested, dehumanized body and the new resplendence of trash may, accordingly, have a consecutive relationship. First comes the objectification of the body by trials and tests (how much load can it bear, how long can it be suspended in midair, how tightly can it be squeezed before its physical integrity collapses), then, as a natural segue to this, comes the subjectification of waste, its rise into something close to personhood within the spaces of art. At first sight, the strained human body might seem like a peerlessly eloquent site on which to inscribe this political message. Certainly it is true that China’s bodyworks coin an arresting visual idiom for the physical toll taken by precarity, as I argued in chapter 1. But waste is an equally appropriate partner method through which to explore the notion of ontological sureties in freefall under the regime of risk and uncertainty. Waste is emerging as a signature in Chinese visual culture because it is a space in which subject/object, human/nonhuman relations exist in a state T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 113 ]

of unusual suppleness. It is well understood that the dump is a crucible for this kind of symbolic change, which is why so many theorists of new materiality have turned to waste as a core case study. The ontological turnover of recycling, the dump’s dematerialization and then rematerialization of the object, the plasticity and shapelessness of waste, its excessive volume, the way this size and scale can give refuse the power of a live threat, the impact that garbage has on the personhood of the human subject who toils with it: all these make trash crucial to the so-called thingly turn. Epitomizing this process are works such as Cao Fei’s “Rumba” (Lunba 伦巴, 2015) and “Rumba II: Nomad” (Lunba zhi er: youmu 伦巴之二: 游牧, 2015), in which the figure of the ragpicker has been ironically “upgraded” into a robot vacuum cleaner that patrols an urban wasteland—the ultimate triumph of thing over person in the AI age.

Subject/Object, Object/Subject Ultimately, the dump belongs to what Nicholas Bourriaud calls the “realm of the exformal: the site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted,” between what is human and what is not, and between who is granted a full life within the polis and who is ejected into the zone of exile. He continues: “Exform designates a point of contact, a ‘socket’ or ‘plug’, in the process of exclusion and inclusion—a sign that switches between center and periphery, floating between dissidence and power. Gestures of expulsion and the waste it entails, the point where the exform emerges, constitute an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political.”39 In many ways, this statement can be read alongside Michel Serres’s well-known concept of the quasi-object and the quasi-subject. In its original formulation, Serres sets out this idea using a sporting analogy: The ball isn’t there for the body; the exact contrary is true: the body is the object of the ball; the subject moves around this sun. Skill with the ball is recognized in the player who follows the ball and serves it instead of making it follow him and using it. It is the subject of the body, subject of bodies, and like a subject of subjects. Playing is nothing else but making oneself the attribute of the ball as a substance.

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The laws are written for it, defined relative to it, and we bend to these laws. Skill with the ball supposes a Ptolemaic revolution of which few theoreticians are capable, since they are accustomed to being subjects in a Copernican world where objects are slaves.40 Here, the scene of a ball game becomes a time-space wherein the hierarchical “Copernican” rules between players and ball collapse into flattened, fluid relations as agency shifts and the humans bend so obediently to the physics of the object that Serres calls it a “Ptolemaic revolution.” Rather than strict “subjects” and “objects,” the actants in the game share a state of intersubjectivity, but one in which the ball arguably calls more of the shots. Turning back to Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China throws further light on this notion of quasi-subjects and quasi-objects. The camera repeatedly closes in on plastic waste in the process of metamorphosis: rendered down in huge vats, oozed out of pipes, squeezed into filaments, and shredded into pellets. This is the story of the life cycle of garbage, its matter made vibrant as it moves through solid and liquid states in ways that at moments feel uncannily like a wildlife documentary (figures 2.11–2.13). This life cycle is mirrored by that of the waste pickers, who are shown in positions of naturalized subservience to plastic trash as they work, forage, eat, rest, play, and, most extraordinarily, labor in childbirth amid the waste. In figure 2.14, they toil waist-high amid Sisyphean piles of plastic; in figure 2.15, they catch a fish for supper from a river rank with polluted waste; in figure 2.16, they share a meal at a small outdoor table encircled by sacks brimming over with waste; and in figure 2.17, the children try to scale the mounds of refuse as part of a game. Yi Jie’s mother even gives birth to her sixth child on the premises of the recycling workshop, her cries of labor echoing among the serried ranks of plastic. This charting of life rhythms, and the way that they proceed (to paraphrase Yi Jie’s father) at the mercy of garbage, suggests the extent to which the dump, like the football field, is a space of quasi-object, quasi-subject relations in which waste is increasingly in control. Indeed, it is in this sense that Bourriaud’s “realm of the exformal” becomes telling. As a “site where border negotiations unfold between what is rejected and what is admitted,” the dump, and working at the dump, applies pressure to personhood and objecthood.This is a pressure that art can elucidate, thereby constituting “an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political.”

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Figures 2.11–2.13 The life cycle of plastic: screenshots from Plastic China. Matter is made   grossly vibrant at the dump. Reproduced with permission from CNEX Studio.

 

 

 Figures 2.14–2.17  Screenshots from Plastic China. At one with waste. Reproduced with permission from CNEX Studio.

In a study of catadores, or waste pickers, in Rio de Janeiro, Kathleen Millar argues that working with waste generates new forms of being: Just as the transition to wage labor in industrial capitalism entailed the creation of new worker-subjectivities, the transition to precarious labor in contemporary capitalism is also a process involving the transformation of desires, values, and arts of living. In other words, like wage labor, work on the garbage dump is a site of subjectmaking, which catadores experience and express as transformative of their inner dispositions.41 In a sense, Millar’s point here is precisely the one I made earlier in this chapter: namely, that the waste picker is an archetype for our age, whose “desires, values, and arts of living” require exploration in art as much as in anthropology. It might seem logical to expect, therefore, that artwork about the dump, set on establishing “an authentically organic link between the aesthetic and the political,” would naturally seek to represent the garbage dump as a “site of subject-making.” But Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China is unusual— exceptional, even—in its sustained effort to realize the subjectivity of the waste picker in visual culture. In particular, the film’s frank yet delicate treatment of quasi-object/quasi-subject relations at the plastics recycling workshop—its self-consciously ontological exploration of what it means to live and work with waste—sets it apart from the slew of other artworks and documentaries whose makers have felt the gravitational pull of garbage. A further exception may be the artist Li Jikai 李继开, to my knowledge the only contemporary painter to represent waste pickers in his work, who also alludes to a deep ontological shift in his The Waste Pickers (Shihuangzhe 拾荒者, 2014). This series of acrylics on canvas represents the dump as a dwelling place where life runs through its cycles. The figures are shown clothed, naked, reading, sleeping, resting, working, thinking, praying, cooking, having a haircut, and, once again, giving birth. Life goes on, but it also shifts at the genome level. The limbs of several figures are malformed or mutated, their sizing is disproportionate (some juxtaposed figures are huge, others tiny), their faces are blank and puppetlike, and some bodies even show stitch marks to reinforce their identity as quasi-subjects or marionettes (figures 2.18–2.20). Wang Jiuliang goes rather further even than Li, though, in his approach to subjectivity. The methodological shift that Plastic China makes—however utopian it may seem—from the artist as ragpicker to the [ 118 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

 Figures 2.18–2.20  Li Jikai: The Waste Pickers. A rare painterly depiction of the Chinese waste picker suggests the genetic costs of living with trash. Reproduced with permission from Li Jikai.

 Figures 2.18–2.20  (cont.)

ragpicker as artist marks a crucial and singular transition in the Chinese representation of precarious lives.

Hypervisible, Invisible So far, I have discussed waste works first in terms of what they tell us about the impact of precarity on the art form, and second as a kind of bellwether about the state of personhood within a world of “entrenched vulnerability.” But these are also works about social relations. They are spaces in which the cliff edge as a structure of feeling—and as a sometimes ugly structure [ 120 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

of feeling—is made tangible. As such, they emerge as a salient method for grasping the contours of the present. Commentators on the bodyworks mentioned earlier have noted that they perhaps veer into indelicate terrain, as I discussed in detail in chapter 1. Thus the close kinship that some artists claim with China’s urban poor—as Zhu Fadong put it in 2007, “I am one of them”42—has been seen as facile or disingenuous because many such artists come from affluent homes, are recipients of tertiary education, and pass only briefly through the vale of social endangerment.43 Similarly, I argued in chapter 1 that Chinese artists who deploy the strained and stressed bodies of the underclass in delegated performance struggle to escape the charge of aesthetic exploitation—not least because they seldom pay workers appropriate wages for services that on some occasions have catapulted the artist into global fame.44 These are not new arguments, nor is the worry over how best to represent class others a fresh type of angst. At root, it is the hypervisibility of the “poor” body in such works that threatens to compromise the ethics of their makers. If the cliff edge is “the condition of our time,” not just the plight of those who “drop out” from the system but that system’s actual mechanism—the very rails on which it runs—then the voyeurism that seems an inalienable premise and effect of these bodyworks is both exploitative and out of synch with the present. A political art of precarity that operates via othering and shows mainly that some people are more precarious than others—or that the cliff edge is someone else’s fate—can induce at best a brief and passing pity. It cannot act politically. As Rancière argues of horror as a spectacle: “if horror is banalized, it is not because we see too many images of it. We do not see too many suffering bodies . . . [but] we do see too many nameless bodies, too many bodies incapable of returning the gaze we direct at them, too many bodies that are an object of speech without themselves having a chance to speak.”45 In short, we see too many bodies in contemporary Chinese art whose massed and muted corporeality represents the plight of zombie citizenship as mere mimesis; speaking subjects are all too thin on the ground. It might seem, therefore, that the delegated performances discussed in chapter 1 constitute the nadir of what I referred to there as a “cruel apparatus of seeing”: a callous gaze that contorts like a self-defensive rictus from the all-too-real threat of being zombified too. But the parallel problem of invisibility that plagues representations of waste is just as troubling. The human figure visualized to voyeuristic excess in the delegated performances that emerged in China in the late 1990s is entirely effaced in many of the T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 121 ]

works referenced in this chapter. The result is that waste—the effluvium of precarity, in both physical and metaphysical ways—for the most part is demobilized as a subject for politically minded, humanely motivated art. This is not to say that works such as Xu Bing’s Phoenixes lack political meaning. On the contrary, some of the art explored here aspires to and may well attain the heights of the toxic sublime, in which “trash has become a material for enacting the exultations” once associated with nature and can thus offer a telling narration on the state of late capitalism.46 But as Yaeger notes, “our society creates and then disavows rubbish in excess. Detritus is objects—both natural and artificial—that have reached the end of their life of value. Given this opposition, why should the dominant aesthetic response to trash suggest that we need to revalue it, to soak up its numina, its radioactive glow?”47 The effacement of the human that occurs in work hostage to these “numina” undertakes a transposing move that is ideologically similar to the displacement of civic death and blighted futures onto the urban poor that we see in China’s delegated performances. Waste is othered. It is disassociated, via art, from the humans who are fundamentally indissociable from it. These waste works, like the bodyworks I discussed earlier, profess to be the arts of the precarious, as evinced by statements the artists themselves make about them. In many ways, however, their aesthetic strategies are at the very least digressive, if not outright hostile.

In Art Shall We Aspire It is in this broader, global context that a work like Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China acquires political value. The documentary commits itself to delineating the subjectivity of Yi Jie as a ragpicker-cum-artist in ways that press for her personhood amid the ontological quagmire of the dump. As such, Plastic China stands in radical contrast to a work such as Zhang Dali’s Chinese Offspring (Zhongzu 种族, 2003), for example, in which the artist made resin casts of the bodies of migrant workers and then strung these life-size casts, each tattooed with an issue number, upside down from warehouse ceilings for the purposes of exhibition. The point and power of the work is, of course, its visual rendering of China’s migrant labor force as indecent puppets, as closely identical to one another as clones or zombies. Like the resin casts, they exist in strung up, subjectless suspension. As Wu Hung notes, “this approach entails risks for the artist—not only does the temporary [ 122 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

employer-employee relationship created between himself and his migrant laborer models reproduce the social power relations and economic operations he aims to criticize, but the act of producing a model of the subject in plaster also evokes the utility and brutality of these power relations and economic structures.”48 Wu Hung reads Zhang Dali’s studied response to this risk positively, arguing that the artist’s decision to photograph and publicize his aesthetic process both lays bare these “operations of power” and also reframes “a potential issue of artistic morality into the self-marginalization of avant-garde art.”49 This, however, is an argument made from the perspective of Zhang-as-subject, which revolves around an exclusively artist-based dilemma: namely, is his aesthetic personhood an exploitative one? Can it be redeemed if Zhang is upfront about it? Meanwhile, the migrants are “voyeurized” twice: first, during the artistic process of producing the casts when they are suffocatingly swathed in plaster and resin; and second, during the exhibition process, as their naked, number-stamped casts are dangled almost obscenely from the rafters. Their subjectivity exists in entirely objectified form. As such, they take their place alongside a significant cluster of similar sculptural works (such as Liang Shuo’s 梁硕 Trendy Peasants—Eight Brothers [Shishang nongmin ba xiongdi 时尚农民八兄弟, 2002] and his Urban Peasants [Chengshi nongmin 城市农民, 2007], for example) that deindividuate or massify migrant workers, casting them—typically as molds—in postures that are passive, inert, and hapless (figure 2.21). As Lisa Richaud and Ash Amin note, a core focus for researchers who study precarious lives should be to “reconsider the affective and psychological dimensions of urban stress and uncertainty . . . by exploring the active management of subjectivity by individuals.”50 Against the understandably dominant narrative of Foxconn suicides, PTSD in the aftermath of factory fires, and “traveling psychosis”51 among those who have to cross a vast continent to see their families for the briefest of annual visits, the role of ritualized resilience and “situated endurance”—how to bear the quotidian across an accumulation of perilous days—is a story that also needs telling, and in art, again, as much as in anthropology. For Richaud and Amin, it is specifically through what might be called the arts of the everyday (“the effervescence of a card game, the laughter exchanged during chitchat, the rituals of living normally”) that the “moments of relief ” on which an actively managed subjectivity depends can be grasped. These routines are the mechanism through which people on the cliff edge go about “rejecting abjection by staying active, purposeful, sane.”52 But Plastic China extends T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 123 ]

Figure 2.21 Liang Shuo, Urban Peasants. A similar vacuity of expression and a medial uniformity in the copper cast attenuate the figures’ agency.

this notion of the arts of the everyday into something much more explicitly aesthetic. It is by the making of art—the cutout shoes, the improvised home computer, the chocolate-wrapper wallpaper—that eleven-year-old Yi Jie not simply manages her subjectivity but arrogates to herself a personhood on a par with that of the documentarist who films her. As such, the film presents what Arjun Appadurai calls the “capacity to aspire”: a specifically aesthetic quantity that enables Yi Jie to assert and exercise her personhood within a domain that consistently threatens to reduce her to a quasi-subject.53 The artists discussed in this chapter, I should say again, see themselves as political. Their express aim is to undo the “us” versus “them” distinctions so rife in mainstream discourse on the underclass in China that typically blame

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migrant workers for “rising crime rates, moral depravity, public health and hygiene concerns, and many other contemporary social ills.”54 We know this not just from the visual codes via which the works of these artists communicate, but from their own paratextual musings and media interviews.55 And although I have described their waste picking practices as borderline appropriative, likening them to the faux-milkmaids of Versailles, most would probably either refute the suggestion that their art crosses the line or at the very least strategize that step as does Zhang Dali. In a sense, though, this dissensus merely heightens the anomaly of an art practice that says it wants to intervene on behalf of people exiled from the pale and yet ends up, in spite of itself, so visibly effacing their agency. What makes this anomaly happen? Appadurai notes that we need “to ask how the poor may be helped to produce those forms of cultural consensus that may best advance their own collective long-term interests in matters of wealth, equality, and dignity.”56 This strategy does not obviate the role of the artist—far from it. But it does very much foreground the importance of training and toning what Appadurai calls the “voice” of the poor as a “cultural capacity.” This capacity functions by “those levers of metaphor, rhetoric, organization, and public performance that will work best in their cultural worlds,”57 and it is a process in which artists, particularly those who have lived among the members of the underclass, can become instrumentally enabling. Yet voice—which represents a transformative shift from looking at precarious people, in massed and muted form, to hearing them—is precisely what is absent from so many of China’s bodyworks and waste works alike. This aphasia seems to ask for an explanation because, on the surface, it appears so counterintuitive within such purportedly engagé practices of art making.

Cruel Gazing, Revisited The condition of precarity, as many theorists have made clear, is transversal, cutting across class and race, gender and nation. It has been a driving mission of the European precarity movement to broker alliances between these diverse cohorts: between creatives and factory workers, between artists and migrants, and so on.Theorists of precarity have been keen to show that even as endemic uncertainty smothers life chances it can “hold the potential to contribute to a political composition of the common” by fostering new

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ways and means of being political together.58 The devil, though, lies in the detail. As Gill and Pratt argue: The appeal of the notion of precarity is precisely in this potentiality, yet it also produces tensions common to all forms of transversal politics: how to deal with differences, how to find ‘common cause’, how to build solidarity while also respecting the singularity and specificity of the very different experiences of [say] janitors, creatives and office temps. . . . Not least is the question of whether there are grounds for such solidarity in a global frame characterized by enormous disparities in wealth and power.59 In short, precarity’s cross-cutting does not necessarily breed effortless solidarities: this is Angela Mitropoulos’s point when she asks if it really favors “the maquiladora worker to ally herself with the fashion designer?”60 Her question meshes with the practices discussed here, in which it is sometimes difficult to see what material or even abstract benefits accrue to the waste picker whose anonymized toil makes it into a photographic series by a bigname artist—even if that artist started out as a migrant, has lived in a migrant village and shared in its patterns of sociality, and has long experience of unsteady work with low or no pay. Sharing space on the cliff edge, in other words, by no means equates to finding common ground. But it seems insufficient simply to critique the relationship between artists and waste pickers, to pull up the former for exploitatively annexing the identity and labor of the latter. Rather, what these artworks require is a closer look at how the tensions of transversal politics play out within aesthetic space, at how waste picking reveals itself as a tool for navigating the strains of the present. Or why it is, more precisely, that so many practitioners of the arts of the cliff edge create a representational language that shoots for solidarity but ends up visually reproducing the “enormous disparities in wealth and power” around which that edifice is structured. Earlier I suggested that these artistic practices tend toward the digressive. Either arrogating the positionality of members of the underclass to themselves or presenting precarity as someone else’s problem, they effectively decline to take part in the important work of mentoring what Appadurai calls “voice” among the poor. As mentioned previously, a more or less Rancièrian view has prevailed among commentators who have noted this tendency in China’s arts of precarity. Lily Chumley summarizes the prevailing stance when [ 126 ]  T H E R A G P I C K E R S

she argues that such works “appear to viewers as images of others, recruiting viewers to roles of sympathetic objectification rather than empathetic identification.”61 According to this “best case” interpretation, artists and their spectators are sometimes misguided, but fundamentally benign. They mean well even when they misfire. But what about a “less good” or even “worst case” scenario? What about the possibility that art of this kind “manages” the threat that the cliff edge now poses to so many constituents of society—effectively trying to box it into the rabbit hutches of the urban poor, as in the photography of Wang Qingsong? Even as this art appears to be politically radical, in other words, its strategies of othering may also be socially reassuring. More than this, in fact, when parsed on the structural plane, the visual language of this art arguably displays an investment in keeping the poor both out of sight and silent. In this sense, such practices suggest that the transversal nature of the cliff edge, rather than fostering a natural solidarity, may instead breed fear over fluid social status and the ever-present possibility of a sudden plummet downward. Activists want to believe that precarity is furnishing the grounds for new experiences of the common, and many contemporary people want to believe these arguments. But the closeness of the artist and the migrant worker may also be a space in which anxious processes of social differentiation are staged at the very same moment that allegiance is outwardly staked. Precisely because the void stretches so deep—inducing what Berlant calls “a notion of systemic crisis or ‘crisis ordinariness’ ”62 that shrouds so many in its heavy uncertainties—it may well be a condition less, not more, likely to incite a new politics of the commons. Moving on from this, it may be necessary to consider the possibility that artworks in which underclass labor is undertaken—if only briefly—by the artist may possess a rivalrous or controlling drive alongside the stated urge for solidarity. This, I should say, is not to accuse particular artists, nor their audiences, but rather to drill down into the visual language of these works and parse them for their syntactical and societal meaning. As discussed in the introduction, what used to be called jieji (class) in Chinese has become something of an outlawed term in recent years, and a new term jieceng, or stratum, has been rolled out to indicate differentials in income, equality, and opportunity. These gaps are glossed as gulfs that social mobility can supposedly bridge rather than as the expressions of an ironclad caste system that class struggle should violently dismantle. Yet all the while China’s Gini coefficient has shot through the roof, a middle class with clear T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 127 ]

but anxious wants has emerged, pressure on space and resources in China’s cities has intensified, and the media is saturated with stories about vicious verbal and even physical clashes between migrants and permanent urban residents. This tension, moreover, often mingles with an awkward sense of resentment: many urban dwellers rely all too heavily on the labor of migrant workers even as some evidently begrudge the claims that China’s underclass make on the cities whose detritus they make disappear. The wastescapes that have unfurled in such prodigious number from the Chinese art-world in recent years should, in theory, represent a conciliatory outstretched hand across class lines at this time of bridling social tension. They make waste and the hard labor of its disposal a theme, a topic, a thing worthy of note. But the practices of appropriation, rivalry, and effacement that recur subcutaneously across these works ultimately countermand the gesture of that beckoning hand. They suggest that art is a zone in which fraught yet possibly inadmissible feelings can play out—and without being caught out. These wasteworks are not openly cruel or disdainful in the manner of some of the delegated performance discussed in chapter 1. But they nonetheless enable a conflicted gaze. This is a gaze that can profess, and even feel, a politically correct sympathy for class others but one that may also derive an illicit, perhaps barely conscious sense of reassurance, even gratification, as these same others are kept visibly in their underclass place—or are simply wiped from the picture altogether. As people who make their lives amid the refuse of others on the abandoned outskirts of the city, ragpickers—perhaps more than any other category of person—emblematize the logic of expulsion, stratified citizenship, strategic informality, and indisposable waste that is shaping social worlds everywhere in our present times. For that reason, the missing waste picker in contemporary art becomes a disappeared person whose lost voice speaks volumes, and Yi Jie’s on-screen passage to artistic personhood becomes a culturally significant act.

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CHA P T E R I I I

The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists

The greatest burden—What would happen if one day or night a demon were to steal upon you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you, “You will have to live this life—as you are living it now and have lived it in the past— once again and countless times more; and there will be nothing new to it. . . . The eternal hourglass of existence turning over and over—and you with it, speck of dust!” —FRI E D RI CH NI E TZSCHE , TH E GAY SCIENCE

O

ne particularly well-known quotation of the Chinese migrant worker poet Zheng Xiaoqiong does not originate, ironically enough, in her actual verse. It comes instead from her acceptance speech for the 2007 Liqun award from the People’s Literature (Renmin wenxue 人民文学) magazine, in which she lamented the tens of thousands of fingers that have been severed by the machines of the Pearl River Delta factory regime: “I often wonder how far those severed fingers would reach if they were joined up in a straight line. Yet my frail words are incapable of connecting a single one.”1 Zheng’s word-picture of amputated digits is a contradictory one. Surely, there are few things lonelier than a single severed finger, ripped from the body by an industrial machine. But at the same time, that lost limb also stands as a grim synecdoche for China’s wounded workforce—millions strong—and the potential they might harness if only they could forge the linked-up solidarity of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s dreams. And although it is gruesome, her word-picture is photogenically arresting. Delivered from the prize-winning podium—a huge milestone in her personal path to mainstream poetic recognition—it implicitly recognizes that sweatshop drudgery in contemporary China, rather like the suffering of slaves in [ 129 ]

antebellum America, exercises a kind of fascination for certain audiences. As Mark Reinhardt notes, “this complicated intersection of suffering and pleasure was one of the most important in American political culture.”2 Some of the same can be said of China’s social order in this new century, in which a pervasive rhetoric of toil-as-sacrifice is deployed to rationalize the subjugation of many millions of the nation’s people in a labor regime that grinds and crushes. The sacrificial class, those whose fingers are lopped off on assembly lines, are also a group whose struggle is narratively consumed by others within a harsh fable of progress. As part of the “necessary violence of development,” in which some must be offered up to “improve the life chances of the rest,”3 their self-abnegation requires an audience at once grateful to have been spared so far yet also fearful that they, too, may one day succumb to the same Darwinian logic. Zheng’s word-picture, delivered to an audience full of middle-class literary professionals, grasps that point intuitively (figure 3.1). Above all, it does so via an uncanny idiom of repetition, through the legion of amputated fingers that stretch one after another toward an uncertain destination in a bleak parody of zombie fleshly decay. This social order is the forcefield within which Zheng Xiaoqiong and migrant worker poets (known in Chinese as dagong 打工 poets) like her— figures such as Xu Lizhi 许立志, Xiaohai 小海, and Xie Xiangnan 谢湘 南—have attempted to articulate their voices, make them resonate, and get those intonations heard. But the final line of the quotation, “my frail words are incapable of connecting a single one,” also implicitly disavows those poetic efforts. It impeaches the utility of poetry, most particularly a poetry of the assembly line that tries to make good or even overthrow a crooked, punishing labor regime. The manifest difficulties of this mission are also directly acknowledged in the range of intellectual questions migrant worker poetry has raised among the researchers who have studied it over the last fifteen years or so.These queries pivot on a recurring set of problems: are the people who write migrant worker verse activists or poets, poet-activists or activistpoets?4 What happens if their poetry wins them establishment success and a route out of the factory—are they still migrant worker poets then? Does it matter that their most visible, vocal audiences tend to hail from more privileged class backgrounds?5 How should readers and commentators understand the role of the so-called middle-class cultural brokers—academics, journal editors, literary bureaucrats—who often facilitate that passage?6 Drilling deeper, is their poetry really poetry, or does the sometimes crude, [ 130 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

Figure 3.1 Telling gesture? Zheng Xiaoqiong holds the volume of poetry discussed in this chapter over one eye.

incantatory character of this verse compromise its status as such?7 Can we, should we, try to read this poetry as poetry, both bonded to but also formally disaggregated from the sweatshop milieu that made it happen? A clean schism between text and context is surely impossible here because, as Liu Dongwu 柳冬妩 points out, social injustice is the inescapable starting point for migrant worker verse: “The reason why subalterns write is precisely because their plight and interests are being ignored.”8 What, then, might such textual/contextual reading practice look like? T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 131 ]

In this chapter, I begin by sketching the peculiar precariousness of the migrant worker poet. This is an identity besieged on many sides: geographically, physically, ontologically. But it is also an identity with significant political potential precisely because of its embattled status, and because of the role of the poet as a migrant who moves through class as well as space, unsettling caste boundaries in the process. To explore this disruptive momentum, I close-read a long sequence of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems. Here, I argue that the howling, discordant character of her verse stems in large part from repetition, in which a large cluster of repeated lexical units functions as the component parts of an emergent dissensual poetic voice manufactured on the assembly line. I use a medium-sized textual corpus—thirty-seven poems in all—as the focus of analysis to gain a purchase on how repetition operates, both within and across poems, as a means of reconfiguring “the fabric of sensory experience.”9 Repetition is a strange, conflicted beast. It exists both as iteration of the mechanical kind that is hammered home on the assembly line and as a practice of “irrepressible creativity and novelty.”10 As Krystyna Mazur puts it, “the apparent incompatibility of the effects repetition may produce causes friction: at once stabilizing and unsettling, structuring and unhinging, repetition forces us to recognize parallels, but at the same time exposes the difference within the elements it brings together.”11 The long poetry sequence by Zheng Xiaoqiong discussed in the first part of this chapter exemplifies repetition as unnerving and disruptive. Her recursive poetic glossary, and the arcs of meaning it traces, shows how poetry from the factory floor can break out as a voice—a fractious voice—that ruptures conventional understandings about what verse is and does. But as Mazur observes, repetition is both a wilding process and also one that can tame or discipline. With this in mind, in the second part of the chapter I turn to an extended case study that reveals how repetition has been mobilized in postmillennial China not to articulate underclass voices and their dissensual potential but to ventriloquize them as a strategy of concerted vocal control. My focus in part two is an almost entirely overlooked magazine for migrant workers, the Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, that reached hundreds of thousands of readers in the Pearl River Delta during its 2000 to 2012 bimonthly print run. This state-endorsed publication featured a roster of regular columns full of predictable tips on how migrant workers might best refashion their raw rural selves into docile neoliberal subjects: through self-reliance, small-scale entrepreneurialism, and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. In this, the magazine aligns with broader [ 132 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

state propaganda drives of the period that viewed China’s migrant workforce as soft putty that could be molded, with the right guidance, into crack troops at the global manufacturing front line. The magazine pursued a consistent and open policy of soliciting raw stories from the public. But in a metatextual replay of the process whereby the labor market tempers the migrant worker, this material—tales from life—was remolded by eliteeducated journalists so that it fit into a small set of cookie-cutter narrative outlines.These schemas plot the same path of peaks and troughs, thus adhering to the adage that “exempla have to be repeated and renewed if they are to be effective.”12 Most pertinent, the stories in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend set out blatantly formulaic blueprints for the migrant self, in which abasement is always the crucial tonic for self-growth. The magazine even published metronomically regular pieces on what might be termed “class downfall”: stories of elite individuals dragged into destitution by the ever-turning wheel of fortune. Just as Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poems have sometimes been consumed by middle-class readers as eloquent snapshots of the cliff edge, so too did these hard luck tales offer up cold comfort to China’s underclass that “we are all precarious now”—that success, however shiny it may seem, is just as brittle as a hardscrabble life within a neoliberal world that rewards only the most tirelessly resilient. Rather like Zheng Xiaoqiong’s acceptance speech, the magazine implicitly gives the lie to China’s harmonious society—the illusion that class antagonism has evaporated like dawn mist despite soaring inequality—by recognizing the mesmerizing appeal of watching another tumble over the cliff edge and into the zone of expulsion. Ultimately, though, these tales of “class downfall” also beat out the same repetitive rhythms of rise-and-fall/fall-and-rise in order to internalize the mantra that selfhood should be forged in the crucible of humility and self-reliance. Focusing on the issues of the magazine published during 2004—a data set of twenty-four issues—I flesh out this notion of sculpted subjectivity by exploring its strict patterns of iteration, both in terms of prescribed story types and also via the narratological arcs that repeat, ad nauseam, within these fixed typologies. Collectively, such repetitions consolidate China’s twenty-first-century “distribution of the sensible”13 by anthemizing its rhythms under the guise of storytelling drawn from life—storytelling which, if it were truly lifelike, would have to drum out not steady, regular beats but the chronically uncertain pulse of precarious existence. That pulse is farcically smoothed out in the stories compiled fortnight after fortnight T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 133 ]

in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, which baldly state that the good life lies within the reach of all. As such, they form an almost musicological counterpoint to the equally repetitive howls of migrant worker poetry that were being uttered at the same point in historical time. The two sets of texts are fractious forms that spark off each other contrapuntally within a sociopolitical domain that both craves and fears the voices from the bottom. Each develops a strident language of repetition: the ululating verse versus the ideological drumbeat of the articles. And just as questions of voice are crucial to Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry, the timbre of which becomes more tunefully modulated over time, so do the articles in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend engage in systematic vocal experimentation. Throughout its print run, the magazine’s elite-educated journalists use free indirect discourse, fake oral accounts, and interviews without direct quotations to ventriloquize migrant workers and artificially fine-tune their powers of speech, in what might be seen as a cynically zombifying riff on the socialist era practice that saw party ideologues and intellectuals coach amateur “worker writers” in collaborative workshops that produced regulated and repetitive content about proletarian life.14 Speaking out of turn and being spoken for, I conclude, are conflicting but complementary rituals of culture within the social field of early twenty-first-century China. Both Zheng’s poetry and the stories in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend narrativize the experiences of China’s underclass, and in both cases the presence of middle-class interlocutors or ventriloquists turn these representations into charged encounters across the caste divide. They are fraught texts in which the tensions between social others are either loudly declaimed or deliberately silenced, and in which cross-class voyeurism—watching others toil, watching others tumble off the cliff edge— forms a key affective backdrop. It seems no coincidence, therefore, that these two fractious forms emerged at more or less the same postmillennial moment. Both declaiming precarious experience and ventriloquizing it are struggles over voice that do not simply revisit the old question of whether or not the subaltern can speak. Rather, these tussles in the vocal field touch more deeply on the question of who is responsible for the condition of entrenched vulnerability, imminent expulsion, and zombie citizenship that besets such a swathe of China’s workforce: the individual migrant subject or the systemic forces that depend on the extraction of her labor. Zheng’s poetry and Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend use insistent patterns of iteration to assert contesting visions of what Rancière calls “commonsense”—a state of [ 134 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

consensus about the social laws that govern a community—and that cultural forms can either uphold or shake up. In both cases, it is by mobilizing the rhythms of repetition that this intervention is staged.

Poetry Out on a Limb Scanning the conditions in which a poet such as Zheng Xiaoqiong lived and wrote her factory verse, a recurrent pressure point emerges. This is the condition of the migrant worker poet as a multiply precarious person, strained and disjointed on many fronts. Precariousness in this context denotes in its primary and most evident sense the conditions of disposability, risk, and exhausted vulnerability under which the physical labor of factory workers is extracted. It is also what Haomin Gong calls the “amphibious” nature of the migrant worker in China,15 who embodies both extreme mobility and a paradoxical sense of being gridlocked in that same condition of displacement, belonging neither to the rural from whence she came nor to the urban that declines to offer proper hospitality to her. But more than this, precarious here also refers to the ontological volatility that comes from the conjunction between poetry and factory labor, from being a worker who puts together units of verse on the assembly line alongside electronic components or toy parts. The substance of her labor is elusive as it shifts between outputs that are material and abstract, physical and textual. This interstitial state is also tied awkwardly to questions of class. The very act of composing verse turns the writer into a caste migrant within a literary system that traditionally gatekeeps poetry within elite enclaves, leaving the migrant worker poet—that oxymoronic self—effectively stranded between social cohorts. Commensurate with her social status, the migrant worker poet is expected to “speak bitterness,” to quote the lost jargon of Maoism: to tell of the hard graft of factory life in sufficiently compelling ways. But she should be bilious to just the appropriate degree because too much spleen might unsettle readers in a harmonious society that now associates class struggle with the uncouth, unrepeatable violence of those past times. On this uneven ground, the articulation of raw voice can seem almost insurmountably difficult. Ultimately, this is also because the stakes are so high—strikingly high for poetry, famously a practice that, as W. H. Auden once put it, “makes nothing happen.”16 But Auden’s words also neatly pun, of course, because they say in T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 135 ]

the same moment that verse can conjure meaning from thin air, that it can create things that were unimaginable before the acts of writing, reading, and interpretation. This play on words carries real force in the case of migrant worker poetry. As noted previously, one of the questions posed and posed again about this verse is: Does it count as poetry, or is it just “goal-oriented activism with line breaks”?17 The consensus, even among advocates, is that the effect of this hybrid character is simultaneously to deaestheticize and overempiricize migrant worker poetry. Its cries of pain are testament to sickness in the body politic. They are even mobilized as emotive epigrams within sociological and anthropological work, and “epithets such as primitive, grassroots, coarse, and in need of aesthetic improvement” continue to abound in literary criticism that discusses verse of this kind.18 Yet it is precisely the disobedience of this poetry—the discordant, unpoetic sounds it creates—that invests it with the potential to “re-configure the fabric of sensory experience.”19 In other words, it is in its dissonance that migrant worker poetry poses a political threat. Therefore, that dissonance should be a central focus of analysis, not in apology or vindication of its jarring sounds but in recognition that writing poetry like this might have the power to change the inherent capacities of the poetic within a given social consensus.

Shades of Gray Zheng Xiaoqiong is, without doubt, a poetry star: she is the most successful of the migrant worker poets who have surged to prominence in print and online since the millennium.20 As Maghiel van Crevel points out, her “media presence in China is nothing short of spectacular,” and she has the prizes to prove it.21 But for a practitioner of verse as celebrated as she is, Zheng’s actual poetic form has drawn relatively scant attention, particularly in English-language scholarship. In terms of aesthetics, scholars both inside and outside China have remarked most frequently on her use of iron as a sculpting metaphoric strategy, contrasting the metal in its rusted, bleeding state as it dominates Zheng’s poetry and essays with the propaganda of the “iron girl” (tie guniang 铁姑娘)—tireless, resourceful, indomitable—that circulated in Maoist times as a symbol of worker pride.22 But beyond the notice given to iron, and its role within an “industrial pastoral,”23 Zheng’s poetic craft and practice are quite often eclipsed by the insistent, hard-toignore questions outlined earlier—about the political status of the migrant [ 136 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

worker poet, about her right to call what she composes poetry, and about the role of cultural brokers in shepherding this verse to its audiences.24 But in the sequence of poems I examine here, actually titled “Iron” (Tie 铁), the metallic element is only one part of a densely patterned figurative grid. The “Iron” sequence comprises one of three freestanding sections within Selected Poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong (Zheng Xiaoqiong shixuan 郑小琼诗选), published in Guangzhou by Huacheng Press in 2008, and it contains thirty-seven poems. The poems are mostly short, averaging approximately sixteen lines each, and are composed in untrammeled free verse. But as I translated the sequence in the summer of 2019, their apparent poetic informality—line length unequal, little effort to control meter or produce rhyme, diction mostly quotidian, even prosaic—began to belie a deeper regulatory momentum. The sequence, when read as such, manifests a remarkable degree of repetition in its poetic lexicon. More than mere repetition, in fact, this vocabulary is organized in polar fashion around affective and environmental antipodes. Emotionally, a glossary of hope (xiwang 希望), love (aiqing 爱情), life (shenghuo 生活), youth (qingchun 青春), forgiveness (kuanshu 宽恕), passion (jiqing 激情), joy (xiyue 喜悦), and dreaming (meng 梦) goes head to head with silence (chenmo 沉默, jijing 寂静), darkness (heian 黑暗), loneliness (gudu 孤独, jimo 寂寞), sorrow and distress (youshang 忧伤, buxing 不幸, beishang 悲伤, chouchang 惆怅, shanggan 伤感), fatigue, toil, and numbness (pibei 疲惫, pijuan 疲倦, laolei 劳累, jianxin 艰辛, mamu 麻木), aging and dilapidation (laoqu 老去, feijiu 废旧), a state of frantic rush (benbo 奔波), anger (fennu 愤怒), complaint (manyuan 埋怨), sickness (jibing 疾病), and pain (teng 疼). Ecologically, parks, lychee trees, plant life, birds, and insects battle for space with the hardware factory, machines and their roar, assembly lines, iron, and nails. Transecting these two opposing lexical axes are words about time and its passing; words about wind and light; and words about the poet’s body.25 The poem “Comfort” (Anwei 安慰)26 gives an indication of how this patterning works (figure 3.2). Here, emotions linked to hope and happiness are in gray type in a black box, negative sentiments are in gray type in a gray outlined box, nature is in bold black type in a black-outlined gray box, the factory and its constituent parts are in white type in a gray box, time is in black type in a gray box, wind and light are in bold black type in a grayoutlined box, and the body is in white type in a black box. As the image makes clear, this scheme can be applied usefully to each individual poem as a freestanding aesthetic unit graspable on its own terms. On this micro level, T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 137 ]

Figure 3.2  Zheng Xiaoqiong: “Comfort,” coded.

the schema uses clashing shadings and type treatments to show how hope and happiness, sickness and pain, and the mundane artifacts of the factory are squeezed into jarring juxtaposition (as in lines 5–9, for example). Such mapping can highlight, in this sense, the extent to which the poem is scaffolded in a tight structure of poetic contrast. A discrete, single-poem view of the corpus also reveals the heavy preponderance of this contrastive lexicon: an average of three semantic units per line belong to the schema in “Comfort.” This allows the reader to conclude with some considerable justification that the poem is “about” a poetic self whose subjectivity is forged in the crucible of emotional and ecological clash, whose body makes its passage through a world in which time is measured out in precious, vanishing quantities. [ 138 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

 Figure 3.2  (cont.)

But zooming out to the macro picture uncovers still more striking patterns. Of the thirty-seven poems in the sequence, no fewer than seventeen contain all seven of the identified themes. Another thirteen poems contain six apiece; the remainder contain at least four and more often five. In other words, coding the poetic sequence according to these thematic topoi reveals that a powerfully recursive drive shapes the entire corpus. We might even call it a repeating pattern, defined as a cyclical repetition of an identifiable core, in which the core is the shortest string of elements that repeat. That string consists of the seven topoi, which may appear in randomized, chaotic ways across the sequence, but whose recurrence is an utterly fixed fact. As a mapped impression of “A Thirty-Seven-Year-Old Female Worker” (Sanshiqi sui de nügong 三十七岁的女工)27 makes still more manifest, this lexicon dictates poetic form by its repeated juxtapositional T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 139 ]

clashes, its clustering of key words, and its sheer density of repeated terms (figure 3.3). In their study of reiteration, Gabriel Altmann and Reinhard Köhler identify ten categories of what they term “the most salient forms of repetition.”28 Of these, Zheng’s poetic sequence manifests at the very least the following six: absolute repetition (“the simple frequency of a unit in a text”); positional repetition (“an unexpected [higher or lower] frequency at a given position”); associative repetition (in which a unit “coincides more often than expected with another one in a given frame”); aggregative repetition in blocks (a unit “forms clusters” by concentrating at certain points in the text); aggregative repetition of similar units (where similar but not identical units gather together); and cyclic repetition (in which the “repetition of units can be regular to the extent that units form cycles”).29 Indeed, the sequence performs repetition so compulsively that it acquires what Ezra Pound memorably called a melopoetic character, “wherein the words (of poetry) are charged, over and above their plain meaning, with some musical property, which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.”30 These poems may not practice rhythm as it is commonly understood.31 But repetition is itself a form of rhythm, just as rhythm is, of course, dependent in its own turn upon repetition. What’s more, the beat that is drummed out here is an insistent one, in which the same sonic and semantic units imprint themselves on the ear and eye again and again within a sequence that is essentially isomorphic while also practicing repetition across a range of “salient forms.” This is not merely the familiar thought that poetry is melodic, that it makes a pretty sound as words match and echo each other in prosodic schemes. Beyond this, as the mathematician Luis Radford observes, rhythm “creates the expectation of a forthcoming event  .  .  . [it] constitutes a crucial semiotic means of objectification to make apparent the feeling of an order that goes beyond the particular figures.”32 Or as Haili You puts it, “Rhythm is a future-oriented temporal order.”33 In this sense, Zheng’s poetic sequence fosters what might be called algebraic or relational habits of reading. The recursive structure of the sequence encourages recognition of the repeating pattern itself, of the friction between opposing forces on which it is based, and of that pattern as a form also expressive of generalities. Repetition, in short, is an organizing, predictive principle with the potential to become a cognitive method. It inducts the reader into “the habit of searching for regularity” and thus thinking on a meta plane. [ 140 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

Figure 3.3  Zheng Xiaoqiong: “A Thirty-Seven-Year Old Woman Worker,” coded.

 Figure 3.3  (cont.)

Of course, it is also plausible to suggest that repetition is aesthetically problematic here.34 These poems repeat themselves so profusely, it might be argued, because they slipped through the editorial net; perhaps some should have been weeded out. The failure to do so might lead ultimately to some of the risks of repetition: namely, that language lapses into semantic satiation, the cognitive phenomenon in which the constant reiteration of a word or phrase causes it temporarily to lose meaning for the reader or listener, even to the point of becoming strange, amusing, or farcical. Further behind this is the darker idea of incessant word repetition as stigma, as explored in the work of mid-twentieth-century psycholinguists such as Wendell Johnson, who drew associations between lack of linguistic diversity and lower IQ, even schizophrenia.35 Yet the “Iron” sequence appears in a volume titled Selected Poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong—which suggests not poor editing but rather the diametrically opposite point that the poems readers find in the sequence are already the survivors of a cull, and thus that there are likely within Zheng’s full, unpublished oeuvre many, many more poems in which this repeating pattern mapped above is the deliberate determinant force. If so, the question then becomes: What are the generalities that this form expresses? What kind of meta-thinking does it encourage? It doesn’t seem especially helpful to argue that this cognitive move relates merely to making readers understand the daily details of life within the Pearl River factory regime. These facts are heart-wrenching and important; but they constitute the specificities, rather than the generalities, of Zheng’s poetic refrain: they are what Radford calls the “particular figures,” not the order that lies beyond them. Or in Pound’s terms, they constitute the “plain meaning” rather than the fusion of word and chant, “which directs the bearing or trend of that meaning.”

On the Assembly Line On one level, this order refers to the regime of capitalist output in a neoliberal epoch. The lexical units created in poem after poem are by this reckoning a verbal equivalent, a semantic metareflection, of the products that roll rhythmically off the assembly line. The terms that repeat (hope—sorrow— iron—lychee—wind—body—light—time) mimic the laws of mechanical production as they generate surplus yield alongside the official products of the Pearl Delta industrial complex. In so doing, they simulate through T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 143 ]

language the brutal macro processes of repetitive labor through which the poet’s identity as a factory worker has been forged. In Rhythmanalysis, Henri Lefebvre calls this process “dressage”: To enter into a society, group or nationality is to accept values (that are taught), to learn a trade by following the right channels, but also to bend oneself (to be bent) to its ways. Which means to say: dressage. Humans break themselves in [se dressent] like animals. They learn to hold themselves. Dressage can go a long way: as far as breathing, movements, sex. It bases itself on repetition. One breaks-in another human living being by making them repeat a certain act, a certain gesture or movement. Horses, dogs are broken-in through repetition . . . repetition pushed to the point of automatism and the memorization of gestures (emphasis in the original).36 Broken in as a factory worker, Zheng learned dressage via the repetition of numbing circadian tasks: this is why her verse compares the migrant worker to iron “that is mute and subject to being cut, slated, melted, hammered, reshaped.”37 Lefebvre argues that “under the imperious direction of the breeder or the trainer  .  .  . [animals] produce their bodies,” which thus acquire use value.38 For Zheng Xiaoqiong, however, the drills of dressage bring about utter corporeal transfiguration, as broken-in migrants— subjected to practices of “spacing” in which the worker-body is assigned an individuated workstation on the conveyor belt, where it performs a single iterative operation39—actually morph into the zombied shadow-objects of their labor. As she put it, “We are like products on the assembly lines, with identification marks for names. Mine is No. 245.”40 Read in this sense, Zheng’s recursive lexicon transposes onto a poetic register the rhythms of her diurnal existence. It merely repeats them. More than this, Zheng’s poetry also enforces dressage on the reader. Its rhythms, as a simulacrum of her own factory life, pound painfully but also tediously to coach readers in what the unremitting repetitions of the factory floor might feel like. Of course, this is closer to an intimation than an induction because it is brief, sensorily limited, and entirely voluntary. But insofar as Zheng’s use of reiteration turns the reading of poetry into an approximation of labor, it mutinies against the notion of art for art’s sake, the venerable idea that poetry should somehow ennoble those who read it. This is a verse with power to stun and convulse the reader with compassion—and, indeed, [ 144 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

shame—when read in small quotients. But also, and more contentiously, it is a poetry that can exact a deliberate toll of monotony on readers after a time for the simple reason that the repetition never lets up.Thus it risks stultifying those who read it; but if it does stale or grate, so much the better. Drudgery is not merely a matter for description in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s work. Rather, it is intentionally processual. It is an experience embedded in the very pulse of the poetry, and as such it infiltrates the sensorium of readers too. But even as it openly courts this risk, Zheng’s poetic sequence also defies the idea that repetition is necessarily static or sterile. Indeed, if this poetry is surplus yield—extra output from the assembly line—it is also errant, even contraband. Unlike the metal parts that Zheng Xiaoqiong assembled for years in a hardware factory, whose market value stems precisely and only from their status as identikit items, whose replication is all about the exactitude of sameness, the poet’s lexicon obeys no such rules. Its repetition is less mechanical iteration than Deleuzian in its simultaneously unruly character. For Deleuze, “In every respect, repetition is a transgression.” As he continues, “if repetition exists, it expresses at once a singularity opposed to the general, a universality opposed to the particular, a distinctive opposed to the ordinary, an instaneity opposed to variation and an eternity opposed to permanence.”41 When this notion of repetition is applied to Zheng’s poetic sequence, what emerges is not just the equivalence of the semantic units as they appear again and again (hope—sorrow—iron—lychee—wind—body—light—time) but also the difference of each in its every iteration.This difference stems in part from simple contextual variation, from the fact that the meaning of “lychee” shifts when it sits next to “iron nail,” say, rather than “spring” or “youth.” But more significant is the fact that the status of “lychee” as a much-repeated term, recognized by the reader as such, also wrenches it out of that immediate context. It disrupts the progression of the immediate poetic line and the thought that line expresses precisely because it belongs to a larger sonic and semantic order. That order is the order of the refrain, and as such its every iteration asks to be read afresh—the dynamic opposite of semantic satiation or stunted linguistic diversity. Or to put this another way, the poetic sequence called “Iron” contains two languages: the meta-language of rhythmically repeated words—the clashing shadings and type treatments—and the plain contextual and nonrepetitive language that surrounds these schematic components. Migrant worker poets such as Zheng Xiaoqiong who practice the arts of repetition have stirred controversy, I would suggest, in part because of the unsettling impact of this linguistic structure. To grasp why this is so, it T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 145 ]

may be productive to turn to Rancière again. In Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, he proposes that politics begins when those who were destined to remain in the domestic and invisible territory of work and reproduction, and prevented from doing “anything else,” take the time that they “have not” in order to affirm that they belong to a common world. It begins when they make the invisible visible, and make what was deemed to be the mere noise of suffering bodies heard as a discourse concerning the “common” of the community. Politics creates a new form, as it were, of dissensual “commonsense”. . . . If there is a politics of aesthetics, it lies in the practices and modes of visibility of art that re-configure the fabric of sensory experience.42 Later, and very pertinently for the case in hand, Rancière emphasizes that aesthetic forms “create specific forms of ‘commonsense’, regardless of the specific message such-and-such an artist intends to convey and or cause he or she wants to serve.”43 Which is to say, it is not merely or even mostly what some critics have called the “Ginsbergian howl” of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry, the way that it revives the Maoist tradition of “speaking bitterness” by condemning the conditions endured by two or more generations of Chinese migrant workers, that makes her verse uncomfortable reading.44 Certainly, it is true that poets down the ages—and humankind more generally—have used repetition to vent the rawest of feelings. But rhythm, due to the repetition on which it relies, is also a clear-cut method for creating solid commonsense within any distribution of the sensible, and for the reasons set out earlier. Rhythm organizes; it encourages predictive thinking. But it is also generative: quite evidently, it makes music. This is Deborah Tannen’s point when she observes both that “repetition is at the heart not only of how a particular discourse is created, but how discourse itself is created,” and that this kind of linguistic “prepatterning” is also a resource for creativity.45

Speaking Out of Turn Quite some time avant la lettre, Pound gestures toward this idea of “dissensual commonsense” via his notion of melopoeia. As he argues, “in melopoeia we find a contrary current, a force tending often to lull, or distract the reader [ 146 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

from the exact sense of the language. It is poetry on the borders of music and music is perhaps the bridge between consciousness and the unthinking sentient or even insentient universe.”46 Melopoeia—the imbuing of verse with musical properties that drive its “plain meaning” off course—is a means of generating new configurations of the senses; and in the case of Zheng Xiaoqiong, it is the tonal practice that helps her to articulate a particular kind of voice. The refrain that Zheng composes in the “Iron” sequence is a form of commonsense that uses the steady cadences of rhythm, with its “reassuring moments of recognition,”47 to create a necessary sense of solidity, but whose pattern of generalities—whose order, to use Radford’s word—is one of constant friction.This refrain seesaws in virtually every line between nature and machine, sorrow and joy. It generates a constant conflict that lays its marks on the poet’s body as she moves through time, seared by light and wind. As it does so, it gives rise to what might be called an order of disharmony, a foundational structure of feeling shaped around opposition and conflict. Zheng’s poetic sequence may offer testimony to toil, fatigue, and injury in the factory complexes of the south. But the specific form of “commonsense” it creates is driven by the frictive antagonism between this negative pole and the poet’s hopes and dreams that doggedly refuse to die, even though the schema outlined previously shows all too clearly that the bad feelings are winning. Through a design of lexical repetition that moves through poem after poem, this antagonism is elevated from the domain of the merely private and personal to the larger structural plane. It summons a powerful oppositional refrain. In this refrain, and the discordant voice it carries, the deep sounds of precarity grind themselves out. As previously discussed, the migrant worker poet in China is precarious across many axes: physiologically, professionally, affectively, spatially, temporally. This chronic unsurety in the world—this lack of any firm foothold on a sheer cliff edge—is registered in the seesaw motion between emotional and environmental extremes set up in the refrain, which produces not only the friction described but a mimetic approximation of precarity as a sensory experience. As the refrain swings between antipodean poles, it mimics the endlessly iterative rhythms of drudgery: clocking on, performing single operations on repeat at the workstation, clocking off. But crucially, it does so irregularly, on an erratic, arrhythmic beat, and in this way it registers the ways in which the lived experience of zombie citizenship is not only Sisyphean but also marked by frequent jolts: physical shocks, of course (the amputated fingers), but also bursts of joys, spasms of T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 147 ]

treacherous optimism, nostalgic longings. Its sound is contrapuntal, in which the sure thing of hard grind is a baseline enlivened by another melodic shape or contour that is less predictable in its movement. Unlike standard counterpoint, however, the overall sound jars. This sort of momentum is politically problematic in more than one way. Most obvious, the deep structure of discordance that no reader of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry can fail to register, however subconsciously, strikes an awkward presence within a sociopolitical order that advocates for harmony and aggressively seeks to depoliticize the interpersonal tensions that are a corollary of China’s hard swing toward the market. This is a poetry of friction within a regime of manufactured consensus. It’s a fractious form par excellence. Relatedly, by using repetition to effect a transition from the details of the particular to the rhythms of the general, Zheng’s poetic sequence implicitly challenges the doctrine, so prevalent in China this century, that the nation’s migrant workers are solely responsible for determining their own fates, and that their only real foe lies within, in their failure to be sufficiently plucky, self-reliant, and entrepreneurial for the market economy with all its potential boon and bounty. As Hairong Yan observes, “When the self is recognized as the greatest enemy, potential demands for change are displaced by the need for change within the self; social antagonism is displaced by antagonism within the self.”48 This is a neoliberal mode of governance “deliberately oblivious to structural logics.”49 It seeks to erase the role of exploitation as an ascendant principle of state power by reducing experiences of underclass labor to the micro level. Zheng’s poetic sequence, with its insistence on the metalanguage of repetition, effectively reinstates “structural logics” into migrant experience. It repositions antagonism as a condition outside the self. Finally, Zheng’s use of repetition as something rooted not just in mindless reiteration but also in difference, novelty, and transgression ascribes to her poetry the insurrectionary power to change, to effect movement in a situation of stasis. In the words that gather incantatory momentum as they repeat, we can make out the faint rumblings of revolt. Her poetry speaks the possibility of zombie revenge.

Repetition as Catechism Several commentators have explored the dilemmas that face the precarious migrant worker poet who begins to taste success.Wanning Sun, for example, [ 148 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

argues that “Since many of the literary initiatives, prizes and publications are funded by local governments and enterprises, poets may fear the potentially punitive consequences of producing noise that interferes with the main melody of social harmony.”50 More positively, Zheng has also been the beneficiary of sustained mentoring from established figures within China’s literary world—relationships that may also in part explain Zheng’s strong protestations that she is no class warrior: The word “class” carries connotations of violence, and bitter memories of it are still part of many people’s consciousness. I don’t write out of class consciousness. I’m driven by an innate compassion for the weak and anger at injustice. The reason these themes loom so large in my works is simply because I’m one of the little, weak individuals. . . . However, very often, these primordial feelings of empathy and resonance with the little and weak people are mistaken for a certain kind of class consciousness. I think another word—stratum (jie ceng)—may be more appropriate than class (jie ji).51 It scarcely needs to be said that poets are entitled to change and grow. So it would be facile and unjust to impugn Zheng Xiaoqiong for writing differently as she has moved up the literary hierarchy from precarious poet to prize-winner to literary editor to vice director of the journal Literary Works (Zuopin 作品), while also serving for a time as a delegate to the People’s Congress of Guangdong Province. Sun, for one, does not level such a charge.52 It would be equally unfair to discount the impact of China’s increasingly harsh political climate, and the chill winds it blows on both public and poetic discourse, on Zheng’s capacity to speak her mind freely and frankly. But even if Zheng Xiaoqiong has not imbibed elocution lessons, there is also little quibbling with the fact that she now makes rather less fractious “noise.” Her recent poetry collection, Rose Manor (Meigui zhuangyuan 玫瑰庄园), is billed as “a family history, a history of decline, a history of conquest.”53 It is a world away from the poetic sequence explored previously as it charts the desecration of China’s ancient civilization through the prism of epic genealogical memory.54 Its diction is also far more consciously “poetic.” On one level, this new mellifluousness—or mutedness—resides at the level of content: there is little clamor of the machines in the Rose Manor collection. But these poems also strike a smoother note because they T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 149 ]

forswear the deep structure of discordant repetition that makes the “Iron” poetic sequence such a jarring read. Instead, the poems practice supple lexical variegation as part of a far more familiar kind of “commonsense.” Whether by chance or by design, the momentum of disruptive repetition has been stalled. Migrant worker poets continue to write and to howl, yet Zheng’s poetic trajectory cannot but pose questions about the appropriate vocal range of a poet on the cliff edge who, quite justifiably, may seek some establishment recognition for her work within a world of letters that sometimes recoils from “too much” underclass rage.55 As will become clear, the taming of poetic iteration is a far milder strategy of discipline than hard-core repetition as it is practiced by the writers of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend. So far, I have discussed repetition in terms of difference, novelty, transgression, even as the first stirrings of revolt. My aim has been to show how repetition has the power to create new “distributions of the sensible” that carry a discernible sense of threat about them—enough to provoke charges that poetry such as Zheng’s is crude and enough, possibly, to cause the poet herself to shift course and write more melodiously as her career has moved up the ladder. Yet repetition is also, and more often, an enforcer of existing regimes of seeing and thinking. As Miranda Marvin notes of the Graeco-Roman world, “in antiquity it was serial repetition that gave Classical architecture much of its power. The columns rhythmically pacing around a temple, or the identical arches of an aqueduct in a landscape.  .  .  . Roman designers understood the effect of repetition, and one way they displayed statuary was to arrange it in pendants, repeated strings, or groups that responded to each other.”56 Marvin goes on to argue that serial repetition created exempla: “fables, parables, and anecdotes illustrating the lessons to be learned,”57 arbitrary instructive tales that Bourdieu and Passeron elsewhere dub “pedagogic actions.”58 To explore this notion of repetition as catechism—the notion that such “fables, parables, and anecdotes” are repeated in quasi-doctrinal fashion—I turn in the remainder of this chapter to a corpus of texts written in more or less exactly the same time frame as the poems that appear in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s anthology. This corpus is drawn from the 2004 print run of the magazine Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend. If Zheng’s poetic sequence “Iron” uses wayward repetition to declaim life at the bottom, the articles printed fortnight after fortnight in this magazine follow the Roman lore of serial iteration to ventriloquize it instead. [ 150 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

Astroturfing the Grassroots Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend was launched as an offshoot of the larger Bosom Friend (Zhiyin 知音) magazine franchise, which stands as perhaps the most striking success story of popular publishing in reform era China. Bosom Friend began life in Wuhan in 1985, under the stewardship of Hu Xunbi 胡勋璧,59 who spotted a gap in the market for sentimental, sensational, first-person human-interest storytelling—about arranged marriage and family dramas—and set out to fill it. Launched under the formal aegis of the Hubei Women’s Federation, thus cementing its ties with officialdom, Bosom Friend initially had to battle its way into profitability.60 As Hu notes in an interview, staff used multiple distribution channels to get copies out: “Besides sending to post offices and railway stations, the staff delivered the magazines themselves by bicycles to the emerging newsstands.”61 By 1987, Bosom Friend had achieved a circulation of 1.7 million, but competition forced continual innovation. One core strategy was to enhance the reality effect of its often improbable stories through a performance evaluation system in the newsroom that rewarded an authentic feel. Another was to pay out substantially, more than any other title in the industry, for story contributions from readers. As Hu Xunbi puts it, somewhat disingenuously, “the best stories are always from reality”62—no matter how radically they are rescripted thereafter. These policies boosted the magazine’s market share until circulation reached three million in 1998, and the term “Bosom Friend style (zhiyinti 知音体)” was even coined to capture its particular brand of mawkish real-life melodrama. A further strategy was to launch a fleet of progeny titles, in large part to capitalize on the publisher’s core stance that the white-collar, high-end focus of magazine publishing in China was leaving millions of grassroots readers out in the cold. Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, which specifically targeted migrant workers, was born from this push. Bosom Friend, the magazine’s mother ship (figure 3.4), retains a huge circulation today. Its website describes the company’s success as follows: The publishing group has 9 magazines and 2 newspapers in its stable, with a monthly circulation of more than 10 million copies. Its core product Bosom Friend magazine now has a monthly circulation of more than 6 million copies, and ranks fifth in the comprehensive global journal rankings and second on the national list of all magazine T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 151 ]

Figure 3.4  Nerve center: headquarters of the Bosom Friend conglomerate in Wuhan.

categories. Several times it has been rated as a top ten favorite title by readers nationwide . . . and on three occasions it won the highest award for a Chinese periodical.63 Given this giant presence, and its implications for opinion-formation across a major demographic in contemporary Chinese society, it’s surprising that Bosom Friend has flickered only intermittently on scholarly radar, especially in research produced outside China—although even nationally it has only begun to cohere into a solid topic of inquiry quite recently. And if its parent publication has been consistently overlooked, Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend has been ignored almost entirely. I have located just two English-language sources about the magazine, both PhD dissertations that only refer to it either in a footnote or en passant, and only a handful of Chinese-language sources, just two of which explore it in any depth.64 Unlike the various magazines and journals published mainly in South China from the 1990s onward that showcase the literary and autobiographical writings of migrant workers and have drawn attention from scholars precisely because they show the subaltern speaking,65 Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend has presumably slipped through the cracks because of its jangling main melody tone.66 As mere propaganda, its messaging is all too obvious: it constitutes the drone of the loudspeaker, which tries to drown out the unfiltered sounds of underclass protest. But rather than simply plugging the party line, the magazine is better understood as a vessel of ventriloquy, whose experiments in [ 152 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

voice-throwing and vocal impersonation make it just as revealing of actual quotidian realities as poetry from the factory floor. Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend cost 3.5 yuan per issue, and it reached peak monthly sales of between 600,000 and 650,000 copies, a circulation that brought it yearly profits of more than 3.7 million yuan.67 The magazine’s page on the encyclopedia site Baike 百科 reports that the magazine deployed “the brand-new operational concept of ‘exploring the secrets of getting rich and promoting the dreams of the common people’ in order to create China’s most passionate self-help people’s magazine.”68 This combination of a robust circulation (which does not, of course, include the countless other readers who did not purchase the magazine themselves but would doubtless have read it in shared factory dormitories),69 an openly aspirational format, and a slightly shadowy governmental aegis makes Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend a crucial corpus for understanding state-media efforts to “manage” the affective lives of South China’s precarious migrant workforce.70 As such a resource, the magazine’s professedly “true-to-life” character and tone, its stagey reality effect, becomes an integral generic trait. Its motto—“we migrant workers are all one family”—is tightly bound to its use of “on-thespot” stories, ostensibly drawn from real life and real readers, that mobilize a specific kind of sentimental flow: what the magazine’s Baidu page aptly terms “the true feelings of the common people” (baixing zhenqing 百姓真情).71 In an interview about setting up the magazine, however, the former editor Qian Jun 钱钧 quickly qualifies this posture of the true-to-life and downto-earth. The magazine’s target readership might be what the Baidu page refers to as “China’s three hundred million migrant workers . . . and all those people who are struggling to lead a good life,” but the operation itself was high-end and high-spec: The company provided a huge amount of investment for the setting up of [Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend], though I’m not at liberty to reveal the exact sum. But you know, to secure a group of elite writers like this from major national publishing houses isn’t possible unless you provide housing as well as excellent pay and benefits. You also have to put on all kinds of training for them, so all in all this has already required several million yuan.72 The piece goes on to describe how “a dozen elite journalists dashed in from places like Jilin, Hunan, Sichuan, and Shenzhen to make up the editorial T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 153 ]

team,” and it also notes that the writer staff had a “rather special characteristic: about half are real migrant workers (zhenzheng de dagongzhe 真正 的打工者), and a third are editors and journalists from national publishing houses.”73 The writing style, meanwhile, followed the “emotionally stirring” Bosom Friend technique, but its specific difference was the requirement to “write in the language of migrant workers, and formulate their thoughts in words.”74 In addition to hiring a tranche of “real workers,” immersion strategies were deployed to enhance the capacity of the elite journalists to speak on behalf of their subjects. As the article describes it: [For one column] journalists or editors take a trip to Guangdong to carry out migrant work, without sufficient expenses, and are forced to find a job and livelihood for themselves. They return to the editorial department a month later after completing the assignment, and publish their real names in the magazine together with pictures and an account of their experiences. This method of really making magazine staff understand the hardships of their target readers has many advantages, and at the very least enhances the cohesiveness of the magazine in the minds of its readership.75 A tension is already apparent here between the raw immediacy of migrant worker experience and the impersonating powers of the elite journalists who are its mediating mouthpiece. They dress up as migrants (rather like the New Year Gala Performance of 2008 in which professional dancers cosplayed subalterns in China’s biggest TV event);76 they test-drive migrant life; they learn how to speak its supposedly simple patois. What we see here, in short, are the perfect laboratory conditions for a sustained experiment in ventriloquism, for an intensive effort to “astroturf ” grassroots migrant experience. A call for submissions posted on Sina.com by the magazine in 2007 makes this point even more bluntly.77 The call begins straightforwardly enough, with a précis of the magazine’s aims to target migrant workers, the newly laid-off, and would-be entrepreneurs. But further down the page comes the declaration that Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend “uses the most affecting real-life, grassroots stories to console people who crave spiritual succor in the midst of poverty; and it harnesses the extraordinary experiences of migrant workers to establish role models for all wanderers under [ 154 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

heaven.” In terms of actual submissions to the magazines, these objectives are parlayed into four specific article types: legal cases (“must come with court verdicts, medico-legal medical evidence and so on”); success stories (“including the phone number of the protagonist”); sentimental pieces (“these manuscripts can be fictitious and are a particular priority”); and so-called problem stories. Each of these four categories is further broken down into subtypes with catchy titles, such as “Uncovering Black-Hearted Bosses,” “Stories of the Left-Behind,” “Notes on Scraping By,” and “The Golden Years,” each with its own even tighter set of bespoke narrative requirements.

Cookie-Cutting Collectively, these categories cohere into a densely prescriptive typology of migrant experience and migrant expectation. The magazine’s solicitation of “real-life, grassroots stories” is countermanded by its simultaneous requirement that these submissions follow a set number of strictly formulaic scripts within a predetermined corpus of story lines. Unlike the standard writers’ room, in which script coordinators, staff writers, and editors push hard on a fledgling idea to “break story”—to make it fly—the model is here is to “break-in story,” to tame a raw yet actually already formed narrative until it fits a fixed template, and in ways that recall the dressage techniques discussed earlier. This “breaking-in” process is essential because “real-life, grassroots stories” about China’s migrant workforce would, of necessity, be testaments to the cliff edge and the threat of zombie citizenship—in terms of content, in terms of form. They would unsettle, as Zheng Xiaoqiong’s verse unsettles; they might create dissensual forms of commonsense. And as a magazine that engages directly in the affective management of China’s underclass, Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend tasks itself precisely with steadying tremulous feelings and with buttressing the “distribution of the sensible” in its current shape.78 It acknowledges endemic uncertainty—hence titles such as “Notes on Scraping By”—only to plane down its jagged edges. The magazine achieves this through a program of pedagogic repetition on the level of content and sustained ventriloquy on the level of form. To explore the first part of this program—the iterative use of exempla in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend—I focus on two particular story subtypes that recur throughout the magazine’s twelve-year print run. These two T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 155 ]

columns—“Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” (Ai pin cai hui ying 爱拼才 会赢) and “Navigating the World Alone” (Tiandi wo duxing 天地我独行)— were each featured in every issue of the magazine published during 2004. The two columns form a natural counterpoint to one another: the first tracks the voyage from rags to riches, and the other plots the diametrically opposite path over the cliff edge. The first of these narrative paradigms is, of course, a well-worn template in state-sponsored storytelling about migrant workers. The rhetoric of self-reliance, frontier spirit, and small-scale entrepreneurial endeavor has saturated propaganda about migrant workers and their civic duties for two decades now, and to an extent “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” is merely another iteration of this hackneyed format.79 More significant are its practices of internal repetition. Each real-life story follows an almost liturgically regularized pattern: the column always appears on page 4 of the magazine, as its second feature; it has a two-part title, such as “Shopkeeping Ace: The Secret of How to Make 20,000 Profit a Month” (Xiaodian gaoshou: meiyue yingli 2 wan zhi mi 小店高手：每月盈利2万之 谜);80 the main text is prefaced by a brief taster, laden with aphorisms, to whet the appetite and set the moral tone; the main text contains three subsections of more or less equal length; and each article contains a small, blurred photograph of its protagonist.81 This patterning is mirrored by the narrative momentum of the stories, which begin with grit, hard graft, and determination, dip into despond midway as setbacks occur, before surging upward to triumph at the end. Often the setback section explores how shame, caused by the protagonist’s perceived deficit of “human quality,” leads to self-doubt—such as in the story “Take Pride in Yourself! A Manual Written by a Migrant Worker Becomes a University Textbook” (Zihao ba! Dagongzai xie de shu cheng le daxue keben 自豪吧！打工仔写的书成了大学课本),82 in which the protagonist Zou Jinhong 邹金宏, a would-be food writer, fails to secure a restaurant job because “he’d never even seen a lobster, let alone knew how to boil one.”83 But he masters his sense of mortification, marshaling it for success: At that time, the shared dormitory where he lived didn’t even have a desk, so he improvised one from a large cardboard box with a wooden board fixed on top. . . . In the face of the incomprehension and mockery of his co-workers, Zou Jinhong quietly encouraged himself: you’ve got to work hard and write the book as fast as possible . . . he couldn’t even afford to buy square-lined writing paper. So he used writing [ 156 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

paper that other people had discarded, and sometimes even wrapping paper and menus from the kitchen.84 The unbendingly formulaic character of the column is not merely about meeting practical readerly expectations: about where to locate the column in each issue; about what kind of content to anticipate; about the mandatory happy ending, even.The deep rhythms of the column—its upside-down bell curve, in which migrant experience falls to a trough between two peaks, and its rigidly distributed spacing along that trajectory—work to regularize the beat of underclass life, and in an inverse pattern to the deep rhythms of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s verse. Her poetry, with its erratic pulse, judders between drudgery on repeat and singular moments of hope or joy, and in this way creates an idiom for the chronic variables of life on the ledge without a safety net, for the paradox of the infallible constancy of the uncertain. In contrast, “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” uses rhythm to disseminate the fiction that life’s slings and arrows can be predicted and therefore parried, so long as workers hold fast and are not afraid to get their hands dirty. Rather than inducting readers into what Radford calls “the habit of searching for regularity”—a process that requires close attention—the rhythm here is already so plodding and self-evident that it deliberately obviates the need for cognitive thinking. Repetition as a “pedagogic act,” repetition as catechism, mandates the elimination of all structural variables. It functions via an excessively symmetrical form.

Over the Cliff Edge: Class Tumbling This iterative pattern in “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” is thrown into starker relief by its partner column, “Navigating the World Alone.” As mentioned earlier, dizzying upward mobility is the perennial mantra of narratives aimed at migrant workers rather than scripted by them—whatever medial format this storytelling takes. In their study of the new crop of state-run migrant worker museums that have sprung up in Shenzhen and Guangdong, for example, Junxi Qian and Junwan’guo Guo note the following: Visitors to the Shenzhen museum encounter the stories of  .  .  . a construction worker becoming the chief manager of a construction company; a migrant worker who started from a low-end job in the T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 157 ]

real estate sector but eventually established a series of businesses in property management, construction, interior design, etc.; and a female worker who saved 800 RMB out of her 900 RMB monthly salary to start her own clothing factory.85 Their observations tally with the work of anthropologist Jie Yang, who uses the example of the TV series The Secrets of My Happiness (Wo de xingfu jinnang 我的幸福锦囊)—which traces similarly heroic treks to the top—to argue that “happiness promotion” is a technology of governance in China that “taps into the resources of the victims of socioeconomic dislocation to effect economic advancement and political equilibrium.”86 According to Yang, the central methodology is to romanticize real-world suffering by demonstrating how optimism can deliver seemingly implausible results. “Navigating the World Alone,” in contrast, works from the premise that wish-fulfilment in a society alive with suppressed class hostilities may operate via brazen Schadenfreude too. This column, fortnight after fortnight, traces precipitous, almost preposterously steep falls from grace: a female lieutenant colonel fighter pilot from Suzhou with a glorious record who becomes a taxi driver;87 a company president who becomes a car wash attendant;88 a vernacular storytelling (pingtan 评弹) master of national renown who becomes a garbage picker;89 a director at Yema Auto who becomes a barber;90 a city mayor who becomes a cattle feed salesman;91 a U.S.-based professor who gives up his comfortable salary and social status to become an electrician in Chongqing;92 an Olympic champion who becomes a persimmon-grower on a remote hilltop;93 a university vice principal in Shenzhen who becomes a chef;94 a published writer from Hunan, and member of the Chinese Writers’ Association, who becomes a street shoe shiner.95 Perhaps the most discombobulating reversal of fortune in the 2004 print run is that suffered by a man named Guo Liming 郭立明, who morphs from real estate millionaire to public lavatory attendant in a story titled “Guts! Bankrupt Shenzhen Millionaire Cleans Toilets” (Yongqi: Shenzhen pochan qianwan fuweng shou cesuo 勇气：深圳破产千万富翁守厕所).96 Traduced by his business partner, who embezzles vast sums from him, Guo loses his fortune, his home, and his wife in short order. An old friend, now working in the Shenzhen municipal sanitation department, offers him a last-ditch reprieve: a job cleaning public lavatories. He thus falls from his supposedly comfortable perch into an abject zone of expulsion: [ 158 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

On his first day at work, a foul smell assailed Guo Liming before he had even reached the public toilet. It had been left unmanaged for a long time, so the sewer pipes were blocked; there was excrement everywhere, making it impossible to set foot inside, and the walls were covered in dust and cobwebs. The sight of this made Guo uncontrollably nauseous, but he immediately fetched brooms and rods to clear it up. The rods, however, failed to shift the blockage. Guo had no choice but to grit his teeth, hold his breath, roll up his sleeves, hike up his trouser legs, and scoop out the shitty pool with his hands. After being steeped in the pool for more than half an hour, Guo finally managed to unblock the pipes. When he re-emerged, he was covered from head to foot with brown and yellow piss and shit; no longer able to control the waves of nausea in his stomach, he vomited violently. Then he grabbed a faucet and rinsed himself from head to foot.When he thought about the grandeur of his former days, and the desperate straits into which he’d fallen, Guo Liming couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. But he worked all day long until the toilet was immaculate.97 For Guo Liming in this story, downward mobility is a scatological vortex, in which the sudden experience of migrant work is metaphorized as a mythic trial of nerves and strength, performed amid the viscous stench of other people’s waste. Tumbling down is a tempering process, in short, in which brittleness is eliminated and resilience enhanced: a baptism not by fire but in shit. Guo’s ritualized experience of class tumbling, his giddying drop from a high social stratum into the underclass, offers at first glance the incipient signs of what Wang Hui dubs “class treason” or “vagabondage” (see introduction). According to Wang, social change in modern China has typically been produced by “the mutual interpenetration and stimulation of the ‘lower strata’ of two or more social realms.”98 Wang observes: “modern class politics  .  .  . arose at the boundaries between classes where they overlapped . . . peasant uprisings were often the products of collaboration between ‘vagabonds’ coming out of the peasant class and the fallen from the ranks of the scholar-gentry.”99 As Guo Liming wades through excrement, he is simultaneously washed clean of his class entitlement and the trappings of status that vouchsafed him membership in an elevated social caste. Reborn as a migrant worker, he harbors the potential to become precisely the kind of class vagabond whose absence from the contemporary Chinese social weal Wang Hui laments in his work. This moment in the text—Guo’s T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 159 ]

scatological rite of passage, in which he tramps through human waste to reach a lower class identity—is, therefore, a moment of clear and present danger to the contemporary social order, in which class vagabondage is disharmonious, if not outright insurrectionary. Once there, after all, he might join forces with other disfranchised people to disturb the commonsense. What’s more, all of the stories in the “Navigating the World Alone” column feature similar trials of purgation halfway through the piece, offering textual moments that dice with the seditious danger that some new form of collaboration might be brokered between actors across the social divide. But the stories in the column invite this particular risk only to shortcircuit its potentially galvanizing charge. They do this, first, by turning these trials of purgation into a form of spectator sport. Indeed, they are often accompanied by histrionic anxiety-dream scenarios in which the protagonist’s ritual humbling, their very lowest ebb, is witnessed by an old acquaintance, distant family member, or even a former admirer. The reader, too, is beckoned into this spectacle-as-ritual, encouraged to take a prurient pleasure in the grimy details—the feces and garbage—of how the mighty have fallen into social exile and the zone of expulsion. In this way, a potential instance of cross-class unity is refashioned into a fractious form, a space in which caste difference is goadingly reasserted rather than transmuted into solidarity. Furthermore, this lowest ebb also serves as the nadir of the narrative parabola mentioned earlier. In the case of toilet attendant Guo Liming, his day in the sludge is one of new resolutions: he determines that “if he had to be a toilet attendant, then his toilet would be the best in Shenzhen.”100 Braving constant slights, he throws himself into his work and is named an “exemplary worker” (xianjin gongzuozhe 先进工作者) in the Municipal Sanitary Department. When the department begins contracting out the management of public toilets, Guo Liming seizes his chance: he borrows money, takes on the franchises of twenty public toilets, hires a crew of workers, and builds a profitable business; he even acquires a new and younger wife in the process. The story ends with his declaration: “I plan to take on the contracts for all public toilets in Shenzhen, and become Shenzhen’s ‘Toilet King’, using scientific improvements and management to turn public toilets into a Shenzhen landmark! I won back my self-confidence by throwing off my pride and tending toilets! To all those friends who are in dire straits, make sure you don’t take your pride too seriously!”101 By hauling himself from the latrine—in ways that are intended to be both literal and figurative—Guo once again opens significant social space between [ 160 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

himself and the magazine’s underclass readership, for whom this kind of vertical ascent out of the mire and back up the cliff face is almost always structurally impossible. As this social distance yawns wide, not only does the seditious vision of class vagabondage recede, but the agony of aspiration also works to fracture in-class unity because the utterly unrealizable dream of middle-class identity “disidentifies the working class as the ‘revolutionary’ proletariat” and thereby stymies their collective mobilization.102 And in the process, the ever-turning wheel of fortune in precarious China begins to show its contours. Across the pages of the magazine, this wheel spins metronomically on its axis, from the rags-to-riches stories of “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” to the riches-to-rags of “Navigating the World Alone.” Ostensibly, their trajectories plot opposing paths. They proclaim that neither wealth nor poverty, labor nor leisure, are steady states. Like a game of snakes and ladders, the social world is crisscrossed with peril and opportunity, and the grafters at the bottom are invited to take solace in the sudden nosedives endured by their social “betters” in these stories at the same time as learning that a sufficiently tempered spirit—one humbled by adversity, one that casts off concerns of “face”—can always stage its own resurrection.103 The wheel turns indiscriminately. It spares no one, and no one, moreover, is rescued by any other force than their own steely capacity to “swallow bitterness.” This repeated cadence accommodates readers to the notion that just as there is no glass ceiling on vaulting ambition, so there is no safety net for those who plummet downward. As a rhythm, it drums a fatalistic beat in which a specific kind of resilience forms the main melody, and in which the stewardship of a benevolent state has no place. Indeed, although the two columns seem to chart directly antipodean experiences—like Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry, in fact—in reality they both trace the same parabolic curve, in which the exposure to social shame or ridicule that comes from hard, demeaning toil ultimately cauterizes the individual and enables an ascent up the arc.

Spoken For As pedagogic exemplars, the stories in the two columns rely for their effects as much on a rigidly regularized form as on the iterative content-based patterns I have just sketched. All the titles in the Bosom Friend magazine conglomerate adhere to what commentators in China have called the group’s house style. For the most part, scholars have linked the key markers of this T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 161 ]

style to its distinctive title format, which features a heavy preponderance of exclamatory particles, interjections, question words, and demonstrative pronouns, as well as a profusely rhetorical and fabular tone.104 Titles are also lengthy, linking as many as twenty words together using colons to reel the reader into the piece through upfront storytelling. Collectively, these traits foster a breathless, confessional feel, commensurate with the magazine’s identity as bosom-friend-cum-moral-tutor for the migrant population. In terms of the main text, commentators have remarked on its baseline “newsy” (xinwenxing 新闻性) tone, which is then thickly coated with sentimental flourish.105 Beyond this, the narratology of the main text material has not drawn much notice. But Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend steers the established magazine style in a noticeably more interventionist direction via its textured use of ventriloquy. As C. B. Davis has noted, the notion of throwing voice “is so commonly invoked in the context of critical theory and identity politics that it has almost become a dead metaphor, absorbed into academic jargon as a general term for any variety of speaking for or through a represented Other.”106 Yet what Stephen Connor calls “the curious, ancient, and long-lived practice of making voices appear to issue from elsewhere than their source”107 retains its life force in this magazine, most specifically as a narratological method that enables the elite journalists who script these stories to speak for and through their subjects in ways that are both deliberately coded and curiously overt.108 Articles in both the columns I explore here often explicitly announce themselves as interviews, such as the story of the former master of pingtan 评弹 who becomes a waste picker, which is billed as “an exclusive interview by our special correspondent” (benkan teyue jizhe de dujia tanfang baodao 本刊特约记者的独家探访报道).109 Yet in this six thousand word, one hundred line long story, the protagonist Wang Yuexiang 王月香 is permitted direct speech in a total of four lines, and in each case her words form part of a dialogue with another character rather than constituting any kind of self-narration. In the story “Salute! Female Lieutenant Colonel Fighter Pilot Dares to Become a Taxi-Driver” (Jingli! Zhongxiao nüfeixingyuan yong zuo ‘dijie’ 敬礼！中校女飞行员勇作‘的姐’), also dubbed an interview, the “interviewee” does not speak once—a pattern that recurs again and again. Consistently, what these texts practice instead is a very particular form of voice-throwing: namely, a journalistic form of free indirect discourse, in which purportedly unmediated access to the interviewee’s thoughts is implied via the forced assumption of her or his voice by that of the [ 162 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

interviewer. In standard free indirect discourse, as Gérard Genette notes, “the narrator takes on the speech of the character, or, if one prefers, the character speaks through the voice of the narrator, and the two instances then are merged” (emphasis in the original).110 This works to interpolate the reader into the subject-position of the protagonist by reducing all forms of narrative distance. Combining omniscient narration with first-person narration, it bespeaks a potent kind of immediacy. Riffing on, or rather refashioning, this narratological mode, the writing team of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend restrict their protagonists to an interiorized form of speech that is quite visibly puppeteered by author-journalists, in significant part because all the other characters in the story are granted full and frequent powers of speech, thus throwing the silence of the lead player into a strange relief. In this way, the protagonists become de facto ventriloquist puppets in textual form, entities who quite transparently only pretend to speak for themselves—a point made visually ironic by the blurred photographs of the protagonists that are a de rigueur feature of each piece. Their stories are as “real” as the dummies in a ventriloquist performance, and their all-too-obvious woodenness is precisely what lends the show its politico-dramatic meaning. The magazine’s explicit practice of combining “newsy” elements with “storyness” (gushixing 故事性)—raw experience with naked fabulation—sites it strategically at the borderline between journalism and literature, with the result that readers not only “mistake fact for fiction, and fiction for fact,” but can only be well aware of that conflation. This palpable sense of fakeness was reinforced by a scandal that embroiled the core Bosom Friend magazine in 2009, when it published a set of floridly emotional—and unauthorized—pieces under the bylines of the well-known writers Bi Shumin 毕淑敏, Shi Tiesheng 史铁生, and Zhou Guoping 周 国平, who subsequently threatened the magazine with legal action. Media coverage of the case noted that despite Bosom Friend’s attempt to guarantee the veracity of its reporting by setting up a legal affairs department in 1998, it had been repeatedly sued for factual errors in its stories in the years since. As Jin Ying 金莹 notes, “Signed articles have not necessarily been written by the corresponding author, articles are frequently cut-and-paste jobs, the interviewee indicated in the foreword may not have actually been interviewed . . . [and] interviewees are not granted final sign-off on content.”111 If famous writers featured in the flagship magazine could fall victim to hatchet jobs of this kind, it seems inevitable that the journalism of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend was still more cavalier in its ventriloquizing drive. T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 163 ]

Davis observes that “ventriloquist performance grounds ‘voice’ not as individual expression . . . but as a signification of an identity that is always under construction in a give-and-take dialogue.”112 It is this crucial fulcrum in the practice of ventriloquy that the stories in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend work so insistently. Rather than deploying voice-throwing as a crudely proprietary practice, in which one person simply usurps the speaking powers of another, the stories perform the process of becoming, of constructing an appropriate identity under tutelage, which is enjoined upon those mired in zombie citizenship as they strive for societally sanctioned belonging. The magazine’s writing team take the raw spoken material of their subjects—the substance of the interview—and trim, chisel, hone, or mold it so that it fits one of the preordained narrative templates mentioned earlier. The migrants’ travails are unprocessed matter that can become appropriate “life stories” to the precise degree that they accommodate themselves to the paradigm. As such, the stories act out on the meta level the tutored mediation of raw experience that must occur as the Maoist practice of speaking bitterness becomes the neoliberal one of swallowing it. In the language of audiovisual manipulation and speech synthesis, these stories are “shallowfakes”—crude attempts at dissimulation that eschew complex technology—and deliberately so.113 They intend to dupe the processes of voice production only in the most superficial ways because the visible commandeering of the speech powers of the underclass by more authoritative elites is integral to the very pedagogic lesson that these stories are imparting. In plain terms, everyone knows who’s boss.

Fractious Counterpoint The two textual sets explored in this chapter—Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry and the 2004 print run of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend—are both direct responses to the condition of precarity, zombie citizenship, and looming expulsion that afflicted migrant workers in early twenty-first-century China and that continues, of course, to this day. The main difference is that nowadays it is not just working-class migrants who are assailed with messages on repeat about the joys of grunt work and the need for a “bootstrap mentality”, but the highly educated too. As shrinking employment opportunities for more privileged cohorts stir discontent in 2020’s China, state media is now recycling the tropes found in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend and targeting them at university graduates, who have responded by posting [ 164 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

material online in which they liken themselves to the down-at-heel literatus in Lu Xun’s 鲁迅 short story “Kong Yiji” (Kong Yiji 孔乙己, 1919), whose elite education proved nothing but a curse and shackle.114 Uneasy feeling of the same kind also produced the twin corpora discussed in this chapter, both of which use patterns of iteration to intervene in the process whereby the cliff edge as an encompassing life-world comes to be affectively and politically understood by those who dwell upon it. For Zheng, this mode of existence is imposed by external forces, and her poetry mobilizes an unruly mode of repetition on the structural plane to locate that responsibility outside the migrant self. The magazine, in contrast, deploys repetition as a form of dogma that incessantly reprises the official line that China’s migrants are micro enterprises, beholden to manage their own fates in a society that has shifted from welfare to workfare modes of labor and sociality. At stake here, I have argued, is what Rancière calls “commonsense” and Bourdieu dubs “doxa”: that which is taken for granted in a given social order and appears both naturally and implacably self-evident within a particular experiential realm.115 For Bourdieu, doxa helps to calcify social boundaries. It petrifies one’s sense of place, of what is and is not possible or permitted for the members of a given social class. Repetition is crucial to the making of doxa, precisely because it can be both creative and numbing.Thus it is no accident that cultural actors who are both invested in the status quo and in disrupting it turn to the rhythms of iteration to do so. Rhythm, as a recurring motion marked by the patterned recurrence of beat or accent, is also crucial because of its literal and symbolic relation to voice. After all, doxa, commonsense, and that which is taken for granted all rely on a particular distribution of powers of speech. Speaking or being spoken for, vocalizing or ventriloquizing: such struggles over who has access to voice are what determine the shape of the social order. It is for this reason that it makes sense to understand poetry such as Zheng’s and the fabular storytelling of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend as contrapuntal forms that emerge at the same time precisely because by that postmillennial moment the influx of tens of millions of migrant workers into China’s biggest cities was generating conditions that required the consolidation of a social order for this potentially volatile, even insurgent new demographic. These forms are not freestanding, sealed-off artifacts. Rather, they are cultural expressions locked in contestation over what the commonsense should be. Their reliance on repetition and rhythm is a recognition of the role speaking and hearing play in the making of so-called commonsense, in the manufacture of a shared consensus about T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 165 ]

what the world should talk and sound like. As these noises play out, they generate friction, as opposing class interests clash with each other abrasively amid the ambient muzak of social harmony. Indeed, class hostility forms an insistent subtext to both the textual corpora explored here, whether in the form of the sensational social downfalls staged in the magazine or in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s oddly hollow assertion that her work lacks “class consciousness” even as it makes such rousing sounds from the factory floor. That friction, the sound of disharmony, works as an aural counterpoint for the visual confrontations discussed in the two previous chapters of this book. Collectively, they expose the deep but suppressed structural antagonisms that shape the “distribution of the sensible” in twenty-first-century China.

[ 166 ]  T H E VO C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

CHA P T E R I V

The Cliffhangers

Construction is a poem, written by poets, who wrote them with steel and cement. —SHE NZHE N GOVE RNME NT SL OGA N 1

T

en construction workers cling by their fingers from the ledge of an industrial water tower thirty-four meters high. They are roped together from a center point at the top of the tower: if one falls, they all do. A low-flying drone captures footage of their strained faces as they hug the smooth sides of the building. On the top of the tower lounges the enigmatic figure of a man: the rope master, it would seem, the person in whose hands rest the fates of those who dangle from the edge (figures 4.1 and 4.2). Overhead, the drone swoops and circles, panning around the circular tower from man to man before sweeping back to shoot the city in panorama as a bleak soundtrack plays. Down below, traffic on the adjacent highway flows on, while pedestrians and a lone cyclist pass directly beneath the tower without looking up. The only watchers are two women, one of whom films the scene on her phone. As the clip draws to a close, an eerie silver ellipse starts to spin at the right-hand side of the screen, made up of four arms clasping each other in an eternal knot: together we survive; divided we fall. Titled The Mercy of Not Killing (Bu sha zhi en 不杀之恩, 2017), the clip is part of a site-specific installation video by the Chinese conceptual artist Chen Chenchen 陈陈陈.2 Chen Chenchen’s website also displays several photographs of the performance, including a jubilant final shot in which the men, who’ve clambered safely to the top of the tower, raise their hands in smiling salute—presumably savoring the mercy of not having been killed.3 The critical consensus so far on the performance is that [ 167 ]

Figures 4.1 and 4.2  From Chen Chenchen, The Mercy of Not Killing. An unconscionably   cruel art practice?

it enjoins on spectators a deep kind of ethical contemplation, that it “raises questions about common humanism and universal connection, voluntary compassion and the suspension of brutality in everyday life.”4 But the performance, like those discussed in chapter 1, is also a striking example of delegated performance art from China that steps calculatingly [ 168 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

into inhumane territory to generate its effects. This point is made clear in a “making-of ” documentary about the performance available on Chen’s website. It makes no bones about the artist’s borderline ruthlessness toward the hired construction crew as he strives for the visual look he wants. It opens with vertigo-inducing shots of the inside of the water tower, in which the camera tilts queasily upward. The scene then cuts to a tense exchange between Chen Chenchen and the professional intermediaries who are managing his relationship with the construction crew—a rather counterintuitive setup given that the stated purpose of the work is to stage and probe “interpersonal relations.” Chen and the intermediaries are arguing about how precisely to suspend the men from the tower. “That hook won’t hold . . . our insurance won’t cover that,” says one middleman. “But in the movies you never see any ropes . . . we’ve all seen how cliffhanger shots (xuanya jingtou 悬崖镜头) work in the movies,” counters Chen. The other intermediary steps in, saying, “I’ve just talked (to one of the guys). Seems he has experience of doing maintenance work at high altitude. So I think they may have their own way of keeping themselves safe. They may not go along with your new method.” Twice she tells Chen that he may need to find a different crew to work with, but he persists with the arrangement. Judging from the final result, in which the ropes are barely visible, he gets what he wants. Toward the end of the film, Chen finally gets around to interacting with the hired hands himself. “Do as many facial experiences as you can in those four minutes,” he instructs them; “flatten your waist against the wall.” These brief directorial interventions aside, the documentary primarily focuses on Chen’s philosophical exposition of the work: namely, his argument that choreographing the jeopardy of others allows for an intimation of our humanity. As he put it, “the situation of the cliffhanger is a highly abstract and artistic one: a kind of focused ritual takes place on top of that beacon.”5 I take Chen Chenchen’s installation, and his philosophical pronouncements on it, as my departure point for a discussion of what he calls the “cliffhanger” in contemporary Chinese cultural politics. Cliffhanging, I argue, represents the apotheosis—or rather the nadir—of the relationship between zombie citizenship, expulsion, and antagonistic cultural practice that has formed the core subject of this book. My particular focus is the recently emerged ritual of the so-called suicide show, or tiaolou xiu 跳楼秀, in which aggrieved precarious workers, most employed in the construction industry, threaten to jump from the top of a high-rise building—quite often T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 169 ]

one they have built themselves—if their wage arrears are not paid by the building site foreman or a higher-level boss. The suicide show is often carefully choreographed. Many of the shows are also filmed and subsequently find their way onto mainstream news and social media platforms. To date, suicide shows have mostly drawn attention as expressions of escalating labor unrest in China and have thus been read through a political science prism. This disciplinary take is concisely summarized in the work of Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin, who describe “a variety of violent actions taken by construction workers which were no doubt caused by the political economy of the construction industry.”6 Yet these displays, precisely in their performative and dramatic dimension— in their status as “shows” (xiu 秀)—also open themselves up to a more culturalist analysis. To an extent, they are instances of what Charles Tilly calls “contentious performances,” politico-cultural recitals in which disadvantaged actors work from a more or less scripted repertoire of public actions that “make claims bearing on someone else’s interests.”7 More than this, though, I argue that cliffhanging is a preeminent instance of the volatile, generative encounter between art, class, and politics in an era of expulsion. It turns the notion of the cliff edge into actual performative practice. It both literalizes the experience of being suspended precariously over the void—or actually tumbling into it—for members of the underclass and metaphorizes that process for those watching anxiously from the wings. Cliffhanging is, in other words, a literal metaphor: a term that means exactly what it says at the same time as it connotes something on the imminent but as yet unrealized plane. As such, it also concretizes the febrile tension between different class actors as they encounter each other across the physical abyss that stretches between the rooftop and the street. Crucially, and in common with several other forms explored in this book, cliffhanging pushes at the boundaries of cultural practice—what it looks like, who can make it—in its search for a mode of intersubjective expression that can capture the fact and fear of exile from citizenship as a divisive structure of feeling. I begin by sketching the backdrop to the suicide show, a practice born in the crucible of precarious labor and whose threats gain clout against a recent history of actual self-slaughter in China’s factory regime. I go on to read these shows as a combustible cultural form that braids together mixed threads, from the Chinese tradition of suicide as righteous remonstrance to present-day forms of creatively embodied protest in the era of Occupy. This notion that protest is inherently creative is crucial to [ 170 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

cliffhanging, in large part because mainstream discourse in China seeks to disavow the cultural import of this form of dissent, typically by portraying the performers as charlatans. In the main body of the chapter, though, I draw on an empirical base of two dozen suicide show videos to argue that these workers have fashioned an aesthetic intervention that is both impassioned and authentic. This creative practice plays in part—no doubt inadvertently—on the two etymological meanings of the term “precarious” in English: to be in danger of falling and to be a supplicant who seeks to obtain rights or goods by entreaty. At the same time, these shows force a visual rupture in the narcotically identikit Chinese cityscape, as the nation’s underclass, so often invisible to their social others on the street, climb to the highest urban summits and command extreme attention. Once there, they turn the rooftop into a site of performance that acts out the excruciating distinction between those who belong within the polis and the dispossessed: those who have been cast out from the circle of humanity and are denied legal and economic redress when they are wronged. In suicide shows, that place of exile is metaphorized as the looming freefall on the brink of which the protestor teeters in full view of impromptu audiences on the street below. To an extent, this potent visual language shares semantic space with a range of art-world and urbexing practices that center on the rooftop as a site of quest, mutiny, and bravado. I explore this zone of overlap by looking briefly at the work of contemporary Chinese artists and urban adventurers who exploit extreme risk in their work; but I argue that the cliffhanging practiced by construction workers belongs in a category of its own. Indeed, the suicide show wrests the rooftop away from the domain of conceptual art and charges it instead with the raw language of the gesture: the silent man, poised at the edge of annihilation, whose strung-out, sometimes shaking body compels a reckoning between those whom the state considers human and those it has banished beyond the pale of redress. That looming space between the two, between the rooftop and the street, connotes social space without a safety net; it is a visualization writ large of Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception.”8 This is the zone of the outcast— the refugee, the immigrant, the disappeared, the evicted, the detainee without prospect of fair trial—but it is also the living-dead state of existing without rights and protection to which not just the few but the many fear they might be consigned in China’s at once closely controlled but tensely precarious society. T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 171 ]

Wage Rage The core premise of this book is labor under siege: labor that is contingent, casualized, informal, piecemeal; labor without sureties, benefits, or prospects; labor that takes and gives little back. As discussed in the introduction, this shift has been felt all the more acutely in China because once upon a time, in the Maoist era, labor was glorious, blessed by the state, and lauded for its national significance. Called laodong 劳动, it was glossed as a sacrosanct calling, and as workers built the “new China,” they enjoyed dignity and a degree of rights that accrued to them precisely because they labored. Since the era of reform and opening up, labor has acquired a new name, dagong 打工, a term that carries strong connotations of degrading dispensability. It is exploitative, often with the state’s tacit blessing; it has no iron rice bowl to deliver even though migrant workers have built the new postsocialist version of China with their blood and sweat. Workers in China’s vast construction industry eke out lives at the sharp end of this shift,9 and they have suffered a particularly precipitous decline in status and conditions.10 They work intense, irregular hours in unsafe conditions; they usually lack union representation or other means of access to compensation in the event of injury;11 they have been denied urban household registration and the access it provides to benefits, rights, welfare, services, and education; they endure a low or no-wage regime, typically based not on contractual arrangements but on verbal agreements with labor subcontractors that can subsequently be shirked or disowned, often because the necessary funds are not yet forthcoming from the top-tier property kingpins.12 This nexus of factors—the punishing work in a state of physical jeopardy, the exclusion from the circle of citizenship rights, the withheld pay and consequent need for hapless entreaty—enforces on China’s construction workers a lived experience of precarity, of the body, of the cortex, which gives that term a set of meanings that, as I suggested earlier, go right back to its etymological roots. Workers have certainly tried to get hold of their wages using the “weapons of the law,” and they continue to do so. But these efforts to resolve disputes frequently end up “stuck in an inefficient bureaucracy with few alternative channels of redress.”13 Indeed, despite repeated mantras from municipal and state authorities about the unimpeachability of the law in labor disputes, migrant construction workers have come to understand that these grievance mechanisms do not really work for them—principally because so few have [ 172 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

contracts and their unregistered status means they struggle to mount legal challenges against employers in court.14 It is in this context of frustrated justice and zombie citizenship that construction workers have turned, since the late 1990s, to the politics of radical performance. As Wanning Sun puts it, “Intuitively, and without much theoretical knowledge of the power of the media, migrant workers . . . realize they may need to escalate their action to the next level of publicity in order to gain voice, recognition and compensation.”15 Or as one protestor states in a video, “We have to get hold of you guys (the media). Without you there’s no way forward.”16 As a consequence, these performances are multiply, strategically mediated. The immediate performance dynamic occurs on-site between the workers, bystanders, emergency services, and building site foremen or subcontractors (who are often summoned to the scene by police or firefighters once the suicide show is underway). In most cases, the central dramatic tension plays out between the jumper and the subcontractor: the latter tries to persuade the former down from the cliff edge by brandishing wads of banknotes, sometimes even enlisting an intermediary to climb up to the protestor’s perch, cash in hand. This on-site performance is recorded by news media organizations and citizen journalists and posted online. Video-sharing sites both inside and outside China contain variously sourced footage of such suicide shows, ranging from slick TV broadcasts to muddy amateur recordings. A further level of mediation often occurs “below the line,” when online commentators post impassioned responses to the videos. Only one of the suicide shows I have found online shows a protestor actually jumping. The rest belong within the limbo space of the cliffhanger, a term that becomes visceral as the bodies of the protestors take up positions that test gravity in agonizing ways.17 Some commentators on these performances have argued that their status as eye-catching shows, rather than actual jumps, has dulled their edge because spectators no longer need to look on with their hearts in their mouths.18 Many grassroots officials, meanwhile, simply “see such displays as routinized performances by citizens trying to strengthen their bargaining position.”19 But audiences in China also know well enough that the nation’s most precarious people—who are not fully “citizens”—are sometimes prepared to trade their lives in return for the chance to stake moral claims that will not be heard any other way. The most egregious case of this is the wave of suicides at the “Foxconn City” industrial park in Shenzhen, which peaked in 2010 when eighteen employees killed themselves by jumping from buildings in protest at “labor camp” conditions T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 173 ]

at the factory complex, quickly forcing the company to install safety nets around the site.20 Then in 2015, thirty cabdrivers tried to take their own lives by swallowing poison in central Beijing after their attempts to petition against new regulations for renewing vehicle licenses had failed.21 Thirtyfive cases of self-immolation occurred in Tibet in 2012 alone, as protestors stripped of other political options carried out extreme embodied remonstrance against the repressions of the Chinese state.22 Within this context of suicide-as-protest, the cliffhangers of China’s construction industry are not merely showmen, purveyors of a spectacle whose credibility depreciates through overexposure. They are the makers of a charged political ritual, a contentious performance, that draws its power from a rich repertoire of historic and contemporary resources. It demands attention both as a complex iteration of suicide-as-protest—in which suicidal ideation can be as threatening as the act of jumping itself—and as an exemplary instance of a fractious form born of strident class clash under China’s regime of precarity in which the threat of expulsion looms large.

Not the Why but the Who As anthropologist Margery Wolf once noted, “In the West we ask of a suicide, ‘Why?’ In China the question is more commonly ‘Who? Who drove her to this? Who is responsible?’ ”23 Although Wolf ’s work on suicide in China concerned itself predominantly with the methods used by persecuted rural women to protest unjust social relations, her argument about the “who” rather than the “why” ricochets both backward and forward in Chinese historical time. Every year in early summer when people race dragon boats and eat sticky rice dumplings at the Duanwu festival, they are in part commemorating the ancient statesman Qu Yuan, who was banished by the emperor and drowned himself in the river Miluo in protest while local villagers threw rice into the water to distract the hungry fishes from his corpse. It is common enough to see Qu Yuan’s death described as a parable of loyalty, as an assertion of the identity of the Chinese scholar-official and his venerable duty to remonstrate against the depredations of despotic imperial power.24 But it may be truer to say that the story of Qu Yuan specifically authorizes suicide as a form of protest in the elite political repertoire at the same time as it provides an annual rite in which that method can be reaffirmed in ways that are insistently vernacular. Indeed, this socially [ 174 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

distributed ritual of remembering may go some way toward explaining why the handbook of psychiatric classifications published in China until 2001 states that “suicide may be motivated by hopelessness, protest against injustice, fear of punishment, superstition and mental disorders. . . . Most people who commit suicide do not suffer from mental disorders.”25 In the same essay, Lee and Kleinman observe that Chinese people “celebrate, remember and reaffirm resistance as a part of their cultural identity.”26 Yet more than a form of resistance that binds the Chinese people together, protest suicide is a mode of dissensus in which the ultimate gift is proffered to a reluctant recipient in order to acquire sociopolitical capital for the donor—and which can thus lend itself very readily to class-on-class strife. This is Lucien Bianco’s point when he notes of pre-Communist China that “one of the most popular ways to take revenge upon a pitiless creditor is to commit suicide before his door”27—a practice that has been updated for the postreform era by peasants who protest unjust taxation by depositing a corpse in front of a cadre’s home to hold bureaucratic malfeasance to account.28 To put this another way, suicide-as-protest is a civilizationally sanctioned means through which exploited people can pressure the bureaucracy and its proxies, using the remonstrance of the most virtuous of all Chinese public servants—Qu Yuan—as precedent. As Diana Fu observes, “performance threats pose a question to bystanders, the media, and officials alike: What kind of state would drive its citizens to the brink of suicide in order to claim their basic legal rights?”29 But more than just the condemnation of the state and its agents, the resort to the rooftop is also a means of self-ennoblement because the protestors directly contest not just the illegality of wage arrears but their own status as “illegals”—people not deserving of the law and its protection—by arrogating to themselves a mode of petition whose origins lie in high statecraft. As Jie Yang puts it, in a “tumultuous transitional period, (workers) have had to design new performance genres to renew their heroism.”30

Blood on the Streets, Shit on the Walls Suicide shows, whether consciously or otherwise, also stake their claims within global genealogies of extreme embodied protest. In a reductionist sense, protest can only ever be an expression of corporeality, of our selves as flesh-and-blood entities. As Basil Rogger puts it, “despite all virtuality, T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 175 ]

protest arises from the human body. This body is the primary means of expression of and the utmost commitment to the cause that is attested to in a protest.”31 And it is precisely because of this inevitability of the body as the genesis of protest that those who find themselves in extremis will often instrumentalize the body from the inside out to make metaphors of resistance, using all matter available. It is for this same reason that blood often becomes the stuff of protest, from the red writings that Cultural Revolution dissident Lin Zhao 林昭 penned on her prison bedsheets after piercing her veins with a hair clip,32 to the “Red Shirts” protestors in downtown Bangkok who drew quantities of plasma from their bodies and used it to decorate the streets as they clamored against governmental policy in 2010.33 Political detainees at the Maze Prison outside Belfast went further during the so-called Dirty Protest of 1978 when they daubed the walls of their cells with excrement to protest their status as common prisoners and the violent treatment to which they were subjected by prison officers when they tried to use the lavatories and showers.34 Embodied protests of this kind are core context for China’s suicide shows. This is not simply because they offer exemplars of Karin Andriolo’s argument that “words do not grip unless one gives them hands to do so, unless one embodies them,” but more fully because they connect with another point she makes about self-sacrifice as the protest gift that keeps on giving. As she puts it, “the meaning of the pain endured is one’s own to bestow, is inalienable, and fuels the capacity to endure more.”35 These examples of corporeal protest that use the body’s gross effluvia to speak truth to power belong within the same spectrum of experience that makes a construction worker dangle himself from an urban precipice. All show that embodied protest is a highroad to desperation, with stage posts along the way, in which injustice takes an ever more visible toll on the integrity of the body until it atrophies into a state of living death— zombiehood, by any other name. The terminus of this journey is, of course, writ large by the fatal hunger strikes that the Maze prisoners later pursued, and by the man in the video mentioned earlier who finally jumped from the building’s edge. In this context, the body that leaches blood and shit, the body that suspends itself recklessly from a rooftop, is auguring its own end in eschatological terms at the same time as it reclaims that imminent decay from the ignominy of political incarceration or a life lived beyond the protection of the law. Maze prisoners, surrounded by their own waste in conditions so appalling that a visiting archbishop was “unable to speak [ 176 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

for fear of vomiting,”36 were on one level simply acting out the status to which the state had consigned them as convicted terrorists, even though the confessions of many had been extracted under duress. They were performing their abject identities, just as the Chinese cliffhanger stages his utter dispensability as he swings from the scaffolding in high winds. At the same time, protests such as these are like baptismal fire: by allowing their bodies to own and show, as zombie metaphor, the process whereby they are cast beyond the pale, the protestors project that degradation back to its origins in governmental injustice. This is Allen Feldmen’s point when he notes of the next stage of the Maze protests that “the act of hunger striking purified and decriminalized the striker, but the queue of corpses emerging from behind prison walls would shake the moral legitimacy of the British state.”37 In this, too, China’s cliffhangers form parallels with the hunger strikers when they seize the sites that have zombified them and expose them for the world to see. A clear genealogy with the Occupy movement can also be traced here; as Sanford Schram argues, Occupy “represents the idea that people should collectively reclaim as public the spaces that have produced our exclusion.”38

Creativity and the Passions of Protest But perhaps what these embodied protests reveal above all else is a central truth of protest: namely, that to agitate in this way is to engage power and the polity creatively, and often in overtly aestheticized ways. In his pioneering work on Black insurgency in the 1950s and 1960s, Doug McAdam noted that “lacking institutionalized power, challengers must devise protest techniques that offset their powerlessness.”39 He called this process “tactical innovation,” explicitly situating it in the goal-oriented domain of warfare. Unquestionably, much protest does play out in the gladiatorial arena of David and Goliath, in which small sleights of hand can sometimes shake the mighty. But the devising and choreographing of tactical innovation is also a necessarily creative process, which is why many protestors often make a point of vocalizing their artistry. After splattering Bangkok with blood, for example, one of the Red Shirt leaders shouted: “We have our own art.”40 On one level, this creativity is about inventiveness and ingenuity, about the capacity to coin an arresting idiom for struggle—whether this is black bloc, gilets jaunes, or painting the city red. Protestors, for this reason, are often masters of the meme, possessors of high visual literacy, generators of new cultural T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 177 ]

scripts that make the lexicon of contemporary life richer. But beyond the level of the gimmick, the slogan, or the hashtag that goes instantly viral, protest is fundamentally live and theatrical. As Rebecca Schneider notes, artist-activists have always understood the inherent dramaturgy of public dissent, approaching “resistance as a labor of theatrical action, and theatre as a vehicle of revolution” with the aim of inciting collective action.41 Ultimately, protest is akin to and indeed deeply part of art because, as James Jasper argues, “much like artists  .  .  . [protestors] are at the cutting edge of society’s understandings of itself as it changes . . . they sometimes generate new ways of understanding the complexities of the human condition.”42 Protestors, in this latter sense, are practitioners of the avant-garde, divided from their brethren at the vanguard of the art world by only a paper-thin theoretical margin. In coining the term “avant-garde,” Henri de Saint-Simon wrote in 1825 that “it is we, artists, who will serve you as avant-garde: the power of the arts is in fact most immediate and most rapid: when we wish to spread new ideas among men, we inscribe them on marble or on canvas  .  .  . and in that way above all we exert an electric  .  .  . influence.”43 His manifesto here extrapolates itself smoothly to China’s cliffhanging vanguard, who take the streets as their canvas and the high-rise as their marble, and who electrify those below and online with their message about spent hopes for justice. But to liken their protests to art, to aestheticize the act of suicidal ideation—even when it is performed quite deliberately in front of spectators, and with every intention of connecting with bigger audiences online—might seem a depoliticizing move. Suicide shows in China are about wages, not art; to suggest otherwise is surely to trivialize radical struggle of this kind. Yet Jasper is right to point out that culture is all too often the missing link in scholarship on protest, which prefers to scope out this kind of civic dissent through a political science prism that is ultimately skewed and partial. As Jasper puts it, “Most scholars, by concentrating on citizenship movements and by slighting culture (especially its moral and emotional dimensions), have inadequately understood the causes, unfolding, and effects of modern protest.”44 Protest becomes meaningful, like art, precisely in the moment it permits new ways of seeing. In plain terms, China’s suicide shows are art forms because they push at the limits of the politically visible. Like avant-garde aesthetics—as avant-garde aesthetics—they commandeer new domains of possibility, in which months of unpaid toil can suddenly morph into stacks of 100-yuan-bills when the ultimate risk is brokered. [ 178 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

These new domains of possibility are hard-won. Belittling media discourse on suicide shows in China—the tone of which has switched “from one of compassion to one of mockery” in recent years—often castigates the protestors as manipulative sensationalists.45 In one video, for example, part of a state media news broadcast in Zhejiang province, the newscaster declares that Wage-seeking incidents are decreasing and rights on pay are improving in Zhejiang, whether this is via the labor inspectorate or via legal channels.The path is becoming much less obstructed. . . . Late payment of wages is totally impermissible, but if our migrant worker friends [nongmingong pengyou 农民工朋友] who find themselves facing this situation climb onto a rooftop and threaten to jump off, this is tantamount to choosing the wrong route towards obtaining labor rights.46 According to this rhetoric, cliffhanging is legally needless and morally culpable, and those who climb to the rooftop are showmen in the most derogatory sense.47 Or as another media commentator complains: “This behavior has been given a strange name: the ‘suicide show.’ The subtext of this term suggests that the jumper doesn’t really plan on dying, it’s just about putting on a show. Putting on a show is fake and so deserves no sympathy.”48 Wanning Sun argues that the use of the word “show” in such accounts registers a shift from tragedy to comedy in the perception of these protests, a disparagement that compromises their status as crusades for social justice.49 Indeed, the Chinese term xiu (show) can sometimes have an ironic or mocking tinge to it. But the ideological slight runs far deeper and relates to the right to perform at all. Performance, after all, can only ever be about simulation. Staging, impersonation, playacting, dramatization: all specifically denote the wearing of a guise, the emoting of fixed lines, the assumption of a temporary identity. Thus to criticize a suicide show for being performative—whether in the tragic or the comedic mode—is a perverse denial of its exact social purpose: rather like hiring a construction worker for his labor and refusing to pay him for it, in fact. Worse still, to castigate a would-be jumper for being “fake” has its own semantic subtext: namely, the assumption that actually plummeting to one’s death is the only way to vouchsafe the authenticity of the protest. In this sense, it becomes clear that suicide shows are dismissed not simply because their initial tragic edge has become attenuated but because the very T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 179 ]

act of performing carries a cultural value that construction workers are not societally “allowed” to access. At stake here is not merely the right to protest but the right to use cultural means to do so. As such, the attempted denial of performative rights has the effect of eliding the precise political aesthetic of the suicide show, which manifests a highly evolved sense of the allegorical reach that these embodied performances can attain. In his work on “contentious performances,” Charles Tilly argued that protestors in nineteenthcentury France “drew their claim-making performances from standardized, limited repertoires”; they “followed available scripts, adapted those scripts, but only changed them bit by bit.”50 From this core finding, Tilly elaborated the dual concepts of performance and repertoire, in which protest is a stage on which the players put on a stock set of shows, and these shift their content only very gradually through time. This notion of “learned and historically grounded performances” resonates powerfully with China’s suicide shows.51 These do certainly follow fixed rules about suicide as the most politically punitive of gifts. But they also depart from Tilly’s notion of fixed repertoire by smashing preexisting protest paradigms to create a new kind of vocabulary for dissent. This vocabulary, I show in the next section, strives to create a visual lexicon for precarious experience in contemporary China, and it draws its creative spark from the explicit staging of class conflict.

Life on a Ledge Limbs dangle from the edge of a high-rise; a protestor is bent double, incapacitated by vertigo on top of a tower crane; a small cluster of men balances, like birds perched on a telegraph wire, on the ledge of a skyscraper; others hang silently from scaffolding as if they were acrobats, but with stricken, tearful faces; a man, persuaded down from the top of a department store, can barely stand and has to be supported by firefighters as his legs give way; protestors scale towers that are visibly still under construction, as the sound of wind and snow howling on the rooftop muddies the audio; huge yellow inflatable mattresses are blown up and positioned on the street in readiness for the jump (figures 4.3–4.5).52 All of these are moments from suicide shows posted on video-sharing sites such as YouTube, Bilibili, iQiyi, Pear Video, and Tencent Video over the last ten years. Several of these scenes recur again and again across the many videos of suicide shows available online, which follow a relatively fixed choreography and order of play. They [ 180 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

 

Figures 4.3 and 4.5  Screenshots from suicide shows. Impossibly perilous lookouts.  

constitute the basic visual language of this protest form, and it is a language that allegorizes the queasy jeopardy of life on a ledge, the precarious state in which millions of workers in contemporary China find themselves subsisting. Precarity, it should be made clear, is seldom crudely coterminous with fragility. It is a condition in which brittleness often coexists with resilience, and the visual language of the suicide show closely captures this dialectic in the courage and tenacity of the protestors. But it should also be noted that this is not the perky kind of resilience that was immortalized in the Great Depression-era photograph “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” in which eleven construction workers ate sandwiches and shared smokes on an iron girder while swinging their legs hundreds of meters above New York streets. The image, staged in 1932 to promote the new Rockefeller Building, acquired its iconicity in large part because of the men’s insouciance, and the way that mood became a cipher for American fortitude and optimism in the face of extreme economic shock. Deeply integral to the photograph is the connection between “hard work and high hopes”53 and the implicit conviction that resilience will bring its own rewards, even as the abyss beckons. Several suicide shows by contemporary Chinese construction workers instantly recall that fabled image for those viewers who are familiar with it. But the rooftop, and its interplay of risk and hardiness, is parlayed into a different set of meanings here. Precariousness, as mentioned earlier, suggests both hanging in the balance and being suspended there at someone else’s mercy, only a plea away from falling. Suicide shows create a metaphoric structure in which the violent dynamics of the cliff edge are inscribed onto urban space. Waiting for wages that never come is, indeed, to be poised at the brink of an abyss: a black hole in which, as the testimonies in the videos make clear, lie not just hardship, eviction, and hunger but also divorce, separation from children, and estrangement from home and family because there is no money to make the annual journey back at Chinese New Year— the loss of all the things that allow those consigned to zombie citizenship to cling to their humanity. Like balancing on a precipice, the difference between payment and nonpayment, between wages and arrears, is a gutchurning knife edge. Rather than the brio of the New York construction workers, China’s cliffhangers show their hardiness via the physical toll high altitude takes on them—the vertigo, the wobbly legs—while still persevering with the performance script. This visual vocabulary is backed up by the lexicon of despair that can be heard on the soundtrack of these shows. Again and again, viewers hear terms such as “forced into a hopeless position” [ 182 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

被逼无奈 (beibi wunai); “hounded to death” (bisi 逼死); “extreme measures” 极端的方式 (jiduan de fangshi); “to take a desperate path” 走投无路 (zoutou wulu); “to make an unwise move out of utter helplessness” 无奈出此下策 (wunai chuci xiace); and to fight for “money earned in blood and sweat” 血汗钱 (xuehanqian). Meanwhile, all that holds the jumper back from the finality of the sheer drop, like the ropes in Chen Chenchen’s installation, is the chimera of payment: the outside chance that the rule of law will, after all, apply to him if—paradoxically—he takes that law into his own hands. This is why a core section of many suicide shows focuses on the chaotic process in which the emergency services call the boss; the boss shows up, all of a sudden flush with cash to pay wages when before apparently there was none; and these bright red banknotes are perilously conveyed to the rooftop. This sequence, a stock staple of the suicide show genre, allegorizes the strategic caprice of the law in China: the money is always there, it’s just that gaining legal purchase on it is as slippery as gripping hold of a rope on a cliff face in high winds. This same notion of the law as an utterly contingent thing surfaces in different form via the mattresses that the emergency services inflate and place at the bottom of the building to cushion the jumper’s fall. On the figurative plane, they are an ironic stand-in for the social safety net (shehui anquanwang 社会安全网) that is never furnished for so many of China’s floating population who cannot access registration-based rights. Social safety nets, by definition, are wraparound and fixed in place, so their mutation into a portable mattress, wheeled out, blown up, and placed at a guesstimated spot on the street becomes a further visual code for what it means to be consigned to zombie citizenship.

Skyline, Eyeline As in all good parables, there is both a stark simplicity to the narrative lines here and a treacherous depth of meaning below. On one level, it is nothing other than logical for construction workers who are seeking unpaid wages to climb to the top of the very same high-rises they themselves have built, the same scaffolding they have constructed, and the same tower cranes they operate, and stage a public grievance there. What other meaningful sites of protest are available to them after legally normative petitioning has failed? But as Andriolo notes, suicide-as-protest is also rooted in a more symbolic T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 183 ]

logic of mimicry: “The body becomes the site on which self-destructive mimesis denounces the wrongs that humans have wrought,”54 or I make manifest in my self-ruination what you have done to me to show the world your injustice. In this context, to use the very architectural structures via which labor has been injuriously extracted as the site of extreme protest doubles down on the symbolism. Both the body and the building it made become part of an emblematic ritual performance as the back-to-back exploitation of hard grind for no pay is made real. To tie the flesh to the built environment in this way positions the protest message of the suicide show within a broader framework of rights claimed and rights denied. And to the extent that these skyscrapers metaphorize China’s own giddy rise, suicide shows find a figurative form of their own for the fact that this success is built on the zombied lives of those whose labor made it happen. Perhaps even more than this, to take a stand on such a perch—forty or more stories above the ground—is to make a radical statement about the politics of visibility in contemporary China. China’s most precarious people often hover just beyond the gaze of those who have a greater entitlement to the city and its citizenship. Migrant workers may build the skyscrapers, clean the streets, and process the garbage, but they struggle to enter into the seeable state of civic identity. Suicide shows violently disrupt this condition of invisibility, in large part because they turn the distant skyline into an ideologically disobedient eyeline. The contemporary Chinese cityscape, as many commentators point out, has acquired a look-alike anonymity in recent years. In a manifesto of 2015, the architect Ma Yansong 马岩松 called China’s conurbations “stock cities,” “copies of one another,” full of “standardized architecture . . . that could be put into use in any locale, for any project.” He writes: “My impressions of them are muddled to the point that I can’t even be sure which ones I’ve visited before.”55 Within this landscape of numb uniformity, high-rises, skyscrapers, and architectural megaprojects act as necessary peaks and summits that project power and tell urban denizens that the space they inhabit is both ultramodern and created by the state. Anne-Marie Broudehoux has argued of China’s new spectacular structures, in particular, that they project state power into the built environment and work as a medium through which political elites attempt to “seduce their followers and intimidate their opponents . . . in order to orchestrate social control, manufacture consent and promote consumption.”56 Even high-rises without pretensions to starchitectural monumentality in China’s lower-tier cities belong within this discourse of the built environment, which decrees [ 184 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

that the metropolis should have a skyward orientation that plays on age-old associations between the steeple and the power of the state. Suicide shows blight this discourse in politically intolerable ways. Figures 4.6 and 4.7, for example, show the huge signage for the Bailian Anqing shopping mall in Anqing city, Anhui province, the site for a suicide show just before Chinese New Year in 2017.57 In the first image, a protestor is perched on one of the giant bright-red shiny characters spelling out the name of the mall, while other protestors seem to swing between adjacent lettering.

 Figures 4.6–4.7  Screenshots from a suicide show. Front and back views expose the illusory nature of the consumer dream as wage protestors dangle from the signage at a large provincial shopping mall. The subtitles read: “Several workers collectively seeking their wages are unable to return to their hometowns at New Year because they haven’t been paid for so long. Out of options, they’re poised to jump off the building.” T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 185 ]

Already the men are an affront to the glossy new mall and its familiar injunctions to consume. In the second image, the person making the video—whose identity is unclear—has climbed to the rooftop and now films from behind the signage, thus revealing the complex system of struts that holds it in place. It is via this metal framework, invisible from the street, that the protestors have managed to climb onto the lettering. As such, the front and back shots of the video end up visually satirizing both the highspec China dream, with its fantasies of untrammeled consumption, and the invisible labor that builds this utopia while being denied entry into it. This language of dissensus is also arresting in suicide shows that are staged on the apparatus of construction: scaffolding, birdcages, and tower cranes. Even more than unfinished buildings, these protest sites metaphorize the strain and danger of toil in this industry, but in their radical play of incongruity they also defamiliarize the banality of the high-rise Chinese cityscape. Neil Leach argues that contemporary architecture narcotizes the denizens of the city, operating as an anesthetic for dissent.58 What Rem Koolhaas calls the “generic city,” “sprawl, sameness . . . a city without history created on a . . . surface”—the notion of the city as a “fractal” that repeats its shape from laptops up to skyscrapers—is an environment that threatens to dull political will and consciousness.59 The scenes captured in figures 4.3–4.7 interrupt this seduction into apathy. The protestors who balance on scaffolding, or who teeter from the extended limb of a tower crane, insert a volatile kind of subjectivity into the cement and concrete of the city, with its overwhelming metaphysics of material, its huge bulk of hard matter. These protestors are matter out of place, not simply because they are rural migrants in the city but far more specifically as decitizenized people who step out of the shadows and demand visibility by appearing in the most ideologically inopportune of places. Urban altitude, after all, is supposedly the preserve of the elite in their penthouses; verticality, and the unique purviews it offers, is meant for the privileged.60 This “trope of elevation as a metaphor for class,” established in Chinese visual culture since the cinema of the Republican period,61 makes the cliffhangers a social aberration. This sense of misalignment is conveyed in the many suicide show videos that use postproduction software tools to draw a red ring around the protestors as they occupy their uncanny lookouts (figure 4.8): viewers need visual help in locating these people in places they are not supposed to be. These suicide shows—as they unsettle the slick architectural order with irruptions of the small, the personal, the [ 186 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

Figure 4.8  Screenshot from a suicide show pinpointing the improbable urban interloper.

unpredictable, the insurgent—present a self-endangering détournement, a form of situationism in which the spectacle-driven ambitions of the Chinese city are flipped around via the figure of the man who turns the skyscraper, an agent of apathy in the built world, into something suddenly political by risking his own life. The very horizon that stifles debate is reactivated into a zone of contention. As such, cliffhanging also radicalizes spatial conventions of protest in modern China, most especially in Beijing. From May 4, 1919, to June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square—a vast flat expanse—served as the nation’s nerve center for political protest; but as Dai Jinhua argues, the very term “square” (guangchang 广场) has been steadily evacuated of revolutionary meaning since the 1990s and has now become “plaza,” a site saturated with the banal semantics of shopping.62 In this context, cliffhanging performs yet another kind of subversive somersault as verticality replaces the horizontal plane as the axis of protest in contemporary China.63 More than this, and in a qualitative difference from the Maze hunger strikers—whose protests were shielded from public view—China’s cliffhangers contest their social invisibility by deploying the mediated image of the body-as-weapon. As suggested earlier, the performativity of suicide shows begins with the local and the immediate, but its real threat and leverage T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 187 ]

are exercised on the infinite publicness of video-sharing sites. Indeed, the specific aesthetic of the suicide show exploits this ambiguous space between the extreme amateurishness of cell phone footage—often captured by citizens now that official media are less inclined to report on these conflicts64—and the codification of the shows, with their set script, into something close to a recognized media genre in recent years, established enough to have spawned its own satirical cartoons (figure 4.9).65 Viewers both know what to expect and don’t because the dynamics of cliffhanging remain, by their very definition, prone to sudden sensory jolts. From this derives the power of the show’s deployment of the mediatized body-as-weapon: the tension between script and shock, contingency and planning, shoddy production values and a savvy media awareness that the precarious body at high altitude has a rawness that can never quite be attenuated by familiarity. In this sense, cliffhanging once again emblematizes Barba and Savarese’s arguments about “precarious balance” (see chapter 1).

Figure 4.9  Man on rooftop: “Police! Come quickly, Someone’s trying to commit suicide by jumping off a building.” Men below: “It’s no big deal, just another guy putting on a suicide show to get his wages.” [ 188 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

More than just making performance “scenically alive”—as with delegated performance—suicide shows, with their intense edgework, also reveal how balance “results in a series of specific organic tensions which engage and emphasize the performer’s material presence.”66 Cliffhanging, as a physiological practice, forcibly visibilizes its practitioners.

Cliffhangers, Rooftoppers, Thrill-Seekers Perhaps it is for these reasons that cliffhanging, in different forms, has crystallized as a broader aesthetic theme in China in recent years. What we see here is the process whereby the rooftop, sharp ledge, or cliff face emerges and reemerges in visual culture, not just as stereotypical liminal space but as a vent in the oppressive urban fabric: a breathing space or breakout zone in which the human figure asserts a right to adventure or rebellion. An example of this is a long series by Xing Danwen titled Urban Fictions (Dushi yanyi 都市演绎, 2004-), in which the artist takes the small shiny scale models, or maquettes, that have been so instrumental in the construction of China’s dead ringer cities and populates them with tiny, transgressive humans. As Yomi Braester has argued, the maquette is a vigorously ideological tool in Chinese state-driven urban planning.67 It mandates the law of duplication at the same time as it creates projects ready for instant implementation, with an overbearingly utopian cast.68 Jeroen De Kloet observes of Urban Fictions that “it is often in the in-between, liminal spaces of the city . . . like rooftops and balconies, where human drama occurs.”69 In figures 4.10a and 4.10b, the rooftop is a murder scene; in figures 4.11a and 4.11b, it becomes a venue for outdoor coupling; and in figures 4.12a and 4.12b, it serves as the stage for an imminent white-collar suicide. In each case, the rooftop becomes a place of discarded strictures and inhibitions that the homogeneity of the surrounding Plexiglas cityscape attempts and fails to hold in place. Similar effects are visible in the photographic work of the Gao Brothers, whose twin series Forever Unfinished Building (Yong bu wangong de dasha 永 不完工的大厦) and The Utopia of Construction (Jianzhu wutuobang 建筑 乌托邦) use rooftops, ledges, risky apertures, and sheer drops to create a dialectic between civic obedience, as enforced by architectural design, and the impulse to waywardness, exhibitionism, violence, and suicide that breaking out of the building comes to symbolize. Most striking, perhaps, is the performance art photography of Li Wei 李暐, whose several photographic T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 189 ]

Figures 4.10a–4.12b  From Xing Danwen, Urban Fictions. Devil in the details: miniatur  ized rebellious figures—killing, kissing, about to jump—unsettle the glossy cityscape. Reproduced with permission from Xing Danwen.

 

 Figures 4.10a–4.12b  (cont.)

 

Figures 4.10a–4.12b  (cont.)  

Figure 4.13  Li Wei, from Li Wei Falls to Earth (Li Wei zhuangru diqiu 李暐撞入地球 2002-). Melodramatic tumbling, head first. Reproduced with permission from Li Wei.

series use cranes, wires, scaffolding, and other technical props to construct vertiginous shots in which the artist appears to be tumbling from a skyscraper or embedding his head in a car windscreen. As figure 4.13 suggests, there is sometimes a playful feel to Li’s highly narratorial image-making. Other photographs gesture more directly to falling as a socially perilous experience, such as another shot in the series that nods noticeably to a suicide show: the artist seems to have plummeted headfirst into a building site while construction workers mill around in the background. Ultimately, these photographic performances—which rely on acrobatics, balance, and craftmanship more than Photoshop—try to capture the ambient sense that all surety is gone as an aestheticized structure of feeling. As Li himself puts it in an interview: “this feeling of having fallen headfirst into the unknown and of having nothing firm under one’s feet is familiar to everyone. One doesn’t have to actually fall from another planet to feel that way . . . there is a feeling of losing a grip on things, an uncertainty about the morrow. It’s a feeling of hanging in the air, of having nothing firm under the feet.”70 The most extreme form of this process may be the practice of rooftopping, a thrill-seeking subculture that has offshoots globally but assumes a sharper edge within the “narcotically” neutralizing cityscapes of contemporary China. Commentary on rooftopping in the international frame tends to T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 193 ]

present it as urban adventurism, a mode of pleasurable self-endangerment in which outlaws engage in unsecured ascents to architectural high altitude— smokestacks, skyscrapers, tower cranes—partly for the adrenaline, partly for the fame they get from posting death-defying selfies on social media.71 Developing Stephen Lyng’s notion of “edgework,” or the voluntary pursuit of peril, some sociologists have argued that rooftopping is an inevitable response to the tamed, gridlike cities of today—a point that gains evident leverage in places where the cityscape is in thrall to state power and overtly fashioned in its image.72 In China rooftopping also needs to be understood as a practice only a hair’s breadth away from the protest activities I have referred to here as cliffhanging. Obviously, both corporealize risk. But more than this, both are legally precarious: only those with “guile and personal connections” can gain access to commercial skyscrapers in China as the police clamp down on rooftopping;73 more troubling, wage protestors are now frequently detained by the authorities after making their descent. Most telling, rooftopping has taken on an activist tinge, particularly in Hong Kong in the 2010s, as thrill-seeking veers into the political realm and becomes a means through which causes can gain extreme photogenic visibility. The core point to make here is that cliffhanging, as a form of creative protest practiced in China since the 1990s, has filtered its way into more overtly aesthetic spaces because of its power as political art, as a cultural practice born partly of challenge and contestation.74 In this sense, it is probably inevitable that—like so many other good examples of détournement—cliffhanging is now finding itself subject to the kind of recuperative moves that dominant social forces so often perform on practices that possess destabilizing potential. This is shown in a recent mainstream romance film titled The Third Way of Love (Di san zhong aiqing 第三种爱情; dir. John H. Lee, 2015). Partway through the movie comes a highly melodramatized rendering of a suicide show. Mr. Wang, a worker left for dead by his employers after an industrial accident, has taken up position on the rooftop of a half-finished skyscraper swathed in complicated scaffolding, with a rickety-looking construction elevator on its side. His wife is having a panic attack at street level, while a huge crowd films the scene on smartphones. The male romantic lead steps in to demand that the corrupt construction company pay the worker’s hospital bill. This won’t work, say the police: “He doesn’t believe the construction contractors. He’s demanding that his attorney gives him the cash in person or he’ll jump.” Enter Mr. Wang’s beautiful pro bono attorney, who publicly rebukes the [ 194 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

representatives of the predatory construction company before putting on a hardhat and making the juddery ascent to the rooftop. The camera flickflacks between her nauseous expression and her patent black stilettos as she quakes and shakes her way up a precipitous wooden ladder. The worker, meanwhile, gets scant screen time as he balances atop a flimsy piece of scaffolding not long after having suffered a severe industrial injury. But despite all the obvious appropriation, it might still be arguable that this scene retains some political value because it stages the experience of cliffhanging, and the precarity that incarnates, for the white-collar class. It seems to metaphorize the motto that “we are all precarious now.”

Gestural Politics: “To Die Is the Only Way to Testify That We Ever Lived” But the scene is better understood as a more problematic kind of recuperation because it seeks to smooth over the cross-class strife in which all suicide shows are rooted.The pale-skinned, white-collared savior who delivers a suitcase full of cash to Mr. Wang, risking her own safety in the process, acts as a kind of fake social unguent in this scene of extreme class friction, for the simple reason that her pro bono benevolence elides the core political truth about suicide shows. These contentious performances protest a caste system that is not primarily about the difference between white-collar and blue-collar work, or even between the “haves” and the “have-nots,” but rather the much deeper ontological question of who is and who is not accorded proper being in contemporary China. The protestor who threatens to jump off a rooftop because of unpaid wages is a person whose rights have been suspended, who must be willing to tender his life in order to gain the essentials necessary to live, who is denied legal redress when wronged but then will feel the full force of the law when he dares to transgress it. Consigned to what Agamben calls the “zone of indistinction,” the protestor who performs suicidal ideation is simply acting out the truth of his existence, which is a state poised precariously between full life and bare life, in Agamben’s terms.75 Indeed, the suicide show constitutes an acute protest metaphor for a plight that can only be understood as ontological, and for people who have been reduced to “anthropomorphic creatures” unable to actualize “their fully fledged human form.”76 It is in this sense that the suicide show stands as the most agonizing representational mode for the half-life state of zombie citizenship. T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 195 ]

As they take up their stances on the cliff edge, these protestors acquire a kind of visibility that is certainly boosted by the points I made earlier about the shock value of physical precarity at high altitude and the rupture this creates in a blandly seamless cityscape. But their eruption into visibility also exceeds those points. Zombie citizenship is life outside the polis—a fact made topographically real by the many migrant encampments that encircle major Chinese cities—but it is also, and paradoxically, an intensely political identity. It is, in a core sense, the place where politics happens, the place where the decision about life and nonlife—the ultimate power exercised by the sovereign state—is made incarnate. Precisely in the moment when he is denied legal rights, the zombie citizen embodies the limits of the law: he shows where it ends, which is in himself. As such, he can only be politically voiceless since his appeals for justice fall on deaf ears. But his body can still “speak,” and this is why the politics of the gesture are so crucial to the suicide show. For Agamben, the purpose of ethics is to stage an encounter—even if that encounter fails—between those in the polis and those without voice who occupy the zone of indistinction. But to assume that this encounter should be verbal is to presuppose that voice is available to all; and given that it is not, the body may take its place as the mechanism through which political communication across the void may be attempted, and by those whose voices cannot carry. As René Ten Bos puts it, “Such a practice does not assume that the talkative citizen is a standard unit of analysis but rather takes the body as its starting point”77—and this may well be a body, moreover, to whom citizenship has been denied. Its corporeal language, the language of the gesture, takes a Debordian kind of situationist stunt as its arena of performance: the kind of calculated conjuring of extreme tension that we see in a suicide show. The gestural intent and practice of the many suicide shows available online is unmistakable. Occasionally the protestors shout out from the rooftop, but their voices are swallowed by the wind and make no intelligible sound. As these words fail to travel, drowned in the space between the rooftop and the street, they turn the protestor who voices his grievance into someone who can only gesticulate, to whom the power of audible speech is not vouchsafed; or into someone whose cries have only a guttural, animalistic sound. In this way, the very instantiation of muteness speaks its truth, as the rooftop becomes a “situation” in which the facts of political voicelessness and the zombie citizenship endured by “anthropomorphic creatures” are made flesh. More often, though, the construction workers [ 196 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

Figure 4.14  Screenshot from a suicide show. Bare life on the rooftop.

remain wordless and impassive throughout their protest. Their bodies, in a state of strung-out jeopardy, do all the talking. This point is vivid in figure 4.14, which shows a protestor, naked from the waist up, his face pixelated, whose legs dangle from the roof edge. This is bare life, literally and in extremis, and the man’s silent body, which quivers in stress, engages with those who watch not verbally but precisely as a body, in its tribulations. This point is made even more forcefully in the videos of suicide shows that feature the authoritative voiceover of a newscaster or a journalist who, in the very act of commandeering the right to speak about the show, actually makes the body language of the protestors more politically poignant. This power of the gesture as a form of language that tries to speak across the divide is even more intensely actualized in figures 4.15a–4.15c, which come from a video of a suicide show that took place in Lingbi County, Anhui province, again just before Chinese New Year in 2017.78 The video, which lasts just over four minutes, opens with blurred images of four members of the emergency services, shot from behind, who are staring into a dazzling white space. They are remonstrating with a fifth person, who remains invisible until the minute-and-a-half mark. A trick of the light means that the figure of this man, who once again is protesting unpaid wages, gradually T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 197 ]

 

Figure 4.15a-c  Screenshots from a suicide show. The poignant power of the gesture plays out before an impassive audience.  

hoves into view as the video progresses. By the end of the clip, the viewer can see clearly that he is clinging tightly to a metal window frame; but for most of the video, his body is a spectral presence, outlined darkly against an intense white backdrop, like a photographic negative emerging slowly from its chemical bath. More than this, the lighting setup makes him appear suspended in midair because the window frame remains invisible for two long minutes of the video. Poised improbably over the void, his body enacts—as gesture—the precarious state of subsisting somewhere in the no-man’s-land between normative citizenship and its zombie shadow. The video ends after a group of eight police officers and firefighters drag the man violently from the window ledge and into detention, thus making him hostage to the very legal system his protest was attempting to access.

Not the Few but the Many In the most literal of senses, this video also reveals the extent to which the suicide show is a decisive example of what I term the fractious form in precarious China. The fractious form refers to a cultural practice that emerges from the experience of the cliff edge as a transversal phenomenon [ 198 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

from which few are confidently and comfortably exempt. China, as is well known, is a society in which a large minority of the population lives either in a zone close enough to the steep drop or in the abyss already. That minority—the underclass—is so vast as to constitute a nation within the nation, and so ubiquitous as to be unmissable, even as many of their social “others” may try hard not to see them. Their existence turns precarity into an atmospheric condition that seeps into the thoughts and fears of the imminently precarious, the partially precarious, the formerly precarious, the might one-day-be-precarious, the never-want-to-be-precarious. Indeed, despite the mechanisms of social segregation so prevalent in China today, the dividing lines between those who exist in zombie citizenship and their supposed social others are in practice blurred and all too crossable. This permeable state epitomizes the state of exception, the zone of expulsion, the void below: the argument made with increasing force by Agamben, Saskia Sassen, and others that dispossession should be understood, not as the exceptional plight of the few but as an increasingly exemplary state that either describes or augurs the fate of the many. Within this context, it makes little sense to categorize a politico-cultural form such as the suicide show as an exclusively underclass practice. Rather, it is a form that emerges and plays out precisely at the tense interface between different social groups. Indeed, practices such as these are far more socially “distributed” than previous scholarship has allowed: as precarious practices, practices about precarity, they are born not of discrete and isolatable class interests but emerge, as forms, from the generative clash between those interests—as we see all too vividly when the emergency services manhandle protestors from the cliff edge and haul them off into detention. In one sense, of course, these shows dramatize the violence of cross-class strife: they render harmonious society as farce. They are reports from the trenches of what Pun and Lu call the “culture of violence” among China’s aggrieved construction workers, whose lives are “deeply affected by quarrels, individual and collective fighting, attempts to damage buildings, bodily abuse and even suicidal behaviors.”79 To an extent, therefore, the shows take their place alongside the forms of cultural protest found on the livestreaming app Kuaishou (discussed in detail in chapter 5) in recent years. Wage grievances among construction workers have acted as a significant creative impetus on the app80 in the form of on-the-spot reporting, songs, even staged skits of wish-fulfillment in which petitioners snubbed by subcontractors manage to secure respect and payment from the big boss.81 T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 199 ]

But in their intensified staging of social friction—and real-time violence— suicide shows also go further than the representational practices found on Kuaishou because these contentious performances reveal how charged encounters between different class actors have the potential to give all present an apprehension of exile as a looming threat within a society that has tried to eliminate class as a category of political analysis while simultaneously enforcing caste as a core mode of governance. As they stage a violently intimate face-to-face across the divide—between protestors and police, between protestors and their real-time or online audiences—suicide shows deploy the language of gesture to perform the meaning of zombie citizenship in the theater of the everyday.These intense encounters are the crucible for suicide shows as a fractious form, as a cultural expression that finds its birth not in commonality as consensus but in the gathering awareness that what people share is their imminent vulnerability to outcast status, to the logic of sacrifice that decrees some lives must be ransomed or forfeited for the “greater good” if the nation’s fortunes are to rise. In large part, this happens because the suicidal protestor changes his class status—if only briefly—when he climbs up to the rooftop. Quite paradoxically, the precariousness of his stance there, its sheer photogenic visibility, transforms him from a zombie citizen into a somebody who commands attention: from film crews, newscasters, passersby, his own miscreant employers. As one construction site manager puts it: “you may not have heard this: migrant workers are the God now; you’ve got to keep them happy. Otherwise, they can get into all sorts of stuff, including mounting the crane, tall buildings, blocking the management office, or obstructing public traffic, and contacting the media.”82 This comment is partly flippant, of course; but it nonetheless recognizes that the act of protest is also an assertion of social mobility and a rejection of assigned class status. And as it pushes and pulls at the rigidity of rank, the suicide show simultaneously draws its observers into a state of cognizance about how potentially close at hand the protestor on the rooftop without rights is to the person watching online or down on the street. The suicide show suggests, in short, that if class lines can be crossed in one direction they are highly permeable the other way too: the rooftop and the street below—the metaphoric zones of endangerment and social shelteredness, respectively—can be traversed in an instant. In a sense, this brings things back around to Chen Chenchen and his almost inexplicably cruel installation The Mercy of Not Killing. Although Chen argues that “the situation of the cliffhanger is a highly abstract and artistic one: a kind [ 200 ]  T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

of focused ritual takes place on top of that beacon,” it is tempting, in light of frequent suicide shows, to put a different interpretive gloss on his statement. Chen’s installation, in which construction workers are choreographed into extreme jeopardy by an avant-garde artist, essentially reinstates the kind of sealed and bordered social world that the suicide show strives to undo. It makes the cliff edge other people’s problem precisely at a time when wage protestors in China are creating an aesthetics of protest that reveals, quite to the contrary, that social vertigo—a sense of being suspended just above the void—is the coming state, not for the few but for the many.

T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 201 ]

CHA P T E R V

The Microcelebrities

“Abjection is above all ambiguity. Because, while releasing a hold, it does not radically cut off the subject from what threatens it—on the contrary, abjection acknowledges it to be in perpetual danger.” — J U LI A KRI STE VA, POW ER S OF H OR ROR : AN ESSAY O N ABJ ECTION

I

n 2019, a netizen called “Daoshi laoba” 岛市老八 posted a sequence of short videos on Kuaishou 快手, a video-sharing and livestreaming mobile app with a user base strongly rooted in China’s rural areas and lower-tier cities. Dubbed “Toilet Wars,” the video series is a study in fullthrottle, sensationalist abjection. In the first video of the set, grainy lowres footage shows Laoba (as he is known for short) squatting in a filthy latrine walled with corrugated metal sheets. Shouting “there’s nothing I won’t do” to the camera, followed by his catchphrase “Aoligei”奥利给— popular internet slang meaning “Come on, you can do it”—he digs his hand into the latrine, pulls out a lump of excrement, and crams it into his mouth before gagging violently (figure 5.1). Laoba’s scatological set pieces were an instant hit online: so much so, in fact, that they soon came to the attention of the cyber censors despite his efforts to conceal the title of the series by creatively scrambling the Chinese characters for “toilet.”1 Laoba was promptly forced off Kuaishou2 and other platforms, although several “best of ” moments still linger on YouTube.3 A year earlier, in 2018, the entire Kuaishou platform had been subjected to a deep cleanse,4 with many of its more outlandish streamers banned and thousands of outré videos deleted:5 unmarried pregnant teenagers baring their bellies; farmers setting off firecrackers on their genitals; obscene vignettes featuring farmyard animals; middle-aged women devouring meal worms, live eels, and light bulbs. [ 202 ]

Figure 5.1 Laoba, Toilet Wars: fecal entertainment, or redefining the shit show.

Kuaishou, whose earthy riffs on daily life in the backwoods had steadily won millions of users and generated a phenomenal revenue stream since its launch in 2012, was forced to spruce itself up and for the most part now showcases content celebrating all that is wholesome about the Chinese countryside. Given this shift, it was inevitable that Laoba and his scurrilous skits would be expunged from the app. But in many ways, Laoba’s videos are simply extreme iterations of a scatological impulse that has run riot in contemporary Chinese cultural practice for quite some time, and in various forms. Chinese writers Yu Hua 余华 and Han Dong 韩东, for example, have composed gross-out death scenes in fetid latrines—black holes of shit into which protagonists are suctioned by the tragicomic pull of thanatos.6 Artist Liu Wei 刘韡, meanwhile, created a two-meter-long mixed-media fecal monument in 2004 titled Indigestion II (消化不良二), whose preposterous size ramped up the sense of repulsion (figure 5.2). In 2010, Zhu Cheng 朱成 fashioned a life-size Venus de Milo from countless kilos of panda dung, generating what he called “an internal conflict between beauty and waste that makes for a magical work of art.”7 Also striking is a sixty-minute-long site-specific performance from 1994 by the conceptual artist Zhang Huan titled 12 Square Meters (12 平方米). On a T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 203 ]

Figure 5.2  Liu Wei, Indigestion II: excremental monumentality. Reproduced with permission from Liu Wei.

sweltering June day, Zhang made his way to a public toilet five blocks from his studio in Beijing, where he stripped off his clothes and slathered his body in fish oil and honey. He then sat on the floor of the rancid public latrine during the thirty-eight-degree heat of summer, and stayed there motionless as flies and mosquitoes swarmed all over his body (figure 5.3). Eventually, Zhang emerged slowly from the stall and walked into a nearby pond, step-by-step, until his body was fully submerged and the flies that had flocked to his filthy skin floated on the surface of the water. In one account of the piece, Zhang suggested that this work was a hymn to the diurnal rhythms of life—rather like the content on Kuaishou, albeit more soberly executed: “the creative inspiration for my work comes from the most ordinary, easily overlooked aspects of life . . . we eat, work, rest and shit everyday—the banal aspects of quotidian existence that allow us to observe the most essential aspects of humanity.”8 Elsewhere, though, he put forward a different reading: “I lived and worked in a tiny studio, five blocks from that toilet. Nobody had their own—everyone had to use the same one. It was so dirty and there were so many flies. For that performance I only thought of how to forget real life—to leave my body and transcend it.”9 These motifs of stoicism, transcendence, and moral challenge emerge quite frequently in interviews with and commentaries on the avantgarde artists from China who use feces as a material substrate, flaunt their [ 204 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

Figure 5.3  Zhang Huan, 12 Square Meters: grim dignity. Reproduced with permission from Zhang Huan Studio.

nakedness, engage in exhibitionist self-harm, deploy bestial shock tactics, or put on revolting culinary displays—artists who have staged performances arguably in poor taste but often acclaimed that are structurally more or less identical to those puritanically purged from the servers of Kuaishou since 2018.10 If anything, China’s avant-garde artists have pushed the envelope further than their counterparts on Kuaishou: the egregious nudity in several works by the Gao Brothers; He Yunchang’s repeated acts of aesthetic self-mutilation, from suspending his bleeding body over a rushing river to excising his own rib and turning it into a necklace; Zhang Huan’s sculpture of a taxidermic donkey rutting with a skyscraper (figure 5.4); and Zhu Yu’s 朱昱 baby-eating cannibalistic performances. For sure, some of these artists have fallen foul of the authorities in China from time to time,11 just as the Kuaishou performers did. But these artists have continued to practice, and to produce provocative work, mostly unimpeded by censorious pressures (although they, too, will doubtless have their room for maneuver constrained as strictures continue to tighten in the Xi era). My purpose in highlighting this contrast is not simply to note that some cultural producers are permitted to be more abject than others. Certainly, the content on Kuaishou pre2018 could well be viewed as China’s millennial shock art refracted through the distorting mirror of social class. And for that reason, the discipline meted out to the microcelebrities and aspirants of China’s livestreaming apps demonstrates even more radically than the suicide shows I discussed in chapter 4 that access to iconoclastic cultural expression is rigidly “classed.” Abjection, it would seem, is acceptable when it is delivered with an avant-garde spin that aspires to aesthetic transcendence—that courts degradation in order to rise above it. It is only when abjection is practiced in the raw by members of the actual underclass that punitive measures are rolled out. But perhaps what is most at issue here is the question of why netizens from some of China’s most excluded and precarious places would choose— in a society that sutures citizenship rights so ruthlessly to the rhetoric of “human quality” (suzhi)—to use displays of abjection as a central mode of self-presentation in the first place. Human quality is the decisive leitmotif of China’s contemporary moral economy. It both emblematizes and enforces the “power of the state to recognize only bodies of value as worthy of full political citizenship.”12 As the elusive behavioral line that separates the citizenly from the not, it has long pulled like a lodestar for those who face or fear expulsion. As Tamara Jacka noted in 2009, “male and female rural migrant workers in all trades respond to urbanites’ view of them as ‘low [ 206 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

Figure 5.4  Zhang Huan, Donkey, 2005: acceptable bestiality. Reproduced with permission from Zhang Huan Studio.

suzhi’ by striving to improve themselves through night classes, by modifying their dress, behavior, and speech, and by throwing the ‘low-suzhi’ epithet back at urbanites.”13 Indeed, a substantial academic literature now exists on the projects of self-betterment disadvantaged people in China undertake to stave off the threat of zombie citizenship or to scrabble out of its grasp.14 What does it mean, then, when those who are most commonly derogated for the lack or lowness of their human quality make a full pivot from apologetic striving to an unabashed embrace of their so-called social untouchability? What does this move reveal about the prickly contours of social friction at a time when the fear of expulsion—the Xinjian evictions after the Daxing fire of 2017 coincided precisely with Kuaishou’s surging success—is on the rise? In this chapter, I explore the Kuaishou app and what it reveals about the relationship between expulsion, zombie citizenship, “bad taste,” class antagonism, and precarity in contemporary China. I begin with a brief history of the app, outlining its user base among the socially and culturally excluded and charting its swift rise as a purveyor of carnivalesque content. Then I dig deeper into the core question of why, precisely, this ribald content proved so mesmerizing, focusing throughout on Kuaishou as a set of vernacular visual artifacts rather than taking the mostly ethnographic approach that has dominated research into the app so far. From Kuaishou’s launch, it cultivated a style or mood that has come to be known as tuwei 土味: a portmanteau, almost untranslatable term (I use it in transliterated form here) signifying all things lowbrow, uncool, folksy, coarse, crude, bawdy, awkward, inept, basic, hometown, homespun, and homemade—the antithesis, in short, of upmarket and hygienic human quality. I sketch the origins of the tuwei subculture before going on to explore how the short videos of Kuaishou creative Foodie Fengjie (Chihuo fengjie 吃货凤姐) riff on its trademark low human quality traits: in particular, the apparent lack of self-consciousness— the brazen bumpkin persona—that makes tuwei such compulsive viewing for its audiences. I argue, however, that incessant public messaging about the dos and don’ts of so-called human quality in contemporary China makes it well-nigh implausible that Kuaishou performers are in any way obtuse or unaware of how they come across. On the contrary, the tuwei style that has dominated Kuaishou arguably buzzes with intent. It enables a potentially radical reclamation of underclass identities at the same time as it allows successful performers to monetize precisely those attributes that commonly make them targets of classist scorn and exclude them from normative routes [ 208 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

to success in neoliberal China. All this makes the triumph of tuwei counterintuitive, or at the very least against the normative social media grain, which typically leans toward a much more unctuous mode of people pleasing. Unsurprisingly, Kuaishou has proved to be socially radioactive. At the same time as it has spurred a collective sense of selfhood among those cast out and left behind, the app’s festival of vulgarity has driven many further up the social ladder into hot-headed acts of digital shaming, even vigilantism. Users across different classes have devoured Kuaishou,15 and the company itself stated publicly in 2018 that its users also come from all walks of life, no doubt with the aim of defusing social tension.16 Rather than fostering cofeeling and bridging social chasms, however, this shared spectatorship has in many ways caused hostilities to flare and caste lines to calcify. I explore this animosity by looking at some of the vitriolic commentary about Kuaishou and similar sites that saturates threads on social media sites with a discernibly middle-class orientation, such as Zhihu 知乎. The tuwei style has even triggered dedicated hater shows on video-sharing sites, helmed by cool cultural buffs who anatomize the supposedly poor taste and crass manners of their social others. These responses demonstrate that it is laughable to suggest that contemporary China has transcended the politics of class. Kuaishou, with its flair for all things abject, has lifted the hood on rampant ugly feelings among those who identify as middle-class and who recognize in livestreaming sites and their repudiation of all politesse a direct threat to the human quality chain of social command. Kuaishou has also proved unsettling because its gut-wrenching skits dissolve barriers between people as much as they reinforce them. We are all, at base, abject beings—and Kuaishou’s videos stir visceral physical reactions that subconsciously remind viewers of that awkward truth. In a society structured around the cliff edge, to maintain a sense of separateness, however fragile or spurious, from those already cast down below is a vital safety mechanism that Kuaishou’s lower-body revelry has the power to immobilize or disable. As such, its visual language offers an idiom for the reality that class positions in precarious China, as elsewhere, are fluid and permeable. To demonstrate this point by inverse example, I take an extended look at a recent documentary that explores some of the most marginalized creators at work in China’s vast livestreaming industry: Zhu Shengze’s 朱声仄 Present.Perfect (Wanmei xianzai shi 完美现在时, 2019). This found footage documentary is an evocative piece of cinema. Whittled down from hundreds of hours of livestreaming feed, the film puts together increasingly T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 209 ]

poignant, sometimes agonizing moments from the chat rooms of people on the edge in contemporary China: desperate tenants of non-places who use livestreaming as a lifeline to a hoped-for somewhere. But for all its slowburn emotional charge, the documentary also applies a delicate patina to the rough tuwei edges of its outcast leads. It presents their abjection as pain rather than riotous lower-body pleasure, with the aim of rousing cross-class empathy. In doing so, it also noticeably deactivates the social friction that has bristled on sites such as Kuaishou from the outset. In this sense, despite its status as a potentially controversial piece of independent filmmaking, the documentary finds itself oddly aligned with the official stance on Kuaishou, which is overtly set on defusing class tension in the era of the harmonious society. This, of course, is why Kuaishou found itself so squarely in the crosshairs of the censors by 2018, and their response (as noted earlier) was to sanitize the site and steer it forcibly toward clean-cut, gemütlich, socially soothing content. Ultimately the platform’s shifting fortunes reveal the extent to which creators on Kuaishou experience precarity across sharply intersecting vectors. They are digital laborers who produce content—sometimes for hours a day—but are in no sense contractually employed; as such, they are co-opted into an “austere and zero-liability peer-to-peer model that leverages software to optimize labor’s flexibility, scalability, tractability, and its fragmentation.”17 These precarious pressures beleaguer platform creatives everywhere but are ramped up still further in China by the constraints of censorship. The Chinese state now energetically promotes grassroots entrepreneurialism on the web as part of its so-called Internet+ strategy, designed to transform China’s heavyweight industrial and manufacturing base into an agile networked one in which individuals are exhorted to banish poverty—and any residual sense that the state owes them a living—through innovative e-commerce. But these small-scale impresarios also have to satisfy official “demand for a compliant culture”;18 they must monetize their online offerings while sticking to prudish governmental guidelines. Kuaishou’s Rabelaisian, in-your-face humor is both its unique selling point and its in-built weakness in the app’s postpurification phase. Charting a course between the two is a high-wire act. It’s a form of work that requires its practitioners to hustle: to move improvisationally between Kuaishou and other kinds of work; to shift shrewdly between different kinds of content creation; and to try to make a living without state help while remaining hamstrung by state rules. But even after the state-sanctioned cleanup of 2018, class tension has continued to simmer [ 210 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

on the site, although now it articulates itself much more circumspectly. To parse this friction, I conclude the chapter by exploring a subgenre of short videos that emerged on Kuaishou after 2018 that find inventively sardonic ways to assert the tuwei style despite the state’s intensified surveillance of livestreaming sites. These skits, which parody shibboleths of taste and status in contemporary China, suggest that Kuaishou may for now at least remain a fractious form, a live if cautious force field for the tense politics of class.

The Most Successful App You’ve Never Heard Of In a fitting irony, the social media post that perhaps did the most to establish Kuaishou’s reputation as a breeding ground for poor-taste content opens with the assumption that most netizens in China would actually have no knowledge of the app whatsoever. The post, written in 2016 by a WeChat user called Dr. X, stated breathlessly: “Friends, you’ve probably never heard of Kuaishou software, but I’ll tell you a surprising statistic: this app is the fourth most popular mobile application in China  .  .  . with more than 10 million daily users.”19 As Kevin Ziyu Liu notes, Dr X’s post hit nearly two million views before it was taken down by the censors barely twentyfour hours after being published,20 although it continued to spark considerable media chatter.21 Quite probably, this swift deletion was prompted by the next sentence of the post, which reads: “When you open this mysterious software, you’ll certainly wonder why this vulgar, crude, coarse app is China’s number one video app. Well, it’s because its users hail from the vast rural population.”22 But rather than this brazen antirural prejudice, it is Dr. X’s astonishment that Kuaishou existed at all, let alone so successfully, that is even more telling here. The notion of Kuaishou as a sleeper success, an app that had crept up to extraordinary numbers without anyone noticing, was predicated on the unnoticeability—the lack of consequence—of its users. These users were, needless to say, keenly aware of Kuaishou. But the mainstream commentariat was essentially unaware of them and so was startled to discover that these denizens of nowhere had propelled the platform to such speedy success. Dr. X was, of course, correct in stating that Kuaishou has millions of users in the countryside, although it would have been more accurate to add that China’s third- and fourth-tier cities also constitute a core base for the app, as well as rural migrants living and working in China’s bigger conurbations.23 T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 211 ]

Significantly, the former two locales are defined by experiences of exclusion and abandonment. Rural China has suffered a vertiginous decline during the postreform era, in large part because China’s urbanization has been so giddy, energized, and photogenic that it has almost eclipsed the countryside from view. Perhaps the most extreme instance of this is the phenomenon Miriam Driessen calls “rural voids” (see the introduction). These are so-called empty-heart villages (kongxincun 空心村) or empty-shell villages (kongkecun 空壳村), many of whose inhabitants have left for the cities; the remaining settlement is then designated as “nonviable or ‘void’ by the government and also by (their) own residents.”24 As Driessen puts it, “the Chinese countryside is seen as being bereaved of a telos:” not just emptied out, but also “ineffective” and “useless,” slumped in entropy, waste, and surplusness.25 Even relatively vibrant pockets of the countryside still suffer from a rooted bias against rurality, a prejudice that sees rural space not so much as an other to the city on an extended continuum of value but as a nowhere zone off the scale entirely, akin to Gertrude Stein’s “no there there.” Yet unlike the migrant community in Xinjian, who were actively ejected from Beijing in large part because of their visibility—their status as matter out of place within the increasingly gentrified precincts of the capital—the condition of exile for many rural people in China connotes the struggle to register meaningfully on the national radar at all. Despite more recent efforts at rural rehabilitation, the pervasive sense remains that this group is not just expelled from the future but also exiled in the past. Superficially, at least, this is a worse fate than that experienced by the residents of China’s lower-tier cities, who have at least gained a perch, however low, on the stratified urban hierarchy. This pyramidal pecking order, known as the China city tier system (Zhongguo chengshi dengjizhi 中国城 市等级制), assigns hyperprivileged megalopolis status to only four giant conurbations: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen (known colloquially as “Bei-Shang-Guang-Shen,” 北上广深). Thereafter, the structure slides downward through further tiers, their precise number and ranking not officially quantified, even though the brand power of the labeling system waxes strong as a core metric for assessing the size, wealth, status, mores, capacity, and potential of different urbanized locales. The mythology of the tier system is such that netizens joke on social media platforms about living in “eighteenth-tier cities,” places big enough to be called urban but effectively lacking the attributes that would turn such spaces into places.26 As with swathes of rural China, lower-tier cities have to fight to be seen. [ 212 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

And as such, they demonstrate, once again, that banishment is a protean fate, one that can be inflicted through gridlock, immobility, and stasis as much as through violent uprooting. But in some ways, their physical anonymity—the lack of monuments and museums, the interchangeability of shop fronts and building sites—makes cities at the bottom of the pile even more displaced, still more denuded of identifiers, than the countryside. This is Paul Kendall’s point when he asks, “What exactly does a small city have to do in order to get noticed?”27 Each of the “Bei-Shang-GuangShen” quartet has spawned specific academic subfields—and parts of rural China are now being targeted for revival—but cities further down the food chain “continue to receive minimal attention, despite their own efforts and despite academic awareness of the need to look beyond ‘paradigmatic cases’ of the urban form.”28 Crucially for Kuaishou, this minimal visibility of lower-tier cities has a palpably cultural dimension. Major news media and entertainment industries are based in “Bei-Shang-Guang-Shen”; they narrate urban lifestyles and are tailored to urban tastes. All of the ten highest-grossing Chinese films of 2018, for example, were set in top-flight metropolitan areas.29 Some notable exceptions can be found in independent film: the work of Hu Bo 胡波 and Jia Zhangke, for example, has memorably visualized the lower-tier or county-level city (xiancheng 县城). Wang Xiaodong 王笑冬 describes the extended exposition of this latter space in Jia’s early films as follows: These are the objective spatial characteristics of the county-level town: the rubble and ruins of demolition amid utterly featureless streets and buildings, desolate coalpits and highways, stretches of wasteland and modern dance performances on car roofs, local opera and disco dancing, indolent pool halls, video rooms, and run-down, deserted train stations; everywhere the sound of people selling lottery tickets, indifferent, mechanical, yet provoking, the iconic voice of restless times . . . lonely passersby, dust floating in the air, the odor of food or other nameless smells—from both visual and auditory perspectives, and in three-dimensional and intersecting ways, Jia Zhangke has created the relics of a hometown which has never had any ancient monuments.30 In interviews, Jia has spoken of how he wishes to break the silence of suppressed realities in China, “to show the ‘facial expressions’ of this ‘giant economic entity’—often by making audible and visible what is muffled or T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 213 ]

blurred, or forgotten altogether.”31 Jia, and others, certainly achieve this. Theirs, however, is a mostly dreary, cheerless realism. It pulls the lower-tier city and its people onto the radar, but what becomes visible does not really challenge the rigid stratification of urban value. These films give voice to those who languish in zombie citizenship precisely in their identity as the cast down and the cast out. The lower-tier city is brought to the screen in these films, but not as any crucible for vibrant culture. To an extent, the big-city cultural bias so prevalent in China today is of a piece with metropolitan favoritism everywhere. This is the rhetoric that only cities can be creative—indeed, that only the bohemian quarters of certain elite cities are truly artistic; that suburbia plays host to tepid or retrograde aesthetic forms; that “crap towns” are cultural dead zones; and that “the most uncreative class . . . seems to be the abject working class.”32 But insofar as China’s city tier system entrenches a rigidly gradated scale of value around urban space, these fixed ideas take on extra negative freight. And it is within and against this amplified prejudicial context that Kuaishou launched itself like a hand grenade. As Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet observe, the app has enabled “diverse, often marginalized, Chinese living outside the urban centers of the country to become ‘unlikely’ creative workers.”33 In many ways defying the established view that “lower income groups . . . lack physical, motivational, skills, and usage access to new media,”34 netizens in rural China and lower-tier cities have capitalized on nearly blanket levels of smartphone penetration, cheap internet data, and the rollout of high-speed networks to make substantial inroads across several key platforms. Much the same is true of the rural migrant workers in big cities, whose online creativity is overlooked because these groups “are often taken as being confined to the factory . . . or engaged in delivery work for digital platforms.”35 Livestreaming and short-video apps lie at the heart of this power grab. Already by the end of 2017, 353 million users in China were regularly accessing livestreamed content over as many as one hundred different platforms— and spending over an hour a day doing so.36 With numbers like this, China has emerged as the global livestreaming hub since 2016, and Kuaishou established itself quickly as an early market leader.37 By 2017, it had won more than five hundred million registered users,38 predominantly from third-tier cities or rural areas. Significantly, Kuaishou and its fellow apps dangle not simply nonstop entertainment to users but also seductive economic promise to would-be creatives who yearn to become internet stars (wanghong 网红). Kuaishou’s current revenue model works via a combination of in-app [ 214 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

advertising and a more recent strategy for monetizing online content: virtual gifting.39 In this model, the app is free to access, but users can choose to reward favorite livestreamers with cash presents represented by visual icons: stars, cars, love hearts, and so on. Reliable data on who makes precisely how much on Kuaishou is, perhaps unsurprisingly, hard to come by. But for a small but prominent minority, performing on the app can be life-changingly lucrative. A notable early example is a streamer called Liu Mama, profiled in the New Yorker, whose bawdy limericks and earthy ways won her fourteen million followers and a monthly income of a million yuan in what the paper calls a “virtual gold rush.”40 The success of Liu Mama and other streamers tantalizes other aspirants, whose life chances outside cyberspace are often bleak and cheerless. As Zhai Wenting and Shi Xiaobing note, Kuaishou’s users are mostly young (74 percent are under twenty-four years old); poorly paid (about 70 percent earn less than 3,000 yuan a month); not well-educated (87.6 percent have not attended university); noncosmopolitan (only 4.8 percent live in Bei-Shang-Guang-Shen); and often tenuously employed (only 4.2 percent are white-collar workers).41 This blend of a vast user base mired in no-hope places and deprived of diversions, and an equally vast pool of potential creatives willing to divert others in the hope of some escape themselves, created the perfect conditions for a social media explosion.

Grossing Out, Cashing In The major fuel for this explosion has been the particular brand of vernacular creativity that Kuaishou by no means patented but that quickly became its hallmark: the tuwei style. Its origins are diverse. Some lie in rural folk culture, particularly in northeast China where slapstick performance styles such as errenzhuan 二人转 constitute an important genealogical thread for Kuaishou’s short videos and livestreams.42 Spreading the net wider, tuwei also shares some space with the worldwide “demotic turn” in cultural production: the notion that everyday life, and the ordinariness of the people who inhabit it, are a deep and rich fount of creativity.43 This is Michel De Certeau’s argument when he writes that “a polymorphous carnival infiltrates everywhere, a celebration both in the streets and in the homes for those who are unblinded by the aristocratic and museological model of durable production . . . housing, clothing, housework, cooking . . . are also the ground on which creation everywhere blossoms.”44 As a subculture that T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 215 ]

took flight on the wings of the digital, tuwei can also trace links to what Nick Douglas has called “Internet Ugly.” This is the notion that online spaces “give outsized attention to the amateurish, the accidental, and the surprise hit”;45 they consistently nurture the kind of willful ugliness that is typically bleached from traditional media spaces. Like internet ugly, tuwei works to “normalize imperfection, counteracting the effect of magazines, TV shows, and corporate websites that use technical tools to build an unattainable simulacrum of the world.”46 Whatever its antecedents, tuwei needs to be grasped, and theorized, as a crucial key word in the study of contemporary Chinese culture, arguably as important since the mid-2010s as shanzhai 山寨, or the counterfeit subculture, was for the previous decade.47 This is because, despite its rural associations, tuwei culture is not precisely coterminous with the culture of the countryside. As Mei Danying 梅聃颖 notes, it is rather a “discursive expression which comes from the bottom of society (diceng 底层)” and articulates itself vibrantly on the internet.48 At a time when both theories of precarity—not to mention theory as an academic practice itself—still remain quite stubbornly Euro-American in orientation, tuwei represents an opportunity to globalize understandings of how underclass identity, cultural production, and digital labor intersect in a precarious world. But as Chinese commentators have noted, there is still very little scholarship on tuwei culture even in China itself, let alone more broadly.49 As should already be apparent, tuwei has something of a split personality. It is both homely and crude, organic and grubby. It captures noncosmopolitan space as both pastoral idyll and crass hinterland, and it remains divided unto itself even as it is consistently dislocated from prestige and privilege. In Kuaishou’s early days, though, it was the crude and grubby side of tuwei that reigned as creatives from the countryside and lower-tier cities stamped the site with a sensationalist imprint. According to Zheng Zhuoran 郑卓然, this tuwei anti-aesthetic breaks down into four more specific features: a sense of coarseness (cucaogan 粗糙感) in both content and technological execution; the prevalence of regional accents; the frequent use of awkward slogans and signature moves; and, perhaps most crucial, an apparent lack of awareness on the part of the performers of just how tuwei they are.50 As Zheng describes it, some performers convey this feel by performing absurd or pointless material in an earnest deadpan fashion, securing laughs from the gap between content and form. Other Kuaishou creatives, however, are apparently much less knowing. They “feel genuinely good about themselves” and their [ 216 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

talents,51 and the tuwei frisson sparked by their performances stems from the disjuncture between this cheerily positive self-perception and the hard reality of low human quality and social unacceptability. A classic case of the latter, according to Zheng, are the videos of Foodie Fengjie, one of Kuaishou’s standout early stars. Foodie Fengjie is an extreme eater—the performer mentioned at the beginning of this chapter who consumes meal worms, live eels, and light bulbs for the camera—and her material seemingly exemplifies each of tuwei’s signature traits. In one fuzzy, low-tech clip, Foodie Fengjie sits with her legs akimbo on a sofa, a pot of instant noodles positioned on the table in front of her.52 She picks up no fewer than five tubs of wasabi, which she squirts into the pot with a huge grin on her face, stirring furiously. Then she braces herself and starts shoveling noodles into her mouth at speed, visibly struggling as the pungent horseradish paste assails her throat and nostrils. Choking, coughing, and belching, she violates the normative gender protocols for social media presence in China, which decree that female performers should be “living Barbies”: young, cute, surgically enhanced (figure 5.5). Finally, she shouts out the corny catchphrase “Shuangji liuliuliu” 双击溜溜溜—established Kuaishou slang for “Like my videos” and “awesome”—in heavily accented Mandarin, complete with a cheesy hand gesture. Throughout the video, she maintains a relentlessly upbeat tone and demeanor, even in the midst of self-induced discomfort and awkwardness, as if fully convinced of the pleasure and value of her performance. Another video, in which Foodie Fengjie eats a spiral light bulb, ramps up the performative intensity (figure 5.6). Scrunching up her face tightly, she bites into the frosted glass of the bulb and manages to chew through half of it in a single five-second bout. The sound of crunching can be heard loudly on the soundtrack while Foodie Fengjie gnaws exaggeratedly on glass fragments—opening her mouth to prove that she is genuinely chewing before swallowing them down. Jagged splinters fall from her lips onto the table in front of her, even as she makes satisfied grunts and smiles gamely. According to Sohu, the light bulb video alone garnered more than 2.7 million views.53 These two videos, in common with others that show Foodie Fengjie munching a cactus or stuffing her mouth and nostrils with lit cigarettes, zero in on the risk and pain of extreme eating, although in a performative mode rather different from the bingeing displays (mukbang), pioneered c. 2010 in South Korea that are now globally ubiquitous on video-sharing platforms. Foodie Fengjie’s videos engender disgust—eating a live goldfish T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 217 ]

  bearing it while swallowing all things Figures 5.5 and 5.6  Foodie Fengjie: grinning and inappropriate.

or a huge plate of wriggling meal worms—and transmit a cognate message, this time fusing physical jeopardy with nausea rather than agony or discomfort. Certainly, gorging repeatedly on five-thousand-calorie meals is a form of bodily endangerment, as some practitioners of mukbang have discovered to their cost. Yet Foodie Fengjie’s shows, in their focus on inedible, even toxic matter overtly work the hinge between abjection, underclass identity, and eating-as-performance. Hard information about Foodie Fengjie in real life is not plentiful online. Most accounts simply state that she is a retired middle-aged woman living in Handan City, Hebei province.54 Yet the persona she cultivates online is robustly tuwei in all its dimensions. In particular, her performances—like those of Laoba—flirt subversively with the idea that extreme eating for the socially marginalized citizens who congregate on Kuaishou becomes something more punitive and gut-wrenching, even as the entertainer maintains a jovial, fun-loving façade throughout. For members of the underclass to have their moment in the sun, they must proudly perform darker, more abject acts. They need to own, if not actively flaunt, their lack of human quality. Indeed, perhaps the most telling aspect of the video and its tuwei exposition is Foodie Fengjie’s shameless failure to observe social norms and strictures. So-called high human quality, after all, cultivates polish by eschewing bodily functions and sticking to [ 218 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

prescriptive gender norms; it strives for etiquette rather than mouthing hackneyed catchphrases; it enunciates itself in standard Mandarin; it is studiously self-conscious. Seen in this light, Foodie Fengjie’s videos are a behavioral horror show because they display the intractability—the sheer dogged unteachability—of the rural subject. How is it possible, after all the state resources that have been funneled into raising the human quality of the Chinese countryside, that Foodie Fengjie could be so socially unaware as to take pride in her crass videos? Yet the status of human quality as an entrenched and dogmatic behavioral code, drummed into rural people from at least primary school onward, makes this lack of self-awareness close to a cognitive impossibility. To put this another way, Foodie Fengjie’s videos are less the nadir of low human quality than the apotheosis of anti-suzhi. To evaluate taste, to place it on a qualitative and implicitly moral spectrum, can be an unpleasant, invidious project. Many contemporary social settings, even as they continue to staple taste to class in micro ways, self-consciously try to enable the conditions in which “good” and “bad” taste can remain shifting, open categories, and in which making value judgments is itself the truly bad-taste choice. In China, however, the approximate constituents of good and bad taste have been officially enshrined in the welter of state discourses that circulate around human quality—how to speak, how to dress, how to walk through a door correctly55—and verdicts on social others that might remain sub rosa elsewhere can in practice be voiced more openly. Indeed, a substantial body of scholarship exists not simply on human quality itself but also on the ways it is instrumentalized—weaponized—by the state and more powerful social actors as a means of sorting and discrimination.56 In this context, it is hard to believe that Foodie Fengjie’s lack of self-awareness, perhaps the most crucial aspect of her tuwei identity, can be anything other than performative. There is, in other words, a paradox at the heart of the tuwei vogue. The unique selling point of this performative mode is supposedly the notion of the rural dope who fails to understand how irredeemably uncool she is and whose entertainment value derives directly from that cognitive deficit. But since the rigid schooling around human quality means that this lack of selfawareness can only really be a posture, we have to dig deeper to grasp why the tuwei style really works for both performers and audiences. Some have argued, quite plausibly, that the tuwei style panders pragmatically to the politics of class in contemporary China: understanding full well that crassness in others is show-stopping and money-making, Foodie T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 219 ]

Fengjie acts it out. Or, as Haoran Wu notes, “some tuwei videos are considered purposefully made to meet audiences’ sense of superiority through the video’s own ‘badness.’ ”57 But this explanation only addresses one cohort of spectators: those who watch from a position of perceived class difference. For those who consume Kuaishou in-class and from the margins, the crux of tuwei’s appeal may lie at the intersection between low human quality and a tentative awareness of political self. Kuaishou is charismatic in significant part because, in its early days at least, it afforded a space in which abject or disdained identities could be openly owned and thus subversively redeemed. Indeed, the site pre-2018 enabled nothing less than blatant civic disobedience from the ranks of China’s decitizenized people: multiple acts of behavioral insurrection that destabilized the code of conduct that helps to keep de facto social apartheid in place. As a sociopolitical move, this was several steps beyond what Jacka calls “throwing the ‘low-suzhi’ epithet back at urbanites.” It provided the left-behind with a platform from which to suggest their emancipation from the very notion of low suzhi as shame— indeed, from the idea that human quality should matter at all. Previous scholarship on Kuaishou has explored this idea that the app fosters underclass consciousness principally through investigating so-called hanmai 喊麥 (literally, shouting into a microphone), a form of rap that flourished briefly on several livestreaming platforms after 2015.58 According to Jiaxi Hou, “hanmai creators usually incorporate denunciations toward other social groups in their lyrics”—in particular wealthy elites and government officials—and their raps have a plaintively emotional tone, articulating the “anger, yearning and desperation” of the terminally disadvantaged.59 As a group, these rappers and their fans are “simultaneously off-grid in relation to (traditional) work but also highly connected to (ICT) networks of solidarity.”60 But in many ways, creators such as Foodie Fengjie and Laoba are more seditious. By reveling in their underclass identity, they rob the low human quality label of its sting and reanimate the zombie citizen persona with unruly, insurgent energies. These performers model other ways of understanding abjection, showing that it harbors its own kind of charismatic power—what Mel Y. Chan describes as “a clashing embodiment of dignity as well as of shame.”61 Indeed, by ingesting feces—a waste product that metaphorizes his own status as human dross—Laoba arguably performs his class pride in the most radical of ways.62 This bold recuperation of spurned identities from China’s margins has the potential to galvanize class consciousness among the disenfranchised at a time when nearly [ 220 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

90 percent of internet users in China belong to the working class or below, and when access to other forms of social mobilization—joining a union, for example—is severely curtailed.63 Just as important, the tuwei style also creates the conditions under which the punitive regime of human quality can be made to pay out for the system’s so-called losers. In an article on “eccentric, excessive, and aggressive” microcelebrities in South Korea, Hojin Song argues that their “focus on unproductive work, idleness, and momentary entertainment . . . represents their rejection of neoliberal self-care, which has long been a key tool of personal success and prosperity in the context of neoliberal Korea.”64 The socially appropriate impresario self is supposed to “make an enterprise of its life, seek to maximize its own human capital, project itself a future, and . . . shape itself in order to become that which it wishes to be.”65 In this context, to cash in, sometimes substantially, via a cultural entrepreneurialism that trades in excrement is a gauntlet thrown down to the go-getting ethos of China’s Internet+ manifesto. As Song puts it, this is a “new modality,” one that emphasizes “unproductive practices that result in valuable capitalistic outcomes.”66 Kuaishou’s hard-core creators take this logic further. Their performances are often noticeably more “eccentric, excessive, and aggressive,” and their disadvantage plumbs worse depths than that of most livestreamers based in South Korea. In large part, this is because they operate within a social field significantly structured by the protocols of suzhi, a calculus of human value specific to contemporary China that effectively bars many people from rural areas and lower-tier cities from productive civic belonging. Rather than consciously opting out, as do certain Korean livestreamers, Kuaishou creatives have never had much of a chance to opt in. In this context, to monetize low human quality may even constitute a form of social revenge. Certainly, it certainly flouts the standard norms of social media success. To date, studies of microcelebrity and minor internet fame have pivoted on the idea that securing niche online audiences hinges on the creation of a persona who can trade adeptly in “accessibility, availability, presence, authenticity, connectedness and . . . intimacy.”67 These traits are key to what Nancy Baym has called “relational labor,” or “regular, ongoing communication with audiences over time to build social relationships that foster paid work.”68 It is not surprising that this form of labor requires online performers to be agreeable and accommodating. Generally they must play nice to win and keep fans. This is precisely the performance mode seen routinely T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 221 ]

on many other livestreaming platforms in China, which are dominated by attractive young women, whose smooth, slightly sexualized patter is a world away from Foodie Fengjie’s crude delivery. The more extreme Kuaishou performers did indeed engage in “relational labor”: before the crackdown they both won fans and kept them. But they did so not via the mood of amenable ordinariness that so typifies current social media regimes in which the “ubiquity of the celebrity race” is writ large.69 Their ordinariness was instead turbocharged and confrontational. It connected with audiences via performances that turned the unremarkable into vernacular melodrama, thus modeling an alternative model for microcelebrity. Although other exceptions to this rule of thumb certainly exist, Kuaishou is striking (at least before 2018) both for the way in which it has mainstreamed content expressly designed to outrage or nauseate and, just as important, for the implications of this sustained grotesquerie within a society already riven by the hard logic of expulsion and the social tensions it drives.

Love to Hate You Kuaishou has experienced extraordinary popularity since its launch. But it attracts haters as well as fans, and its success has been heavily laced with toxicity for some time now. Ditties and jingles circulate on the Chinese web about the supposed idiocy of Kuaishou users, such as “there are millions of brainless people in this world—half of them are on Kuaishou and half on Douyin” (Shishang naocan qianqianwan, Douyin, Kuaishou geyiban 世上 脑残千千万，抖音快手各一半),70 and other social media platforms post videos that forensically dissect the “awkwardness” (ganga 尴尬) of the tuwei style. Bilibili frequently plays host to this kind of content, and typical sites go by names such as “Tuwei Challenge” (Tuwei tiaozhan 土味挑战), “A Collection of Excruciating Tuwei Moments” (Tuwei ganga heji 土味尴尬合集), and “The Most Excruciating Tuwei Dramas in History” (Shishang zuiga de tuwei gaju 史上最尬的土味尬剧).71 These videos almost form a subgenre of their own and tend to adhere to the following format: a young male host, self-styled as hip and urban, selects some standout recent clips of tuwei content and provides quick-fire follow-up commentary. This punditry is mocking as it picks apart the conduct of the subjects in the videos, some of whom may not even be striving especially for a tuwei feel. In some cases, a split screen effect is used that enables viewers to track the facial expressions [ 222 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

of the host as he monitors the content: cringing, wincing, grimacing, recoiling, lips curling in disdain. Above all, a sense of social superiority rolls off these hosts in waves, both words and body language unapologetic in their classist disdain. Jeering at tuwei, in this sense, may even serve as a convenient cover for the expression of broader social animosities, a socially acceptable cyber blood sport in which often marginalized people are baited without comebacks. Even genuine aficionados of the tuwei style “express shame in their enjoyment, which they feel is ‘deviant,’ and they often hide their attachment to the videos from their friends, who they worry will criticize them (or worse) for their indulgence.”72 Q&A platforms such as Zhihu and Wukong 唔箜 are also riddled with noxious commentary about Kuaishou and its users. The questions seeking answers are blatantly loaded as they hunt down negativity: “Why are there so many low-suzhi people on Kuaishou?” (Weishenme Kuaishou name duo suzhi di de ren? 为什么快手那么多素质低的人?);73 “Are Douyin and Kuaishou vulgar?” (Douyin Kuaishou disu ma? 抖音快手低俗吗?);74 “What’s behind the vulgar content on Kuaishou?” (Kuaishou de yixie disu neirong beihou fanying le shenme? 快手的一些低俗内容背后反映了什么?);75 “Why do you hate the Kuaishou app?” (Ni weishenme taoyan (Kuaishou) zhe ge APP? 你 为什么讨厌(快手)这个APP?);76 “Which microcelebrities with zero suzhi have you seen on Kuaishou?” (Ni zai Kuaishoushang jianguo naxie meiyou suzhi de wanghong? 你在快手上见过哪些没有素质的网红?);77 “Just how disgusting can people on Kuaishou get?” (Kuaishoushang de ren neng exin dao shenme chengdu? 快手上的人能恶心到什么程度?);78 “Why do so many people enjoy watching such contrived, disgusting, vulgar, and meaningless videos on Kuaishou and Douyin?” (Weishenme Kuaishou Douyin shangmian name zuozuo, exin, disu, haowu yiyi de shipin hui you name duo ren kan, weizhi hecai? 为什么快手抖音上面那么做作，恶心，低俗，毫无意义的视频 会有那么多人看，为之喝彩?”);79 “Why doesn’t Kuaishou block vulgar users?” (Weishenme Kuaishou bu fengsha disu de yonghu? 为什么快手不封杀 低俗的用户?”);80 “Why do lots of people look down on Kuaishou users?” (Weishenme hen duo ren kanbuqi wan Kuaishou de ren? 为什么很多人看不起 玩快手的人?).81 These dog-whistle questions typically wend their way to like-minded users, who post replies, even when they take on a more sympathetic tone, that are strikingly predicated on an “us” and “them” stance, on a gaze—or stare—that is condescendingly ethnographic. A particularly triggering question was posted in July 2017, when a Zhihu user asked “Why is Kuaishou so aggravating?” (Weishenme Kuaishou re ren T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 223 ]

xian? 为什么快手惹人嫌?).82 From July 2017 to November 2020, the question received hundreds of responses, which themselves garnered thousands of likes. Scanning the two-hundred-odd comments posted on scores of webpages during this time frame, the same denunciatory epithets flash up again and again: “lack of suzhi” (meiyou suzhi de 没有素质的), “low culture” (disu de wenhua 低俗的文化), “cheesy” (suqi 俗气), “clownish” (xiaochou 小丑), “nauseating” (exin 恶心), “garbage” (laji 垃圾), “embarrassing” (ganga), “polluted” (wuran 污染), “cancerous” (duliu 毒瘤), “boring” (wuliao 无聊), “clichéd” (laotao 老套), “low class “(diceng 底层), “uneducated” (wu xueli 无学历), “boorish” (tu 土), and sartorially challenged. Of these key words, a core cluster stand out with particular prominence: “suzhi” is repeated thirteen times, “class” twenty-five times, and “low” no fewer than sixty-two times. Although some netizens do attempt to defend Kuaishou users from this class-driven cybermugging, even these supportive comments often have a noticeably patronising tone: “Kuaishou is so popular these days because it meets lots of people’s needs, and those people may not be like you and me”; or “Although there is no way I can tolerate vulgar entertainment myself, I do accept other people’s lifestyles.”83 The prevalence of certain key words, and the semantic web they stitch across this lengthy thread, reveal a good deal about the nature of class politics in China today. Most self-evident is that this roiling mass of Zhihu comments shows it is nonsensical to claim that China has kissed goodbye to the class warfare of yesteryear and is now socially harmonious. More interesting, the thread also suggests that this friction has evolved less than we might have expected. In high Maoist times, the theory of class origin (chengfen lun 成分 论) ruled, and it vaunted those who were “born red”: bad blood was hard to overcome even for those who strove their hardest to be politically correct. A different dogma seems to rule today, and it decrees that the self can achieve betterment and mobility if it strives. In practice, however, some strivers are more equal than others, and a strict behavioral rubric defines how betterment should be obtained. Selling farm produce online is fine; making lewd videos featuring farmyard animals is not. Contemporary regimes of social mobility may profess flexibility, but one’s place of birth and the social habitus it often prescribes make movement little easier than it was when the discourse of immovable origins was official diktat. Furthermore, the Zhihu thread shows that policing this regime is not just the business of the state. Jiaxi Hou notes that proto-vigilante practices such as the Zhihu comments “exercise disciplinary force and contribute to the class-stratifying [ 224 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

process,” in which “people are collectively offended by others and respond by collaborative revenge.”84 The Zhihu posters recognize all too clearly that Kuaishou is a threat to China’s suzhi-steeped social fabric, and so some of the more socially advantaged resort to suzhi-based semantic overload in an attempt to keep that fabric intact. It is for this reason that vigilantism can be seen as a form of “autonomous citizenship.”85 But in this case the ranks of the enfranchised exercise that autonomy to crush the civic aspirations of those without a firm grip on rights—all in the name of moral rectitude. Kuaishou’s status as a site that actively challenges “the digital production gap”—the fact that elite voices still hold sway in the so-called digital commons—seems to make class fury seethe all the more. As Les Johnston argues, vigilantism “arises when some established order is perceived to be under threat from the transgression (or potential transgression) of institutionalized norms . . . [it is] a reaction to real or perceived deviance.”86 As a consequence, both the trolls and those whom they target are routed by this circuit of offensiveness into a seemingly hardened sense of us and them (first the Kuaishou users offend the middle-class netizens, then the middle-class netizens offend the Kuaishou users). To an extent, then, Kuaishou could be read as a tool that actually upholds the social order despite the best intentions of its disobedient creatives, who attempt not simply to defy the rhetoric of human quality but to toss it out altogether. The problem, of course, is that in the very moment they frontally assault suzhi norms, Kuaishou creatives incite those who are socially and economically invested in the discourse of human quality to mobilize for its maintenance. And insofar as content on the site underscores the boundary between those who perform abjection and those who do not, it arguably helps to stencil the social line between the people who feel they matter and those whose outcast abjection is required to shore up that sense of self. Kuaishou thus provides what Hennefeld and Sammond ironically call an “abject lesson.”87 It creates a platform on which the “wretched population”—the zombie citizenry—parade themselves as objects of “disgust and fascination” for their supposed social betters whose sense of entitlement, and desire to defend their privileges, is reasserted as they stare voyeuristically at all the obscene things they are not and vow never to be. The result is a tug-of-war, a push and pull in which the repudiation of suzhi-as-shame rams hard against the determination of others to keep the law of shame in place. The result, on one level, can only be the further fortification of existing class lines. Indeed, as the 2018 crackdown on Kuaishou demonstrated, this tussle also aligns T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 225 ]

those who identify as enfranchised and entitled within the suzhi moral economy with the disciplinary drives of the state,88 thus redoubling the exilic pressures placed on those who dwell outside the charmed circle.

The Other That Is Also Myself This process, however, forms only one part of Kuaishou’s impact on class relations in China. Indeed, perhaps the more intriguing aspect of Kuaishou’s tuwei style, and most particularly its deep dives into abjection, is the way it also subliminally dismantles rigid suzhi-based boundaries.As I argue throughout this book, the logic of expulsion is never simply about those who already subsist beyond the pale. As a social formation, the cliff edge is as much about those who teeter on the brink as the people down below. In fact, even those safely ensconced on the social high ground still belong within the gravitational pull of the abyss for the simple reason that “each extremity structures the other, depends on and invades the other in certain historical moments, to carry political charge through aesthetic and moral polarities.”89 Those who are secure, however tenuously and temporarily, derive their sense of shelteredness precisely from an awareness of the others—those beyond the civic pale—who have been strategically ejected and on whose expulsion the blessed ones psychologically rely for their ongoing hopes of entitlement. There is no human quality without the so-called human dross against which it can define itself. As Imogen Tyler observes, “Waste populations are in this way included through their exclusion, and it is this paradoxical logic which the concept of abjection describes” (emphasis in the original).90 It is precisely this paradoxical logic—this dialectic between the polis and what lies beyond its pale—that Kuaishou performers make all too real. In her classic study of abjection, Julia Kristeva writes: Aversion to food is the most basic, most archaic form of abjection. . . . Spasms and vomiting protect me. I use them throughout my life, in my repugnance—the intermittent retching that will distance me from, and allow me to avoid, objects and extreme situations that I experience as menacing and dangerous: defilement, sewage, sordidness, the ignominy of compromise, in-between states, betrayal. Fascination and rejection at the same time, abjection is the jolt that leads me into the abject but also separates me from it.91 [ 226 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

Put another way, performances of abjection are deceptive. They appear to distance subject from spectator, thus permitting “the sovereign reinforcement of the self or the social body through the charged, violent, and perversely pleasurable denial of the other.”92 But at the same time, abjection pulverizes boundaries. It drags different forces together like scattered iron filings to a supermagnet. This is not simply because disgust and fascination, repulsion and compulsion, are two sides of the same coin. It is also because the sheer physicality of abjection incites reactions that in their own viscerality evaporate barriers between self and other as bodies respond, as bodies and in the gut, to the extreme corporeality of other bodies. Standard mukbang—in which solitary performers gorge themselves exultantly on fattening foods while challenging the dual demands of body image and a shared eating culture—already pushes at these boundaries. It permits “more intimate and immersive interactions between fan and celebrity body,”93 even enabling what Sean Redmond calls “delirious forms of affect.”94 Small wonder that the Chinese government officially banned mukbang in 2021 as part of its drive against excess and indulgence.95 Performative eating that pivots on inedible objects—human waste itself—propels this process in still more corporeally vivid, reversely hypnotic directions, as viewers squirm, wince, and gape at their screens. Laoba’s scatological series illustrates this dynamic all too well, instantly summoning Kristeva’s mention of “spasms and vomiting.” As mentioned earlier, Laoba gags reflexively after ingesting feces in the latrine. But surely plenty of his viewers do too. I certainly did, almost to the point that it was quite hard to continue watching the scene. This is Kristeva’s point when she argues that “abjection is the jolt that leads me into the abject but also separates me from it.” Watching Laoba, extreme eating, performative self-harm—all of these viewing experiences shake the line between self and other because they force the spectator into an almost equal discomfort, even into forms of reflex mimicry. As they do so, they are a reminder of the shared humanity of the abject and the not, the coidentity of the included and the excluded. And by allegorical extension, they show that the suzhi-based structure of social value is flimsier, and the cliff edge nearer to hand, than those who are currently comfortable might like to acknowledge. It is in this sense that Kuaishou’s abject performances conjure an affective metaphor for the menacing fluidity of class positions in contemporary China. These subliminal meanings also help to explain the volatile character of the anti-Kuaishou commentary on Zhihu and other sites. As already noted, T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 227 ]

most of these posts are harsh. But many are also disproportionately hotblooded, and some are lengthy trolling rants that are at least as unseemly and incontinent as the content they critique. This intemperate feeling is not simply the righteous desire to uphold the status quo. It arguably also stems from a vague intuited sense that performances of abjection touch, in deeply discomfiting ways, on the inviolable commonality of all people as creatures bound by our physicality—by our biological sameness and the shared precarity that brings. As an unwelcome reminder of this fact, performances of abjection on Kuaishou stir an unnameable fury that is all about the urge to reassert difference and put boundaries back in place at a time of pervasive social subsidence. It is in this context of threatened class borders that I turn next to Zhu Shengze’s Present.Perfect. Zhu’s critically acclaimed film moves away from the short videos that have been the focus of this chapter so far to explore China’s vast livestreaming industry, which takes place both on Kuaishou and on other sites such as Douyu 斗鱼, Huya 虎牙, Huajiao 花椒, and Inke 映客. As I show in the next section, Zhu’s approach to this material is more empathetic than it is empirical. The film is a statement of compassion, which demonstrates that some marginalized people in China turn to livestreaming not for its social shock value but in the hope of forging human connection amid exile and immiseration. Precisely because of this, the filmmaker’s agency is much more than dispassionately archival, despite the fact that the film is crafted entirely from found footage. Present. Perfect beats with a strong, controlling aesthetic pulse, and its modulations of the streamed feeds—in particular through editing and color choice—may ultimately have the effect of shoring up the walls that keep different social constituencies apart in contemporary China.

Smoothing the Edges To represent underclass experience via the genre of found footage is a more ideological move than might first appear. As Michael Zyrd notes, “ ‘Footage’ is an already archaic  .  .  . measure of film length, evoking a bulk of industrial product—waste, junk—within which treasures can be ‘found.’ ” It is sourced from “junk stores, and garbage bins, or has literally been found in the street.”96 There is, in this sense, a suggestive parallelism between the form of the documentary and its subjects, most of whom belong to the category of human debris within the suzhi regime of population management. [ 228 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

Indeed, although the first thirty minutes or so of the film splice together footage from multiple and varied livestreaming feeds, the focus of the documentary tightens as it gets into its stride and increasingly pivots on a quartet of outcast subjects: a man with severe facial burn scars, another who is paraplegic, a third whose physical and sexual development was arrested while he was a young teen, and a woman working in an underwear factory whose livestream is her sole window to the world outside. They live out their lives in the social junkyard, and the mission of the filmmaker is to salvage the hidden treasures within: the moments, culled from more than eight hundred hours, that capture their complex humanity and decry their status as people who dwell in zombie citizenship. The result is a documentary that is heartrending but also uplifting, even though it explicitly states (via initial intertitles) that the peak of livestreaming is now over thanks to tougher state regulation of the industry. Much of this emotional charge is generated in the edit. Zhu Shengze assertively mediates the footage she finds, and in the process the documentary ends up disclosing a complex politics of class. The film begins with an approximately eleven-minute-long prologue consisting of short, mostly silent scenes of working-class labor with a precarious twist: a bulldozer wrecks a fragile structure; haulers lug heavy bags, wearing masks to protect themselves from toxic dust; a factory machine jabs and thrusts violently; a man straddles two branches of a tree, brandishing an electric saw (figure 5.7); workers weld metal, their faces in full protective armor; others balance from scaffolding that sways in the wind as they attempt to fit cables (figure 5.8). There is barely a word of dialogue throughout this section, nor any overt indication that the footage is taken from any livestreaming feed. Rather, this visual preface is an imaginatively edited narrative scene-setter that ostensibly locates the first-person stories that follow within the context of China’s risky, low-paid, precarious labor regime. But as it creatively collages footage of unattributed origin, with leitmotifs of high-wire balance, physical jeopardy, and imminent demolition, this artful montage also makes a strong claim for the filmmaker’s aesthetic ownership of Present.Perfect— and with a focus on underclass peril-as-vignette that begs comparison with Huang Weikai’s 黄伟凯 Disorder (Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai 现实是过去的 未来, 2009). Filtered through the lens of Zhu Shengze’s choices, if not her actual camera, this preface acts as a structural harbinger of the documentary proper that in many ways also recalls Xu Bing’s radical experimentalism in Dragonfly Eyes (Qingting zhi yan 蜻蜓之眼, 2017). In this high-concept T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 229 ]

 Figures 5.7 and 5.8  Screenshots from Zhu Shengze, Present.Perfect: laboring on the ledge. Reproduced with permission from Burn the Film.

film, Xu knits together countless clips of surveillance footage from CCTV cameras all over China to weave a violent romance, an event that never happened in real life but is composed entirely of moments that did. Present. Perfect does not go as far as this. But a winnowing as brutal as the one Zhu Shengze undertakes in this documentary—from eight-hundred-odd hours of unprocessed footage to two hours and four minutes of finished film— requires so much snipping and stitching that the final fabric can only be more inventive than it is objective. Or to return to the theme of salvage and [ 230 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

objets trouvés, it is the filmmaker who makes the judgment call on where the human quality of her subjects is to be found. Found footage documentaries always work like this, of course: they can only come into being in the edit. There would be no film without the all-seeing, all-selecting eye of the master builder who chooses the bricks and puts them in their places. But when this found footage is drawn from livestreaming platforms used principally by people from rural areas and lower-tier cities who so grievously lack other modes of media self-representation, the role of the filmmaker—a U.S.-educated film professional— becomes rather more conflicted. As such, Present.Perfect ends up diverging markedly from the digital storytelling movement with which it might at first sight seem to claim an obvious kinship, given their shared focus on voices from the margins. As Jean Burgess notes, digital storytelling marks a sharp break with even “the most empathetic ‘social documentary’ traditions” for the core reason that editing is eliminated and people speak for themselves: “stories are around two minutes in length, using scripts of around 250 words which are then recorded as voiceovers, and a dozen images, usually brought from home. . . .The philosophy behind this economy is that formal constraints create the ideal conditions for the production of elegant, highimpact stories by people with little or no experience, with minimal direct intervention by the workshop facilitator.”97 Certainly, livestreaming by its very nature lacks this sense of economy; it is deliberately long-form. But it is nonetheless perhaps the most vibrant form of vernacular narrative made by marginalized people to be found globally today. For that reason, efforts by more socially advantaged creators to discipline it, to reshape its “found” status, have a discernibly political edge or implication. Livestreaming has rocked the boat precisely because it is raw. It has incited fury on social media for the very reason that it flips the finger at the gatekeepers of mainstream cultural production in contemporary China, who mostly prefer to slam the door shut on the “lower orders.” Sensitive and empathetic as it is, Present.Perfect remains, at the basic level of its premise, a film that implicitly endorses the rule that the excluded and the expelled belong in culture not as unexpurgated speaking subjects but as objects who, if not quite spoken for, should have their speech acts selectively edited for them. Indeed, it is only through that editorial process that the words of underclass people become palatable, a point made all too clear by the documentary’s reception. Unlike the rough-and-ready Kuaishou performers who are trolled on Zhihu for their low human quality, Zhu’s film, which T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 231 ]

showcases content-producers from the same or similar livestreaming platforms, has become a festival favorite, reviewed rapturously and held up for its humanism.98 This, it should be noted, is not simply because the documentary’s circuits of distribution are primarily international. Short videos by several of the boldest Kuaishou performers have also made it forcibly onto the radar of global media, and the tone of such reporting is often openly sensationalist, even borderline derisory.99 Cultural production by an unabashed underclass stirs retaliatory responses everywhere. In contrast, the performers of Present.Perfect provoke no such backlash because the snippets the documentary’s audiences see of them are much more socially obedient. They wear their underclass, low-suzhi status not as a badge of pride but as stigmata. These livestreamers have little of the bravado—the urge to show that human quality is in the eye of the performer not the beholder—that enlivens the short videos I discussed earlier in this chapter. Certainly, it is true that Present.Perfect illuminates a mostly hidden yet vital corner of the livestreaming industry: namely, its role as a space of peer-to-peer bonding among the socially disenfranchised. The streamers who feature in the documentary do not really qualify as microcelebrities; they have few followers and many have now reportedly given up livestreaming.100 Their chat rooms were always about communitas rather than fame and fortune, and by spotlighting the capacity of livestreaming sites to afford this kind of social succor, Zhu Shengze’s documentary has real salutary power. But the film also presents abjection and exile as incommutable life sentences. It gently edits out the rowdy, unashamed energies seen elsewhere on Kuaishou but at the same time glosses over what Ge Zhang calls the “affective resignation” that reigns over so many livestreaming feeds in contemporary China.101 Zhang argues that fatalism about the inaccessibility of the “good life” is a crucial theme for many performers. It vouchsafes their authenticity to audiences at the same time it snubs social edicts about success in liberating ways. As Zhang argues, livestreams “offer a parable for a low-affect society that no longer thrives on unalloyed optimism,”102 and this “joyful pessimism” sparks a sense of agency.103 In contrast, Present.Perfect offers a vision of the social order in which the underclass stay in their lane, neither reveling in low human quality nor savoring their release from the treadmill of unrealizable ambition. This sense of tasteful mood management also manifests itself in the filmmaker’s postproduction decision to regrade the entire film in black-and-white. This crucial choice is arguably another instance of aesthetics-as-control. As [ 232 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

noted earlier, a key component of the tuwei style that has flourished on Kuaishou and similar platforms is the roughness of its technical execution. These short videos and livestreams are shot with a sometimes willful lack of finesse that steps up their sense of immediacy and helps to communicate their tuwei character. What’s more, the typical visual field on these sites is rife with colorful, noisy interruptions: gifs, text chat, the breezy icons representing virtual gifts. These visuals also have the effect of anchoring the feed in the moment, in the unpredictability of liveness. Monochroming this field, as Zhu does in Present.Perfect, both cleans it up and renders it more uniform, as the idiosyncrasies of different streaming feeds shrink or disappear into the shared schema of black-and-white. In an interview, Zhu presents her rationale for the regrading as follows: “turning all the material into black and white was one way of organizing video shot at various resolutions and color settings into a visually cohesive whole. Moreover, black and white detaches us from both real virtual worlds, creating for the film its own subjectivity. I come from a journalism background that made me question documentary’s claims to objectivity and truth.”104 This hermeneutical suspicion is well founded, but it is equally undeniable that documentary as a genre has deep roots in the monochrome, most particularly the subbranch of cinéma verité with which Present.Perfect shares many unmissable parallels. The mantras of cinéma verité are ordinariness, improvisation, authenticity, nonprofessionalism—all typically rendered in black-and-white, all utterly germane to Present.Perfect. More relevant than this anomaly is Zhu’s statement that the monochrome wash creates “for the film its own subjectivity.” This, in and of itself, is an entirely reasonable aspiration for any documentarist. Yet once again the stakes shift when we consider that this particular film creates “its own subjectivity”—a process steered by Zhu—from the personal narratives of people who have been so routinely denied that kind of creative agency in real life. Just as with the edit, the documentary’s color choices end up lending a discernibly proprietorial character to the filmmaker’s actions as she sculpts the stories of those consigned to zombie citizenship into a filmic mode of her own devising. Moreover, livestreaming, as a particular media category, complicates this already fraught process as the component parts of its very name, in both English and Chinese, make clear. To stream live—or zhibo 直播, to “broadcast directly”—is to strive for both immediacy and duration. It is not a form whose definitional traits are faithfully served by the transition to color-cleansed, aesthetically re-rendered, highly abbreviated clips.105 Tuwei T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 233 ]

is bleached out; distance is asserted; the specific communicability of the longue durée is arbitrarily broken down. Editing the feeds in this way undoes core aspects of their mediatic and social identity. Unlike many of Kuaishou’s outrageously abject short videos, in other words, Present.Perfect affirms rather than undermines the fixed estates of the social realm in China. The film is edgy in its intimate portrayal of those consigned to zombie citizenship, and for that reason did not secure domestic theatrical exhibition.106 But its baseline class politics are nonetheless approximately in sync with those of the very censors who block content of this kind in the PRC. Construing abjection as blight rather than carnival, and upholding the broad rule of thumb about social class and cultural command in China, Present.Perfect is a pity project more than a political one, mostly because it so carefully tempers the untreated content originally posted on the sites. As this raw material is processed, and its underclass makers remain in their place—over the cliff edge, in the space below—the documentary effectively neutralizes some of the class tension that has bristled in Chinese cyberspace since the ascent of livestreaming to prominence and popularity. In one sense, of course, it would be absurd to suggest that Present.Perfect is anything other than decisively antiestablishment. It probes the discordances that jar the so-called harmonious society: the feelings of hopelessness, abandonment, and immiseration that reaching out to others on a livestream feed can mitigate in only small and short-lived ways. Yet insofar as harmony—on the ground, in real time—may actually depend on social immobility and in-class stickiness, the film’s modulated tales of socially exiled livestreamers who fail to change their fates in any substantive way do little to disturb the fragile peace.

Shaky Labor The documentary’s focus on futile bids at microcelebrity is also telling in other ways. As Ge Zhang and Gabriele de Seta observe, most analyses of online fame “center on a rather limited sample of successful online influencers and massively popular social media personalities.”107 Yet failure—or at best only very short-lived success—is the default experience for most who seek to make it big on livestreaming sites. This failure requires more attention, not least because it illuminates a key emergent aspect of precarious experience in contemporary China: the potential perils of creative digital labor for the already forsaken in the country’s rural areas and lower-tier [ 234 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

cities. Up to a point, creative digital labor is always dangerous for its workers for the simple reason that income is never guaranteed. As Christian Fuchs observes: “the rate of exploitation converges toward infinity if workers are unpaid. They are infinitely exploited. Capitalist Internet produsage is an extreme form of exploitation, in which the produsers work completely for free and are therefore infinitely exploited.”108 Strictly speaking, the virtual gifting economy on sites such as Kuaishou means that the labor of its livestreamers is unwaged rather than unpaid, and thus their capacity to be exploited is somewhat less than infinite. But this distinction is essentially moot for many aspiring microcelebrities because they are rewarded with little if any compensation for their work. More to the point, Fuchs’s warning about infinite exploitation rings out with renewed threat when content creators are members of the underclass, uncushioned from the risks they take when seeking to monetize their material—and thus even easier prey. Insofar as scholars have explored the intersection between digital engagement and class, their focus has homed in on consumption, and scant research explores how and why “poor and working-class” users produce online content.109 Apps such as Kuaishou, in this sense, offer an invaluable case study into digital creativity—its potential and pitfalls—among internet users who are not just economically disadvantaged and professionally marginalized but in many cases endure de facto zombie citizenship. In many ways, their situation recalls Tressie McMillan Cottom’s observations about the vexed interplay between race and online exploitation in “job-adjacent work” outside the glossy start-ups of Silicon Valley. She argues that “as the economy shifts to more and more non-job labor, digital technologies will continue to reshape work by finding new ways to facilitate efficient, racialized extraction.” Key to this process is the role that digital platforms play in serving and solidifying “an economy where livelihoods are increasingly defined by a patchwork of entrepreneurial activities.” Even though it may bestow riches on the breakout few, the platform economy has the concomitant power to make already precarious people still more fragile as it normalizes and accelerates the death of the steady job, and non-White people are disproportionately affected.110 A similar claim can be made for China’s creative citizens who live in a state of quasi-racialized apartheid, generating content for the very tech giants who are busy dislocating the traditional workscape.111 Already on the edge, such makers risk compounding their preexisting precarity when they invest what scant, fragile resources they have in a T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 235 ]

chancy online endeavor—and one, moreover, that incites such tantalizing hopes of fame as well as fortune. Unlike the purchase of scratch cards by indigent people, gambling on Kuaishou success extracts significant inputs of time, creativity, and aspirant selfhood. For those who lack voice and visibility in China’s left-behind places, the app thrums with the promise of self-actualization, of suddenly becoming a somebody within a social world that typically treats such people as nobodies. In a nation with exceptionally high smartphone penetration (66 percent in 2021) but relatively low per capita income, digital access may in fact be the only way the terminally disenfranchised can feel like bona fide citizens. As such, the hazards these people may encounter as creators are much more than economic. Even as the content they produce is for the most part light and playful in tone, the affective toll of nonsuccess may well weigh heavy. At a time when even the most privileged have “a hovering sense that perhaps the unwatched life is invalid or insufficient,” those whose lives have been officially deemed of lower value yearn to be watched all the more.112 Lin and de Kloet are right to point out that there is much more to digital labor than “exploitation and precarity,” and that sites such as Kuaishou open up an arguably unprecedented portal to remunerated creativity for the people of China’s vast underclass.113 What’s more, viewing experiences of precarity as only and always bleak is to see them through a glass darkly when the piecemeal economy can in fact endow some people with previously impossible agency and agility. Yet the bottom line is that profit is always a numbers game, and the losers in this new platform economy massively predominate. In 2018, Kuaishou CEO Su Hua 宿华 boasted that more than ten million users had made money on the site in the previous year, only to note in the next breath that more than 130 million users were sharing content on the site every day.114 This is a low hit rate for success, even without taking into account the fact that making money (the Chinese expression used in the report is huode le shouru 获得了收入, or “gain some income”) is by no means the same as making a living.115 The fact that the heyday of livestreaming, both in China and across East Asia, has now passed will presumably only squeeze opportunities further.116 Moreover, youth intersects with class to deepen the snarls of precarity in China’s platform economy. Kuaishou and its sister sites are most commonly a young person’s game, with significant implications for the potential penalties of failure. Many young members of China’s underclass are mired in “waithood,” a stage of stagnation or paralysis in which the age-old markers [ 236 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

of maturity—steady work, a home, children—have receded into distant illusion. For people locked in the antechamber to adult life, livestreaming seems to offer the key out of limbo and into the realms of opportunity. But for the huge majority of livestreamers who never make it (or even turn any kind of profit), this glimpse through the bars can prove worse than illusory. This is because banking emotionally on Kuaishou in left-behind places where youth unemployment is high and educational attainment low carries practical risks. Li et al. note from the interviews they conducted in schools that teachers deplore Kuaishou for its powers to distract—“Especially that Kuaishou, oh, it’s most dangerous for the students. It teaches them so many bad things; they don’t listen in class, they compose those awful songs, and they stay up late to sing these songs loudly.”117 But for the students themselves, of course, Kuaishou fame promises “to shower them with wealth that education could not” in a system that already tends to serve the young people of China’s downbeat towns poorly.118 Their brittle dreams of becoming an internet star can thus jeopardize limited learning opportunities at a time of already straitened employment. It is within this climate of shrinking hopes that a seemingly counterintuitive new performative mode emerged on Kuaishou post-2018 that pivots on the notion of hustle. On one level, hustle can be defined as an improvised, off-the-grid, tactical approach to work, in which sources of income are constantly alternated or diversified to work around the vulnerabilities of an uncertain economy. As Fuchs suggests, without using the term directly, hustle may be especially rife in the digital realm: “Self-employed labor in informational capitalism is very much likely to be precarious labor . . . [as] individuals shift from self-employment to temporary labor, unpaid labor, and back again.”119 This is the “patchwork of entrepreneurial activities” referred to earlier, and in some senses it is easy to see how hustling in digital China may redouble the strains of making a living on the edge because the online arena—with its performance metrics, the battle for likes and gifts, and the unforgiving law of the algorithm—is so fearsomely competitive, even though the tuwei mood can also build a pulsating sense of underclass identity. But hustle also has other connotations. In her work on youth in Nairobi, Tatiana Thieme stresses the countercultural nature of hustle as a means to livelihood: it seeks “alternative structures of opportunity outside formal education, employment, and service provision.”120 If hustling can counter what Thieme calls “pathologies of despair,”121 this is in part because it has a liberatory and effervescent thrust. T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 237 ]

Skitting Around I conclude this chapter by exploring some short videos on Kuaishou that showcase precisely this capacity of digital hustle to push at proprieties, especially in the aftermath of the official crackdown on Kuaishou in 2018. Several commentators have noted that China’s post-2018 online regulatory climate has further intensified the precarity of the livestreaming world. Li et al. observe that “precisely because Kuaishou enabled its many producers to transmit images to its many consumers, the app inevitably threatened to let the whole world see what life in China was really like.”122 The state’s desire to snatch back the veil has led to a tense new reality in which creators must tread a tightrope between producing content that can drive decent traffic— let alone score virtual gifts—and keeping to the chaste new rules in the era of Internet+. Pincered between “platform logic and Party logic,”123 the creative path of livestreamers and short-video makers is arguably more tortuous than ever—and this is without considering the pressures of interclass animosity discussed earlier in this chapter. It is within this climate of economic, political, and social strain that a new genre of short skits emerged, particularly after the 2018 cleanup. These play teasingly with the tuwei style in order to entertain at the same time as they gesture pointedly to the cruel politics of class and suzhi-based prejudice that continue to hold sway in China, despite the tacked-on veneer of harmony. As will become clear, these videos exemplify hustle not just as a means of getting by but as a performance—as a form of “theater,” to quote Cottom124—that rattles the bars of class-based identity. Many are extremely popular: the short-video channel of performer Yue laoban 岳老板 (referenced here), for example, has 11.1 million subscribers, and this genre of skits typically garners many hundreds of comments. Biting class parody is the dominant tone of these performances. In one typical example, a young woman sits on a bench outside a shabby rural home dressed in dungaree shorts stenciled with an outsized rabbit pattern.125 This is no accident, given that the Chinese term for rabbit, tu 兔, is a homonym for the tu in tuwei. Sure enough, seconds later a more stylishly dressed young woman sashays into the shot wearing silver stilettos, on her way to eat spicy crayfish in the city. Young woman no. 2 declines to take no. 1 with her, quipping rudely, “You’re dressed like such a bumpkin (chuan de zheme tu 穿的这么土), you’d be better off going home and eating sweet potato!” As in many such skits, fashion, cuisine, and consumption are the [ 238 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

axes along which the politics of taste, class, and status play out, and it is in their intersections that the energizing theater of hustle is performed. As soon as the snobbish young woman disappears, her disdained tu acquaintance launches a high-speed improv revenge. In a two-minute-long makeover montage, she creates a long dining table by removing an interior door from its hinges; she styles a white linen tablecloth from a bedsheet; she uses a pump to drain a nearby murky river until she manages to catch a giant lobster; she creates a large serving platter by cutting out the base of a laundry bucket and painting it white. Finally, she changes into an evening gown, decorates the dining table with fresh flowers, candlesticks, and homebrew wine, and awaits the return of young woman no. 2. “Can I have some?” no. 2 asks. “You can watch me have some!” the newly chic woman replies, closing the show with a triumphant fist pump. Plenty of skits in this vein can now be found on Kuaishou, and in them performers who playfully self-identify as tu (the term and its variants recur constantly in these videos) gain the upper hand over snooty adversaries who stick unbendingly to the rules of middle-class taste and style. Unlike these slaves to human quality, the stars of tu are endlessly resourceful, able to retaliate to slights and insults by conjuring high-end couture out of palm leaves,126 garbage bags,127 or cheap denim, and a Louis Vuitton handbag out of a brick;128 or by performing an elegant makeover using homegrown cosmetics (a duck feather as an eyebrow pencil, red chili pepper as lipstick, gardening shears as hair straighteners).129 In one video (figure 5.9), the protagonist

Figure 5.9  Jingshen nüzi: from tu to meinü 美女 (beautiful woman) courtesy of two cabbages. T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 239 ]

is brusquely rebuffed by a young guy because of her tu look (“you’re dressed so hick” [chuan de tulituqi 穿的土里土气]), but then stages a faux-elegant retaliation by stitching together a chic minidress made of cabbage leaves, accessorized with botanical headgear and outsized earrings. Mesmerized by this self-evidently flippant makeover, the surly young guy turns suitor and asks her on a date, almost genuflecting as she struts past. The supposedly higher-suzhi character is always hoodwinked by these sleights-of-hand— however knowingly crass and clunky they are—thus exposing the specious foundations of the contemporary regime of social value. Meanwhile, the slick production values of these skits match this mood of quick-witted cando and defy the cliché that all things tuwei are necessarily low-rent. This notion that the rules of taste, class, and status are nothing more than the emperor’s new clothes is expressed even more forcefully in another category of skits that depart from the adversarial dynamic just described and zero in on lampooning the follies of class vanity and conspicuous consumption. Representative examples feature absurd grooming rituals, in which performers shape and darken their eyebrows with char scraped from the underside of woks, strip their pores using transparent adhesive tape, apply homemade facemasks made of tomatoes and cucumbers, slick their hair with raw egg white in place of gel, whiten their complexions with flour applied with a sponge scouring pad, brush their teeth with a toilet brush, and make perfectly serviceable bowties and pocket handkerchiefs out of old socks.130 Cuisine and etiquette are, once again, a further flashpoint. Skits with a visibly rural backdrop parody the fetishes of upward mobility by serving homey recipes on scruffy tables set in the middle of a field, but with silver service and a bottle of wine with 1982 Château Lafite scrawled on the label.131 Other skits take pointed aim at leisure, lifestyle, and living the so-called dream. One illustrative example shows a rural boss sipping whiskey while two minions dance attendance.132 When the boss declares that he would like to go for a swim, a speeded-up montage ensues, in which one of the lackeys digs a preposterously shallow pool in a nearby field, lines it with a plastic sheet, and laboriously fills it with water from an outdoor tap using a pair of plastic buckets. The boss then “dives” in and swims a couple of lengths, before reclining at the side as if it were an infinity pool, savoring another glass of whiskey.133 Golfing offers another rich satirical vein, with mallets and broomsticks standing in for clubs, and pieces of fruit or plastic bottles serving as the golf ball in rundown rural “fairways.”134 [ 240 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

As in the more combative skits described previously, hustle is the leitmotif. Performers frequently move nimbly in revved-up sequences; they are versatile, determined, and quick-thinking; they may hail from nowhere places, but they fully understand the hard rules of the neoliberal world, even as they show those mores no respect. This last element is crucial. Eating live eels and human excrement may no longer be possible on China’s short-video sharing sites. But the artistes of class-conscious Kuaishou skits post-2018 make it clear that their hustling spirit lives on via satire that pokes fun at the social order in less combustible ways, discreet enough to avoid censure and censorship. Now that it is no longer possible to revel in the most taboo pleasures of low human quality, the class warriors of Kuaishou have switched tactics and caricature the norms and forms of seemly sophisticated behavior instead. Throughout these skits, the left-behind in supposedly benighted places display their verve and resourcefulness as they ostensibly dress up, dine out, and play hard like city folk, but with a mordant twist that exposes these peacocking pastimes for what they really are. Once again, this is not quite the same as what Jacka calls “throwing the ‘low-suzhi’ epithet back at urbanites.” Rather, it is of a logical piece with luxuriating in so-called lowness because it suggests that the calculus for human value operational in China today is skewed. Human quality and its technologies for social sorting are ethically and practically dysfunctional; it is those who subsist in zombie citizenship who see the world of class and status for what it really is. This last point emerges clearly in a final category of skits: blatant plays on the tu persona. In one example, an older man dressed in a tattered Mao uniform steps gingerly into a gleaming, high-spec urban toilet.135 He gawps open-mouthed at the lavatory, apparently a new-fangled invention for him, before getting to his knees and subjecting it to a 360-degree inspection, pressing buttons randomly. The push-up trash can next to the toilet flummoxes him even more, and when it pops up at his touch, he falls to the floor in slapstick terror before approaching it several more times, finally grinning with glee and clapping his hands as he works out the mechanism. Similar skits feature rural people gawking in hammy astonishment at the volume of passing cars on an urban freeway; horrifying fellow passengers on a bus by taking off their shoes in public and airing smelly feet; refusing to vacate an overloaded elevator despite being the last person on board; brazenly guzzling free food samples in markets; and scamming store owners in order to make off with free merchandise.136 Technically speaking, these skits are quite T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 241 ]

ambivalent: it’s certainly possible to construe them as pious and scornful of all things tu. Yet the prevailing mood is more subversive, and it is those who disparage tu rather than those who actually embody and practice its traits who are arguably the submerged targets here. Indeed, there is a mood of impudence, if not outright noncompliance, in the latter examples mentioned here. In place of the melodramatic—and now prohibited—abjection of Laoba and Foodie Fengjie, these performers celebrate tu more pragmatically in a censored age, offering de facto tutorials on the hustle: how to breach social norms in China and get away with it, either by trickery or by just not giving a damn.

Making Ripples In a poem titled “Yang Ni” 杨霓, the migrant worker poet Zheng Xiaoqiong (discussed at length in chapter 3) writes bitterly of class habitus as a burden borne by the decitizenized that copycat self-grooming can never alleviate: . . . a cheap and second-class Social identity. You frantically paint your nails red, Blue. You pencil round your eyes, dye your hair yellow, Always clumsily imitating those city fashions To mask your rural blood. Your accent And your bulky joints reveal the secrets of your heart, Our souls made abject by poverty.137 In contrast, the skit-makers of Kuaishou have switched from mimicry to mockery, with the attendant psychological relief that the latter can bring. Even if their souls are “made abject by poverty,” this is not an abjection to be ashamed of because the “right” look and lifestyle are always accessible. They are little more than social code that can be cloned on the cheap or disregarded altogether. Ultimately, therefore, the most subversive aspect of hustling is not its rejection of propriety so much as the way it creates new modes of being and feeling “that may be off the charts of what constitutes ‘value’, ‘a good job’ or a specific ‘class.’ ”138 In the case of Kuaishou’s provocateurs—from Laoba and Foodie Fengjie to the skit-makers just discussed—this means thinking differently about human quality as a coercive [ 242 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

and life-limiting protocol. Unlike, for example, the desperate petitioners who trek like pilgrims to Beijing to beseech the authorities about the land grabs that dispossess them of their rights, many Kuaishou performers refuse to adhere to the traditional playbook of dignified, system-bound remonstrance. Owning low suzhi, spoofing high suzhi: these are resistant behaviors that unsettle the ethos of striving and aspiration enjoined even on those whose circumstances render those objectives a classic case of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism.” In the age of Internet+, considerable media and scholarly interest is now focusing on the potential of digital entrepreneurship in the countryside.139 There are plenty of success stories in which optimism proves not cruel but kind, both among those who sell rural products online and those who market creative content of a bucolic nature.140 This latter category, as Han Li notes, is “well received and enthusiastically followed by viewers from various social strata, especially urban users.”141 This is in large part because these netizens do not challenge the contemporary calculus of value, instead presenting rurality as quaint and charming. The video blogger Li Ziqi is a standout example here: neither the discomfort of poverty nor the threat of disorder tinge her representations of pastoral life. Kuaishou itself, after cooperating closely with the state to clean up its content in 2018, has overtly espoused a more “positive” orientation. CEO Su Hua, in his letter of apology for the platform’s risqué offerings, stated that “the algorithm will be optimized with a healthy and positive value” that “strictly complies with the national regulations and common ethics and morals.”142 In practice, this has meant algorithmic favoritism toward the kind of jolly and wholesome content just described, which transforms tuwei from something countercultural into its safe-mode variant. It takes further form via videos in which Kuaishou’s once abrasive social tension is dispersed in sugary “positive energy” minidramas of cross-class largesse—typically a road accident in which a migrant worker on a bashed-up bicycle crashes into a supercar, only to be graciously forgiven by its high-suzhi, high-networth owner.143 This sanitization of image-making from nonmetropolitan China also needs to be seen within the context of an online environment that maintains “deep asymmetry in . . . discursive expression among different social classes,” resulting in “an inverted pyramid structure, with a huge under-representation of the lower class and over-representation of the upper class.”144 In other words, voices from China’s countryside, small towns, and lower-tier cities are squeezed in both quantitative and qualitative terms, T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 243 ]

overwhelmed numerically online at the same time as their tone is strictly policed. And although rural e-commerce is developing apace, the accelerating platformization of Chinese society is also furnishing fresh opportunities for the zombie-fication of citizens, as those who labor in these industries— food delivery bikers, couriers, Didi rideshare drivers—are othered by algorithms and made faceless by interactions blighted by “relational poverty.”145 The skits I have described here are pushing against a relentless tide, however breezy and insouciant their energies may be. Studying the internet means trying to pin down the most agile of moving targets; snapshot-based analysis is perhaps the only realistic goal in a field so mobile. If this is true of online culture everywhere, it is arguably doubly so of both livestreaming (which has almost sui generis ephemerality) and of virtual China itself because the cybersphere’s natural volatility is intensified there by regulatory flips and interventions that can upend the status quo overnight. Yet the surge of the tuwei style online in the mid2010s via Kuaishou and other livestreaming sites nevertheless carbon-dates a short but vital moment in the history of the Chinese internet in which underclass voices rang out loud and proud. The shift from Foodie Fengjie to more circumspect satirical skits shows beyond doubt that these voices have

Figure 5.10 “Lying Flat,” 2021: passive-aggressive protest. [ 244 ]  T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

now been muted. But evidently they were not muzzled altogether. Indeed, the bouncy, flippant tone of these skits forms an inverse parallel with the so-called lying flat (tangping 躺平) movement that came to the fore in 2021 (and was reported on copiously in global media), in which young urban strivers decided en masse to opt out of competition, hard work, and upward mobility and assume a recumbent position instead (figure 5.10). The cheeky verve of the rural hustlers (who refuse zombiehood) may seem poles apart from the zoned-out inertia of the urban wasters (who seem to want to transmogrify into the living dead).Yet both are articulating deep discontent with a system of stratified social value in which the specter of being assigned something less than full rights and personhood looms. It is likely that both forms of protest are transient things, ripples rather than the great wave that might pose a real threat to the current order of the social.Yet as they carve a through line of disenchantment and dissent across the harmonious society in China’s era of restless aspiration, they cast some doubt on the pseudo-moral power of human quality to hold that edifice together indefinitely. In a recent paper, Carwyn Morris suggests that the era of bodily governance in China via the regimes of human quality and household registration is now on the wane. He argues that it is being superseded by a new modality of coercive power in which space becomes the medium—rather than the site—of control through practices centering on construction, demolition, and eviction. Social groups who have been consistently derogated and disciplined via policies of bodily management such as “stigmatizing and excluding” are now overseen “through governance of the spaces in which they (can) live and work.”146 The temporal half-life of human quality as a technology of power remains up for debate; indeed, it may perhaps prove more tenacious than Morris argues. But it is nonetheless telling that as resistance to the shibboleths of human quality has become more creative in recent years, the state has rallied by rolling out policies that turn ever more decisively on the axis of expulsion.

T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 245 ]

Conclusion Viral Precarity

“We must answer here and now for our life on Earth with others (including viruses) and our shared fate” — AC H I LLE MB E MB E , “THE UNI VE RSAL R IGHT TO BR EAT HE”

A

s Covid-19 convulsed the globe in the spring of 2020, an unusual collaborative project got underway in Chongqing’s Huangjueping Graffiti Street (Huangjueping tuyajie 黄桷坪涂鸦街) (figures 6.1 and 6.2).The street itself has been dubbed “the world’s largest graffiti work”: 50,000 square meters in area and 1.25 kilometers long, it was created in 2007 with the support of local residents and businesses; a team of art academy students, school pupils, and workers painstakingly decorated it into existence using 12,500 kilograms of architectural paint and nearly 30,000 brushes.1 Whether or not such a situational artwork, which proceeded with the direct blessing of the municipal government, qualifies for the graffito descriptor with its potently counter-hegemonic resonances is a matter of debate. Others might prefer terms such as street art, mural, or even “officially authorized beautification project.”2 What’s more, the overtly participatory, openly daytime character of the 2020 project—titled The Smile Behind the Mask (Kouzhaoxia de weixiao 口罩下的微笑)—sets it somewhat apart from the standard vision of the guerrilla graffitist, who may not always work alone but usually does so in the shadows. Viewed through a different lens, this cheerily collaborative work might seem to give the lie to the arguments I have made throughout this book about solidarity as a pipe dream that can materialize only evanescently in our uncertain times. What, after all, is more viscerally and planetarily precarious than a pandemic? Yet Chongqing’s street artists, drawn from diverse social groups, performed in this piece [ 247 ]

Figures 6.1 and 6.2  The Smile Behind the Mask: team spirit on the street.  

an ensemble of togetherness which suggested that fellow feeling and esprit de corps, articulated through primary color brush strokes and a team of palette-wielding painters, could help put the world back together again. The work’s messaging, moreover, mirrored quite precisely other street scene responses to the virus. Urban art across the globe, from Moscow to Amsterdam to Manhattan, circled the predictable but vital themes of reassurance, the necessity of hope, and an intense gratitude toward health workers. The visual language that spells out this latter theme is noticeably consistent, as figures 6.3–6.7 show. In spray-paint artworks across the world, health workers are angelic avengers against the scourge, superheroes who combine selflessness with blunt force and blunt instruments and who hold the future of the planet in their surgically gloved hands. Chinese representations— which emerged in vast quantity on the street, online, and in brick-andmortar spaces—pick up this same motif, but often with a more assertively collaborative, even militant feel. As Xiaodan Feng has noted, the martial lexicon the state deployed from the outset in its management of the pandemic increasingly inflected grassroots art making, and sketches posted on social media platforms that showed health workers slumped in exhaustion and passed out in hospital hallways were soon deleted.3 Almost in calculated contrast to the devastating last photograph of the coronavirus whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang 李文亮—sweating, wild-eyed with fear, and hooked up to a ventilator—which stormed social media shortly after his death and spawned many remediations, later online images preferred to imply the somatic invincibility of health workers.4 A high-profile exhibition at the National Museum of China in 2020, aptly titled “Unity Is Strength” (zhongzhi chengcheng 众志成城), did include among its two hundred exhibits some artworks that depicted health workers under strain. But its iconography for the most part swiveled on the axis of preternatural resilience and determination (figures 6.8–6.12). Health workers throughout are clad head-to-toe in personal protective equipment (PPE), which gives them collective uniformity but also an almost spacemanlike aura of otherworldly invincibility that enables them to transcend their mere humanity.The virus might rage, but doctors, nurses, and medical support staff across these works seem fully inoculated against contagion long before the arrival of any vaccine. Heroism is ethico-spiritual, in other words, but also a matter of bodily quality (shenti suzhi 身体素质), as expressed through the superhuman fortitude of the figures depicted here. The health worker, within the state-managed visual economy of these exhibits, most typically emerges as faceless, flawless Übermensch. C O N C L U S I O N   [ 249 ]

Figures 6.3–6.7  Around the world: street angels and superheroes take on the virus. Reproduced with permission from Austin Zucchini-Fowler. Reproduced with permission from Eva Busevich. Reproduced with permission from John D’Oh. Reproduced with permission from © PØBEL / DACS, London 2022. Reproduced with permission from Dmitry Levochkin.

 

 Figures 6.3–6.7  (cont.)

 

F   igures 6.3–6.7  (cont.)

 

Figures 6.8–6.12  Medical crack troops at the National Museum of China.  

 

Figures 6.8–6.12  (cont.)  

The history of China’s pandemic is, of course, still very much in the writing. But it should surely come as no surprise that early studies are already finding that Covid-19, in Chinese society as elsewhere, immediately made precarity deeper and sharper. In a study of delivery drivers, for example, Hui Huang notes that these gig workers reported dismally [ 254 ]  C O N C L U S I O N

deteriorating conditions within an industry that already bled them dry.5 Their status as informal workers meant they could not access pandemicrelated benefits; surging demand for on-time deliveries forced them into dangerous driving practices; and the sheer volume of delivery work led to increased unpaid overtime. For obvious reasons, these drivers were close counterparts for health workers throughout the pandemic. They kept society on its feet during lockdowns while braving heightened personal risks, and for this reason, state-controlled media took some steps to lionize them. Compared with health workers, however, this hagiographic drive made scant inroads into aestheticized public space, either offline or online.6 China’s borders were mostly closed when the National Museum of China show had its run, and even foreigners resident in China were barred access to the exhibition. But media coverage, including short videos shot inside the museum, was copious and offered clear visuals of many of the artworks. I have located only one artwork in the available reports that features a figure who is probably a delivery driver: this is a huge medley-style sculpture, a three-dimensional microcosm of China’s multipronged battle against the virus that depicts workers and volunteers of all kinds (figure 6.13).

Figure 6.13  A lone delivery driver makes the sculptor’s cut. C O N C L U S I O N   [ 255 ]

The piece is perhaps the most grandiose work in the entire show in both scale and execution, and for that reason its image was featured in scores of news articles about the exhibition. Yet all but one of these photographs was taken from an angle that crops out the delivery driver—a figure on a scooter positioned at the far right and back of the sculpture who, rather tellingly, seems to be exiting the sculptural space. Arguably, the rub here lies with a further axis of convergence/divergence between health workers and delivery drivers: namely, their status as vectors of transmission. In the case of health workers, a centripetal pull draws the infected toward them in their mostly static positions in hospitals, whereas a centrifugal push propels delivery drivers into multi-sited spaces of potential contagion. But beneath this surface distinction lies the far deeper chasm of class. Many, if not most, delivery drivers in China are migrant workers, unlike the majority of nurses and doctors. They are people who, as Dong Han has noted, were already subjected to policing practices that effectively “raced” them as Untermensch right down to their supposed “bodily features.”7 Hui Huang’s research shows how this quasi-racial discrimination turned still more noxious during the pandemic, as state media puffery about martyred drivers failed to translate into gratitude, or even basic decency, on the ground. As Huang observes, Drivers are being shunned by the public as potential carriers of the coronavirus. Incidents of inflaming bigotry against drivers have been common during the pandemic, disturbing the work and life of drivers. For example, the gates of many buildings and public places have a warning of “No access for drivers” and every drop-off spot now has a sign reading “No Touch for Drivers” . . . some drivers reported that their fellow delivery drivers were forced to leave their homes by their landlords. Without a place to shelter, these drivers must pay a high price to live in a hotel and hide their occupational identity.8 Ultimately, what we see at work here is the logic of zombie contagion operating at full throttle under the perverse regime of a novel pandemic. Storytelling about zombies, whatever its medium, almost always features some kind of virus for the simple reason that the two are necrotic alter egos. As James Der Derian and Phillip Gara argue, they are both “the living dead, in the sense that they acquire vitality only after they find and infect a host.” From this, Der Derian and Gara deduce that “the zombie clearly has [ 256 ]  C O N C L U S I O N

something to teach us about the virus.”9 But the reverse is, of course, just as true, if not truer—and most particularly amid an era of expulsion in which tranches of the global population are consigned to the status of indisposable waste and intermittent usefulness: half-life, by any other name. Prepandemic, the notion that zombie citizenship might be contagious mostly existed at the level of osmotically intuited fear: the kind that produces cordons sanitaires and gated communities—sharp but vague, possibly irrational, even as it motivates actual practices of exclusion. Once Covid-19 struck, this trepidation concretized into a far more unforgiving shape. In part, this was because the specific etiology of the coronavirus intensified the menace of the undead, as Athena Aktipis and Joe Alcock have observed. More than just a symbolic zombie doppelgänger, Covid-19 seemed in actual pathogenetic terms “a sort of zombie virus, turning people not into the undead but rather into the unsick. By interfering with our bodies’ normal immune response and blocking pain, the virus keeps the infected on their feet, spreading the virus.”10 Across deserted streets in locked-down cities—already redolent of zombie apocalypse—delivery drivers were very often the only figures still visible and on the move. Unlike the saviors working inside hospitals, they could be tagged and tracked on apps as mobile agents of transmission, even actual incarnations of the virus. This book is about the condition of zombie citizenship, and I have consistently defined the undead as a zone of existence into which some are cast rather than as a flesh-and-blood identity embodied by China’s underclass. But the pressures of the pandemic assaulted this distinction in dangerous ways. Members of the underclass, already estranged from full civic belonging before Covid-19, were forced several steps toward more literal zombiehood as their second-class citizenship and its occupational realities pushed them into severe epidemiological hazard during the pandemic. That furnished, in some minds, a medically attested “rationale” for their untouchability. The stigma of viral infection, real or potential, branded the long-stigmatized body with a newly searing force. At a time when the ambient world took on the lineaments of a zombie movie, with its familiar traits—the inexplicable disease, the conspiracy theories about laboratory escape, the rush to quarantine, the denial of the authorities, the buzz of media disinformation, the menace to the social order11—the desire to purge the contaminated both overlaid and ramped up already existing impulses to expulsion. Discriminatory policy, practice, and affect found faux but plausible legitimation in Covid-19 and latched onto it tightly. Considerable work has already been C O N C L U S I O N   [ 257 ]

done on the xenophobia unleashed by the coronavirus, and especially on the anti-Asian racism that raged like a viral disease all on its own as soon as the outbreak began.12 This research is crucial. But equally germane is the acknowledgment that such racism does not simply fester along the color or ethno-national divide; it also spews its bile at the boundary between full and bare life, between the citizenly and the not. If racism is the attempt to delimit or disavow the humanity of the other, then the pariah status inflicted on ethnically-same compatriots during a once in a century public health crisis—their forced exile into zombie status at the very moment of their greatest service—shows the inexhaustible taxonomic drive of the racist impulse, which continually seeks new schematic categories for degradation via segregation. Small wonder one of Hui Huang’s interviewees laments, “I feel I am not human.”13 This was precisely the intention. As Byung-Chul Han observes, “In a system where the Same predominates . . . (I)mmunological defense always takes aim at the Other or the foreigner.”14 In this sense, the pandemic throws the case studies presented in this book into heightened, grotesque relief.The findings of these chapters, in their different ways, all indicate that zombie citizenship—both as an existing plight and an imminent threat—generates an archetypal Hobbesian dilemma. In this conundrum, shared exposure to harm—including viral threat—does not necessarily produce fellow feeling but also the urge to deflect that vulnerability onto others or blame them directly for it. Insofar as it brings shame, a sense of helplessness can be salved by stamping derogated others with its stigmata. Rather than the common good, “the most dangerous of enemies is then created: our worst possible selves, ready to do whatever is necessary to survive.”15 Nancy Ettlinger suggests that rigid essentialist thinking—demonizing the already disadvantaged, for example—can work “as a reflexive denial of precarious life,”16 most particularly when the vulnerability of others is so visible that it serves as an unmissable embodiment of a broader swirling threat. Cast out those people, and that bigger threat, too, might dematerialize. Also in play here is what Arjun Appadurai calls “the fear of small numbers.”17 China’s underclass is numerically vast, but it remains a minority physically proximate to the somewhat safer majority who sense, however irrationally, their continued security and well-being menaced by those down below but near at hand. Appadurai observes that “predatory identities arise in those circumstances in which majorities and minorities can plausibly be seen as being in danger of trading places.”18 When that zone of [ 258 ]  C O N C L U S I O N

identity exchange is the cliff edge, and when the surrounding climate feels so uncertain—so virally menacing—the will to harm may intensify. According to Appadurai, predatory identities are usually majoritarian ones, and the cultural works by more advantaged members of society that I explore here—especially in chapters 1 and 2, which explore delegated performance and waste art, respectively—certainly testify to that trait in their disdain and cruelty. But the affective punch packed by cultural forms produced by more marginalized people is no less intense. The poetry from the factory floor, suicide shows, and short skits I analyze in chapters 3, 4, and 5 pulsate with rage, grievance, resentment, and lost trust.19 Again and again, these hard feelings are directed at specific class others rather than at the official system that has tectonically carved out the cliff edge.20 The shunning of some frontline workers, but not others, during a pandemic the state arguably mismanaged in its crucial early stages partakes of this same unwholesome structure of sentiment.

Expulsion by Another Name In the introduction to this book, I raised the question of why this furious feeling so often toxifies laterally in precarious China rather than boiling upward toward the true makers of the policies that hurt. I suggested that the necropolitics of sacrifice and martyrdom may be at work in this sideways, scapegoating impulse because there is a degree of soft-spoken societal buyin for the notion that growth and progress cannot be victimless feats, and that some must be forfeited if others are to flourish. But another factor may also be at work, and it serves as a long lens through which to consider China’s position within a wider precarious world. Long before Covid-19, the logic of expulsion was at work right across the globe, from the subprime mortgage crisis and voter suppression in supposedly advanced democracies to depredations of the biosphere that rob people of food and shelter in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. Expulsion is not a China-specific problem, however egregious its Chinese iterations may be.Yet the cliff edge in China nonetheless requires laser-sharp attention, not simply because of the grievous impact of this socio-affective structure locally but because of what it reveals about the relationship between the threat of civic death and precarious feeling far more broadly. In particular, Chinese experiences offer vital corroboration of Loïc Wacquant’s claim that access to citizenship is the core fulcrum on C O N C L U S I O N   [ 259 ]

which expulsion hinges—and one that requires more intensive study across multiple settings geographically disparate yet fundamentally linked by the logic of exile. As he points out, “if citizenship, and not class, income, employment status, or ‘race’, is becoming the central pivot of exclusionary closure and of entitlement to transfers, goods, and services from the national collectivity, then we stand in dire need of an adequate sociological understanding of this institution, central to modernity yet still relatively marginal to social theory and research” (emphasis in the original).21 In the more than twenty years since Wacquant made this assertion, scholars have taken solid steps to flesh out the claim that citizenship constitutes the axis of “exclusionary closure.” In many cases, however, this work tends to consider expulsion from citizenship through the relatively tight prism of deportation and denationalization.22 This is in part because the twenty-first century has seen a major stepping up of these practices as liberal democratic states flex their powers to cast beyond sovereign frontiers “rejected asylum applicants, unauthorized migrants, authorized residents who commit a crime or become a perceived burden on the welfare state, or those considered security risks.”23 Two key points emerge here, and they both touch on the issue of formal nomenclature. The first is the idea that casting out typically operates via explicit bureaucratic decree. It is a loss of citizenship status that takes place through laws that name the process of expulsion outright, even if it has clear implications for citizenship as a normative concept as much as a legal one.24 The second, also rooted in literal terminology and referenced in the introduction, is the settled idea that expulsion denotes a physical ejection from the body politic and across national lines. These two notions, although guided by a clear classificatory framework, may not be adequate to the task of encompassing the reality of expulsion within an age of endemic precarity. The latter, after all, is about the sustained and often disingenuous exercise of informality. Informality is so constitutive of precarity, in fact, that the two often merge into synonymous conditions within the academic literature. This conflation can be problematic;25 yet it nonetheless has clear but overlooked implications for experiences of flexiexpulsion. Informal labor practices, informal workplaces, informal modes of remuneration, informal approaches to protection, liability, and legality: these are the seminal experiences of the precarious epoch, even—indeed, especially—when that informality proceeds from the most official, the most formal sources of power.

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What Chinese experience illuminates so sharply—and precisely because the CCP is such an authoritarian behemoth—is that such informality is often the alibi of “governmental precarization,” of a state that is tacitly invested in inducing vulnerability, at least among certain groups at certain times. When forms of expulsion happen within the borders of the nationstate via policies that profess to be about something else or because of apparent regulatory laxity, their status as acts of banishment is occluded. This strategic obliqueness is a mode of plausible deniability that imposes flexiexile on marginalized people while limiting or obscuring state responsibility for such acts, or for the failure to prevent them. In this sense, the spirit of expulsion arguably has the potential to corrode citizenship even more insidiously than the letter. When expulsion occurs via another name—because of preventable industrial injury, the dormitory regime in factories, the failure to protect delivery drivers from social violence, and so on—it is much harder to name this act and protest against it in exactly the same way that wage arrears are more difficult to claim without a contract of employment. Such processes seem a legal world away from deportation and denationalization. But in a core sense, that distance, with its consequent unaccountability, is exactly what enables states to unmoor certain people from a rights-based existence and pitch them into civic jeopardy. And to return to the quandary posed earlier—namely, why do rage and resentment at the cliff edge spill out sideways instead of funneling upward toward the state—one answer to this conundrum may be the reactive, volatile frustration people feel when the architects of societal misery camouflage their own responsibility while openly pushing the blame for hard times downward. Expulsion by another name is globally widespread. To focus on its affective impact in China is not to minimize that bleak universality nor to imply that facile parallels can be drawn between Chinese expressions of this mode of casting out and those in play elsewhere. But the incongruity between the status and support vouchsafed to workers in the Chinese constitution, on one hand, and the proliferation of de facto strategies of civic exile, on the other, should make China a key focus for the study of citizenship under siege, and in ways that might initially seem counterintuitive. At first sight, exploring indirect modes of expulsion in China might even seem a disingenuous move given that it is the formally authoritarian character of the Chinese state and its banishment power that is most striking and that has previously monopolized scholarly interest: from forced evictions to the vast

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layoffs from state-owned enterprises that hurled many workers into forms of half-life. This long-standing focus has been made even more glaringly justified in recent years by the Xinjiang internment camps, which may operate secretively and extrajuridically but are no less official for that fact. But if expulsion is, to an extent, a submerged logic whose contours have yet to be fully grasped, this conceptual elusiveness may be linked to what I earlier called strategic obliqueness during an era in which sureties of every kind are wearing thin. Like so many other experiences in a precarious epoch, expulsion is hard to nail down. In this sense, even if Chinese experiences are imprecise, imperfect analogues for those elsewhere—and vice versa— they still offer harsh insight into the relationship between state-stewarded expulsion outside the strict letter of the law and precarity as an embedded structure of feeling. This is because citizenship, as Goodman and Guo have argued, is a social quantity best understood through a “connected histories” approach. Such a take explicitly acknowledges that seemingly local—for example, Euro-American—ideas are, in fact, constituted by transnational traffic in people, texts, and ideas, and thus avoids turning China into “an orientalized ‘other’ that defines what citizenship is not.”26 This is not simply the point, well understood for a couple of decades now, that citizenship studies needs to throw off its Eurocentrism.27 Rather, it is a process of conceptual braiding that interweaves Chinese experiences with those of other places— a point raised in the introduction in relation to the pseudo-divide that separates “precarious Euro-America” from “postsocialist China,” when the two entities are, in fact, experientially enmeshed in thoroughgoing ways. More particular for my purposes here, forms of de facto expulsion in China stand as a crucial parallel to the concept of informal citizenship/denizenship that has been extensively theorized in liberal democratic states over the last two decades. These range from Etienne Balibar’s description of the “gray area where individuals are neither completely included nor completely excluded” (emphasis in the original)28 to research on “liminal legality,” “segmented assimilation,” and the notion that access to citizenship operates on a sliding scale rather than as an emphatic either/or.29 The impetus that drives the vast bulk of this scholarship is the movement of people across national lines and the improvised, makeshift modes of civic incorporation that illegal residents pursue in migrant destination nations. More precisely, it documents how those categorized as aliens “integrate into mostly local environments, benefit from the humanitarian support of [ 262 ]  C O N C L U S I O N

non-governmental organizations, and take part in myriad institutions such as schools, churches, ethnic community groups, art collectives, and political associations.”30 Informal citizenship, in short, is about how those officially outside the legal pale claw their way inside it, tentative step by step. Indirect expulsion, in contrast, is typically born of internal migration from countryside to city and operates the other way around. As a reverse arc, it describes how those whose civic rights are officially enshrined in the law of the land can find themselves cast out from its charmed circle, insidious step by step. Understanding citizenship in our current precarious epoch requires an interlaced approach that knits these opposite but parallel experiences together as precarity radically expands the scope and remit of expulsion. It enables innovative and tricky to track modes of excommunication that sit at the interface between an unprotective state, induced vulnerability, hypersurveillance, and footloose capital, and which shape in contrastive fashion the life chances of those inching their way into citizenship as well as those who are being squeezed out. Just as the recent widespread civic practice of consciousness-raising traces its origins back to Maoist revolution and its focus on remaking subjectivity,31 so too do forms of indirect expulsion in China constitute a significant strand in global understanding of the complex threats to citizenship in this precarious age and the socio-affective toll those risks take. As goes China, so goes the world.

A+B=C Searching for words that can somehow capture the nature of this toll has been a preoccupation for social theorists in recent years. In particular, what kind of terminology can meaningfully describe the many people trapped in ordinary catastrophe who “inhabit a living status that is disconcerting for our architectures of identity, of meaning, of subjectivity . . . (trapped in) permanent undocumented statuses, social and legal invisibility . . . subjects unmoored from the structures that allow us to conceive the subject”?32 These are the people “missing from our account,” presumably because we struggle to see them.33 Such considerations, vital as they are, almost always presuppose an “us and them”—as, undeniably, does the notion of expulsion that has driven this particular book. But the binding together of expulsion, precarity, and the threat of zombie citizenship which I have attempted here has at its conceptual root the ever-impending dissolution of that apparent C O N C L U S I O N   [ 263 ]

boundary between selves. The class friction that heats up to boiling point in so many of the cultural practices discussed in this book is a portent of imminent chemical reaction, of the hot energy surge that occurs at the slippage between different physical states, at the point when A and B merge to make C. This antagonism, as I have argued, is creative as much as it is destructive: at the very least, it is the crucible of the five cultural practices described in the preceding chapters, which show the vibrancy of rage and resentment when they are let off the leash. At this final stage, it is worth reiterating the point that these fractious forms do not seek to hold up a looking glass to social realities so much as to create symbolic firepits in which smoldering tensions can ignite and blaze. They give free, full, and excessive rein to negativity and in so doing become social documents just as vital as the cultural practices, to date much more extensively explored, that foster communitas across the class divide. If we are to probe and challenge the binaries between “citizen/noncitizen, insider/outsider, entitled/unentitled, legal/illegal, and deserving/ undeserving,”34 the friction that can arise from the intimate coexistence and tight interdependency of different social groups needs attention—and most pertinently perhaps in cultural spaces because they lend the runaway power of metaphor and imagination to the outworkings of this tension. Ultimately, in fact, the incendiary practices I have explored here also show how class antagonism brings people into tight physical or affective proximity with each other even as their difference is aggressively asserted: from the violent sparring in He Yunchang’s delegated performance to the volatile stand-offs between rooftop and street in suicide shows. That proximity is not just creative but transformative too. At one level, this is the coming into selfhood that cultural creation can often usher in and which is never more crucial than for “subjects unmoored from the structures that allow us to conceive the subject.” But it is also the third state—the A + B = C—that comes when the self really acknowledges the other, face-to-face, even if that recognition occurs amid the torridness of conflict. And as people come together like this, they also intuit both their sameness and the constructed nature of the barriers that sunder them. This may not be the balm of cultural solidarity, soothing as that can often be. But the fear and fury of shared vulnerability, at a time when exile and belonging lie on an increasingly slippery scale, are subjects just as deserving of study because this commonality in extremis might at any point catalyze new reactions of its own.

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Writing in 2023—at the tail end of a global pandemic, at a time when the fear and fact of zombie citizenship seem more menacing than ever— I accept that this might seem a groundless, even hollowly hopeful note on which to end a study committed from the outset to the necessity of documenting dark feelings. What might such new reactions be? Is it conceivable that any good might come of them? I do not pretend to have answers to those questions. But as I look back on the writing of this book and the cultural forms it has described, I’m struck once more by the force of the passions that animate these practices and to which they themselves often give rise. At different points in the preceding pages, I have referred to the culture of sang (despondency) and to the so-called tangping (lying flat) movement, both vernacular expressions of protest against the status quo of life and labor in China today that deliberately deploy a verbal or visual lexicon of passivity. They make manifest the subversive potential of opting out, staying supine, tactically disengaging. It is telling that both have been picked up extensively by foreign media, perhaps because they tally neatly with long-standing clichés about lone, bold dissidents who are always on their feet and the broader masses who seldom stand up to be counted. In contrast, the cultural practices I have explored are vehement repudiations of passivity; they are the raging anti-inert. Ultimately, it is this bristling energy, even more than the darkness to which it gives vent, that might offer the possibility of a route forward. Civic status is traditionally linked to civility, in contemporary China as in ancient Rome, and this is a civility that is mannered and gracious, disciplined and smooth. It marshals and militates for harmony. The cultural makers I have explored here subvert these code words for citizenly membership; but they do so precisely to stake or maintain their claim to the polis: they disobey in the hope that they might belong. The results are messy. They seemingly reek of the uncivilized. And precisely because of this, they suggest not only that citizenship is worth fighting for, even getting one’s hands dirty over, but that as a social norm it also requires this kind of ongoing definitional struggle to remain meaningful. At the core of that struggle, as I have just suggested, are those white-heat moments in which the epiphany of shared fragility—of sameness—shakes the tiered, differentiating structures on which so many regimes of citizenship covertly or openly depend. By transgressing codes of citizenly conduct, in other words, precarious and embattled makers of culture may point the way to a more vital civic self.

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All that said, some might argue—and with a rich set of rationales—that the coronavirus pandemic has delivered a well-nigh mortal blow to the civic self in China, at least for the immediate future. Repeated, almost random confinements; suffocated economic activity; forced family separations; and straitened access to food and health care—these grinding corollaries of Xi Jinping’s Zero-Covid policy—led to a deepened, heightened, broadened normalization of precarity, which the practices described here might have prefigured but did not have a vision quite grim enough to foretell in full. And this impact is decisively civic, in part because of the speed and comprehensiveness with which people who thought themselves safe from harm, swaddled cozily by their social blessings, saw the illusion of their rights pulverized. To cite perhaps the most prominent example, the brutal experiences of the 2022 lockdown in Shanghai, a beacon city full of elite professionals, demonstrated all too clearly that basic liberties can be peremptorily withdrawn from even the most privileged people. The result, it might be reasoned, is a civic spirit made yet more precarious by the rolling out of blanket precarization. But in the years to come, it will be increasingly crucial for researchers to push at the limits of this truism, precisely because the pandemic-era leveling down process just described has expanded the orbit of the powerless right across the very class lines this book has taken as a core frame of reference. To put this another way, how might the fractious form— as a cultural practice, as a social intervention—change when people really are in it together, when the cliff edge has transmogrified from fear to fact for the many as well as for the few? A moment ago, I referred to shared fragility amid conflict as a transient, if potentially transformative, thing. But what are the implications for civic self if that experience of tense sharedness stretches out over weeks and months of lockdown in the first instance, but as a state of broadly strangulated rights over the longer haul thereafter? These questions resist answers for now, but their salience can only sharpen over time.

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Notes

“East Asian” name order is used for all writers who publish primarily in Chinese, “Western” name order for all who publish primarily in English. Exceptions are included based on author preference, when known.

Preface: Trial by Fire 1. Song Jiani, Zhang Shuchu, and Li Qiaochu, “Beijing Evictions, a Winter’s Tale,” Made in China Journal (January–March 2018), https://madeinchinajournal.com /2018/05/17/beijing-evictions-a-winters-tale/. 2. Ling Minhua, “Container Housing: Formal Informality and Deterritorialised Home-Making Amid Bulldozer Urbanism in Shanghai,” Urban Studies 58, no. 6 (2021): 1146. 3. Jean-Philippe Béja, “Le Hukou: Avec ou Sans?,” Tous urbains 23 (2018): 22. 4. Ching Kwan Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 2 (2016): 322–24. 5. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (London: Allen Lane, 2007). 6. Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 21. 7. Loïc Wacquant, “Revisiting Territories of Relegation: Class, Ethnicity and State in the Making of Advanced Marginality,” Urban Studies 53, no. 6 (2016): 1082. 8. Song et al. note that “migrant workers who dwell in Beijing’s urban villages work in a variety of industries that go far beyond traditional occupations in

[ 267 ]

small retail, decoration, domestic work, vehicle repairing, etc. Today’s migrants work in industries that are characterised by the logics of modern large-scale capital investment, including logistics, delivery, and real estate.” Song et al., “Beijing Evictions.” Other inhabitants of these settlements include members of the so-called ant tribe (yizu 蚁族): a group of university-educated migrants, perhaps three-million strong, who lack urban household registration and are unable to obtain employment commensurate with their skills. See Patricia M. Thornton, “A New Urban Underclass? Making and Managing ‘Vulnerable Groups’ in Contemporary China,” in To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power, ed. Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 260. 9. See Kevin Lin, “Eviction and the Right to the City,” Made in China Journal (January–March, 2018), https://madeinchinajournal.com/2018/05/17/eviction -and-the-right-to-the-city/; and Philipp C. D. Immel, “High-Modernist Urban Planning in Beijing for Population Control,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 49, no. 3 (2020): 291–311. 10. Eva Pils, “From Authoritarian Development to Totalist Urban Reordering: The Daxing Forced Evictions Case,” China Information 34, no. 2 (2020): 277. 11. Quoted in Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 7. 12. Helen Siu, “Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Postreform South China,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 329–50. 13. Song et al., “Beijing Evictions.” 14. The Beijing municipal government has publicly denied this point. For an interview with an official from the Municipal Committee on Safety, which repudiates this charge and attributes the evictions entirely to fire safety concerns, see Beijing qingnianbao 北京青年报 [Beijing youth news], “Liang lun paicha. Yinhuan chumujingxin” 两轮排查 隐患触目惊心 [Two rounds of investigation: Shocking dangers hidden from view], November 26, 2017. 15. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 1. 16. Sassen, Expulsions, 1. 17. Saskia Sassen, “At the Systemic Edge: Expulsions,” European Review 24, no. 1 (2016): 89. 18. Matthew Gibney, “Banishment and the Pre-history of Legitimate Expulsion Power,” Citizenship Studies 24, no. 3 (2020): 279. 19. See National People’s Congress of the People’s Republic of China, “Constitution of the People’s Republic of China,” 2004, http://www.npc.gov.cn/zgrdw /englishnpc/Constitution/node_2825.htm. 20. See Susan Greenhalgh, “Planned Births, Unplanned Persons: ‘Population’ in the Making of Chinese Modernity,” American Ethnologist 30, no. 2 (2003): 198; Jieh-min Wu, “Rural Migrant Workers and China’s Differential Citizenship: A [ 268 ]  P R E F A C E

Comparative-Institutional Analysis,” in One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China, ed. Martin King Whyte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 56; and Samantha A. Vortherms, “Hukou as a Case of Multi-Level Citizenship,” in The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Citizenship, ed. Zhonghua Guo (Routledge: New York, 2022), 132–42. 21. Marcel Paret, “Apartheid, Migrant Labor, and Precarity in Comparative Perspective,” in Precarity and Belonging, ed. Catherine S. Ramírez, Juan Poblete, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 113. 22. Catherine S. Ramírez, Juan Poblete, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, “Introduction. Toward a Politics of Commonality: The Nexus of Mobility, Precarity, and (Non)citizenship,” in Precarity and Belonging, ed. Catherine S. Ramírez, Juan Poblete, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 3. 23. Sarah Juliet Lauro, “Introduction:Wander and Wonder in Zombieland,” in Zombie Theory: A Reader, ed. Sarah Juliet Lauro (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2017), x. 24. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), xv. 25. See Lian Si 廉思, ed., Yizu: Daxue biyesheng jujucun shilu 蚁族：大学毕业生 聚居村实录 [Ant tribes: A record of the villages inhabited by university graduates] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Engebretsen, “Precarity, Survival, Change: China’s ‘Ant Tribes,’ ” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38, no. 2 (2013): 62–71; and Ching Kwan Lee, “China’s Precariats,” Globalizations 16, no. 2 (2019): 137–54. 26. See Lin, “Eviction and the Right to the City”; Song et al., “Beijing Evictions”; and Ah Qi 阿七, “40 tian handong qingli: Minjian zijiu shilu” 40天寒冬清理： 民间自救实录 [40 days of social cleansing in mid-winter: An account of relief efforts from civil society], NGOCN, January 15, 2018, https://shimo.im/docs /6t94NJ4xMpsdamPz/read. 27. Weiquanwang 维权网 [Rights Defense Network], “Jiang Ping, He Weifang deng xuezhe lüshi dui Beijingshi zhengfu qugan wailai jumin de xingdong ji qi yiju de xingzheng wenjian xiang quanguo rendahui changweihui tiqing hexianxing shencha de quanwen” 江平、 贺卫方等学者律师对北京市政府 驱赶外来居民的行动及其依据的行政文件向全国人大会常委会提请合宪 性审查的全文 [Full text of the submission from Jiang Ping, He Weifang, and other scholars and lawyers to the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress requesting a review of the constitutionality of the Beijing municipal government’s operation to expel nonresidents and of the administrative documents that formed the basis for that action], December 24, 2017, https:// wqw2010.blogspot.com/2017/12/blog-post_27.html . P R E F A C E   [ 269 ]

28. Weiquanwang, “Lijie, shandai, kuanrong, guan’ai tamen! Guanyu liji tingzhi cubao qugan ‘diduan renkou’, liji kaifang jiuzhuzhongxin de huyu” 理解、善 待、宽容、关爱他们！关于立即停止粗暴驱赶“低端人口”、立即开放救 助中心的呼吁 [Be understanding, decent, tolerant, and caring toward them! An appeal to end violent expulsions of “low-end groups” and to open relief centers immediately], November 25, 2017, https://wqw2010.blogspot.com/2017 /11/blog-post_53.html. 29. See, for example, Wang Liuyi 王留一, “Beijingshi ‘dongji qingli xingdong’ de hefaxing fenxi” 北京市 “冬季清理行动” 的合法性分析 [An analysis of the legality of Beijing’s “Winter Social Cleansing Campaign”], November 28, 2017. Originally posted on WeChat, this piece was later deleted but can be accessed at https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/573234.html. 30. Pils, “From Authoritarian Development,” 271. 31. Weiquanwang, “Jiang Ping.” 32. Pils, “From Authoritarian Development,” 281. 33. See https://weibo.com/1640601392/FwRZ95IJr?type=comment; https://mp .weixin.qq.com/s/HNi0cM8EBpwzRxRIsh_l_w; and https://mp.weixin.qq.com /s/8AXwPceHwm0Yg_ynccRKhQ. 34. See https://weibo.com/1640601392/FwRZ95IJr?type=comment; and https:// mp.weixin.qq.com/s/t0vQbCpruarsg9x-H0Q2fA. 35. See https://weibo.com/1974576991/GmYiHCY9N?type=comment; and https:// weibo.com/1640601392/FwRZ95IJr?type=comment. 36. See https://weibo.com/5463794433/Fw2VRjI11?ssl_rnd=1612211929.5969&type =comment. 37. For a varied selection of comments, see https://tieba.baidu.com/p/5455113582?red _tag=2655895757; https://www.guancha.cn/society/2017_11_27_436584.shtml; https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/17/11/24/n9890731.htm; and https://www .sohu.com/picture/206507704. 38. Lin Chun, “The Language of Class in China,” Socialist Register 51 (2015): 25. 39. Elizabeth J. Perry, “Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?,” The China Journal 57 (2007): 13. 40. I am thinking here particularly of the “lying flat” or tangping 躺平 movement, which went viral in China in 2021.

Introduction: Grasping the Precarious 1. Hao Jingfang 郝景芳, Gudu shenchu 孤独深处 [Deep loneliness] (Nanjing: Jiangsu wenyi chubanshe, 2016). 2. Javier C. Hernández and Karoline Kan, “Author’s Vision of a Future Beijing Looks to China’s Present,” New York Times, November 29, 2016, https://www [ 270 ]  P R E F A C E









.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/world/asia/china-hao-jingfang-science-fiction.html. Hao makes the identical point in other interviews. See, for example, Gwennaël Gaffric, “Entretien avec Hao Jingfang,” Monde chinois 3, nos. 51–52 (2017): 65. 3. Vassilis Tsianos and Dimitris Papadopoulos, “Precarity: A Savage Journey to the Heart of Embodied Capitalism,” Transversal Journal 11 (2006), https://transversal .at/transversal/1106/tsianos-papadopoulos/en. 4. Sherry Ortner, “Dark Anthropology and Its Others: Theory Since the Eighties,” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 1 (2016): 49. 5. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Equality (London: Verso, 2016), 190–93. 6. As Yun Li and Rong Rong argue, it is precisely the state’s repeated hailing of working-class people into a middle-class identity they cannot realize that eats away at in-class solidarity: “It is a reidentification as disidentification, inventing a ‘working class’ misidentified with a class image that is beyond its financial reach as well as social function. The misidentification, on the one hand, throws migrant workers into a lifelong search for identities, on the other hand, it disidentifies the working class as the ‘revolutionary’ proletariat. This explains why Chinese workers have not given ‘a national voice to the world’s largest working class,’ though there are protests and strikes ‘mounted up by small groups in discrete areas of the country.’ ” See Yun Li and Rong Rong, “A Middle-Class Misidentification: Self-Identification in the Autobiographical Poetry of Chinese Female Peasant Workers,” positions: asia critique 27, no. 4 (2019): 774. 7. For sociological and political science studies that deploy the term “underclass” in various iterations to describe social marginalization in China, see Dorothy Solinger, “The Creation of a New Underclass in China and Its Implications,” Environment and Urbanization, 18, no. 1 (2006): 177–93; Dorothy Solinger, “The New Urban Underclass and Its Consciousness: Is It a Class?,” Journal of Contemporary China 21, no. 78 (2012): 1011–28; Kam Wing Chan, “The Global Financial Crisis and Migrant Workers in China: ‘There Is No Future as a Labourer; Returning to the Village Has No Meaning,’ ” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 34, no. 3 (2010): 662; Ching Kwan Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment? Reflections on Recent Labor Unrest in China,” Journal of Asian Studies 75, no. 2 (2016): 324; and Patricia M. Thornton, “A New Urban Underclass? Making and Managing ‘Vulnerable Groups’ in Contemporary China,” in To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power, ed. Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 254. 8. The term ruoshi qunti made its official discursive debut in a speech by Zhu Rongji at the Ninth National People’s Congress in 2002. See Linda Wong, “Chinese Migrant Workers: Rights Attainment Deficits, Rights Consciousness and Personal Strategies,” China Quarterly 208 (2011): 872. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 271 ]

9. National Bureau of Statistics of China, “Statistical Communiqué of the People’s Republic of China on the 2019 National Economic and Social Development,” Feb­ ruary 28,2020,http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202002/t20200228 _1728917.html. 10. Michael B. Katz, “The Urban ‘Underclass’ as a Metaphor of Social Transformation,” in The “Underclass” Debate:Views from History, ed. Michael B. Katz (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4. 11. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852, https://www.marxists .org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch05.htm. 12. Charles A. Murray, “The Underclass,” in Criminological Perspectives: Essential Readings, ed. Eugene McLaughlin and John Muncie (London: Sage, 2002), 138. 13. Loïc Wacquant, Urban Outcasts. A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), 21, 44. 14. Li Qiang 李强, “ ‘Dingzixing’ de shehui jiegou yu ‘jiegou jinzhang’ ” “丁字型” 的社会结构与 “结构紧张” [The “inverted T-shape” social structure and “structural strain”], Shehuixue yanjiu 社会学研究 [Sociological research] 2 (2005): 55–59. 15. Jin Han, Qingxia Zhao, and Mengnan Zhang, “China’s Income Inequality in the Global Context,” Perspectives in Science 7 (2016): 24–29. 16. Jieh-min Wu, “Migrant Citizenship Regimes in Globalized China: A HistoricalInstitutional Comparison,” Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science 14 (2017): 131. 17. Jieh-min Wu, “Rural Migrant Workers and China’s Differential Citizenship: A Comparative-Institutional Analysis,” in One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China, ed. Martin King Whyte (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 56, 66. 18. See also Helen Siu, “Grounding Displacement: Uncivil Urban Spaces in Postreform South China,” American Ethnologist 34, no. 2 (2007): 333. 19. Mun Young Cho, “  ‘Dividing the Poor’: State Governance of Differential Impoverishment in Northeast China,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 1 (2012): 188. 20. This is the view of opponents of the underclass thesis, such as Stephen Frenkel and ChongxinYu, who argue that factors such as high employment, rising pay, occasional occupation outside the “low-end” sector, and growing rights awareness among rural migrants are steadily lifting them out of vulnerability. See Stephen J. Frenkel and Chongxin Yu, “Chinese Migrants’ Work Experience and City Identification: Challenging the Underclass Thesis,” Human Relations 68, no. 2 (2015): 261–85. 21. For extensive discussions, see Lü Tu 吕途, Zhongguo xin gongren: mishi yu jueqi 中 国新工人：迷失与崛起 [China’s new workers: Lost but on the rise] (Beijing: Falü chubanshe, 2013); and Lü Tu 吕途, Zhongguo xin gongren: wenhua yu ming­ yun 中国新工人：文化与命运 [China’s new workers: Culture and destiny] (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 2015). 22. Wu, “Rural Migrant Workers,” 60. [ 272 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

23. Wu, “Rural Migrant Workers,” 65. Even a more upbeat diagnosis, such as that by Frenkel and Yu, acknowledges that ongoing precarious work, prejudicial social treatment, residential segregation, and limited access to legal safeguards put brakes on that journey as employers “continue to evade the law, probably in collusion with local government officials.” See Frenkel and Yu, “Chinese Migrants’ Work Experience,” 278. 24. Cho, “ ‘Dividing the Poor,’ ” 187. 25. Chan, “The Global Financial Crisis,” 670. 26. Lei Che, Haifeng Du, and Kai Wing Chan, “Unequal Pain: A Sketch of the Impact of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Migrants’ Employment in China,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 61, nos. 4–5 (2020): 448. 27. Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 4. 28. Kam Wing Chan, “The Chinese Hukou System at 50,” Eurasian Geography and Economics 50, no. 2 (2009): 197–221. 29. Yan Hairong, New Masters, New Servants: Migration, Development, and Women Workers in China (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 25–52. 30. Foxconn is a vast multinational electronics manufacturer, producing goods and services for Apple, Sony, Nintendo, and many other companies. Headquartered in Taiwan, it is one of the world’s largest employers and has a huge presence in China, where it has been linked to a range of controversial practices related to the harsh treatment of employees. 31. Miriam Driessen, “Rural Voids,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (2018): 64. 32. Ann Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 195. 33. Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” 193. 34. Chan, “The Global Financial Crisis,” 670. 35. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 36. Solinger, “The New Urban Underclass,” 1013–14. 37. Solinger, “The New Urban Underclass,” 1026. 38. Junxi Qian and Junwan’guo Guo, “Migrants on Exhibition: The Emergence of Migrant Worker Museums in China as a Neoliberal Experiment on Governance,” Journal of Urban Affairs 41, no. 3 (2018): 306. 39. Xiang Biao, “Suspension: Seeking Agency for Change in the Hypermobile World,” Pacific Affairs 94, no. 2 (2021): 246. 40. Ortner, “Dark Anthropology and Its Others,” 54. 41. You-Tien Hsing, The Great Urban Transformation: Politics of Land and Property in China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 62. 42. Qin Shao, Shanghai Gone: Domicide and Defiance in a Chinese Megacity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 273 ]

43. Harriet Evans, Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 5. 44. Sassen, Expulsions, 222. 45. See Zheng Siqi 郑思齐, Liao Junping 廖俊平, Ren Rongrong 任荣荣, and Cao Yang 曹洋, “Nongmingong zhufang zhengce yu jingji zengchang” 农民工住房 政策与经济增长 [Migrant housing policy and economic growth], Jing­yi yanjiu 经济研究 [Economic research] 2 (2011): 73–86;Youqin Huang and Chengdong Yi,“Invisible Migrant Enclaves in Chinese Cities: Underground Living in Beijing, China,” Urban Studies 52, no. 15 (2015): 2948–73; Shaohua Zhan, “What Determines Migrant Workers’ Life Chances in Contemporary China? Hukou, Social Exclusion, and the Market,” Modern China 37, no. 3 (2011): 269; and Ling Minhua, “Container Housing: Formal Informality and Deterritorialised Home-Making Amid Bulldozer Urbanism in Shanghai,” Urban Studies 58, no. 6 (2021): 1141–57. 46. Siu, “Grounding Displacement,” 333. 47. Siu, “Grounding Displacement,” 332. 48. Huang and Yi, “Invisible Migrant Enclaves,” 2948. 49. Miao Li, Citizenship Education and Migrant Youth in China: Pathways to the Urban Underclass (London: Routledge, 2015). 50. Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” 202. 51. Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Iron,” trans. Isabelle Li, Sydney Review of Books, November 22, 2019, https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/essay/iron-zheng-xiaoqiong/. 52. Simon Fitzgerald, Xin Chen, Hui Qu, and Mira Grice Sheff, “Occupational Injury Among Migrant Workers in China: A Systematic Review,” Injury Prevention 19 (2013): 348. 53. Fitzgerald et al., “Occupational Injury,” 248. 54. Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” 201. 55. Pun Ngai 潘毅 and Yi Xu 许怡, “Longduan ziben yu Zhongguo gongren: yi Fushikang gongchang tizhi wei li” 垄断资本与中国工人：富士康工厂体制 为例 [Monopoly capital and Chinese workers: The Foxconn factory system as a case study], Wenhua zongheng 文化纵横 [Beijing cultural review] 2 (2012): 48–54. 56. Cheng Pingyuan 程平原, Pun Ngai 潘毅, Shen Cheng 沈承, and Kong Wei 孔伟, “Qiu zai Fushikang: Fushikang zhunjunshihua gongchang tizhi diaocha baogao” 囚在富士康—富士康准军事化工厂体制调查报告 [Imprisoned in Foxconn: A survey report on Foxconn’s paramilitary factory system], Qingnian yanjiu 青年研究 [Youth studies] 5 (2011): 60–74. 57. Siu, “Grounding Displacement,” 331. 58. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 787. 59. Comaroff and Comaroff, “Alien-Nation,” 798. 60. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1., trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 926. [ 274 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

61. Chera Kee, “ ‘They Are Not Men . . . They Are Dead Bodies!’: From Cannibal to Zombie and Back Again,” in Better Off Dead: The Evolution of the Zombie as Post-Human, ed. Deborah Christie and Sarah Juliet Lauro (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011), 9–23. 62. For invocations of the term “apartheid” see, for example, Peter Alexander and Anita Chan, “Does China Have an Apartheid Pass System?,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30, no. 4 (2006): 609–29. 63. Mike Mariani,“TheTragic,Forgotten History of Zombies,”Atlantic,October 28,2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/10/how-america -erased-the-tragic-history-of-the-zombie/412264/. 64. Masha Borak, “Coronavirus Game with Hidden Political Messages Gets Blocked in China,” South China Morning Post, April 28, 2020, https://www.scmp.com /abacus/games/article/3081827/coronavirus-game-hidden-political-messages -gets-blocked-china. 65. Quoted in Tatiana Siegel, “Zombie Films at Cannes: What’s Up with All the Undead?,” Hollywood Reporter, May 18, 2019, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com /news/zombie-films-at-cannes-whats-up-all-undead-1211968. 66. See Xiao Kaijing, “Scary Halloween Monsters Threatened with Arrest on Beijing Subway,” ABC News, October 31, 2014, https://abcnews.go.com/International /scary-halloween-monsters-threatened-arrest-beijing-subway/story?id=26600856; and BBC.com,“China: GuangzhouWarns Zombies to Stay Off Metro,” BBC, October 30,2015,https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/blogs-news-from-elsewhere-34677057. 67. Joanna Verran and Xavier Aldana Reyes, “Emerging Infectious Literatures and the Zombie Condition,” Emerging Infectious Diseases 24, no. 9 (2018): 1774. 68. Kyle William Bishop, American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010), 206. 69. Verran and Reyes, “Emerging Infectious Literatures,” 1775. 70. Achille Mbembe, “Democracy as a Community of Life,” Johannesburg Salon 4 (2011): 3. 71. For useful summaries of these two strands of debate, see Chow Yiu Fai, Caring in Times of Precarity: A Study of Single Women Doing Creative Work in Shanghai (London: Palgrave, 2018), 12–13; and Clara Han, “Precarity, Precariousness, and Vulnerability,” Annual Review of Anthropology 47 (2018): 331–43. 72. For important recent work on precarity in China, see Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment?”; Sarah Swider, “Building China: Precarious Employment Among Migrant Construction Workers,” Work, Employment and Society 29, no. 1 (2015): 41–59; Sarah Swider, “Informal and Precarious Work: The Precariat and China,” Rural China: An International Journal of History and Social Science 14 (2017): 19–41; Hao Wang, Wei Li, and Yu Deng, “Precarity Among Highly Educated Migrants: College Graduates in Beijing, China,” Urban Geography 38, no. 10 (2017): 1497–516; Chris Smith and Pun Ngai, “Class and Precarity I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 275 ]

in China: A Contested Relationship,” in Gilded Age: Made in Yearbook 2017, ed. Ivan Franceschini and Nicholas Loubere (Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2017), 44–47; Chris Smith and Pun Ngai, “Class and Precarity: An Unhappy Coupling in China’s Working Class Formation,” Work, Employment and Society 32, no. 3 (2018): 599–615; Chow, Caring in Times of Precarity; Ching Kwan Lee, “China’s Precariats,” Globalizations 16, no. 2 (2019): 137–54; Irene Pang, “The Legal Construction of Precarity: Lessons from the Construction Sectors in Beijing and Delhi,” Critical Sociology 45, nos. 4–5 (2019): 549–64; Jake Lin, “Precarity, Cognitive (Non-)Resistance and the Conservative Working Class in China,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 49, no. 4 (2019): 568–85; and Evans, Bejiing from Below. For an insightful exploration of precarity and its cultural expressions in Taiwan, see Erin Y. Huang, Urban Horror: Neoliberal PostSocialism and the Limits of Visibility (Durham N.C.: Duke University Press, 2020, 184-217. 73. For this term, see Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2011). 74. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 54. 75. Neilson and Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept,” 54. 76. Ronaldo Munck, “The Precariat: A View from the South,” Third World Quarterly 34, no. 5 (2013): 747. 77. Munck, “The Precariat,” 752. 78. Nancy Fraser, Justice Interruptus. Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997). 79. Much the same could be said for the postrevolutionary condition, as Wang Hui has argued on several occasions. See, for example, Wang Hui, The End of the Revolution: China and the Limits of Modernity (London: Verso, 2009). 80. This is not to suggest that postsocialism should only be understood in its harsher neoliberal dimensions. Rather than marking a sharp caesura with the socialist period, postsocialism also signifies the extent to which the legacies of the Maoist era—state interventionism chief among them—have persisted into the reform and postreform eras. 81. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 82. Mao Zedong, Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, vol. 1. (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 296. 83. Andrew Kipnis, “Neoliberalism Reified: Suzhi Discourse and Tropes of Neoliberalism in the People’s Republic of China,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13, no. 2 (2007): 393. 84. Jeremy Daum, “China Through a Glass, Darkly. What Foreign Media Misses in China’s Social Credit,” China Law Translate, December 24, 2017, https://www .chinalawtranslate.com/en/china-social-credit-score/. [ 276 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

85. I am grateful for discussions with Patricia Thornton on this point. 86. Xiang, “Suspension,” 236, 242. 87. Xiang,“Suspension,” 238–39. Suspension and the motif of the hummingbird also chime resonantly with the recent meme that depicts ordinary Chinese people today as “garlic chives” (jiucai 韭菜): frantically entrepreneurial and resilient but constantly chopped down by the sharp sickle that is the state. As Pang Laikwan writes, “the individual jiucai connects with others only through their common economic striving, not via a sense of public belonging. They are hardworking and will likely persevere, but they are also trapped in a perpetual present, obedient and submissive to their biological drive.” See Pang Laikwan, “China’s PostSocialist Governmentality and the Garlic Chives Meme: Economic Sovereignty and Biopolitical Subjects,” Theory, Culture & Society 39, no. 1 (2022): 94. 88. Matthew Erie, “Property Rights, Legal Consciousness and the New Media in China:The Hard Case of the ‘Toughest Nail-House in History,’ ” China Information 26, no. 1 (2012): 38. 89. Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin, “Unfinished Proletarianization: Self, Anger, and Class Action Among the Second Generation of Peasant-Workers in Present-Day China,” Modern China 36, no. 5 (2010): 497. 90. Zhonghua renmin gongheguo zhongyang renmin zhengfu 中华人民共和国 中央人民政府 [The Central People’s Government of the People’s Republic of China], “Zhonghua renmin gongheguo laodongfa” 中华人民共和国劳动 法 [Labor law of the People’s Republic of China),” 1995, http://www.gov.cn /banshi/2005-05/25/content_905.htm. 91. Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment?,” 320. 92. Lee, “Precarization or Empowerment?,” 320–21. 93. Lee, “China’s Precariats,” 145. 94. See, for example, Xiaomin Yu, “Impacts of Corporate Code of Conduct on Labor Standards: A Case Study of Reebok’s Athletic Footwear Supplier Factory in China,” Journal of Business Ethics 81, no. 3 (2008): 513–29; Ching Kwan Lee and Yelizavetta Kofman, “The Politics of Precarity: Views Beyond the United States,” Work and Occupations 39, no. 4 (2012): 396; Swider, “Building China,” 78–80; Lin, “Precarity,” 570. 95. This rhetoric has achieved some significant traction in China. Multination surveys on social justice and inequality directed by Martin King Whyte reveal that “with the exception of Japan, none of the other countries rate lack of individual effort as so important in explaining poverty as do Chinese”; attitudes to structural inequality are similar: “only 15–24 percent of Chinese rate unfairness of the economic system as important in explaining who is poor.” See Martin King Whyte, “China’s Dormant and Active Social Volcanoes,” China Journal 75 (2016): 20. 96. Bridget Anderson argues that “The challenge of ‘vulnerable worker’ [as a term] is that it emphasizes the worker, ‘someone’, rather than the political, institutional I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 277 ]

context within which these relations are forged.” See Bridget Anderson, “Battles in Time: The Relation Between Global and Labour Mobilities,” University of Oxford, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), Working Paper 55 (2007): 4. 97. Isabell Lorey,“The Precarious Minimum,” New Inquiry, February 26, 2015, https:// thenewinquiry.com/the-precarious-minimum/. 98. Cho, “ ‘Dividing the Poor,’ ” 192. 99. Whyte, “China’s Dormant and Active Social Volcanoes,” 30. 100. See Jenny Chan and Pun Ngai, “Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital, and the State,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 8, no. 37 (2010): 3; and Lee and Kofman, “The Politics of Precarity,” 396. 101. Pierre Bourdieu, Sociology in Question, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1993), 71. 102. Pang, “The Legal Construction of Precarity,” 549. 103. Jan Breman and Marcel van der Linden, “Informalizing the Economy: The Return of the Social Question at a Global Level,” Development and Change 45, no. 5 (2014): 938. 104. Loïc Wacquant, “Territorial Stigmatization in the Age of Advanced Marginality,” Thesis Eleven 91, no. 1 (2007): 66–67. 105. Jasbir Puar, “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 163–77; and Marcel Paret, “Politics of Solidarity and Agency in an Age of Precarity,” Global Labour Journal 7, no. 2 (2016): 174–88. 106. Anne Allison, “Ordinary Refugees: Social Precarity and Soul in 21st Century Japan,” Anthropological Quarterly 85, no. 2 (2012): 349–50. 107. Examples include Leung Pak Nang and Pun Ngai, “The Radicalisation of the New Chinese Working Class: A Case Study of Collective Action in the Gemstone Industry,” Third World Quarterly 30, no. 3 (2009): 551–65; Chan and Pun, “Suicide as Protest”; Chris King-Chi Chan and Elaine Sio-Ieng Hui, “Bringing Class Struggles Back: A Marxian Analysis of the State and Class Relations in China,” Globalizations 14, no. 2 (2017): 232–44; and Smith and Pun, “Class and Precarity.” 108. Elizabeth Engebretsen, “Precarity, Survival, Change: China’s ‘Ant Tribes,’ ” Suomen Antropologi: Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society 38, no. 2 (2013): 69. See also Asef Bayat, “From ‘Dangerous Classes’ to ‘Quiet Rebels’: Politics of the Urban Subaltern in the Global South,” International Sociology 15, no. 3 (2000): 552. 109. Chow, Caring in Times of Precarity, 15. 110. Wang, China’s Twentieth Century, 190–92. 111. Pun Ngai, Shen Yuan, Guo Yuhua, Lu Huilin, Jenny Chan, and Mark Selden, “Worker-Intellectual Unity: Trans-Border Sociological Intervention in Foxconn,” Current Sociology 62, no. 2 (2014): 220. [ 278 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

112. For students, see Jenny Chan, “A Precarious Worker-Student Alliance in Xi’s China,” China Review 20, no. 1 (2020): 168–69; for lawyers, activists, and academics, see Sebastian Veg, Minjian: The Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 164–203. 113. Tom Cliff and Kan Wang, “Survival as Citizenship, or Citizenship as Survival? Imagined and Transient Political Groups in Urban China,” in The Living Politics of Self-Help Movements in East Asia, ed. Tom Cliff, Tessa  Morris-Suzuki, and Shuge Wei (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 35. 114. Feng Miao,“ ‘Dushu shenghuo’ yu sanshi niandai Shanghai chengshi geming wenhua de fazhan”〈读书生活〉与三十年代上海城市革命文化的发展 [Reading Life and the development of revolutionary culture in 1930s’ Shanghai], Wenxue pinglun 文学评论 [Literary criticism] 4 (2019): 112. 115. This group has subsequently been renamed the New Workers Art Troupe (Xin gongren yishutuan 新工人艺术团) and later the New Workers Band (Xin gongren yuedui 新工人乐队). 116. Li Yunlei 李云雷, “Zhang Huiyu ji women zhe yi dai ren de shiming” 张 慧瑜及我们这一代人的使命 [Zhang Huiyu and our generation’s mission], Chuangzuo yu pinglun 创作与评论 [Creation and criticism] 16 (2017): 16; Maghiel van Crevel, “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry,” Chinese Literature Today 8, no. 1 (2019): 130. 117. A few examples that focus on cultural empowerment in particular are Wang Xiling 王锡苓,Wang Shu 汪舒, and Yuan Jing 苑婧,“Nongmingong de ziwo fuquan yu yingxiang: yi Beijing Chaoyangqu Picun wei ge’an” 农民工的自我赋权与影 响: 以北京朝阳区皮村为个案 [Migrant workers’ self-empowerment and influence: Picun in Beijing’s Chaoyang district as case study], Xiandai chuanbo 现代传播 [Modern communication] 10 (2011): 21–26; Cliff and Wang, “Survival as Citizenship”; Federico Picerni,“Strangers in a Familiar City: Picun Migrant-Worker Poets in the Urban Space of Beijing,” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 51 (2020): 147–70; Junxi Qian and Eric Florence, “Migrant Worker Museums in China: Public Cultures of Migrant Labour in State and Grassroots Initiatives,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47, no. 12 (2021): 2706–24; and Maghiel van Crevel,“I and We in Picun: The Making of Chinese Poet Xiaohai,” unpublished manuscript, 2020. 118. Joel Robbins, “Beyond the Suffering Subject: Toward an Anthropology of the Good,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19 (2013): 447–62. 119. Zhiying Lian and Gillian Oliver, for example, note that Picun has created “the only independent community archives focusing on migrant workers in China.” See Zhiying Lian and Gillian Oliver, “Sustainability of Independent Community Archives in China: A Case Study,” Archival Science 18 (2018): 313. 120. Wanning Sun, “Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class: China’s WorkerPoets and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries,” Journal of Contemporary China 21, no. 78 (2012): 997. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 279 ]

121. van Crevel, “I and We in Picun,” 9. 122. Xu Ming, “Migrant Workers Use Poetry, Rock ’n’ Roll to Uplift Spirits Amid Evictions,” Global Times, December 13, 2017, https://www.globaltimes.cn/content /1080106.shtml. 123. See https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/FJ7P9LMwcWInU2hk2dclrw. This post also contains a devastating letter of farewell to the Museum written by Yuan Changwu 苑长武. 124. van Crevel, “I and We in Picun,” 17. 125. Diana Fu and Greg Distelhorst, “Grassroots Participation and Repression Under Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping,” China Journal 79 (2017): 107–8. 126. Chan, “A Precarious Worker-Student Alliance,” 178. A further reason for the crackdown was the role played in the protest by an underground network of retired Cultural Revolution era activists who were recruiting and training the students as underground labor organizers. I am grateful to Patricia Thornton for alerting me to this point. 127. Au Loong Yu, “The Jasic Struggle in China’s Political Context,” New Politics 17, no. 2 (2019), https://newpol.org/issue_post/the-jasic-struggle-in-chinas-political -context/. 128. Elizabeth Perry observes, “Public security forces, augmented by military units if necessary, work to ensure that various social groups—especially workers and intellectuals—do not join hands.” See Elizabeth Perry, “Studying Chinese Politics: Farewell to Revolution?,” China Journal 57 (2007): 13. 129. NGOs have experienced similar treatment in recent years. As Ching Kwan Lee notes, “in late 2015, Xi Jinping’s government reacted (to the emergence of new solidarity networks) by arresting key labor-NGO leaders and orchestrated smear campaigns against them and their organizations on national television, stifling the confidence and capacity of a budding worker movement.” See Lee, “China’s Precariats,” 149. 130. For information on Shen Mengyu’s activities, see Xu Yiyang 徐亦扬, “Guangzhou nü shuoshi chengwei gongren weiquan daibiaohou zao kaichu” 广州女 硕士成为工人维权代表后遭开除 [A female MA student in Guangzhou is sacked after becoming a representative for workers’ rights], Epoch Times, July 10, 2018, http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/18/7/9/n10550038.htm. 131. Earl V. Brown Jr. and Kyle A. deCant, “Exploiting Chinese Interns as Unprotected Industrial Labor,” Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 15, no. 2 (2014): 150–95; Chris Smith and Jenny Chan, “Working for Two Bosses: Student Interns as Constrained Labour in China,” Human Relations 68, no. 2 (2015): 305–26. 132. Huang Yan 黄岩, “Gongchangwai de gangong youxi: yi Zhusanjiao diqu de ganhuo shengchan wei li” 工厂外的赶工游戏—以珠三角地区的赶货生产 为例 [The rush-labor game beyond the factory: Rush production in the Pearl [ 280 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

River Delta region as a case study], Shehuixue yanjiu 社会学研究 [Sociological research] 4 (2012): 187–203. 133. Elaine Jing Zhao, “Writing on the Assembly Line: Informal Labour in the Formalised Online Literature Market in China,” New Media and Society 19, no. 8 (2016): 1236–52. 134. Lian Si 廉思, ed., Yizu: Daxue biyesheng jujucun shilu 蚁族：大学毕业生聚居村 实录 [Ant tribes: A record of the villages inhabited by university graduates] (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009); Thornton, “A New Urban Underclass?” 135. CnBeta.com, “Huobao de 996.ICU xiangmu zhengzai yunniang kaiyuan xukezheng jinzhi 996 gongsi shiyong” 火爆的996.ICU项目正在酝酿开源许 可证禁止996公司使用 [Lively 996.ICU project tries to create open source license and prohibit companies with the 996 system from using it], March 29, 2019, https://www.cnbeta.com/articles/tech/832449.htm; Li Xiaotian, “The 996.ICU Movement in China: Changing Employment Relations and Labour Agency in the Tech Industry,” Made in China Journal, June 18, 2019, https:// madeinchinajournal.com/2019/06/18/the-996-icu-movement-in-china -changing-employment-relations-and-labour-agency-in-the-tech-industry/. 136. Allison, “Ordinary Refugees,” 348–49. 137. Zeng Yuli, “Turn Off, Drop Out: Why Young Chinese Are Abandoning Ambition,” Sixth Tone, June 27, 2017, https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1000407/turn -off%2C-drop-out-why-young-chinese-are-abandoning-ambition. 138. K. Cohen Tan and Shuxin Cheng describe Slouching Ge You, the TV character who serves as apathetic mascot of the sang movement, as “a degraded subject deemed to be indecent or unhealthy. The ‘unliveable’ abject quality is visually reinforced through the character’s prostrate body: his emaciated face, unfocused eyes and feeble limbs render Ge You more like a corpse than a living person.” See K. Cohen Tan and Shuxin Cheng,“Sang Subculture in Post-Reform China,” Global Media and China 5, no. 1 (2020): 91. Significantly, the character sang (pronounced with a different tone) also has mourning and funerary connotations. 139. Cohen Tan and Cheng, “Sang Subculture,” 87. 140. Wang, China’s Twentieth Century, 187. 141. Smith and Pun, “Class and Precarity in China,” 47. 142. Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” 206. 143. Pu Miao, “Deserted Streets in a Jammed Town: The Gated Community in Chinese Cities and Its Solution,” Journal of Urban Design 8, no. 1 (2003): 64. 144. Jie Yang, “The Politics and Regulation of Anger in Urban China,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40, no. 1 (2016): 100. 145. Lian Si 廉思 and Zhang Linna 张琳娜, “Zhuanxingqi ‘yizu’ shehui bugongpinggan yanjiu” 转型期“蚁族”社会不公平感研究 [Research on feelings of social injustice among the “Ant Tribes” during the transitional period), Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu 中国青年研究 [Research on Chinese youth] 6 (2011): 20. I N T RO D U C T I O N   [ 281 ]

146. Li Zhang, Anxious China: Inner Revolution and Politics of Psychotherapy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2020). 147. Quoted in Yi-Ling Liu, “China’s ‘Involuted’ Generation. A New Word Has Entered the Popular Lexicon to Describe Feelings of Burnout, Ennui, and Despair,” NewYorker, May 14, 2021, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural -comment/chinas-involuted-generation. 148. Yang, “The Politics and Regulation of Anger,” 104. 149. Yang, “The Politics and Regulation of Anger,” 110. 150. See Ann Anagnost, “From ‘Class’ to ‘Social Strata’: Grasping the Social Totality in Reform-Era China,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 497–519;Yingjie Guo, “Farewell to Class, Except the Middle Class: The Politics of Class Analysis in Contemporary China,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 7, no. 26 (2009): 1–19; Lin Chun, “The Language of Class in China,” Socialist Register 51 (2015): 24–53; and Thornton, “A New Urban Underclass?.” A key Chinese source that sets out but carefully does not problematize this shift is Liang Xiaosheng 梁晓声, Zhongguo shehui ge jieceng fenxi 中国社会各阶层分析 [An analysis of social strata in China] (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe,  2011). As Thornton aptly observes, this influential study “identified several emerging social strata (阶层) and popularized a new conceptual language for describing social inequality delinked from either social antagonism or revolutionary political mobilization.” See Thornton, “A New Urban Underclass?,” 260. 151. Lin Chun, “The Language of Class,” 25. 152. Guo, “Farewell to Class,” 6–7. As Yan Hairong also notes, the notion of strata is linked to “status mobility, functional coexistence, and civility,” whereas class “comes to signify not just social antagonism but the specter of physical violence associated with peasants’ hungering bodies, eking out a bare subsistence.” See Yan Hairong, “Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 231–32. 153. Lu Xueyi 陆学艺, “Xietiao ge shehui jieceng de guanxi, goujian hexie shehui” 协调各社会阶层的关系，构建和谐社会 [Harmonize relations between all social strata and build a harmonious society], Kexue juece 科学决策 [Scientific decision-making] 9 (2006): 21. 154. Zifeng Chen and Clyde Yicheng Wang, “The Discipline of Happiness: The Foucauldian Use of the ‘Positive Energy’ Discourse in China’s Ideological Works,” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs 48, no. 2 (2020): 216. 155. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 133. 156. Paradigmatic examples are the so-called stuck nail tenants (dingzihu 钉子户), who refuse to vacate their homes after they have been slated for demolition, even as the properties all around them are razed and all services are cut off. [ 282 ]  I N T RO D U C T I O N

157. Whyte, “China’s Dormant and Active Social Volcanoes,” 9. 158. Anagnost, “From ‘Class’ to ‘Social Strata,’ ” 514. 159. Anagnost, “From ‘Class’ to ‘Social Strata,’ ” 514. 160. Florian Schneider and Yih-Jye Hwang, “The Sichuan Earthquake and the Heavenly Mandate: Legitimizing Chinese Rule Through Disaster Discourse,” Journal of Contemporary China 23, no. 88 (2014): 654. 161. Eric Florence, “Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and Narratives About Work as Sites of Struggle,” Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 144; Wanning Sun, Subaltern China. Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 148; Qian and Guo, “Migrants on Exhibition”; Chen and Wang, “The Discipline of Happiness,” 210. 162. Ash Amin and Lisa Richaud, “Stress and the Ecology of Urban Experience: Migrant Mental Lives in Central Shanghai,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 45 (2020): 862. 163. Amin and Richaud, “Stress and the Ecology of Urban Experience,” 862.

1. The Delegators 1. Gao Shi Xiongdi 高氏兄弟 [Gao Brothers], “20 ge bei guyongzhe yongbao xingwei de shouji” 20个被雇佣者的拥抱行为的手记 [Notes on the performance 20 Hugs for Hire], Dongfang yishu 东方艺术 [Eastern art] 6 (2001): 22. 2. Gao Shi Xiongdi, “Notes,” 22. 3. Xavier Ortells Nicolau,“Urban Demolition and the Aesthetics of Recent Ruins in Experimental Photography from China” (PhD diss., Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2015), 248. 4. Gao Shi Xiongdi, “Notes,” 22. 5. Gao Shi Xiongdi, “Notes,” 23. 6. To a certain extent, this neglect is due to the dominance of European examples in the study of participatory art so far. See Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship (London: Verso, 2012), 2. Meiqin Wang makes this point more specifically of China, arguing that socially engaged art there is “a subject yet to be systematically and sufficiently examined.” See Meiqin Wang, Socially Engaged Art in Contemporary China: Voices from Below (New York: Routledge, 2019), 2. 7. Claire Bishop, “Delegated Performance: Outsourcing Authenticity,” October 140 (2012): 91–112. 8. Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Presses du réel, 2002). 9. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York: Routledge, 2005). 10. Wang, Socially Engaged Art, 13. 1 . T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 283 ]

11. Grant Kester quoted in Mick Wilson, “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art: An Interview with Grant Kester,” Art Journal 66, no. 3 (2007): 115. 12. Bishop, “Delegated Performance,” 112. 13. Grant Kester quoted in Wilson, “Autonomy, Agonism, and Activist Art,” 112. 14. Susan Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), 73–105. 15. Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 33–35. 16. The recording can be accessed at https://www.5122018.com/rememberance. 17. Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 16, 44. 18. Claire Bishop, “Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics,” October 110 (2004): 65–66. 19. Bishop, “Delegated Performance,” 109–11. 20. Tian Zhiling 田志凌, “Yishujia chuangzuo jingguan zuopin, jiang nongmingong touxiang gua zai chengshi dibiaoshang” 艺术家创作景观作品将农民工 头像挂在城市地标上 [Artist creates a work of landscape by hanging portraits of migrant workers from a city landmark], Ifeng.com,April 28, 2010, http://culture .ifeng.com/whrd/detail_2010_04/28/1464631_0.shtml. 21. See, for example, http://www.shuyongart.com/wap/en/work/behavior/2014/0618 /79.html. 22. Shu Yong 舒勇, Zhu meng 筑梦 [Building dreams], n.d., http://www.shuyongart .com/wap/en/work/behavior/2014/0618/79.html. 23. Maurizio Lazzarato, Le gouvernement des inégalités: Critique de l’insécurité néolibérale (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2008), 57. 24. In some ways, the borderline repugnant character of the genre bears the bloody imprints of a notorious exhibition held in a Beijing basement in 1999, titled “Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies & Delusion” (Houganxing: yixing yu wangxiang 后感性：异型与妄想), whose grotesque exhibits arguably set a precedent for overstepping ethical boundaries within the contemporary Chinese art scene. 25. Madeline Eschenburg, “Migrating Subjects: The Problem of the ‘Peasant’ in Contemporary Chinese Art” (PhD diss., University of Pittsburgh, 2018), 57. 26. Eschenburg, “Migrating Subjects,” 58. 27. As Hou Hanru argues, “Utopia ended up being a broken promise when everyone came back to the reality of everyday labour after a short moment of euphoria and ‘liberation’ of the self. Utopia became dystopia.” See Hou Hanru, “Living with(in) the Urban Fiction (Notes on Urbanization and Art in PostOlympic China),” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, no. 3 (2009): 23. 28. The titles of these works are Wang Qingsong, Skyscraper (Motian dalou 摩天大 楼, 2008); Zhao Liang, Sleepers (Chenshuizhe 沉睡着, 2006); Cao Fei, Whose Utopia (Shei de wutuobang 谁的乌托邦, 2006); and Qiu Zhijie, All the Meat Here Is Clean (Zheli de rou dou shi ganjing de 这里的肉都是干净的, 2001). [ 284 ]  1 . T H E D E L E G AT O R S

29. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 6–7. 30. See Boxun.com, “Nü luomo pei mingong chifan—shei zai ‘xinghuanxiang’?” 女裸模陪民工吃饭—谁在 “性幻想” [Nude female models eat lunch with migrant workers:Whose sexual fantasy is this?], February 12, 2011, https://boxun .com/news/gb/pubvp/2011/02/201102120736.shtml; and Yang Jianru 杨简茹, “Xing­wei de kunhuo yu tuwei—yi 80 niandai yilai de Zhongguo xingwei yishu weili” 行为的困惑与突围—以80年代以来的中国行为艺术为例 [Bafflement and breakthrough in performance: Chinese performance art since the 1980s as a case study], Dongfang yishu 东方艺术 [Eastern art] 7 (2013): 131. 31. Anna Dezeuze, Almost Nothing: Observations on Precarious Practices in Contemporary Art (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2016), 9. 32. Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, trans. by Richard Fowler (New York: Routledge, 1991), 32–35, 218. 33. Li Anle, in contrast, argues in his discussion of the piece that the discomfort of the migrant workers and their haggling over the price should not be seen as “sounds of disharmony” because the men are long “inured to alienation and neglect.” Instead, “the meaning of Hugs lies in using the peasants as sample figures who refer to all humankind and deliver the promise of a universal love which we no longer cherish.” See Li Anle 李安乐, “Youan de shehuishi: nongmin xingxiang de yanjiu—1980 nian yilai de Zhongguo dangdai yishu” 幽暗的 社会史：农民形象的研究—1980 年以来的中国当代艺术 [A hidden social history: Research on images of peasants—contemporary Chinese art since 1980], Yishu shenghuo: Fuzhou daxue xuebao 艺术生活: 福州大学学报 [Art & life: A journal of Fuzhou University] 3 (2015): 20. 34. Nicholas Ridout and Rebecca Schneider, “Precarity and Performance: An Introduction,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 8. 35. Isabell Lorey, State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious (London: Verso, 2015), 70. 36. This speech turbocharged the reform process after the turmoil of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. 37. Yang Zhenzhong quoted in Sha Yue, “Medium, Installation and Bio-Politics in Contemporary Capital Space. Sha Yue Interviews Artist Yang Zhenzhong,” trans. Jeff Crosby, Shanghartgallery.com, 2019, https://www.shanghartgallery.com /galleryarchive/text.htm?textId=9218. 38. Yang Zhenzhong quoted in Sha Yue, “Medium.” T. J. Demos echoes this interpretation of the work, observing that “one approach (to representing uneven globalization) is to perform and materialize the policies and reforms of neoliberalism in order to make them visible and invite their critical consideration, as in Yang Zhenzhong’s Spring Story (2003), a video that depicts factory workers at 1 . T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 285 ]

Siemens Shanghai Mobile Communications Ltd. who collectively reconstruct Deng Xiaoping’s famous ‘Southern Campaign Speech’ of the early 1990s.” See T. J. Demos, “Another World, and Another . . . Notes on Uneven Geographies,” in Critical Landscapes: Art, Space, Politics, ed. Emily Eliza Scott and Kirsten Swenson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015), 154. 39. See also Li Zhenhua 李振华, “Bu zai cishi zhi duitan” 不在此时之对谈 [A conversation about trespassing], Yangzhenzhong.com, 2013, http://www.yang zhenzhong.com/?p=2867&lang=zh-cn. 40. Jonathan Watkins, Yang Zhenzhong (Birmingham, UK: Ikon Gallery, 2006), 3. 41. Shannon Jackson argues here that “While some social art practice seeks to innovate around the concept of collaboration, others seek to ironize it. While some social art practice seeks to forge social bonds, many others define their artistic radicality by the degree to which they disrupt the social.” See Shannon Jackson, Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics (New York: Routledge, 2011), 14. 42. Harvie, Fair Play, 44. 43. Judith Butler quoted in Jasbir Puar, “Precarity Talk: A Virtual Roundtable with Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Bojana Cvejić, Isabell Lorey, Jasbir Puar, and Ana Vujanović,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 168. 44. Tavia Nyong’o, “Situating Precarity Between the Body and the Commons,” Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 23, no. 2 (2014), https://www .womenandperformance.org/ampersand/ampersand-articles/introduction_to _precarious_situations.html. 45. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Mary Flexner Lectures of Bryn Mawr College) (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 66–98. 46. This is Rob Horning’s point when he observes that, “precarity creates a selfsustaining ideological energy that hinges on our preoccupation with our individuality, our unique destiny, our special distinctive abilities.” See Rob Horning, “Precarity and ‘Affective Resistance,’ ” New Inquiry, February 14, 2012, https:// thenewinquiry.com/blog/precarity-and-affective-resistance/. 47. Judith Butler quoted in Puar, “Precarity Talk,” 170. 48. Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts, “How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 2 (2013): 1–18. 49. See https://maps.clb.org.hk/?i18n_language=en_US&map=1&startDate=2020 -01&endDate=2020-07&eventId=&keyword=&address=&industry=&parent Industry=&industryName=. 50. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Equality (London: Verso, 2016), 193–95. 51. Shui-yin Sharon Yam, Inconvenient Strangers: Transnational Subjects and the Politics of Citizenship (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2019), 4. [ 286 ]  1 . T H E D E L E G AT O R S

52. Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), xiii. 53. Emmanuel Levinas, Emmanuel Levinas: Basic Philosophical Writings, ed. Adriaan T. Peperzak, Simon Critchley, and Robert Bernasconi (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1996), 167. 54. Jie Yang, “The Politics and Regulation of Anger in Urban China,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 40, no. 1 (2016): 100–123. 55. Yang, “The Politics and Regulation of Anger,” 121. 56. Jie Yang, “The Crisis of Masculinity: Class, Gender, and Kindly Power in PostMao China,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (2010): 551. 57. Isabell Lorey, “The Precarious Minimum,” New Inquiry, February 26, 2015, https://thenewinquiry.com/the-precarious-minimum/. 58. Jiang Ming 江铭, “Mogui zhuazhu de ganjue: He Yunchang fangtan” 魔鬼抓住 的感觉: 何云昌访谈 [Feels like being trapped by devils: An interview with He Yunchang], Yishu dang’an 艺术档案 [Art archive], April 2, 2008, http://www .artda.cn/view.php?tid=305&cid=14/. 59. He Yunchang quoted in Rachel Lois Clapham, “Mahjong 2007 at PERFORMA07: Interview with He Yunchang,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 7, no. 3 (2008): 87. 60. Gu Zhengfeng 顾丞峰, “Cong zhurengong dao kanke—1942 nian yilai meishu zuopinzhong nongmin xingxiang fenxi” 从主人公到看客—1942年以来美术 作品中农民形象分析 [From protagonist to onlooker: An analysis of images of peasants in artworks since 1942], Nanjing yishu xueyuan xuebao: meishu yu sheji ban 南京艺术学院学报：美术与设计版 [Journal of Nanjing Arts Institute: Fine arts & design edition] 1 (2006): 74; See also Li Anle, “Youan de shehuishi: nongmin xingxiang de yanjiu,” 20. 61. Ma Dayong 马大勇, “Dangxia yingxiang jilu zuopin de houxiandai wenbenguan fenxi” 当下影像纪录作品的后现代文本观分析 [An analysis of postmodern textual perspectives in contemporary documentary videos], Dianying wenxue 电影文学 [Cinema literature] 1 (2014): 11. 62. Meiqin Wang, “The Primitive and Unproductive Body: He Yunchang and His Performance Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese 13, no. 4 (2014): 16. For a similar account that focuses on He’s stoicism and resolve, see He Yunchang 何云昌 and Hei Ming 黑明, “He Yunchang he ta de xingwei sheying” 何云昌 和他的行为摄影 [He Yunchang and his performance photography], Zhongguo sheyingjia 中国摄影家 [Chinese photographer] 8 (2008): 69. 63. HeYunchang,“My Only Requirement Is to Stay Alive,” Inkstudio.com.cn, October 3, 2015, https://www.inkstudio.com.cn/press/37-my-only-requirement-is-to -stay-alive/. 64. Shannon Jackson, “Just-in-Time: Performance and the Aesthetics of Precarity,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 20. 1 . T H E D E L E G AT O R S   [ 287 ]

65. As Pablo Helguera observes, “In some ways a confrontational artwork is easier to orchestrate than one that requires many hours of negotiation, consensus building, and collaboration with a community.” See Pablo Helguera, Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook (New York: Jorge Pinto, 2011), 60. 66. Harvie, Fair Play, 43. 67. Bishop, “Delegated Performance,” 110. 68. Eschenburg, “Migrating Subjects,” 54–56. 69. For other discussions of what might be termed the artistic bottom line in works that feature migrant workers, see Elizabeth Parke, “Migrant Workers and the Imaging of Human Infrastructure in Chinese Contemporary Art,” China Information 29, no. 2 (2015): 233–36; and Angie Baecker, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Zhang Huan,” Art Asia Pacific 66 (2009), http://artasiapacific.com /Magazine/66/StandingOnTheShouldersOfGiantsZhangHuan. 70. Bishop, “Delegated Performance,” 91. 71. Eschenburg, “Migrating Subjects,” 57. 72. Butler, Precarious Life, 146. 73. Quoted in Puar, “Precarity Talks,” 174. 74. Zhu Dake 朱大可, “Yu Ji de milu: cong shenxing shenti dao rouxing shenti” 余极的迷津：从神性身体到肉性身体 [Yu Ji’s maze: From a divine body to a fleshly one], Artdepot.cn, September 29, 2009. http://www.artdepot.cn/artist /interview/id/70. 75. Qiu Fen, “Revived Confucianism as Popular Mass Activities in China: A Case Study of Foot-Washing Performances for the Revival of Filial Piety” (master’s thesis, University of Oslo, 2016); Delia Lin, Civilising Citizens in Post-Mao China: Understanding the Rhetoric of Suzhi (New York: Routledge, 2017), 134–35. 76. Thomas Berghuis, Performance Art in China (Hong Kong: Timezone 8 Limited, 2006), 90. 77. Elaine Jeffries, Prostitution Scandals in China: Policing, Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 2012), 5. 78. See, for example, Lu Mingjun 鲁明军, “Yishujia dang’an:Yu Ji” 艺术家档案： 余极 [Artist dossier: Yu Ji], Meishu wenxian 美术文献 [Fine arts literature] 6 (2011): 57–64. 79. Zheng Bo, “Playing Cool Under the Iron Ceiling:The Current State of Socially Engaged Art in Mainland China,” FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism 12 (2019), http://field-journal.com/issue-12/far-east-and-australia/playing -cool-under-the-iron-ceiling-the-current-state-of-socially-engaged-art-in -mainland-china. 80. Meiqin Wang, “Place-Making for the People: Socially Engaged Art in Rural China,” China Information 32, no. 2 (2018): 245. 81. Zheng Bo, “Playing Cool.” [ 288 ]  1 . T H E D E L E G AT O R S

82. Nato Thompson, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the Twenty-First Century (New York: Melville House, 2015), 55–81. 83. Yi Gu, “The ‘Peasant Problem’ and Time in Contemporary Chinese Art,” Representations 136, no. 1 (2016): 54–76. 84. Another important example of participatory art over the longue durée is the Social Sensibility project, coordinated by Alessandro Rolandi, which has worked for well over a decade within the Bernard Controls Factory in Beijing, generating collaborations with workers on art and performance pieces of different kinds. See Zandie Brockett and Alessandro Rolandi, “An Infrastructure for Autopoiesis on Building a Sustainable Platform for Process-Driven Artistic Research and Practice,” Made in China Journal 4, no. 2 (2019): 121–27. I am grateful to Fabrizio Massini for discussions about this project. 85. For a thorough analysis of this point, see Mai Corlin, “Imagining Utopia: Reading Ou Ning’s The Bishan Commune: How to Start Your Own Utopia,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 31, no. 1 (2019): 1–46. Some of the suppressed class conflict that bubbled beneath the social surface at Bishan was also noted by Zhou Yun, a sociologist based at Harvard who visited the commune. Zhou later posted a sharp commentary on Weibo in 2014, titled “Whose Countryside, Whose Commune: Taste, Distinction, and the Bishan Project” (Shei de xiangcun, shei de gongtongti: pinwei, quge yu Bishan jihua 谁的乡村， 谁 的共同体—品味，区隔与碧山计划). Ou Ning reacted in outrage to Zhou’s critique, sparking an instance of what might be termed intellectual in-class friction alongside the inter-class tension that the project had already stirred up. See Phenix Luk, “Bishan zhi huo: Ou Ning huisu Bishan jihua zhe 5 nian de san ge hexin wenti” 碧山之惑： 欧宁回溯碧山计划这5年的三个核心问 题 [The Puzzle of Bishan: Ou Ning looks back on three core problems with the Bishan Project over the last 5 years], Yishu xinwen 艺术新闻 [Art News], August 15, 2015, http://www.tanchinese.com/archives/feature/5998.

2. The Ragpickers 1. For a resonantly similar ethnographic narrative of the role played by fashion in the emotional life of waste pickers, see Wu Kaming 胡嘉明 and Zhang Jieying 张劼颖, Feipin shenghuo. Lajichang de jingji, shequn yu kongjian 废品生活—垃圾 场的经济, 社群与空间 [The life of waste: Economy, community and space at the dump] (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2016), 133–34. 2. Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, ed. Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New York: New Directions, 1989), 136–37. 3. Charles Baudelaire quoted in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings,Volume 4: 1938– 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 48. 2 . T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 289 ]

4. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 48. 5. Benjamin, Selected Writings, 48. 6. Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York: Holt, 2000), 21–69. 7. Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 182. 8. Patricia Yaeger, “Editor’s Column: The Death of Nature and the Apotheosis of Trash; or, Rubbish Ecology,” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 325. 9. An exception is Wu and Zhang’s illuminating study of 2016. For an example of the extensive treatment the relationship between waste and art has received elsewhere, see Gillian Whiteley, Junk: Art and the Politics of Trash (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); and Amanda Boetzkes, Plastic Capitalism: Contemporary Art and the Drive to Waste (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2019). 10. Peter Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design, trans. R. P. Crease (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2005), 3. 11. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 20. 12. Nicolas Bourriaud, “Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Rancière on Art and Politics,” Open 17 (2009): 32. 13. Joshua Goldstein, Remains of the Everyday: A Century of Recycling in Beijing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), 4. 14. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 3. 15. Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt, “In the Social Factory? Immaterial Labour, Precariousness and Cultural Work,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 3. 16. Isabell Lorey, “Governmental Precarization,” Eipcp 1, 2011, http://eipcp.net /transversal/0811/lorey/en. 17. Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 18. Xu Bing quoted in Carol Vogel, “Phoenixes Rise in China and Float in New York. Xu Bing Installs His Sculptures at St. John the Divine,” New York Times, February 14, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/15/arts/design/xu-bing -installs-his-sculptures-at-st-john-the-divine.html. 19. For an enraptured reading, see Wang Hui,“How Does the Phoenix Achieve Nirvana?,” Made in China Journal, April 30, 2020, https://madeinchinajournal.com /2020/04/30/how-does-the-phoenix-achieve-nirvana/. 20. Xu Bing, Phoenix (Hong Kong: Thircuir, 2015). 21. Claes Oldenburg quoted in Barbara Rose, Claes Oldenburg (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 191. 22. Menno Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town (New York: Picador, 2018), 203–16. 23. Schilthuizen, Darwin Comes to Town, 138–39.

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24. See, for example, Jennifer Peeples, “Toxic Sublime: Imaging Contaminated Landscapes,” Environmental Communication: A Journal of Nature and Culture 5, no. 4 (2011): 373–92. 25. An exception is Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary about Burtynsky’s China-based work, Manufactured Landscapes. The film features, among other sequences, visually compelling footage of Chinese workers laboring in a factory that supplies most of the world’s clothes irons. Jennifer Baichwal, dir., Manufactured Landscapes (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2006). 26. Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forever: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (London: Portobello, 2012), 35. 27. For a treatment of subaltern creativity in Chinese documentary filmmaking, see Paola Voci, “This Is Not Reality (Ceci n’est pas la réalité): Capturing the Imagination of the People Creativity, the Chinese Subaltern, and Documentary Storytelling,” Global Storytelling 1, no. 2 (2022): 1–35.Voci does not address waste picking as a specific theme but explores the many ways in which even the best intentions of educated, urbanite documentarists—including those who consciously hand over creative control to subaltern people—struggle to circumvent, and may even reproduce, “the cultural and social hierarchies that devalue subaltern art” (25). 28. Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 331. 29. Maurizia Boscagli, Stuff Theory: Everyday Objects, Radical Materialism (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), 230. 30. Robert Stam, “Hybridity and the Aesthetics of Garbage: The Case of Brazilian Cinema,” Cultura Visual en América Latina 9, no. 1 (1998), http://eial.tau.ac.il /index.php/eial. 31. Xing Danwen 邢丹文, danwen.com/web/, n.d. 32. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 4. 33. The work of Wang Zhiyuan, in particular his garbage installation Thrown to the Wind (Long juan feng 龙卷风, 2010)—an eleven-meter-tall tornado of entirely depersonalized trash—provides a cognate example of the artist as waste picker within a highly climatic scene. 34. Jean Baudrillard, Fatal Strategies, trans. Philip Beitchman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 141. 35. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Equality (London: Verso, 2016), 193–95. 36. For more on the first two categories, see Madeline Eschenburg, “Fixing Identities: The Use of Migrant Workers in Chinese Performance Art,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 16, no. 3 (2017): 26–36. 37. During the socialist period, of course, the worker reigned dominant in poster art and official visual culture as a muscular and luminous figure.

2 . T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 291 ]

38. Andrea Muehlebach, “On Precariousness and the Ethical Imagination: The Year 2012 in Sociocultural Anthropology,” American Anthropologist 115, no. 2 (2013): 298. 39. Nicolas Bourriaud, The Exform, trans. Erik Butler (London: Verso, 2016), x. 40. Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1982), 223–24. 41. Kathleen Millar, “The Precarious Present:Wageless Labor and Disrupted Life in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil,” Cultural Anthropology 29, no. 1 (2014): 45. 42. Zhu Fadong quoted in Elizabeth Parke, “Migrant Workers and the Imaging of Human Infrastructure in Chinese Contemporary Art,” China Information 29, no. 2 (2015): 230. Elsewhere, Zhu reinforces his claim to subaltern status when he states that his aim was to use “my conditions of existence as the subject of my art” in works such as This Person Is for Sale (Zhu Fadong quoted in Wu Hung, ed., Contemporary Chinese Art: Primary Documents [New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2010], 214). Zhang Dali makes a similar point in an interview. In response to the suggestion that he has now “gradually become estranged from lower-class life, with his Italian nationality, professional artist status, connections with art museums and galleries, and improved material conditions,” he states that “because of my past experience, I have not changed in the least, and spiritually still retain memories of life at the bottom.” See Zhang Dali,“Zai huati yu zhengyi zhong xunzhao ‘Zhongzu’ mima” 在话题与争议中寻找‘种族’密码 [Seeking the key to “Chinese Offspring” in discussion and controversy], KuArt, March 31, 2017, http://chuansong.me/n/1728464852519. For a similar argument, see Yang Shi 杨时, “Yishujia Zhang Dali: Wo wufa tuoli diceng, guanzhu nongmingong qunti” 艺术家张大力：我无法脱离底层,关注农民工群体 [Artist Zhang Dali: I can’t extricate myself from the lower rungs of society and I care about migrant workers], Zhongguo xinwenwang 中国新闻网 [China news network], March 19, 2009. http://www.chinanews.com/cul/news/2009/03-19/1608769.shtml. 43. See, for example, Eschenburg, “Fixing Identities,” 31. More common, however, are treatments of such work that either ignore the problematic elements of this claiming of kinship, for example, Bian Jiaojiao 卞皎皎, “Zhu Fadong: jixu ‘chushou’ ” 朱发东：继续 ‘出售’ (Zhu Fadong: Still for sale), Yishujie 艺术 界 Leap 1 (2011): 74–77; or which see nothing troubling in the equivalence of identities. This is Parke’s point when she argues that Zhu Fadong’s “adoption of the identity of a migrant is confirmed by his biography and it is not just an identity he was performing for this piece” (Parke, “Migrant Workers,” 231). The difficulty here is the assumption that China’s nearly 300-million-strong migrant population is homogeneous in terms of class origin and class destiny, and that an artist migrant with an international reputation is experientially coterminous with an economic migrant with no escape route from precarious labor. 44. Zhang Huan is the standout example here. As he observes, “I received the most benefit from the fish pond piece (To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond). This [ 292 ]  2 . T H E R A G P I C K E R S

piece changed my situation, my life. Everybody likes this piece.” See Zhang Huan quoted in Mathieu Borysevicz, “Before and After: An Interview with Zhang Huan,” Art Asia Pacific 30 (2001): 61. 45. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliot (London: Verso, 2011), 96. 46. Wu Hung quoted in Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 330. 47. Wu Hung quoted in Yaeger, “Editor’s Column,” 335. 48. Wu Hung, “Instantaneous Copying and Monumentality: The Historic Logic of Permanence and Impermanence,” Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 16, no. 3 (2017): 13–14. 49. Wu Hung, “Instantaneous Copying and Monumentality,” 14. 50. Lisa Richaud and Ash Amin, “Life Amidst Rubble: Migrant Mental Health and the Management of Subjectivity in Urban China,” Public Culture 32, no. 1 (2020): 78. 51. Sing Lee, “Higher Earnings, Bursting Trains, and Exhausted Bodies: The Creation of Travelling Psychosis in Post-Reform China,” Social Science and Medicine 47, no. 9 (1998): 1247–61. 52. Richaud and Amin, “Life Amidst Rubble,” 79–85, 92. 53. Arjun Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire: Culture and the Terms of Recognition,” in Culture and Public Action, ed.Vijayendra Rao and Michael Walton (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 59–84. 54. Amy Dooling, “Representing Dagongmei (Female Migrant Workers) in Contemporary China,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, no. 1 (2017): 137. 55. See, for example, Zhang Dali, “Zai huati yu zhengyi zhong;” and Wang Qingsong’s commentary on his work, available at http://www.wangqingsong.com /index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=96&Itemid=17. In this artist’s statement, he writes “I am empathetic to this ‘migrant’ population. I think they hold on dearly to their dreams and like to be recognized for their contribution to the constructions of China’s cities as they attempt to fulfill their dreams of improving their lives. . . . In 1993, I moved to Beijing, also from a faraway place, from Jinzhou, in Hubei Province. Jinzhou is a very small city. I also had my big dreams despite being surprised by the huge scale of the city of Beijing, a capital city with a population 100 times larger than the population of my hometown. . . . I survived because of the realization that my situation was not special and there were tens of thousands of people just like me pouring into China’s cities hoping and trying to realize their dreams.” 56. Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire,” 64. 57. Appadurai, “The Capacity to Aspire,” 67. 58. Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, “Precarity as a Political Concept, or, Fordism as Exception,” Theory, Culture & Society 25, nos. 7–8 (2008): 55. 59. Gill and Pratt, “In the Social Factory?,” 12. 2 . T H E R A G P I C K E R S   [ 293 ]

60. Angela Mitropoulous, “Precari-us,” Mute: Culture and Politics After the Net 1, no. 29 (2005), http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/precari-us. 61. Lily Chumley, Creativity Class: Art School and Culture Work in Post-Socialist China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 101. 62. Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 10.

3. The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists 1. Zheng Xiaoqiong quoted in Cheng Xi 成希 and Pan Xiaoling 潘晓凌, “Zheng Xiaoqiong: zai shiren yu dagongmei zhijian” 郑小琼：在诗人与打工妹之间 [Zheng Xiaoqiong: Between poet and female migrant worker], Nanfang zhoumo 南方周末 [Southern weekend], June 6, 2007. 2. Mark Reinhardt. “Who Speaks for Margaret Garner? Slavery, Silence, and the Politics of Ventriloquism,” Critical Inquiry 29 (2002): 91. 3. Ann Anagnost, “From ‘Class’ to ‘Social Strata’: Grasping the Social Totality in Reform-Era China,” Third World Quarterly 29, no. 3 (2008): 514. 4. Maghiel van Crevel probes this relationship between poetry and activism in the work of Zheng Xiaoqiong and several of her poetic peers, setting out the core dilemma as follows: “is their poetry a form that happens to be taken by their efforts toward changing their individual lives and affecting social change at large—and if so, does this mean they will stop writing once change arrives? Or are they poets in something like an innate sense, whose material happens to come from, or whose talent is triggered by, the migrant worker experience?” See Maghiel van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, no. 2 (2017): 253. Here and elsewhere, van Crevel also points out that this apparent tension is, in fact, “a false dichotomy. There is no need to choose.” See Maghiel Crevel, “No One in Control? China’s Battler Poetry,” Comparative Critical Studies 18, nos. 2–3 (2021): 183. 5. Obtaining hard data on readership of migrant worker poetry is difficult, not least because peer readers—fellow workers—do not possess the social profile or cultural capital of more privileged audiences. I’m grateful to Maghiel van Crevel for input on this point. For further discussion of this kind of social awkwardness between migrant worker poets and their audiences, see Cheng and Pan, “Zheng Xiaoqiong.” 6. Wanning Sun offers substantial analyses of the sting of success, middle-class audiences, and the role of cultural brokers. See Wanning Sun, Subaltern China. Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 185–216. 7. For explorations of the aesthetic quality of migrant worker poetry versus/ alongside its social impact, see Maghiel van Crevel, “Misfit: Xu Lizhi and [ 294 ]  2 . T H E R A G P I C K E R S

Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 1 (2019): 106–8; and Liu Dongwu 柳冬妩, “Guodu zhuangtai: Dagong yizu de shige xiezuo” 过渡状态：打工一族的诗歌写作 [State of transition: The writing of poetry among migrant workers], Yuehai feng 粤海风 (South China breeze) 5 (2005): 55–56. Liu spells out the environmental stakes explicitly regarding these poets: “Their powerful historical consciousness, sense of the times, homesickness, and social identification impel them to take up a robust stand; yet from another perspective these factors have also constrained their aesthetic development in terms of attaining a more modern orientation. As far as the more influential migrant worker poets are concerned, many are self-taught and come from remote villages. Their general knowledge is deficient, their outlook is narrow, and they lack artistic influences and the necessary literary training” (55). More broadly, the question of aesthetic merit has sparked sustained debate; for some of the key stances, see Leng Shuang 冷霜, “ ‘Dagong shige’ de meixue zhengyi” ‘打工诗歌’的美学争议 [Controversies over the aesthetics of “migrant worker poetry”], Yishu pinglun 艺术评论 [Art review] 9: 20–24; and Luo Xiaofeng 罗小凤, “Bei xianshi bangjia de xin shiji shige” 被现实绑架的 新世纪诗歌 [Kidnapped by reality: Poetry in the new century], Wenyi pinglun 文艺评论 [Art and literary criticism] 6 (2016): 25–33. 8. Liu Dongwu, “Diceng weihe xiezuo” 底层为何写作 [Why subalterns write], Zhanjiang shifan xueyuan xuebao 湛江师范学院学报 [Journal of Zhanjiang Normal College] 29, no. 1 (2008): 32. 9. Jacques Rancière, Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 140. 10. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 142. 11. Krystyna Mazur, Poetry and Repetition: Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery (London: Routledge, 2005), xii. 12. Miranda Marvin, The Language of the Muses: The Dialogue Between Roman and Greek Sculpture (Los Angeles: Getty, 2008), 244. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, ed. and trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 89. 14. Paola Iovene and Federico Picerni, “Chinese Workers’ Literature in the 20th and 21st Centuries,” Oxford Research Encyclopedias: Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), https://oxfordre.com/literature/view/10.1093/acrefore /9780190201098.001.0001/acrefore-9780190201098-e-1260. 15. Haomin Gong, “Ecopoetics in the Dagong Poetry in Postsocialist China: Nature, Politics, and Gender in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 25, no. 2 (2018): 259. 16. W. H. Auden, Another Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1940), 98. 17. van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry,” 254. 3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 295 ]

18. He Mang 贺芒, “Dagong wenxue: zai shehui xiaoying yu meixue hefaxing zhijian” 打工文学：在社会效应与美学合法性之间 [Migrant worker literature: Between social effects and aesthetic legitimacy], in Dagong wenxue zongheng tan 打工文学纵横谈 [An overview of migrant worker literature], ed.Yang Honghai 杨宏海 (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2009), 94. 19. Rancière, Dissensus, 140. 20. Zheng Xiaoqiong’s closest contender for that epithet is Xu Lizhi, who jumped to his death in September 2014. 21. van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry,” 256. For a list of the awards Zheng has garnered, see Zheng Xiaoqiong and Xiaojing Zhou, “Eight Poems,” Chinese Literature Today 6, no. 1 (2017): 101. In a more recent paper, van Crevel probes and to an extent problematizes Zheng’s status as the luminous figurehead of migrant worker poets, questioning how and why “foreign audiences can come to see a single author as the ‘face’ of an entire genre.” See van Crevel, “China’s Battler Poetry and the Hypertranslatability of Zheng Xiaoqiong,” unpublished manuscript (2020), 1. 22. See, for example, Xie Youshun 谢有顺, “Fenxiang shenghuo de ku: Zheng Xiaoqiong de xiezuo jiqi ‘tie’ de fenxi” 分享生活的苦—郑小琼的写作及其 ‘铁’的分析 [Sharing the bitterness of life: An analysis of Zheng Xiaoqiong’s writing and its use of “iron”], in Dagong wenxue zongheng tan 打工文学纵横谈 [An overview of migrant worker literature], ed. Yang Honghai 杨宏海 (Guilin: Guangxi Normal University Press, 2007), 27–36; Liu Dongwu, “ ‘Dagong sanwen’: laizi diceng neibu de shenti shuxie” “打工散文”: 来自底层内部的 身体书写 [Essays on migrant work: Body writing from the subaltern classes], Dangdai wentan 当代文坛 [Contemporary literary forum] 3 (2009): 44–48; and Zhang Qinghua, “Who Touches the Iron of the Age: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry,” Chinese Literature Today 1, no. 1 (2010): 33–36. 23. Jonathan Stalling, “Zheng Xiaoqiong,” in New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, ed. Ming Di (North Adams, MA: Tupelo, 2013), 144. 24. Zheng Xiaoqiong’s focus on gender inequality is also a key theme pursued by critics, particularly in the wake of her 2012 collection Nü gongji 女工记 [Women migrant workers] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2012). 25. Tellingly, this repetitive pattern of polarity also results in “a relative paucity of action verbs.” See Iovene and Picerni, “Chinese Workers’ Literature.” 26. Zheng Xiaoqiong 郑小琼, Zheng Xiaoqiong shixuan 郑小琼诗选 [Selected poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2008), 69. 27. Zheng Xiaoqiong, Zheng Xiaoqiong shixuan, 77. 28. Gabriel Altmann and Reinhard Köhler, Forms and Degrees of Repetition in Texts: Detection and Analysis (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015), 4. 29. Altmann and Köhler, Forms and Degrees of Repetition, 4–6.

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30. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed.T .S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1968), 25. 31. For a fascinating study that reads rhythm as a crucial method for understanding how the experience of poverty is inscribed into realist prose, see Keru Cai, “The Temporality of Poverty: Realism in Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, no. 1 (2020): 1-36. 32. Luis Radford, “Layers of Generality and Types of Generalization in Pattern Activities,” PNA—Pensamiento Numérico Avanzado 4, no. 2 (2010): 50. 33. Haili You, “Defining Rhythm: Aspects of an Anthropology of Rhythm,” Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 18, no. 3 (1994): 364. 34. Eleanor Goodman touches on this point when she observes of the poem “Moonlight: Married Migrant Workers Living Apart” [Yueguang: fenju de dagong fuqi 月光：分居的打工夫妻] that “To be sure, less ‘moonlight’ and ‘illumination’ and fewer comparatives (deeper, darker, brighter, closer) would make for a smoother, faster pace. These repetitions, however, are essential to Zheng’s way of building energy in the poem and reinforcing her message. The slight awkwardness is not clumsiness; it is a strategy.” See Eleanor Goodman, “Translating Migrant Worker Poetry: Whose Voices Get Heard and How?,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, no. 2 (2017): 125. 35. For a discussion of Wendell Johnson’s ideas, see Willem J. M. Levelt, A History of Psycholinguistics: The Pre-Chomskyan Era (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 456. 36. Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis: Space,Time and Everyday Life (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 39–40. 37. Zhou Xiaojing, “Scenes from the Global South in China: Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetic Agency for Labor and Environmental Justice,” in Ecocriticism of the Global South, ed. Scott Slovic, Swarnalatha Rangarajan, and Vidya Sarveswaran (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2015), 71. This resonates with Mark Fisher’s argument that “capitalist realism” has so tight a grip that no alternative can be imagined and all that is left is the same, on repeat: as he puts it, “What happens if the young are no longer capable of producing surprises? . . . (when) the future harbors only reiteration and re-permutation.” See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Alresford, UK: Zero, 2009), 3. 38. Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, 40. 39. Wanning Sun, “Narrating Translocality: Dagong Poetry and the Subaltern Imagination,” Mobilities 5, no. 3 (2010): 296–97. 40. Zheng Xiaoqiong quoted in Lin Qi, “Heavy Metal Poet,” China Daily, March 13, 2008, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/cndy/2008-03/13/content_6531572.htm. 41. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), 3.

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42. Rancière, Dissensus, 139–40. 43. Rancière, Dissensus, 149. 44. For howling, see Wanning Sun, “Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class: China’s Worker-Poets and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries,” Journal of Contemporary China 21, no. 78 (2012): 1004; and Justyna Jaguścik, “Cultural Representation and Self-Representation of Dagongmei in Contemporary China,” DEP 17 (2011): 127. 45. Deborah Tannen, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 37. 46. Pound, Literary Essays, 26. 47. Mazur, Poetry and Repetition, xi. 48. Yan Hairong, “Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 236. 49. Junxi Qian and Junwan’guo Guo, “Migrants on Exhibition: The Emergence of Migrant Worker Museums in China as a Neoliberal Experiment on Governance,” Journal of Urban Affairs 41, no. 3 (2018): 306. 50. Sun, Subaltern China, 212. 51. Zheng Xiaoqiong quoted in Sun, Subaltern China, 211. 52. Yu Yang 余旸, by contrast, does precisely this, stating that Zheng “has abandoned the subaltern experience of authenticity from which her poetry was born, and yielded to the marginalized but refined minority.” See Yu Yang, “ ‘Tengtong’ de xiangzheng yu yuejie: lun Zheng Xiaoqiong shige” “疼痛” 的象征与越界——论郑小琼诗歌 [Symbolizing and transgressing “pain: The poetry of Zheng Xiaoqiong], Wenyi lilun yu piping 文艺理论与批评 [Theory and criticism of art and literature] 1 (2010): 77. 53. Zheng Xiaoqiong, Meigui zhuangyuan 玫瑰庄园 [Rose manor] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2017). 54. As Luo Zhiting 罗执廷 suggests, the shift in Zheng’s work can be traced back still earlier to her 2011 collection, Pure Plants [Chunzhong zhiwu 纯种植物]. In an analysis of Zheng’s apparent transition from a “female migrant worker to an intellectual,” Luo argues that there is a striking diminution of first-person subjectivity—of the I-persona who so dominates Zheng’s early verse—as this shift occurs, and that Zheng becomes an intellectual bystander as she leaves the factory behind. Crunching the numbers, Luo calculates a reduction from 70 percent I-narrated poems in Zheng’s Selected Poems of 2008 to 43 percent in Pure Plants, published three years later. See Luo Zhiting, “Cong ‘dagongmei’ dao ‘zhishenfenzi’: shilun Zheng Xiaoqiong shige chuangzuo de zhuanxing” 从“打工妹”到“知识分子”——试论郑小琼诗歌创作的转型 [From “female migrant worker” to “intellectual”: On the shift in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetic [ 298 ]  3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

creativity], Yangzijiang pinglun 扬子江评论 [Yangzi River criticism] 6 (2011): 85–86. 55. For a discussion of some of the nuances in this complex process of establishment assimilation—if that is indeed the correct term—see Maghiel van Crevel’s recent discussion of the career of migrant worker poet Xiaohai. Noting that the experience of settling in Picun—a village on the Beijing perimeter home to an NGO deeply invested in supporting migrant worker culture—might seem ostensibly to have “defanged” or “domesticated” Xiaohai, van Crevel argues that such a view betrays “a lingering Cold-War vision that equates grassroots cultural practice with resistance vis-à-vis a Communist state whose culture can only ever be propaganda that aims to perpetuate the oppression of the individual subject. The realities on the ground are richer, messier, and more dynamic.” See Maghiel van Crevel, “I and We in Picun:The Making of Chinese Poet Xiaohai,” unpublished manuscript, 2020, 18. 56. Marvin, The Language of the Muses, 231. 57. Marvin, The Language of the Muses, 244. 58. Pierre Bourdieu and Jean Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice (London: Sage, 1990), 5–6. 59. In a fall from grace even more egregious than those charted in the pages of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, Hu was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in 2016 on charges of corruption, bribery, cronyism, and nepotism. See http://news.sina.com.cn/o/2016-02-26/doc-ifxpvutf3464892.shtml. 60. For a discussion of the role of the Women’s Federation in the establishment of the Bosom Friend group, see Liu Qitao 刘启涛, “ ‘Zhiyin xianxiang’ yu yawenxue de shengchan he xiaofei” 《 “ 知音》现象”与亚文学的生产和消费 [The Bosom Friend phenomenon and the production and consumption of subliterature] (PhD diss., Shandong University, 2017), 32–36. 61. Hu Xunbi quoted in Wang Ru,“Emotional Appeal,” China Daily, January 29, 2013, http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/culture/2013-01/29/content_16182995_2.htm. 62. Hu Xunbi quoted in Wang, “Emotional Appeal,” 2013. 63. See http://www.zhiyinmedia.com/plus/list.php?tid=7. 64. For the English-language sources, see Eric Florence, “Struggling Around ‘Dagong’: Discourses About and by Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta,” (PhD diss., Université de Liège, 2008), 35; and Yang Qian, “Urban Strangers: Representations of Migrant Workers in Contemporary Chinese Literature, Film, and Popular Culture,” (PhD diss., University of California Santa Barbara, 2014), 76. For the more detailed Chinese-language sources, see Xiang Dunhou 向敦厚, “ ‘Zhiyin’ weihe hai xuyao ‘Dagong’ ”《知音》为何还需要“打 工” [Why Bosom Friend needs a “migrant workers” edition], Xinwen tiandi 新闻 天地 [News universe] 4 (2001): 56–57; and Yuan Yue 袁玥, “STP zhanlüe zai zazhi zhuanmenhuazhong de yunyong: yi Dagong zazhi wei li” STP战略在杂 3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 299 ]

志专门化中的运用：以《打工》杂志为例 [The use of STP (SegmentingTargeting-Positioning) strategies in the specialist magazine sector: Migrant Worker magazine as a case study], Qunwen tiandi 群文天地 [Folk art and literature] 9 (2009): 57–58. 65. These literary magazines include Dapeng wan 大鹏湾 (Dapeng Bay), Tequ wenxue 特区文学 (Special Economic Zone Literature), Foshan wenyi 佛山文 艺 (Foshan Literature), Jiangmen wenyi 江门文艺 (Jiangmen Literature), and Dagongzu 打工族 (Migrant Workers). For studies, see Eric Florence, “Migrant Workers in the Pearl River Delta: Discourse and Narratives About Work as Sites of Struggle,” Critical Asian Studies 39, no. 1 (2007): 121–50; Zhou Hang 周航, “ ‘Dagong wenxue’ shengcun yangtai chutan: jian kaocha ji jia dagong wenxue zazhi de wenxue shengchan” “打工文学”生存样态初探—兼考察几 家打工文学杂志的文学生产 [A preliminary analysis of the state of the field of “migrant worker literature”: Investigating the literary production of some migrant worker literary journals], Dangdai wentan 当代文坛 [Contemporary literary circles] 1 (2009): 80–83; and Amy Dooling, “Representing Dagongmei (Female Migrant Workers) in Contemporary China,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, no. 1 (2017): 133–56. 66. The term “main melody” (zhu xuanlü 主旋律) refers in Chinese political parlance to cultural production closely in tune with the party line. As a discursive force, it helps to maintain the preeminence of the CCP’s voice on matters of culture within the chorus of public opinion, with a particular tonal emphasis on patriotism and the achievements of the party. 67. Yuan, “STP zhanlüe,” 57. Online forums in the Chinese blogosphere suggest different data for the number of copies sold, with one blogger suggesting that sales peaked at 800,000 copies per month. See http://bbs.tianya.cn/post-142-532166-1 .shtml; http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4fe9fb270100cg6p.html; and http://www .cmtad.com.cn/news/zazhizhishi/28395.html. 68. See http://www.baike.com/wiki/《打工》. 69. Yuan, “STP zhanlüe,” 57. 70. As Yuan Yue notes, the target readers were migrant workers, laid-off workers, and would-be entrepreneurs, between sixteen and forty-five years old, with a monthly income of about 1,000 yuan. Using an analytical framework developed by Lu Xueyi and his team of sociologists at the Chinese Academy for Social Sciences, Yuan argues that the magazine’s intended readership belonged to the bottom three tiers of China’s ten social classes; they possessed a strong desire to enter the ranks of the xiaokang 小康 (or comfortably off) classes but had only limited access to organizational, economic, and cultural resources. See Yuan “STP zhanlüe,” 57. 71. See https://baike.baidu.com/item/打工知音。 72. Xiang, “ ‘Zhiyin,’ ” 57. [ 300 ]  3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

73. Xiang, “ ‘Zhiyin,’ ” 57. 74. Xiang, “ ‘Zhiyin,’ ” 57. 75. Xiang , “ ‘Zhiyin,’ ” 57. 76. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6yP_CPHo1Q. 77. See http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_4bf36a4d010007aa.html. 78. In her study of the marketing strategies pursued by Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, Yuan Yue alludes to this pacifying function: “Although the position (the target readers) occupy in society is relatively low, and they have no access to decisionmaking powers, their sheer demographic volume means that this group has an influence that cannot easily be ignored.The conditions of their existence directly impact on economic development and the maintenance of public order in society, and they constitute a core social problem.” See Yuan, “STP zhanlüe,” 57. 79. For discussions of how self-discipline and the go-getting spirit are enjoined on migrants as a sustained state strategy for leveraging maximum value from their labor, see Yan Hairong, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow Through Labor Recruitment Networks,” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 493–523; and Florence, “Struggling Around ‘Dagong.’ ” 80. Shui Shangshui 水上水, “Xiaodian gaoshou: meiyue yingli 2 wan zhi mi” 小店 高手: 每月盈利2万之谜 [Shopkeeping ace: The secret of how to make 20,000 profit a month], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 86 (2004): 40–42. 81. Other typical stories include Ding Shaoying丁少颖, “Fudan boshi: wo shi laizi Shenzhen de banyungong” 复旦博士：我是来自深圳的搬运工 [Fudan PhD: I’m a former porter from Shenzhen], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 87 (2004): 4–6; Sun Shijie 孙士杰,“Yixiaoboda: wo mai jianbing chengwei baiwan fuweng de mimi” 以小搏大：我卖煎饼成为百万富翁 的秘密 [A sprat to catch a whale: The secret of how I became a millionaire by selling pancakes], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 89 (2004): 4–6; Mo Li 茉莉 and Ru Ru 茹茹, “Guangtou ming zhuchi: xiang wo luo zai dagong suiyue de toufa zhijing” 光头名主持：向我落在打工岁月的 头发致敬 [Top bald TV presenter: I salute the hair I lost in my migrant worker days], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 86 (2004): 4–6. 82. Lin Ling 林灵, “Zihao ba! Dagongzai xie de shu cheng le daxue keben” 自豪 吧！打工仔写的书成了大学课本 [Take pride in yourself! A manual written by a migrant worker becomes a university textbook], Dagong zhiyin [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 84 (2004): 37–39. 83. Lin, “Zihao ba!,” 38. 84. Lin, “Zihao ba!,” 38. 85. Qian and Guo, “Migrants on Exhibition,” 316. 3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 301 ]

86. Jie Yang, “ ‘Fake Happiness’: Counseling, Potentiality, and Psycho-Politics in China,” Ethos 41, no. 3 (2013): 292. 87. Zhang Xia 张霞, “Jingli! Zhongxiao nüfeixingyuan yong zuo ‘dijie’ ” 敬礼！中 校女飞行员勇作“的姐” [Salute! Female lieutenant colonel fighter pilot dares to become a taxi driver], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 84 (2004): 17–19. 88. Chu Dan 楚丹, “Rensheng jizhuanwan: zongjingli yong dang xichegong” 人生 急转弯：总经理勇当洗车工 [Sudden change of circumstances: General manager bravely becomes a carwash attendant], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 92 (2004): 16–18. 89. Dao Dao 道道, “Zhengjiu xiagang erzi! Yidai pingtan dashi jietou jian laji” 拯救下岗儿子！一代评弹大师街头捡垃圾 [Rescuing my laid-off sons! An outstanding pingtan master collects garbage on the street], Dagong zhiyin 打工 知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 86 (2004): 37–39. 90. Zhang Dezhi 张德志, “Yongqi: xiri Yema qiche laozong gan dang titoujiang” 勇气：昔日野马汽车老总甘当剃头匠 [Courage: Former boss at Yema Auto is happy to become a barber], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 91 (2004): 37–39. 91. Ding Xiang 丁香, “Zhenjing! Ciguan shizhang dagong mai siliao” 震惊！辞官 市长打工卖饲料 [Shocker! Mayor who resigned his post makes a living selling cattle feed], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 89 (2004): 16–18. 92. Lü Zongqing 吕宗清, “Meiguo jiaoshou Chongqing zuo diangong: tianxia de qiong baba dou zai ren” 美国教授重庆做电工：天下的穷爸爸都在忍 [American professor becomes an electrician in Chongqing: Poor fathers of the world tough it out], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 89 (2004): 47–49. 93. Zhao Zhenjiang 赵振江, “Fangxia mianzi: Aoyun guanjun shenshan zhong shizi” 放下面子：奥运冠军深山种柿子 [Forget about face: Olympic champion goes deep into the mountains to grow persimmons], Dagong zhiyin 打工 知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 94 (2004): 19–21. 94. Zheng Yan 正言, “Piaoling Shenzhen: daxue fuxiaozhang dang chushi ming­ yun ruhe” 飘零深圳：大学副校长当厨师命运如何 [Adrift in Shenzhen: Fate of a university vice principal who became a chef], Dagong zhiyin 打工知 音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 74 (2004): 18–20. 95. Tan Zhongxin 谭忠欣, “Zhenjing! Hunan zuojia jietou caxie mousheng” 震 惊！湖南作家街头擦鞋谋生 [Shocker! Writer from Hunan makes a living by shining shoes on the street], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 76 (2004): 44–46. 96. Jian Feng 建峰 and Yi Bin 毅斌, “Yongqi: Shenzhen pochan qianwan fuweng shou cesuo” 勇气：深圳破产千万富翁守厕所 [Guts! Bankrupt Shenzhen [ 302 ]  3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

millionaire cleans toilets], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 86 (2004): 13–15. 97. Jian and Yi, “Yongqi,” 14. 98. Wang Hui, China’s Twentieth Century: Revolution, Retreat, and the Road to Equality (London: Verso, 2016), 190. 99. Wang, China’s Twentieth Century, 190. 100. Jian and Yi, “Yongqi,” 14. 101. Jian and Yi, “Yongqi,” 15. 102. Yun Li and Rong Rong, “A Middle-Class Misidentification: Self-Identification in the Autobiographical Poetry of Chinese Female Peasant Workers,” positions: asia critique 27, no. 4 (2019): 774. 103. One editorial of Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend is actually titled “Don’t Be Afraid of Losing Face” [Bie pa diulian 别怕丢脸], and ends with the exhortation: “What constitute human success and maturity? If you’re willing to lose face a lot now . . . in the end you’ll stop losing face altogether.” See Anonymous, “Bie pa diulian” 别怕丢脸 [Don’t be afraid of losing face], Dagong zhiyin 打工知音 [Migrant workers’ bosom friend] 86 (2004): 1. 104. Li Wei 栗玮, “ ‘Zhiyinti’ de yuyan fengge jiqi yingxiang” “知音体”的语言风 格及其影响 [The linguistic mode and influence of the “Bosom Friend style”], Shanxi shida xuebao: shehui kexue ban 山西师大学报：社会科学版 [Journal of Shanxi Normal University: Social science edition] 40 (2013): 128–29. 105. Li, “ ‘Zhiyinti,’  ” 129. 106. C. B. Davies, “Reading the Ventriloquist’s Lips: The Performance Genre Behind the Metaphor,” Drama Review 42, no. 4 (1998): 133. 107. Stephen Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 13–14. 108. Recruitment notices posted on the Bosom Friend website specifically solicit applications from “outstanding graduates  .  .  . of key universities.” See http:// www.zhiyin.cn/2011/1220/189446.html. The Bosom Friend magazine group also holds regular writers’ gatherings as a mechanism for acquiring top writers and honing their skills. See Liu, “ ‘Zhiyin xianxiang,’ ” 55. 109. Dao, “Zhengjiu xiagang erzi!,” 37. 110. Gérard Genette, Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 174. 111. Jin Ying 金莹, “Zuojia weiquan yin guanzhu: ‘Zhiyinti’ jiantie zhenshi, xugou relei?” 作家维权引关注：“知音体”剪贴真实虚构热泪? [Defense of authors’ rights grabs attention: Is “Bosom Friend style” cutting-and-pasting the truth and faking hot tears?], Wenxuebao 文学报 [Literary news], August 6, 2009. 112. Davies, “Reading the Ventriloquist’s Lips,” 134. 113. For the logic of the shallowfake, see Bobby Johnson, “Deepfakes Are Solvable— But Don’t Forget That ‘Shallowfakes’ Are Already Pervasive,” MIT Technology 3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S   [ 303 ]

Review, March 25, 2019, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/613172/deepfakes -shallowfakes-human-rights/. 114. See ThePaper.cn, “Nianqingren weihe yu Kong Yiji gongqing? Yangshiwang: zhengshi Kong Yiji wenxue beihou de jiaolü” 年轻人为何与孔乙己共情？ 央视网：正视孔乙己文学背后的焦虑 [Why are young people empathizing with Kong Yiji? CCTV.com: We must face up to the anxiety behind “Kong Yiji Literature”], March 16, 2023, https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward _22321897. 115. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 159–71.

4. The Cliffhangers 1. Shenzhen government quoted in Jonathan Bach, “ ‘They Come in Peasants and Leave Citizens’: Urban Villages and the Making of Shenzhen,” in Learning from Shenzhen: China’s Post-Mao Experiment from Special Zone to Model City, ed. Mary Ann O’Donnell, Winnie Wong, and Jonathan Bach (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 138. 2. The installation can be viewed onYouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =Yvt1WHFKt-M. 3. The website is Chen Chenchen, “The Mercy of Not Killing 2.0,” https:// www.chenchenchen.net/the-mercy-of-not-killing-2-0. 4. Megan Miller, “ ‘The Mercy of Not Killing’: Chenchenchen on ‘Poor Sci-fi’ and Humanitarian Glamour in Berlin,” Art Radar, July 11, 2018, http://artradar journal.com/2018/07/11/the-mercy-of-not-killing-chenchenchen-on-poor -sci-fi-and-humanitarian-glamour-in-berlin/. Other assessments consistently echo this point, arguing that the work draws “on a shared humanity that Chen believes is in all of us” (Thomas Mouna, “The New Normal,” ArtAsiaPacific 104 [2017]: 100); or that it “laments the power relations between the spectator and the spectated” (Abby McKenzie, “China’s Artistic Stance Against the Rising Tide of Anti-Global Sentiment,” Widewalls, May 17, 2017, https://www.widewalls .ch/the-new-normal-ucca-beijing/). For a more nuanced treatment that explores Chen’s work from the perspective of urban panoramic vision, see Yomi Braester, “Panorama as Method,” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 2 (2019): 298–319. 5. See Chen Chenchen website at https://www.chenchenchen.net/the-mercy-of -not-killing-2-0. 6. Pun Ngai and Lu Huilin, “A Culture of Violence: The Labor Subcontracting System and Collective Action by Construction Workers in Post-Socialist [ 304 ]  3 . T H E V O C A L I S T S A N D T H E V E N T R I L O Q U I S T S

China,” China Journal 64 (2010): 145. For other analyses that interpret suicide shows through a principally political lens, see Diana Fu, Mobilizing Without the Masses: Control and Contention in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 117; and Wanning Sun, Subaltern China. Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 62–71. 7. Charles Tilly, Contentious Performances (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 5. 8. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). 9. Sarah Swider notes that approximately one-third of China’s migrant labor force works in the construction industry. See Sarah Swider, “Building China: Precarious Employment Among Migrant Construction Workers,” Work, Employment and Society 29, no. 1 (2015): 41. 10. During the Maoist period, as Pun and Lu note, “their food was provided and they enjoyed modest but regular payments and reasonable working hours  .  .  . construction jobs were viewed as skilled and respected work, and construction workers were often propagandized as ‘model workers’ contributing to the rebuilding of the socialist country.” See Pun and Lu, “A Culture of Violence,” 146. 11. C. M. Tam, S. X. Zeng, and Z. M. Deng, “Identifying Elements of Poor Construction Safety Management in China,” Safety Science 42, no. 7 (2004): 569–86. 12. Pun Ngai and Xu Yi, “Legal Activism or Class Action? The Political Economy of the ‘No Boss’ and ‘No Labour Relationship’ in China’s Construction Industry,” China Perspectives 2 (2011): 11–12. 13. Fu, Mobilizing Without the Masses, 107. 14. Swider, “Building China,” 45. 15. Sun, Subaltern China, 58. 16. Iqiyi.com, “Jinan: wei taoyao gongzi mingong jiti shangyan tiaolouxiu” 济南： 为讨要工资民工集体上演跳楼秀 [In Jinan, migrant workers seeking wages stage a group suicide show], November 26, 2015, https://www.iqiyi.com/adv/v _19rrkbntzc.html. 17. This extreme tension recalls Jonathan Parry’s work on suicide in Indian steel towns. As he put it, “If not an intent to die, such ‘accidents’ suggest a willingness to gamble with death. Between them and ‘completed suicides’ the line often looks thin; and many suicides and suicide attempts suggest an element of wager, or of submitting to an ordeal the outcome of which is left to fate or to God . . . many suicides resemble a game of Russian roulette, which different individuals play with different numbers of bullets in the chamber. . . . Intentions seem to range from rock-solid to highly equivocal; outcomes from virtually inevitable to razor-edge.” See Jonathan Parry, “Suicide in a Central Indian Steel Town,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 46, nos. 1–2 (2012): 156. 18. Sun, Subaltern China, 66. 4 . T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 305 ]

19. Ching Kwan Lee and Yong Hong Zhang, “Seeing Like a Grassroots State: Producing Power and Instability in China’s Bargained Authoritarianism,” in To Govern China: Evolving Practices of Power, ed. Vivienne Shue and Patricia M. Thornton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 185. 20. For a detailed study, see Jenny Chan and Pun Ngai, “Suicide as Protest for the New Generation of Chinese Migrant Workers: Foxconn, Global Capital, and the State,” Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 8, no. 37 (2010): 1–33. 21. Hong Ning 洪宁,“30 yu fangmin Beijing zisha weiguo 6 ren zao jing jiankong” 30余访民北京自杀未果6人遭警检控 [More than thirty petitioners make failed suicide attempts in Beijing: Six are prosecuted], Epoch Times, April 28, 2015, http://www.epochtimes.com/gb/15/4/28/n4422309.htm. 22. Carole McGranahan and Ralph Litzinger, “Self-Immolation as Protest in Tibet,” Cultural Anthropology, April 9, 2012, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/self -immolation-as-protest-in-tibet. 23. Margery Wolf, “Women and Suicide in China,” in Women in Chinese Society, ed. Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975), 112. 24. Laurence Schneider, A Madman of Ch’u:The Chinese Myth of Loyalty and Dissent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 48–86. 25. China’s psychiatric classifications as quoted in Sing Lee and Arthur Kleinman, “Suicide as Resistance in Chinese Society,” in Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, ed. Elizabeth J. Perry and Mark Selden (New York: Routledge, 2000), 312. 26. Lee and Kleinman, “Suicide as Resistance,” 301. 27. Lucien Bianco, “Peasant Movements,” in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 13, ed. John King Fairbank and Albert Feuerwerker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 280. 28. Thomas P. Bernstein and Xiaobo Lü, Taxation Without Representation in Contemporary Rural China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 122. 29. Fu, Mobilizing Without the Masses, 111. 30. Jie Yang, “The Crisis of Masculinity: Class, Gender, and Kindly Power in PostMao China,” American Ethnologist 37, no. 3 (2010): 555. 31. Basil Rogger, “Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance,” in Protest: The Aesthetics of Resistance, ed. Basil Rogger, Jonas Voegeli, Ruedi Widmer, and Zurich University of the Arts (Zurich: Lars Müller, 2018), 42. 32. Lian Xi, Blood Letters: The Untold Story of Lin Zhao, a Martyr in Mao’s China (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 4. 33. Noah Viernes, “The Aesthetics of Protest: Street Politics and Urban Physiology in Bangkok,” New Political Science 37, no. 1 (2015): 118–40. 34. Tim Pat Coogan, On the Blanket: The Inside Story of the IRA Prisoners “Dirty Protest” (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 2002). [ 306 ]  4 . T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

35. Karin Andriolo, “The Twice-Killed: Imagining Protest Suicide,” American Anthropologist 108, no. 1 (2006): 102, 105. 36. Quoted in Coogan, On the Blanket, 265. 37. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 236. 38. Sanford Schram, The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 65. Fan Yang notes that actually jumping from the rooftop becomes an even more extreme mode of “occupying” the city, in part because of the acceleration of the body as it moves through time and space. See Fan Yang, “Temporality and Shenzhen Urbanism in the Era of ‘China Dreams,’ ” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 3, no. 1 (2017): 189–90. 39. Doug McAdam, “Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency,” American Sociological Review 48, no. 6 (1983): 735. 40. Red Shirt leader quoted in Viernes, “The Aesthetics of Protest,” 119. 41. Rebecca Schneider, “It Seems as If  .  .  . I Am Dead: Zombie Capitalism and Theatrical Labor,” TDR: The Drama Review 56, no. 4 (2012): 154. 42. James M. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 13. 43. Henri de Saint-Simon quoted in Donald D. Egbert, “The Idea of ‘Avant-Garde’ in Art and Politics,” American Historical Review 73, no. 2 (1967): 343. 44. Jasper, The Art of Moral Protest, 16. 45. Sun, Subaltern China, 67. 46. Bilibili.com, “Zhejiang Wenzhou Ruian. Si ming gongren wei taoxin tiaolou qingsheng. Zuihou bei chu 6 ri juliu” 浙江温州瑞安 四名工人为讨薪跳楼 轻生 最后被处6日拘留 [In Ruian near Wenzhou in Zhejiang province, four workers threaten to jump from a rooftop in protest against unpaid wages and are eventually detained for six days], July 26, 2018, https://www.bilibili.com/video /av27819497/. 47. For other media stories that report harshly on suicide shows, see Feng Lei, “Mingong ‘tiaolou xiu’ bei jingxiang xiaofang Shenzhen jingfang cheng jiang duibi yancheng” 民工“跳楼秀”被竞相效仿 深圳警方称将对此严惩 [Migrant worker “suicide shows” engage in competitive copycat. Shenzhen police will issue severe sanctions], sohu.com, January 7, 2003, http://news.sohu .com/46/79/news205557946.shtml. 48. Shi Xin, “Cong ‘Liu Liang an’ fansi ‘tiaolou xiu’ ” 从“刘亮案”反思“跳楼秀” [Rethinking “suicide shows” on the basis of the “Liu Liang case”], Zhongguo gongchandang xinwen 中国共产党新闻 [Chinese Communist Party news], November 17, 2014, http://cpc.people.com.cn/pinglun/n/2014/1117/c39072226041310.html. 49. Wanning Sun explains this shift: “Adding the word ‘show’ to the description of workers’ struggles facilitates a rhetorical shift, from the poetic (tragedy) to the 4 . T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 307 ]

prosaic (comedy), and from the sublime to the ridiculous. For this reason, it is not simply the addition of a word; it represents a profound revamping of what Hall et al. (1978) call the ‘primary definition’ of the situation . . . these actors are no longer perceived as fighters for justice. Instead they are portrayed as amateur performers in reality shows whose claim to authenticity and recognition is connected less to real life than to the logic of the media.” See Sun, Subaltern China, 66. 50. Tilly, Contentious Performances, xiii. 51. Tilly, Contentious Performances, 4. 52. See YouTube, “Wei taoxin mingong shouchi 40 wan baitiao hanlei jiti tiaolou” 为讨薪民工手持40万白条含泪集体跳楼 [Tearful migrant workers seeking wages stage a collective suicide show clutching promissory notes worth 40,000 yuan], YouTube.com, June 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5l01S7yPPs; YouTube, “Beijing shipai Zhongguancun wu mingong yu tiaolou wei taoxin chucixiace” 北京实拍中关村五民工欲跳楼为讨薪出此下策 [Footage from Zhongguancun in Beijing of five migrant workers seeking wages who rashly threaten to jump from a rooftop], YouTube.com, June 1, 2016, https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=S2NXnxugCso; Pearvideo.com, “Baogongtou wuding taoxin, gongdifang qu 30 wan laiquan” 包工头屋顶讨薪, 工地方取30万来劝 [Labour contractor climbs onto a roof to protest unpaid wages, site manager produces thirty thousand yuan to persuade him to come down], September 5, 2017, https:// www.pearvideo.com/video_1149055; and Tencent Video, “Lingbi yiwei taoxinzhe yu tiaolou, jingcha xiaofang chenggong jiuren!” 灵璧一位讨薪者欲跳楼, 警察 消防成功救人! [In Lingbi a person seeking wages threatens to jump from a rooftop and is rescued by police and emergency services], January 25, 2017, https://v .qq.com/x/page/p0369lrsdwd.html. 53. Jesse Newman,“Revisiting a Lunch at Perilous Heights,” NewYorkTimes, September 20, 2012, https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/revisiting-a-lunch -at-perilous-heights/. 54. Andriolo, “The Twice-Killed,” 102. 55. Ma Yansong 马岩松, Shanshui chengshi 山水城市 [Shanshui city] (Guilin: Guangxi shifan daxue chubanshe, 2014), 49. 56. Anne-Marie Broudehoux, “Images of Power: Architectures of the Integrated Spectacle at the Beijing Olympics,” Journal of Architectural Education 63, no. 2 (2010): 52–53. 57. Tencent Video, “Nianguan jiangzhi gongren taoxin wuguo xiang jiti tiaolou qing­ sheng” 年关将至 工人讨薪无果想集体跳楼轻生 [As year end approaches, a group of workers unsuccessful in securing unpaid wages threaten to jump from a rooftop], January 25, 2017, https://v.qq.com/x/cover/t436r94h83whux9/z0369flfvtr .html. 58. Neil Leach, The Anaesthetics of Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 33–54. [ 308 ]  4 . T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

59. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL (New York: Monacelli, 2002), 1250–51. 60. Gary Bratchford and Dennis Zuev, “Aerial Visibilities: Towards a Visual Sociology of the Sky: Introduction to the Special Issue,” Visual Studies 35, no. 5 (2020): 402. 61. Jason McGrath, Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2023), 99. See also Leo OuFan Lee, Shanghai Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 12. 62. Dai Jinhua 戴锦华, “Dazhong wenhua de yinxing zhengzhixue” 大众文化的 隐形政治学 [The invisible politics of mass culture], Tianya 天涯 [Frontier] 2 (1999): 32–41. 63. I am grateful to Clare Harris for raising this point with me. 64. Sun, Subaltern China, 65. 65. An early visual rendering of the suicide show can be found in Wei Ke’s 魏克 well-known cartoon Migrant Worker Panorama [Dagong quantu 打工全图], which was featured on the cover of the important poetry anthology The Best of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, 1985–2005 [1985–2005 Zhongguo dagong shige jingxuan 1985–2005 中国打工诗歌精选], edited by Xu Qiang 许强, Luo Deyuan 罗 德远, and Chen Zhongcun 陈忠村, which appeared in 2007. I thank Maghiel van Crevel for this reference. 66. Eugenio Barba and Nicola Savarese, A Dictionary of Theatre Anthropology: The Secret Art of the Performer, trans. Richard Fowler (New York: Routledge, 1991), 33. 67. Yomi Braester, “The Architecture of Utopia: From Rem Koolhaas’ Scale Models to RMB City,” in Spectacle and the City: Chinese Urbanities in Popular Culture and Art, ed. Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 66–67. 68. Braester, “The Architecture of Utopia,” 64. 69. Jeroen De Kloet, “Rescuing History from the City,” in Cities Interrupted: Visual Culture and Urban Space, ed. Shirley Jordan and Christoph Lindner (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 38. 70. Li Wei quoted in the Guardian, “The Art of Li Wei,” Guardian, April 30, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/arts/gallery/2008/apr/30/photography .chinaarts2008. 71. Davide Deriu, “ ‘Don’t Look Down!’: A Short History of Rooftopping Photography,” Journal of Architecture 21, no. 7 (2016): 1042. 72. Bradley Garrett, “Meet the Rooftoppers: The Urban Outlaws Who Risk Everything to Summit Our Cities,” Guardian, February 17, 2015, https:// www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/feb/17/rooftoppers-urban-explorers-risk -photographs-skyscrapers-bradley-garrett. 73. Zhuang Pinghui, “Friends in High Places: Why China’s Extreme Rooftoppers Are Reaching for New Heights,” South China Morning Post, December 16, 4 . T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S   [ 309 ]

2017, https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2124597/friends-high -places-why-chinas-merry-band-extreme-rooftoppers-are. 74. Braester argues in this connection that “the image of the rooftopper against the backdrop of the built environment  .  .  . identifies her as a hero who conquers the city. She is an entrepreneur of viral images, vying with the master builders for defining the contemporary skyline. The rooftopper claims the position of an urban subject, taking advantage of—if not outright celebrating—the city’s vertical growth and the development of corporate architecture.” See Yomi Braester, “Panorama as Method,” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 2 (2019): 303.The cliffhanger also vies with the “master builders” for control of the skyline but does so from a posture of lamentation rather than triumph and privilege. 75. Agamben’s core example was the concentration camps, “a zone of indistinction between inside and outside, exception and rule, licit and illicit, in which the concepts of subjective right and juridical protection no longer made any sense.” See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 170. 76. René Ten Bos, “On the Possibility of Formless Life: Agamben’s ‘Politics of the Gesture,’ ” Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization 5, no 1 (2005): 34. 77. Ten Bos, “On the Possibility of Formless Life,” 37. 78. Tencent Video, “Lingbi.” 79. Pun and Lu, “A Culture of Violence,” 144–45.This culture of violence is exacerbated by what Swider describes as the “socially distant” character of relationships between contractors and workers, and by the dynamics of social organization on the jobsite. As she puts it, “Place-based social networks separate workers into different workgroups, dorms and into different social spaces. In this context, social networks reinforce hometown and place-based solidarities while fostering divisions across these groups.” See Swider, “Building China,” 55. 80. I am very grateful to Feng Zhilan for illuminating discussions about this aspect of Kuaishou. 81. For on-the-spot reporting, see https://live.kuaishou.com/u/3x3s633e5gc4nsc /3xsxpxmv5yar42s?did=web_3fa2fc1d82a2553d62e8aca40cbc5e08. For songs, see https://live.kuaishou.com/u/3x247fnqneuw4nk/3xsn5ia9ifzyvha?did=web _3fa2fc1d82a2553d62e8aca40cbc5e08. For skits, see https://live.kuaishou.com/u /3xg46kscthq3j7q/3xh5js7as5g74j4?did=web_3fa2fc1d82a2553d62e8aca40cbc5e08. 82. Sun, Subaltern China, 70–71.

5. The Microcelebrities 1. Laoba dubbed his performance 撤硕战争 instead of 厕所战争. 2. Weijiyulu 维基语录, “Daoshi laoba” 岛市老八 [Daoshi laoba], n.d., https:// zh.m.wikiquote.org/zh/岛市老八. [ 310 ]  4 . T H E C L I F F H A N G E R S

3. See, for example, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAclo4e8SNo. 4. Guojia guangbo dianshi zongju 国家广播电视总局 [National Radio and Television Administration], “Guojia guangbo dianshi zongju yansu chuli ‘Jinri Toutiao’ ‘Kuaishou’ chuanbo youwei shehui daode jiemu deng wenti” 国家 广播电视总局严肃处理“今日头条”“快手” 传播有违社会道德节目等问题 [The National Radio and Television Administration has dealt strictly with the problem of “Jinri Toutiao” and “Kuishou” disseminating programs that violate social decency], Weixin.com, April 4, 2018, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/jnn -uMPl_uPaFbunaE4Kgg. 5. Liu Jing 刘婧, “ ‘Kuaishou’, Jinri Toutiao ‘Huoshan xiaoshipin’ bei yuetan” “快手”、今日头条 “火山小视频” 被约谈 [“Kuaishou” and Jinri Toutiao’s “Huoshan Video” are summoned for interview], Renminwang 人民网 [People’s Daily online], April 8, 2018, http://gongyi.people.com.cn/n1/2018/0408/c151132 -29910514.html. 6. See Yu Hua, Xiongdi 兄弟 [Brothers], Part 1 上部 (Shanghai: Shanghai wenyi chubanshe, 2005); and Han Dong, Zhagen 扎根 [Striking root], (Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe, 2003). 7. Zhu Cheng quoted in Barbara Demick, “Chinese Artist Wanted Statue to Show Beauty-Waste Link,” Spokesman Review, December 23, 2010, https://www .spokesman.com/stories/2010/dec/23/kung-poo-panda/. 8. Zhang Huan quoted in Angie Baecker, “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: Zhang Huan,” Art Asia Pacific 66 (2009), http://artasiapacific.com/Magazine/66 /StandingOnTheShouldersOfGiantsZhangHuan. 9. Zhang Huan quoted in Pernilla Hughes, “Zhang Huan: They Thought I Was Insane,” Telegraph, September 22, 2007, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture /art/3668049/Zhang-Huan-They-thought-I-was-insane.html. 10. Zhu Yu, for example, presents his cannibalistic work as a challenge to the “arbitrary sense of morality,” which dictates that flesh-eating is abhorrent. As he puts it, “I herewith announce my intention and my aim to eat people as a protest against mankind’s moral judgment that (one) cannot eat people.” Zhu Yu quoted in Meiling Cheng, “Violent Capital: Zhu Yu on File,” TDR: The Drama Review 49, no. (2005): 66. For stoicism and transcendence in He Yunchang’s artistic practice, see He Yunchang, “My Only Requirement Is to Stay Alive,” Inkstudio.com.cn, October 3, 2015, https://www.inkstudio.com.cn /press/37-my-only-requirement-is-to-stay-alive/. 11. The Gao Brothers, in particular, have repeatedly come to the attention of the authorities in China and have engaged in inventive tactics to avoid censorship. 12. Ann Anagnost, “The Corporeal Politics of Quality (Suzhi),” Public Culture 16, no. 2 (2004): 198. 13. Tamara Jacka, “Cultivating Citizens: Suzhi (Quality) Discourse in the PRC,” positions: asia critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 523. 5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 311 ]

14. See, for example, Yan Hairong, “Neoliberal Governmentality and Neohumanism: Organizing Suzhi/Value Flow Through Labor Recruitment Networks,” Cultural Anthropology 18, no. 4 (2003): 493–523; Yan Hairong, “Self-Development of Migrant Women and the Production of Suzhi (Quality) as Surplus Value,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 227–59; Gary Sigley, “Suzhi, the Body, and the Fortunes of Technoscientific Reasoning in Contemporary China,” positions: asia critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 537–66; and Wanning Sun, “Suzhi on the Move: Body, Place, and Power,” positions: asia critique 17, no. 3 (2009): 617–42. 15. See Chen Yawei 陈亚威, “Diceng biaoyan yu shenchou kuanghuan: tuwei wenhua de qingnian yawenhua toushi” 底层表演与审丑狂欢: 土味文化的青 年亚文化透视 [Lower-class performance and a festival of ugliness: Looking at tuwei culture from a youth subculture perspective], Dongnan chuanbo 东南传播 [Southeast communication] 4 (2019): 75; Mei Danying 梅聃颖, “Kuanghuan lilun shiyuxia de ‘tuwei wenhua’ ” 狂欢理论视域下的 “土味文化 [Looking at tuwei culture via the theory of the carnival], Xinwen yanjiu daokan 新闻研 究导刊 [Journal of news research] 10, no. 8 (2019): 205; and Yang Ping 杨萍, “Fuquan, shenchou yu houxiandai: hulianwang tuwei wenhua zhi jiedu yu fansi” 赋权、审丑与后现代: 互联网土味文化之解读与反思 [Empowerment, ugliness and the postmodern: Interpretations and reflections on internet tuwei culture], Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu 中国青年研究 [Research on Chinese youth] 3 (2019): 26. 16. Zhou Min 周敏, “ ‘Kuaishou’ xin shengdai nongmingong—yawenhua ziben de shengchang changyu” “快手”新生代农民工—亚文化资本的生产场域 [The new generation of migrant workers on “Kuaishou”—the field of production for subcultural capital], Zhongguo qingnian yanjiu 中国青年研究 [Research on Chinese youth] 3 (2019): 22. 17. Niels van Doorn, “Platform Labor: On the Gendered and Racialized Exploitation of Low-Income Service Work in the ‘On-Demand’ Economy,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 6 (2017): 901. 18. Jian Lin and Jeroen de Kloet, “Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class: Kuaishou and Chinese Digital Cultural Production,” Social Media + Society 5, no. 4 (2019): 4. 19. X Boshi X 博士, “Canku diceng wuyu: yige shipin ruanjian de Zhongguo nongcun” 残酷底层物语: 一个视频软件的中国农村 [Cruel tales from the bottom of society: Rural China in a video app], China Digital Times, June 10, 2016, https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/531974.html. 20. Kevin Ziyu Liu, “From Invisible to Visible: Kwai and the Hierarchical Cultural Order of China’s Cyberspace,” Global Media and China 5, no. 1 (2020): 70. 21. Zhou, “ ‘Kuaishou,’  ” 21. 22. X Boshi, “Canku diceng wuyu.” [ 312 ]  5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

23. Ma Yong notes that more than 60 percent of Kuaishou users are from third-tier and lower cities and towns, 80 percent are from second- and third-tier cities, and only 10 percent hail from first-tier cities. See Ma Yong 马涌, “Renmin ribao: zhengshi ‘jiceng wenyu gangxu’ ” 人民日报: 正视 “基层文娱刚需 [China daily: Face up to “urgent need for grassroots entertainment”], Renminwang 人民网 [People’s Daily online], April 11, 2017, http://opinion.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0411 /c1003-29200762.html. For migrant workers’ use of Kuaishou, see Min Zhou and Shih-Diing Liu, “Becoming Precarious Playbour: Chinese Migrant Youth on the Kuaishou Video-Sharing Platform,” Economic and Labour Relations Review 32, no. 3 (2021): 322–40. They note that in some cases Kuaishou was the motivating factor that brought migrants back to their hometowns, as returning “does not only reduce their cost of living but also enables them to display rural settings that could attract more attention” (326). 24. Miriam Driessen, “Rural Voids,” Public Culture 30, no. 1 (2018): 63. 25. Driessen, “Rural Voids,” 79, 64. 26. Baidu zhidao 百度知道 [Baidu Knows], “Shibaxian chengshi shi shenme?” 十八线城市是什么? [What is an eighteenth-tier city?], n.d., https://zhidao.baidu .com/question/1772647422131516980.html. I thank Joe Lovell-McNamee for this reference. 27. Paul Kendall, “Between Big City and Authentic Village: Branding the Small Chinese City,” City 19, no. 5 (2015): 665. 28. Kendall, “Between Big City and Authentic Village,” 665. 29. Wu Haoran, “Cultural Consumption of Tuwei:The Conflicted Lowbrow Appeal of the ‘Rural Flavor’Video in China” (master’s thesis, George Washington University, 2021), 6. 30. Wang Xiaodong 王笑冬, “Lun Jia Zhangke de dianyingzhong de ‘guxiang’ ” 论贾樟柯电影中的 “故乡” [“Hometown” in the cinema of Jia Zhangke], Dianying wenxue 电影文学 [Film literature] 5 (2009): 72. 31. Jia Zhangke quoted in Zhang Xudong, “Poetics of Vanishing: The Films of Jia Zhangke,” New Left Review 63 (2010): 78. 32. Tim Edensor, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington, and Norma M. Rantisi, “Introduction. Rethinking Creativity: Critiquing the Creative Class Thesis,” in Spaces of Vernacular Creativity, ed. Tim Edensor, Deborah Leslie, Steve Millington, and Norma M. Rantisi (London: Routledge, 2009), 6. 33. Lin and de Kloet, “Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class,” 1. 34. Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” Information Society 26, no. 3 (2010): 190. 35. Zhou and Lin, “Becoming Precarious Playbour,” 323. 36. By December 2017, Chinese netizens were spending 65.8 minutes per day watching short videos, a full quarter of their total viewing time. See Sykong, “Duan shipin yonghu yi chaoguo 4 yi, rijun shiyong shichang chao 1 xiaoshi, 5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 313 ]

zhe jiang shi ‘youxi guanggao’ de xin zhanchang” 短视频用户已超过4亿， 日均使用时长超1小时，这将是“游戏广告”的新战场 [Number of shortvideo users exceeds 400 million in China and average daily usage time tops one hour—this will be the new battlefield for gaming advertising], Zhihu zhuanlan 知乎专栏 [Zhihu column], March 8, 2018, https://zhuanlan.zhihu .com/p/34369168. 37. Zhicong Lu, Haijun Xia, Seongkook Heo, and Daniel Wigdor, “You Watch,You Give, and You Engage: A Study of Live Streaming Practices in China,” Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’18), 2018, https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1803/1803.06032.pdf. 38. Zhang Bo,“The Performers Behind China’s Much-Derided Livestreaming App,” Sixth Tone, December 22, 2017, https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001437/the -performers-behind-chinas-much-derided-livestreaming-app#. 39. For a detailed study of virtual gifting on China’s livestreaming platforms, see Zhang Xiaoxing, Yu Xiang, and Lei Hao, “Virtual Gifting on China’s Live Streaming Platforms: Hijacking the Online Gift Economy,” Chinese Journal of Communication 12, no. 3 (2019): 340–55. 40. Yi-Ling Liu, “The Chinese Farmer Who Live-Streamed Her Life and Made a Fortune,” New Yorker, October 29, 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/culture /culture-desk/the-chinese-farmer-who-live-streamed-her-life-and-made-a-fortune. 41. Zhai Wenting 翟文婷 and Shi Xiaobing 史小兵, “Kuaishou weishenme neng zhuazhu chenmo de daduoshu?” 快手为什么能抓住沉默的大多数? [How has Kuaishou managed to capture the silent majority?], Zhongguo qiyejia 中国 企业家 [The Chinese entrepreneur] 1 (2017): 61–63. 42. I thank Wang Yi for insightful discussions on this point. 43. Graeme Turner, Ordinary People and the Media: The Demotic Turn (London: Sage, 2009). 44. Michel De Certeau, Culture in the Plural, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 140–42. 45. Nick Douglas, “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit: The Internet Ugly Aesthetic,” Journal of Visual Culture 13, no. 3 (2014): 315. 46. Douglas, “It’s Supposed to Look Like Shit,” 327. 47. For a study that links shanzhai itself directly to precarious experience, see Sara Liao, Fashioning China: Precarious Creativity and Women Designers in Shanzhai Culture (London, Pluto Press, 2020). 48. Mei, “Kuanghuan lilun,” 205. 49. See Yi Sha 易莎, “Gelie yu fankang: chongshen Zhongguo ‘tuwei wenhua’ xianxiang—jiyu ‘xiangcun yu chengshi’ shijiao” 割裂与反抗: 重审中国 “土味文化” 现象—基于 “乡村与城市” 视角 [Separation and resistance: Reassessing the phenomenon of “tuwei culture” in China from the urban-rural perspective], Shiting 视听 [Radio & TV journal] 10 (2019): 240; and Chen, “Diceng biaoyan,” 75. [ 314 ]  5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

50. Zheng Zhuoran 郑卓然, “Huobian quanwang de 6 da tuwei wanghong, zouhong beihou you na xie mijue?” 火遍全网的6大土味网红，走红背后有 哪些秘诀? [What are the secrets behind the success of the 6 big tuwei microcelebrities who have set the internet on fire?], Digitaling.com, October 16, 2018, https://www.digitaling.com/articles/76201.html. 51. Zheng, “Huobian quanwang.” 52. This footage is available at https://www.6parknews.com/newspark/view.php? app=news&act=view&nid=168233. 53. Sohu.com, “Handan zinüe nüzhubo ‘Chihuo fengjie’ bei Handan jingfang diao­ cha” 邯郸自虐女主播“吃货凤姐”被邯郸警方调查 [Self-harming female anchor from Handan “Foodie Fengjie” is investigated by local police], June 6, 2016, https://m.sohu.com/n/453186922/?wscrid=32576_7. 54. See, for example, Sohu.com, “Wangluo zinüe shipin dapi yongxian, nüzi chi dengpao yisi bei xiepo” 网络自虐视频大批涌现, 女子吃灯泡疑似被胁迫 [Self-harming videos surge online, woman who ate a light bulb is suspected of coercion], June 6, 2016, https://www.sohu.com/a/81165783_114719. 55. Britta Ingebretson, “The Tuhao and the Bureaucrat: The Qualia of ‘Quality’ in Rural China,” Signs and Society 5, no. 2 (2017): 251–52. 56. See Andrew Kipnis, “Suzhi: A Keyword Approach,” China Quarterly 186 (2006): 295–313; and Linliang Qian, “The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back: Suzhi (Human Quality), Social Mobility, and E-Commerce Economy in China,” Journal of Contemporary China 27, no. 114 (2018): 887–901. 57. Wu, “Cultural Consumption of Tuwei,” 25. 58. Ge Zhang and Jian Xu, “A Brief Genealogy of Hanmai,” China Perspectives 3 (2019): 63–68; Jian Xu and Ge Zhang, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘King of Hanmai’—MC Tianyou,” Celebrity Studies 12, no. 2 (2020): 333–38; Jiaxi Hou, “Contesting the Vulgar Hanmai Performance from Kuaishou: Online Vigilantism Toward Chinese Underclass Youths on Social Media Platforms,” in Introducing Vigilant Audiences, ed. Daniel Trottier, Rashid Gabdulhakov, and Qian Huang (Cambridge: Open Book, 2020), 49–75. 59. Hou, “Contesting the Vulgar Hanmai Performance,” 61. 60. Tatiana Adeline Thieme, “The Hustle Economy: Informality, Uncertainty and the Geographies of Getting By,” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 4 (2018): 532. 61. Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 40. 62. I am grateful to Keru Cai for discussions on this topic. 63. Jack Linchuan Qiu, “China’s Digital Working Class and Circuits of Labor,” Communication and the Public 3, no. 1 (2018): 6–9. 64. Hojin Song, “The Making of Microcelebrity: AfreecaTV and the Younger Generation in Neoliberal South Korea,” Social Media + Society 4, no. 4 (2018): 1–10. 5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 315 ]

65. Nikolas Rose, Inventing Our Selves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 154. 66. Song, “The Making of Microcelebrity,” 8. 67. Tobias Raun, “Capitalizing Intimacy: New Subcultural Forms of Microcelebrity Strategies and Affective Labour on YouTube,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research Into New Media Technologies 24, no. 1 (2018): 108. 68. Nancy Baym, “Connect with Your Audience! The Relational Labor of Connection,” Communication Review 18, no. 1 (2015): 16. 69. Chris Rojek, Celebrity (London: Reaktion, 2001), 185. 70. See, for example, https://www.zhihu.com/question/270089866. 71. See https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1i54y117zJ; https://www.bilibili.com /video/BV1uU4y1E7pB; https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Vo4y1Q7hi; and https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV17K4y1k7XY/ 72. Wu, “Cultural Consumption of Tuwei,” 3. 73. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/412257090. 74. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/386072059. 75. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/263929181/answer/278518844. 76. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/63100919/answer/1042497643. 77. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/330868071/answer/725864014. 78. Sipujie 肆仆街, “Kuaishoushang de ren neng exin dao shenme chengdu?” 快 手上的人能恶心到什么程度? [Just how disgusting can people on Kuaishou get?], Zhihu zhuanlan 知乎专栏 [Zhihu column], July 24, 2019, https://zhuanlan .zhihu.com/p/74924508. 79. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/316989647. 80. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/268094572/answer/334751563. 81. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/66347059. 82. See https://www.zhihu.com/question/54817888. For further brief discussion of this question, see Liu, “From Invisible to Visible,” 79. 83. See, for example, https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/26855065. 84. Hou, “Contesting the Vulgar Hanmai Performance,” 51, 58. 85. Les Johnston, “What Is Vigilantism?,” British Journal of Criminology 36, no. 2 (1996): 226. 86. Johnston, “What Is Vigilantism?,” 229. 87. Maggie Hennefeld and Nicholas Sammond, Abjection Incorporated: Mediating the Politics of Pleasure and Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 4. 88. As Daniel Trottier notes, governments and citizen vigilantes may find themselves in tacit alignment over the need to police “deviant” elements: “While states may not willingly support vigilantism, recent trends in policing are indicative of nodal governance between government, law enforcement, private industry and the general public.” See Daniel Trottier, “Digital Vigilantism as Weaponisation of Visibility,” Philosophy and Technology 30 (2017): 64. [ 316 ]  5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

89. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Poetics and Politics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 3. 90. Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed, 2013), 20. 91. Julia Kristeva, Hatred and Forgiveness, trans. Jeanine Herman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 185. 92. Hennefeld and Sammond, Abjection Incorporated, 27. 93. Glen Donnar, “ ‘Food Porn’ or Intimate Sociality: Committed Celebrity and Cultural Performances of Overeating in Meokbang,” Celebrity Studies 8, no. 1 (2017): 125. 94. Sean Redmond, “Emotional Celebrity: Introduction,” in A Companion to Celebrity, ed. P. David Marshall and Sean Redmond (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2016), 351. 95. For a detailed study of moralistic state actions targeting mukbang in China, see Lina Qu, “Waste on the Tip of the Tongue: Social Eating Livestreams (Chibo) in the Age of Chinese Affluence,” Asiascape: Digital Asia 8 (2021): 43–69. 96. Michael Zyrd, “Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99,” The Moving Image 3, no. 2 (2003): 41. 97. Jean Burgess, “Hearing Ordinary Voices: Cultural Studies,Vernacular Creativity and Digital Storytelling,” Continuum 20, no. 2 (2006): 207. 98. See, for example, Sunil Chauhan,“Present. Perfect,” Eye for Film, January 24, 2020, https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/presentperfect-2019-film-review-by -sunil-chauhan; and Wendy Ide,“Present. Perfect. Review—Chilling Documentary on Chinese Live Streaming,” Observer, January 26, 2020, https://www.theguardian .com/film/2020/jan/26/present-perfect-review-china-live-streaming-documentary -zhu-shengze. 99. For a typical example, see Sophie Williams,“ ‘The Woman Who Eats Everything’: Mother Investigated by Police After Streaming Herself Eating Live Eels, Mealworms and Light Bulbs,” Daily Mail, June 7, 2016, https://www.dailymail.co.uk /news/peoplesdaily/article-3628915/The-woman-eats-Mother-investigated -police-streaming-eating-live-eels-mealworms-light-bulbs.html. 100. Becca Voelcker, “Interview: Shengze Zhu,” Film Comment, February 1, 2019, https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-shengze-zhu/. 101. Ge Zhang, “Richang: An Affect-Inflected Ethnography of Chinese Livestreams,” Asiascape: Digital Asia 8 (2021): 16. 102. Zhang, “Richang,” 40. 103. Martin Demant Frederiksen, An Anthropology of Nothing in Particular (Winchester, UK: Zero, 2018), 92. 104. Zhu Shengze quoted in Voelcker, “Interview.” 105. As Haoran Wu notes in an interview-based study of tuwei fandom, “Enjoyment was compromised only if a video was sophisticated or well-produced, which would break its technically primitive vibe, thus damaging the viewing 5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 317 ]

experience: ‘I don’t like well-produced tuwei video. . . . I prefer to see something really shot by a phone and that is the most authentic one. Watching tuwei, to me, [means] its cinematography must be different from film. It must be different to render tuwei. Its aestheticism cannot converge to (film). If it is similar to film . . . (I)t’s not the vibe.’ (Male, 24, filmmaker).” See Wu, “Cultural Consumption of Tuwei,” 20. 106. Present.Perfect only managed to secure a very limited release in Hong Kong. See https://www.cinema.com.hk/tc/movie/details/11895. I am grateful to Xiaochu Wu for this reference. 107. Ge Zhang and Gabriele de Seta, “Being ‘Red’ on the Internet: The Craft of Popularity on Chinese Social Media Platforms,” in Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame, ed. Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (Bingley, UK: Emerald, 2019), 58. An example of this more upbeat approach can be found in Zhou and Liu, “Becoming Precarious Playbour.” For a sustained study of the affective impact of failure among livestreamers, see Zhang, “Richang.” In this paper, Zhang shows how most livestreamers “hit a wall, either by running out of performative tropes or by gradually losing all their viewers” (17). 108. Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism,” 191. 109. Jen Schradie, “The Digital Production Gap: The Digital Divide and Web 2.0 Collide,” Poetics 39 (2011): 146. As Jack Linchuan Qiu points out, this classist bent in digital research is particularly pronounced in China: “researchers for the most part only concentrate their analysis on the top one-tenth of the entire user population, be they entrepreneurs, professionals, officials, or middle-class users . . . only .9 percent (16 articles out of 1705) examines how workers use digital media.  .  .  . There is nothing natural about the dramatically lopsided academic field that scrutinizes commercial enterprises, professionals, and partystate authorities while having scant interests in working-class people and the issues they face.” See Qiu, “China’s Digital Working Class,” 9. 110. Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Hustle Economy,” Dissent Magazine, Fall, 2020, https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/the-hustle-economy. 111. Dong Han, “Policing and Racialization of Rural Migrant Workers in Chinese Cities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, no. 4 (2010): 593–610. 112. Joshua Gamson, “The Unwatched Life is not Worth Living: The Elevation of the Ordinary in Celebrity Culture,” PMLA 126, no. 4 (2011): 1061–1069; as Niels van Doorn observes, “Like conventional temporary staffing agencies, platform labor intermediaries are active ‘infrastructural’ agents in the reconstitution of labor relations and the nature of work, further institutionalizing the tenuous post-Fordist social contract that forces workers to shoulder the risks and responsibilities of social reproduction.” See van Doorn, “Platform Labor,” 902.

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113. Lin and de Kloet, “Platformization of the Unlikely Creative Class,” 2. Zhou and Liu make a similar point when they argue that “simply labelling such practices in terms of exploitation may preclude the possibility that rural youths’ hopes and desires will be actualised.” See Zhou and Liu, “Becoming Precarious Playbour,” 4. 114. Zhang Fan 张帆, “Kuaishou CEO Su Hua: chaoguo 1000 wan ren zai Kuaishou huode le shouru”快手CEO宿华：超过1000万人在快手获得了收入 [Kuaishou CEO Su Hua says more than 10 million people have made money on Kuaishou], Tencent, November 8, 2018, https://tech.qq.com/a/20181108/010135.htm. 115. Similarly bleak numbers were reported by the Tencent Research Institute in 2017. It surveyed 4,500 livestreamers and found that “only 5 per cent made more than 10,000 yuan a month, while more than 70 per cent said they earned less than 100 yuan a month.” See Meng Jing, “What It Takes to Be an Internet Live-Streaming Star in China,” South China Morning Post, December 13, 2017, https://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2124190/eating-yogurt -deadly-stunts-what-it-takes-be-live-streaming-star. 116. Ge Zhang and Gabriele de Seta, “Introduction: ASIA.LIVE: Inaugurating Livestream Studies in Asia,” Asiascape: Digital Asia 8 (2021): 10. 117. Miao Li, Chris K. K. Tan, and Yuting Yang, “Shehui Ren: Cultural Production and Rural Youths’ Use of the Kuaishou Video-Sharing App in Eastern China,” Information, Communication & Society 23, no. 10 (2020): 1505. 118. Li et al., “Shehui Ren,” 1505. They also note that “rural students occupy the bottom of the social hierarchy, having been left behind by urban-biased educational policies that resulted in rundown countryside schools, inadequately prepared teachers, unattractive teaching materials, and inefficient school management” (1500). 119. Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism,” 186. 120. Thieme, “The Hustle Economy,” 537. 121. Thieme, “The Hustle Economy,” 530. 122. Li et al., “Shehui Ren,” 1510. 123. Xu and Zhang, “The Rise and Fall,” 338. 124. Cottom, “The Hustle Economy.” 125. Qizhi baimao 气质白猫, “Shenghuo xuyao yishigan . . . jiayou rang mingtian geng meihao” 生活需要仪式感 . . . 加油让明天更美好 [Life needs a sense of ceremony . . . let’s do our best to make tomorrow better], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xb9dzsesctkcfi?fid=1717177226&. 126. Jingshen nüzi 精神女子, “Paishe bu yi, xiwang nimen xihuan” 拍摄不易, 希望 你们喜欢 [This wasn’t easy to shoot, hope you like it], Kuaishou, 2019, https:// www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xjdnvey5nj5629?fid=2085245489; and Jingshen nüzi 精神女子, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-vid eo/3x9u39pe3nds9cw?fid=2085245489

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127. Yuanlai shi doudou ya 原来是逗逗呀, “Nü haizi yongyuan buyao quyue beiren erhuo, yao wei ziji erhuo! Jiayou” 女孩子永远不要取悦被人而活, 要为 自己而活! 加油 [Girls should never live to please other people, but for themselves! Come on], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video /3xmwyr6sf5rrz6e?fid=1717177226. 128. Yuanlai shi doudou ya, “Ruguo ni buneng jieshou zuijia de wo, na jiu bupei yongyou zuihao de wo!” 如果你不能接受最佳的我, 那就不配拥有最好的 我! [If you can’t accept my best, then you don’t deserve to have my best!], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3x9sh6g5kwuz6kc?fid =1717177226. 129. Qizhi baimiao, “Shenghuo xuyao yishigan”; Weilongge 威龙哥, “Shili long laopo, laopo xiang chi shenme, jiu gei ta zuo” 实力宠老婆, 老婆想吃什 么, 就给她做 [Spoil your wife, whatever she’d like to eat, make it for her], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xdgdff8973hjem?fid =1717177226; and Xiao chouyu 小丑鱼, “Xinzhong you meng, nali dou shi wutai” 心中有梦, 哪里都是舞台 [When there’s a dream in my heart, everywhere’s a stage], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xf5 7na4ve2aejw?fid=2085245489. 130. Yue laoban 岳老板,“Shenghuo yao you yishigan, jian ge pengyou zhen de tai nan la!” 生活要有仪式感, 见个朋友真的太难啦 [Life needs a sense of ceremony, meeting up with a friend is so tough!], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou. com/short-video/3xa9h4zfregwess?fid=1717177226; Yue laoban, “Shenghuo yao you yishigan, zhe ci juedui buhui rang ni ma zai shiwang le” 生活要有仪 式感, 这次绝对不会让你妈再失望了! [Life needs a sense of ceremony, there’s no way I’ll let your mother down again this time], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www. kuaishou.com/short-video/3xmi2t4q23yfgh2?fid=1717177226; Xiao Lei 小磊, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xxhqqvz4 dxgyu6?fid=1717177226; and Ah Xia 阿夏, “Chifan xuyao yishigan” 吃饭需 要仪式感 [Eating requires a sense of ceremony], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www .kuaishou.com/short-video/3xvrp4pmbizxdci?fid=1717177226.Yue laoban also specializes in skits that satirize middle-class craving for high-end cars, often in videos that feature him scooting around the countryside in a sharp suit riding a dilapidated tractor. See, for example,Yue laoban, “Shenghuo yao you yishigan, mei gei ta diulian ba, jieju manyi ma?” 生活要有仪式感, 没给她丢脸吧, 结局 满意吗? [Life needs a sense of ceremony, happy that you didn’t end up embarrassing her?], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3x8m8 gry8ycjjqu?fid=2085245489. 131. See Xiao Lei, “Untitled,” 2019. 132. Shanli ren 山里人, “Wo lai ge” 我来咯 [I’m on my way], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xg4tmvxi7jh5nq?fid=1717177226.

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133. For a similar example, see Nongcun xiao dage 农村小大哥, “Yi qi du nanguan” 艺起渡难关 [Overcoming difficulties through art], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www .kuaishou.com/short-video/3xbsdxrudv4bww6?fid=1717177226. 134. Yang Zhong 扬种, “Nongcun yishigan zhi gao’erfu” 农村仪式感之高尔夫 [Golf with a rural sense of ceremony], Kuaishou, 2019, https://www.kuaishou .com/short-video/3x7shdfkaa9nhcc?fid=1717177226. 135. Zhongshanfu fengzi 中山服疯子, Untitled. Kuaishou, 2020, https://www .kuaishou.com/short-video/3xkmwha5dighhng?fid=2085245489. 136. See Hongyun ershouche julebu 鸿运二手车俱乐部, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2020, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3x5rz7uahg2a4tq?fid=2085245489; Dong Niangniang guan mei yan 董娘娘关美颜, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2020, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xyx69kcg8vymhs?fid=2085245489; Sange pk sansao 三哥pk三嫂, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2018, https://v.kuaishou.com /8Mft9Q; Shendiao xialü 神雕侠驴, “Xiao Lü na 500 kuai qian mai yitiao huazi, que yaoqiu laoban dao gei 50 wan! Zhe zhong shiqing ni zenme chuli?” 小驴拿500块钱买一条华子,却要求老板倒给50万!这种事情你怎么处 理? [Xiao Lü paid 500 yuan for a pack of cigarettes, but demanded that the store owner give him 50,000! How do you deal with this sort of thing?], Kuaishou, 2020, https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xrx94vegyct6v6?fid =2085245489; and Xiaoxiao 笑笑, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2020, https://www .kuaishou.com/short-video/3xmshttqjwz9nt4?fid=2085245489. 137. Zheng Xiaoqiong, Nü gongji 女工记 [Women migrant workers] (Guangzhou: Huacheng chubanshe, 2012), 70–71. 138. Thieme, “The Hustle Economy,” 543. 139. See Carmen Leong, Shan L. Pan, Sue Newell, and Lili Cui, “The Emergence of Self-Organizing E-Commerce,” MIS Quarterly 40, no. 2 (2016): 475–84; and Qian, “The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back.” 140. Qian, “The ‘Inferior’ Talk Back,” 890. 141. Han Li, “From Disenchantment to Reenchantment: Rural Microcelebrities, Short Video, and the Spectacle-ization of the Rural Lifescape on Chinese Social Media,” International Journal of Communication 14 (2020): 3770. 142. Quoted in Hou, “Contesting the Vulgar Hanmai Performance,” 70. 143. See, for example, Ma Fangzhe 马钫哲, Untitled, Kuaishou, 2019, https://www .kuaishou.com/short-video/3x7uzdnwtquahn4?fid=2085245489. 144. Ping Sun, Guoning Zhao, Zhen Liu, Xiaoting Li, and Yunze Zhao, “Toward Discourse Involution Within China’s Internet: Class, Voice, and Social Media,” New Media & Society 24, no. 5 (2022): 1041. 145. Ping Sun, “From Platform Economies to Platform Justice,” trans. Shiqi Lin, positions: politics, August 9, 2021, https://positionspolitics.org/ping-sun-from -platform-economies-to-platform-justice/.

5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S   [ 321 ]

146. Carwyn Morris, “Spatial Governance in Beijing: Informality, Illegality and the Displacement of the Low-End Population,” China Quarterly 251 (2023): 838.

Conclusion: Viral Precarity 1. Lu Pan, “Who Is Occupying Wall and Street: Graffiti and Urban Spatial Politics in Contemporary China,” Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 28, no. 1 (2014): 143; Women of China, “Graffiti Can Be Art or Vandalism, Take Your Pick,” August 14, 2020, https://www.womenofchina.cn/html/culture/lifestyle /200817852-1.htm. 2. Minna Valjakka, “Negotiating Spatial Politics: Site-Responsive Urban Art Images in Mainland China,” China Information 29, no. 2 (2015): 259. 3. Xiaodan Feng, “Curating and Exhibiting for the Pandemic: Participatory Virtual Art Practices During the COVID-19 Outbreak in China,” Social Media + Society 6, no. 3 (2020): 3–4. For more on warlike propaganda in China during the pandemic, see Meiqin Wang, “Pandemic, Censorship and Creative Protests via Grassroots Visual Mobilization,” Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art 8, nos. 2–3 (2021): 168–69. Key exemplars of pandemic poetry have also attempted to resist the martialization of medical workers. See Federico Picerni, “ ‘Poets, What Can We Do?’ Pandemic Poetry in China’s Mobilization Against COVID-19,” Asian Studies 10, no. 1 (2022): 141–43. 4. For striking examples on a range of social media platforms, see https://zhuanlan .zhihu.com/p/135801939; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/sWMWGQ31vFakDn XSbYTNNA; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/NnCXWiJD89oAe2EycbRYyg; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/venQ5gyc2l7JMj3YJk9X0Q; https://mp.weixin .qq.com/s/3-T-OaJLssZxuR3Jby6Kbw; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/-eMUluT5arDZWZFsg3eS5g; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/JRLApcZHWFfqwqAIz 6gWYg; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/6intIuvcZ_gIz1MU7Ayz7Q; https://mp .weixin.qq.com/s/N9Lq60d50gceyxtwpLYqLA; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s /GGrSmGqQV-y7bcmUBpXtHQ; https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/plvsWlL0GNOO 9V2mq3s6vQ; https://www.tiktok.com/@kokhowe84/video/70177978835754 38593;https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xd9zewtu977k2u?fid=0;https:// www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xgaedeq6gps9sk?userId=3xv3b7xkf7knyja; https://www.kuaishou.com/short-video/3xk7mku4mvi7exu?fid=0; https:// weibo.com/3757724611/L06wLsVyq?refer_flag=1001030103. 5. Hui Huang, “Riders on the Storm: Amplified Platform Precarity and the Impact of COVID-19 on Online Food-Delivery Drivers in China,” Journal of Contemporary China 31, no. 135 (2022): 359–63. 6. Art featuring delivery drivers has been posted on social media in China, but both the volume and tone of these works is vastly muted compared to the aesthetic [ 322 ]  5 . T H E M I C RO C E L E B R I T I E S

outpourings about health workers.For examples,see https://weibo.com/5968995903 /Iv1Fk3u7m?refer_flag=1001030103_; https://weibo.com/5968995903/KcYT p7PiU?refer_flag=1001030103_; and https://weibo.com/2504196145/JyjOSb 5Cn?refer_flag=1001030103_. 7. Dong Han, “Policing and Racialization of Rural Migrant Workers in Chinese Cities,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 33, no. 4 (2010): 605–6. 8. Huang, “Riders on the Storm,” 363. 9. James Der Derian and Phillip Gara, “Life, Death, and the Living Dead in the Time of COVID-19,” Cultural Politics 17, no. 1 (2021): 105. 10. Athena Aktipis and Joe Alcock, “A Year Into the Pandemic, the Coronavirus Is Messing with Our Minds as Well as Our Bodies,” Conversation, March 8, 2021, https://theconversation.com/a-year-into-the-pandemic-the-coronavirus-is -messing-with-our-minds-as-well-as-our-bodies-155213. 11. Lúcio Reis Filho, “No Safe Space: Zombie Film Tropes During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Space and Culture 23, no. 3 (2020): 254. 12. See, for example, Angela R. Gover, Shannon B. Harper, and Lynn Langton, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” American Journal of Criminal Justice 45 (2020): 647–67. 13. Huang, “Riders on the Storm,” 363. 14. Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 4. 15. Der Darian and Gara, “Life, Death, and the Living Dead,” 105. 16. Nancy Ettlinger, “Precarity Unbound,” Alternatives 32 (2007): 324. 17. Arjun Appadurai, The Fear of Small Numbers (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 18. Appadurai, The Fear of Small Numbers, 52. 19. Jake Lin, citing a survey by the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, notes that “social trust among citizens in general has reached a record low in China.” See Jake Lin, “Precarity, Cognitive (Non-)Resistance and the Conservative Working Class in China,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 49, no. 4 (2019): 575. 20. This anger is directed both at more economically advantaged social others and toward fellow members of the underclass. Describing the fury that destitute long-term Beijing residents feel toward incoming migrant workers, Harriet Evans observes that “in the absence of media and political protection of the migrant laborer as a deserving citizen, vilification of the outsider could become a local explanation for conditions of precarity and social disorder. It could also function as a means of reasserting a desire for rootedness and security in a ragingly uncertain world.” See Harriet Evans, Beijing from Below: Stories of Marginal Lives in the Capital’s Center (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020), 213. C O N C L U S I O N   [ 323 ]

21. Loïc Wacquant, “The Rise of Advanced Marginality: Notes on Its Nature and Implications,” Acta Sociologica 39, no. 2 (1996): 129. 22. For examples of this approach, see William Walters, “Deportation, Expulsion, and the International Police of Aliens,” Citizenship Studies 6, no. 3 (2002): 265–92; Bridget Anderson, Matthew J. Gibney, and Emanuela Paoletti, “Citizenship, Deportation and the Boundaries of Belonging,” Citizenship Studies 15, no. 5 (2011): 547–63; and Rutger Birnie and Rainer Bauböck, “Introduction: Expulsion and Citizenship in the 21st Century,” Citizenship Studies 24, no. 3 (2020): 265–76. 23. Birnie and Bauböck, “Introduction,” 265. 24. As Anderson et al. note, “Far from settling the question of who is a citizen, deportation often exacerbates it, revealing politically embarrassing gaps between normative understandings of membership and legal vulnerability to expulsion power.” See Anderson et al., “Citizenship,” 561. 25. Irene Pang, “The Legal Construction of Precarity: Lessons from the Construction Sectors in Beijing and Delhi,” Critical Sociology 45, nos. 4–5 (2019): 549–64. 26. Sophia Goodman and Zhonghua Guo, “Introduction: Practicing Citizenship in Contemporary China,” Citizenship Studies 21, no. 7 (2017): 737. 27. Malgorzata Jakimów, “Chinese Citizenship ‘After Orientalism’: Academic Narratives on Internal Migrants in China,” Citizenship Studies 16, nos. 5–6 (2012): 657. 28. Etienne Balibar, Citizenship, trans.Thomas Scott-Railton (London: Polity, 2015), 73. 29. Cecilia Menjívar, “Liminal Legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan Immigrants’ Lives in the United States,” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 4 (2006): 999–1037. Relatedly, Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas state that “the distinction between citizen and noncitizen is not a dichotomous one, but rests on a continuous and reversible gradation.” See Sébastien Chauvin and Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas, “Beyond Informal Citizenship: The New Moral Economy of Migrant Illegality,” International Political Sociology 6 (2012): 242. 30. Chauvin and Garcés-Mascareñas, “Beyond Informal Citizenship,” 242. 31. Andrew Ross, “Mao Zedong’s Impact on Cultural Politics in the West,” Cultural Politics 1, no. 1 (2005): 12. 32. Gabriel Gatti, “The Social Disappeared: Genealogy, Global Circulations, and (Possible) Uses of a Category for the Bad Life,” Public Culture 32, no. 1 (2020): 39. 33. Jenny Edkins, Missing: Persons and Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011), 6. 34. Catherine S. Ramírez, Juan Poblete, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, “Introduction. Toward a Politics of Commonality: The Nexus of Mobility, Precarity, and (Non)citizenship,” in Precarity and Belonging, ed. Catherine S. Ramírez, Juan Poblete, Sylvanna M. Falcón, Steven C. McKay, and Felicity Amaya Schaeffer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2021), 3. [ 324 ]  C O N C L U S I O N

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Index

abjection, performances of: on Kuaishou, 52, 202, 206, 210, 218, 220, 225–28, 242; vs. Present. Perfect, 232, 234; and sang culture, 281n137; vs. waste art, 123 activism: as art, 177–80; vs. class strife, 125–27; and compassion, 79, 80; from Cultural Revolution, 280n125; and migrant worker poetry, 130, 135, 136, 294n4; public, 76–77; and rooftopping, 194; and solidarity, 76–77, 78–79; and waste art, 122–25 aesthetics: and class, 47, 61, 228, 229, 232–33; in delegated performance, 61, 62, 68, 69, 81–84, 86, 91, 121; and exploitation, 75, 86, 121, 123; of migrant worker poetry, 136, 143, 146, 147, 151, 294n7; and politics, xvii, 46, 114, 115, 118, 124, 126, 146, 177, 178, 180, 194, 201, 226; and solidarity, 61, 62; of suicide shows, 51, 171, 178, 180, 187, 189, 194; of tuwei culture, 206, 214, 216, 233; of waste, xix,

50, 96–98, 101, 105, 107–9, 111–15, 121–24; and zombie citizenship, 7, 45–47, 62 After the Great Fire (film; Dahuo zhi hou; Hua Yong), xvii Agamben, Giorgio, 14, 171, 195, 196, 199, 310n75 Ai Weiwei, 62 Aktipis, Athean, 257 Alcock, Joe, 257 Allison, Anne, 34, 41 Along the Railway (film; Tielu yanxian), 105 Altmann, Gabriel, 140 America. See Euro-America Amin, Ash, 48, 123 Anagnost, Ann, 13, 18, 19, 43, 47 Anderson, Bridget, 277n96 Andriolo, Karin, 176, 183–84 ant tribes (yizu), 43, 268n8 Appadurai, Arjun, 124, 125, 126, 258–59 appropriation: of suicide shows, 195; in waste art, 50, 98, 128

[ 361 ]

architecture: scale models of, 189–92; and suicide shows, 183–89 artists: in delegated performances, 80–86, 87, 89, 93; exploitation by, 121, 123, 126; and migrant workers, 127; in rural areas, 92; and scatalogical art, 204–5; and underclass, 111, 124–25, 130, 148; and waste art, 101–4, 107, 108–9; and waste pickers, 97–98, 101, 106, 108–9, 120, 126 assembly halls (da litang), 55–56 Auden, W. H., 135 authenticity: in Bosom Friend, 151; in film, 105; in migrant workers poetry, 298n51; outsourcing of, 85–86; in Present. Perfect, 233; and social media, 221, 232, 317n105; of suicide shows, 171, 179, 307n49 Baichwal, Jennifer, 291n25 Bailian Anqing shopping mall (Anqing city, Anhui), 185–86 Balibar, Etienne, 262 banishment, 17–18, 171, 213, 261; and visibility, xiii, xvi, 1–2 Barba, Eugenio, 69, 79, 188 Baudelaire, Charles, 94–96 Baudrillard, Jean, 110 Bauman, Zygmunt, 100 Baym, Nancy, 221 Beijing, 33, 43, 79, 101, 212; eviction program in (2017), 38, 268n14; suicides in, 174, 187; zombies in, 1–2, 22. See also Migrant Workers Home; Xinjian Village Benjamin, Walter, 95–96 Berghuis, Thomas, 88 Berlant, Lauren, 27, 28, 68, 100, 127, 243

Bi Shumin, 163 Bilibili (website), 222 Bishan Project (Bishan jihua; Ou Ning and Zuo Jing), 91, 93 Bishop, Claire, 59, 62, 85, 86 Bishop, Kyle, 22 bodyworks, 111, 113–14, 121, 122, 125 Boo, Katherine, 105 Bosom Friend (magazine; Zhiyin), 151–53, 161–62, 163. See also Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend Bourdieu, Pierre, 33, 150, 165 Bourriaud, Nicolas, 59, 62, 92, 99, 114, 115 Braester, Yomi, 189, 310n74 Broudehoux, Anne-Marie, 184 Brown, Bill, 107 Building Dreams (performance; Zhu meng; Shu Yong), 63–65 Burgess, Jean, 231 Burtynsky, Edward, 105, 291n25 Butler, Judith, xv, 76 cab drivers, suicides of, 174 call centers, 75–76 Cao Fei, 22, 67, 97, 114 capitalism, xii, 25, 118; and cheap labor, 13–14; and delegated performance, 62, 71; disaster, x, xi; global, 15; and repetitive work, 144–47; and waste, 98–99; and zombies, 21–23 capitalist realism, 297n36 caste system, de facto, xvi, xix, 4–5, 30, 127, 195, 200. See also class censorship: of class antagonism, 29–30, 50–51, 78, 98, 135, 243; of class discourse, xvi, xviii, 1, 4, 29–30, 44, 50, 86; and Covid-19 pandemic, 22, 23; and Gao Brothers, 311n11; of Kuaishou, 52, 210–11, 238, 241,

[ 362 ]  I N D E X

243; and scatalogical art, 202, 206; of social media, xvii, 210, 234; and tuwei culture, 52, 211, 242; and zombies, 3 Chaile Travel (Chaile lüxingshe; Weng Fen), 91 chaiqian (demolition and relocation), 16–17, 19 Chan, Kam Wing, 13 Chan, Mel Y., 220 Chen Chenchen, 111, 167–68, 183, 200–201 Chen Qiufan, 94 Cheng, Shuxin, 281n137 Chinese Communist Party (CCP), xix–xx, 44, 71, 238, 300n65. See also state, the Chinese Offspring (sculpture; Zhongzu; Zhang Dali), 122–23 Cho, Mun Young, 10 Chow, Yiu Fai, 34 Chumley, Lily, 126–27 cinéma verité, 233 citizenship, xiv–xvii, 10, 260–65, 324n24. See also zombie citizenship city tier system (Zhongguo chengshi dengjizhi), 212–13 class (jieji): censorship of discussion of, xvi, xviii–xix, 1, 4, 29–30, 44, 50, 86; vs. citizenship, 260; and cultural forms, 5, 46; and delegated performance, 58–59, 60, 61, 72, 74, 75; and delivery drivers, 256; and human quality, 206, 208, 209, 225–27; on Kuaishou, 226–28, 238–42; in Maoist era, 98, 224; and migrant worker poets, 132, 135, 149, 165, 259; and participatory art, 49–50; and precarity, 198–201, 266; and Present. Perfect, 229–34; and

scatalogical art, 206; and skyscrapers, 184–86; and social media, 221, 222–26; in social media, 209, 220, 317n109; vs. stratum (jieceng), 44–45, 127, 149, 200, 282n149, 282n151; and tuwei culture, 211, 219–20, 222–26. See also elites; middle class; underclass class antagonism: censorship of, 29–30, 50–51, 78, 98, 135, 243; in delegated performances, 84–85, 87; and fractious forms, xix, xx, 6, 46, 49, 51, 59–60, 93, 98, 134, 148, 160, 174, 198–99, 211, 264, 266; and migrant worker poets, 133, 134; and precarity, 100, 174, 323nn19–20; vs. Present. Perfect, 234; in rural areas, 93; and scatalogical art, 208–9; vs. social harmony, xviii–xix, 44–45, 47, 199; on social media, 220, 225; vs. solidarity, 4–6, 160, 210, 271n6; and suicide shows, 170, 175, 180, 195 class consciousness, 8, 10, 29, 44, 149, 166, 220 class origin (chengfen lun), 224 class struggle, xvi, xviii–xix, 49, 80; suppression of, 29–30, 50–51, 78, 98, 135, 243 cognitive dissonance, 2, 12–15 collaborative art, 62, 91–93, 286n41 Comaroff, Jean, 21 Comaroff, John, 21 “Comfort” (poem; Anwei; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 137–40 conceptual art, 60, 84, 167, 171, 203 Connor, Stephen, 162 construction industry, 169–70, 171, 305nn9–10; culture of violence in, 199–200; and suicide shows, 172–74, 183–84

I N D E X   [ 363 ]

Coronovirus Attack (video game), 22 Cottom, Tressie McMillan, 235, 238 Covid-19 pandemic, 11, 52, 258, 266; and censorship, 22, 23; heroes in, 247–59; and worldwide urban art, 249–52 Cultural Revolution, 55, 176, 280n125 Dai Jinhua, 187 Dancing with Migrant Workers (performance; He mingong tiaowu; Wu Wenguang and Wen Hui), 68 Daoshi laoba, 202–3, 218, 220, 227, 242 Davis, C. B., 162, 164 Daxing District. See Xinjian Village De Certeau, Michel, 215 De Kloet, Jeroen, 189, 214, 236 de Seta, Gabriele, 234 delegated performance, 54–93; aesthetics in, 61, 62, 68, 69, 81–84, 86, 91, 121; artists in, 80–86, 87, 89, 93, 127; as bodyworks, 111–12; and class, 58–59, 60, 61, 72, 74, 75, 84–85, 87, 259, 264; critical attention to, 66–67, 82; cruelty in, 80, 93, 121, 128, 259; in democratic societies, 59, 62–63, 66; empathy in, 70–76, 127; ephemerality of, 68–69; and exploitation, 89–91, 121; and expulsion, 60, 62, 66, 83; hierarchy in, 88–89; migrant workers in, 54–56, 60, 63–65, 68–69, 80–87, 111; photography of, 58, 63, 65, 67, 68, 69, 83, 87, 88–89; positive views of, 60, 62; and precarity, 60, 62, 66, 67–70, 87, 112; risk in, 69–70; and solidarity, 61, 62, 63–65, 87; and spectatorship, 60, 62, 87, 167–68; and suicide

shows, 168–69, 188; underclass in, 49–50, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 121, 122; women in, 88–91; and zombie citizenship, 60, 66, 68, 70, 76, 86, 87, 93 Deleuze, Gilles, 145–46 delivery drivers, 52, 254–57, 261 democracy, 59, 62–63, 66, 76, 92 demolition and relocation (chaiqian), 16–17, 19. See also evictions Deng Xiaoping, 70, 71, 286n38 denizenship, xiv, 262 Der Derian, James, 256 despondency. See sang culture Dezeuze, Anna, 69 Dickens, Charles, 54 digital collages, 109–10 digital storytelling movement, 231. See also social media Dirty Protest (Belfast; 1978), 176 disCONNEXION (photographs; Jueyuan; Xing Danwen), 106–8 Disorder (film; Xianshi shi guoqu de weilai; Huang Weikai), 229 Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Rancière), 146 Dong Han, 256 Donkey (sculpture; Zhang Huan), 206, 207 dormitory system, 19, 67, 153, 156, 261, 310n79 Douglas, Nick, 216 Douyin (social media site), 222, 223 Douyu (social media site), 228 Dragonfly Eyes (film; Qingting zhi yan; Xu Bing), 229–30 “dressage,” 144, 155 Driessen, Miriam, 13, 212 Du Haibin, 105 Du Zhenjun, 97

[ 364 ]  I N D E X

East Wind II (photograph; Han Bing), 109 Eastern Art (journal; Dongfang yishu), 54 economy, formal vs. informal, 5, 24–25, 31, 34, 42, 237, 260, 261–62; and delegated performance, 63; and delivery drivers, 255; and suicide shows, 172; and waste art, 94, 97, 100, 128 Eighteenth Brumaire, The (Marx), 7–8 elites: empathy of, 35, 84; and pandemic precarity, 266; and skyscrapers, 51, 184, 186; on social media, 220, 225; and traditional remonstance, 174–75; and underclass voices, 51, 133–35, 153, 164; and waste art, 50 entrepreneurship, 237, 277n87; digital, 235, 243–44; of migrant workers, 149, 154, 237 Erie, Matthew, 31 Eschenburg, Madeline, 67, 85 Ettlinger, Nancy, 258 Euro-America, 59, 130; postsocialism in, 26–27, 262; waste art in, 96–97, 105 Evans, Harriet, 16, 323n20 evictions, 4, 16, 38, 48, 99, 268n14, 282n155, 368n14 exclusion, xi, 212, 226, 257; and citizenship, 10, 172, 260; and the exformal, 114; vs. expulsion, xii, 3, 15, 17; of migrants, xii, 15, 20, 27; and Occupy movement, 177; and Present. Perfect, 231; and waste art, 114 expulsion: and class antagonism, 263–64; and cultural forms, 5, 20; and de facto vs. de jure law, 32, 33; and delegated performance, 60, 62, 66, 83; and delivery drivers, 257;

and economic development, 48; vs. exclusion, xii, 3, 15, 17; global, xii–xv, 261; vs. human quality, 245; indirect, 261–63; and Kuaishou, 222; and labor practices, 17–19; and migrant worker poets, 133, 134, 164; and pandemic art, 52; and precarity, 23, 29, 226, 259–66; and scatalogical art, 206, 208; and suicide shows, 51, 169, 170, 199; of underclass, 8, 15–20; and visibility, 2, 20, 23; and waste art, 50, 97, 128; and zombie citizenship, 15–20, 263; and zombies, 23 Fan Yang, 307n38 Fan Yusu, 38 Feldmen, Allen, 177 Feng, Xiaodan, 249 filial piety, 88 film: documentary, xvii, 105, 169, 228–34, 291n25, 291n27; found footage in, 228–34; lower-tier cities in, 213–14; and suicide shows, 170, 194–95; and waste art, 105, 110, 113; xianchang (on-the-spot) style of, 105; zombies in, 22. See also Plastic China; Present.Perfect; video streaming financial crisis (2008), 11, 92 Fisher, Mark, 297n36 Fitzgerald, Simon, 18 Fly Together—Shijiezi Village Art Practice Project (Yiqi fei—Shijiezi xiangcun yishu shijian jihua; Qing Ga and Jin Le), 91 Folding Beijing (novella; Beijing zhedie; Hao Jingfang), 1–2, 20 Foodie Fengjie (Chihuo fengjie), 208, 217–21, 222, 242, 244 foot washing, 88–91

I N D E X   [ 365 ]

Fordism, 25; and post-Fordism, 24, 29, 318n112 Foxconn City (Shenzhen), 13, 19, 35, 123, 273n30; suicides at, 123, 173–74 Fraser, Nancy, 26 Frenkel, Stephen, 272n20, 273n23 From the New World (photograph; Laizi xindalu; Yang Yongliang), 110 Fu, Diana, 175 Fuchs, Christian, 235, 237 Galeano, Eduardo, xi games, online, 21–22 Gao Brothers, 54–58, 67–70, 80, 83, 206, 311n11 Gara, Phillip, 256 García, Dora, 60 gender, 45, 217, 296n24; and tuwei culture, 218–19 Genette, Gérard, 163 gentrification, 16, 212 ghost workers (youling gongren), 10 Gibney, Matthew, xiii gig economy, 15, 77, 254 Gill, Mark, 22 Gill, Rosalind, 126 Ginsberg, Allen, 51 Gong, Haomin, 135 Goodman, Eleanor, 297n33 Goodman, Sophia, 262 Greenhalgh, Susan, xiv Guangzhou, 22, 91, 212 Guo, Junwan’guo, 157 Guo, Zhonghua, 262 Guo Liming, 158–60 Half White-Collar/Half Peasant (performance; Yiban shi bailing, yiban shi nongmin; Luo Zidan), 111 Han, Byung-Chul, 258

Han Bing, 97, 107, 109 Han Dong, 203 Han Li, 243 hanmai (rap style), 220 Hao Jingfang, 1–2, 20 Harvie, Jen, 84 He Yunchang, 67, 80, 86, 89, 206, 264 health workers, 249, 256 Heavy Metal (film; Huxiao de jinshu), 105 Helguera, Pablo, 288n65 Hennefeld, Maggie, 225 Hong Kong: protests in (2019), 77; rooftopping in, 194 Horning, Rob, 286n46 Hou, Jiaxi, 220, 224 Hou Hanru, 284n27 household registration (hukou) system, xi, 4, 11–13, 15, 27, 245, 268n8; and de facto vs. de jure law, 31, 32 Hsing, You-Tien, 16 Hu Bo, 213 Hu Xunbi, 151, 299n58 Hua Yong, xvii Huajiao (social media site), 228 Huang Weikai, 229 Huangjueping Graffiti Street (Huangjueping tuyajie; Chongqing), 247–49 Hui Huang, 254, 256, 258 human quality (suzhi): and class, 206, 208, 209, 225–27; and health workers, 249; and Kuaishou skits, 206, 208, 242–43, 245; in Migrant Worker’s Bosom Friend, 156; parodies of, 238–42; and precarity, xvi, 3, 14, 30, 226, 227; and Present. Perfect, 228–29, 231; and scatalogical art, 206, 208; and the state, 219, 226; vs. tuwei culture, 217–25; and underclass,

[ 366 ]  I N D E X

208, 218–19; and urban vs. rural areas, 221 hunger strikes, 176–77 hustle, 237, 245; digital, 238–42 Huya (social media site), 228 India, 33 Indigestion II (sculpture; Liu Wei), 203, 204 individualism, mandatory, 77, 277n95, 286n46; and self-improvement, 153–61, 206, 208 injuries, industrial, 18–19, 31, 129–30, 148, 261. See also construction industry Inke (social media site), 228 installations: delegated-performance, 46, 49, 61, 67; photography of, 46, 58, 63, 67–69, 83, 87, 101; site-specific, 58, 59, 64, 167, 203; sound, 62; videos of, 167–69, 183, 200–201; and waste art, 101–3, 104, 112, 291n33 Internet+ policy, 210, 221, 238, 243 internet stars (wanghong), 214–15 Internet Ugly, 216 involution (neijuan), 44 Ireland, protests in, 176–77, 187 “Iron” (poems; Tie; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 136–44, 147–48, 150 Jacka, Tamara, 206, 220, 241 Jackson, Shannon, 83–84, 286n41 Japan, 34, 41, 277n95 Jasic protests (Shenzhen), 38–40 Jasic Workers Solidarity Group (Jiashi gongren shengyuantuan), 38 Jasper, James, 178 Jeffries, Elaine, 88 Jia Zhangke, 109–10, 113, 213–14 Jiang Guoliang, 35

Jiang Pengyi, 97 Jiao Xingtao, 91 Jin Huaqing, 105 Jin Le, 91 Jin Ying, 163 jiucai (garlic cloves; resilient workers), 277n87 Johnson, Wendell, 143 Johnston, Les, 225 Jordan, Chris, 105 Katz, Michael, 7 Kendall, Paul, 213 Kester, Grant, 60, 61 Klein, Naomi, x, xi Kleinman, Arthur, 175 Köhler, Reinhard, 140 “Kong Yiji” (short story; Lu Xun), 165 Koolhaas, Rem, 186 Kristeva, Julia, 202, 226, 227 Kuaishou (video app), 202–45; censorship of, 52, 210–11, 238, 241, 243; class tension on, 200, 210–11, 232; and digital creativity, 235–37; and human quality, 206, 208, 231, 242–43, 245; income from, 214–15, 235–37; and lower-tier cities, 211, 213–14; and Present. Perfect, 231, 234; satire on, 242–45; and self vs. other, 226–28; skits on, 199, 238–42, 244–45, 259; social media attacks on, 222–28; and tuwei style, 215–22, 233, 238–42, 244; users of, 211–12, 313n23; and youth, 236–37; and zombie citizenship, 225, 241, 243 labor: in delegated performances, 54–56, 60, 63–65, 68–69, 80–87; digital, 210, 216, 234–37; informal, 5,

I N D E X   [ 367 ]

labor (continued ) 24, 25, 31, 94, 97, 100, 128, 172, 255, 260–61; as laodong vs. dagong, 111, 172; low-cost, 13–14, 86; market for, 2, 77; relational, 221–22; repetitive, 71–75, 144–48; self-employed, 237 labor disputes: and Cultural Revolution activists, 280n125; legal redress in, 31, 172–73; small-scale, 78; vs. the state, 280n128; and suicide shows, 51, 170, 172–74, 178, 182–83; over wage arrears, 17–18, 19, 78, 170, 172–74, 178, 182–83, 261 Labor Law (PRC; 1995), 32, 40 labor practices: and de facto vs. de jure law, 31, 32–33; migrant worker poets on, 129–30; and precarity, xii, xv, 4; and slavery, 130 Laclau, Ernesto, 62 Lam, Barry, 101 landscape painting, 109–10, 112 Laoba. See Daoshi laoba law: vs. “cults and superstitions,” 21–22; de facto vs. de jure, 31–33; labor, 4, 31, 32, 40, 172–73; and suicide shows, 183, 195–98 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 66 Leach, Neil, 186 Lee, Ching Kwan, 32 Lee, Sing, 175 Lefebvre, Henri, 144 Les Fleurs du Mal (Baudelaire), 94–95 Levinas, Emmanuel, 79 Li, Miao, 17, 237, 238 Li Anle, 285n33 Li Dan, 105 Li Jikai, 118 Li Qiang, 9 Li Shan, 88 Li Wei, 189, 193

Li Wei Falls to Earth (photographs; Li Wei zhuangru diqiu), 193 Li Wenliang, 249 Li Zhang, 44, 46 Li Ziqi, 243 Lian Si, 43 Liang Shuo, 123 Liang Xiaosheng, 282n149 Lin, Jian, 214, 236 Lin Chun, xviii, 44 Lin Zhao, 176 Lingbi county (Anhui), suicide show in, 197–98 Literary Works (journal; Zuopin), 149 Liu, Kevin Ziyu, 211 Liu Dongwu, 131 Liu Mama, 215 Liu Wei, 203 Liu Xintao, 97 livestreaming (zhibo): editing of, 228–34; found footage from, 228–34; income from, 214–15, 236, 319n115; regulation of, 229; tuwei in, 244; and youth, 236–37. See also Kuaishou Lorey, Isabell, 32, 80, 100 Lu Huilin, 31, 170, 199 Lü Tu, 10 Lu Xueyi, 44–45 Lu Xun, 165 “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” (photograph; 1932), 182 Luo Zhiting, 298n53 Luo Zidan, 111 lying flat (tangping) movement, 245, 265, 270n40 Ma Yansong, 184 main melody (zhu xuanlü), 149, 152, 161, 300n65

[ 368 ]  I N D E X

Manufactured Landscapes (film; Jennifer Baichwal), 291n25 Marvin, Miranda, 150 Marx, Karl, 7–8, 21 Marxism, 71, 86; suppression of, 38–39 masculinity, 80, 85 May Fourth movement, 34, 35, 38 Maze prison protests (Belfast), 176–77, 187 Mazur, Krystyna, 132 Mbembe, Achille, 247 McAdam, Doug, 177 Mei Danying, 216 melopoeia, 147 Mercy of Not Killing, The (performance; Bu sha zhi en; Chen Chenchen), 167–69, 183, 200–201 middle class: and China dream, xix, 5, 161; and formal economy, 42; and Kuaishou, 52, 209, 225; and migrant worker poets, 130, 133–34; vs. migrant workers, 127–28, 271n6; parodies of, 238–42, 320n130; precarity of, 5, 15, 43, 44, 195; on social media, 318n109 Migrant Worker Panorama (cartoon; Dagong quantu; Wei Ke), 309n65 migrant workers: and aesthetic practices, 46–53, 127; artists’ use of, 122–23, 125, 127; in construction industry, 172–74, 200; as creative workers, 214–15; cross-border, 262–63; and cross-class relations, 6, 34–40, 126, 128, 243, 310n79; and de facto vs. de jure law, 31–33; dehumanization of, 122–23; in delegated performances, 49–50, 54–56, 60, 63–65, 68–69, 80–87, 111; as delivery drivers, 52, 256; encampments of, ix–xi, 196; entrepreneurship of, 148, 154, 237,

243–44; expulsion of, 16–18, 20, 260; heterogeneity of, 9–10; hostility to, xviii, 21, 93, 124–25, 179, 212, 323n20; human quality of, 2–3, 14, 206, 208; influx of, 12–13, 165; and Kuaishou, 211–12; and laid-off workers, 14–15; and middle class, 127–28, 271n6; museums of, 18, 35, 36, 157; occupations of, 7, 267n8; precarity of, 11–15, 18–19, 27–29, 48–49; and sacrifice, 3, 48, 130; and self-improvement, 153–61, 206, 208; and skyscrapers, 184, 186; terms for, 7–8; university-educated, 15, 43, 268n8. See also poetry, migrant worker; underclass Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend (magazine; Dagong zhiyin), 51, 132– 34, 150–66; elite editors of, 153–54, 162–64; interviews in, 162–63, 164; and migrant workers, 153–55; narrative templates in, 155, 156–57, 164; origins of, 151; readership of, 51, 132, 151, 153–54, 161, 163, 300n69, 301n77; self-help propaganda in, 153–61; state propaganda in, 132–33; and Zheng Xiaoqiong, 155, 157, 161, 165–66 Migrant Workers Home (Gongyou zhi jia; Picun), 35–38, 92, 279n119, 298n54 Millar, Kathleen, 118 minimum livelihood allowance (dibao), 7, 32 Mist and Fog (film; Cao Fei), 22 Mitropoulos, Angela, 126 “Moonlight: Married Migrant Workers Living Apart” (poem; Yueguang: fenju do dagong fufu; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 297n33

I N D E X   [ 369 ]

Morris, Carwyn, 245 Mouffe, Chantal, 59, 62 Mu Chen, 55, 56 Muehlebach, Andrea, 112 mukbang (bingeing displays; South Korea), 217–18, 227 Munck, Ronaldo, 25, 26 Murray, Charles, 8 Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art (Dagong wenhua yishu bowuguan), 35, 36, 38 Mushroom at the End of the World, The (Anna Tsing), 98–99 “My Name is Fan Yusu” (essay; Wo shi Fan Yusu), 37 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 79 “Navigating the World Alone” (column; Tiandi wo duxing; Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend), 156, 158–61 Neilson, Brett, 25 neoliberalism, xi, 3, 16, 30–33, 276n80, 285n38; and delegated performance, 59, 66, 70, 84; and individualism, 32, 39–40, 149, 221; and Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, 132, 133, 164; and precarity, 24, 29; and repetition, 144; and social media, 208, 241; and waste art, 101 new workers (xin gongren), 7, 10, 11, 34, 111. See also migrant workers New Workers Art Troupe (Xin gongren yishutuan), 279n115 New Workers Band (Xin gongren yuedui), 37, 279n115 New Workers Theater (Xin gongren juchang), 35 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129 996.ICU movement, 40–41 Nyong’o, Tavia, 76

Occupy movement, 76, 170, 177, 307n38 Oldenburg, Claes, 104 100 percent (performance; Wang Jin), 68 Ortner, Sherry, 4, 16 Ou Ning, 91 Pang, Irene, 33 Pang Laikwan, 277n87 Papadopoulos, Dimitris, 2 Parry, Jonathan, 305n17 participatory art, 247, 283n6, 289n84; and class, 49–50; vs. delegated performance, 58–62, 76, 83, 84, 89, 91, 92 Passeron, Jean, 150 performance art, xix; photography of, 58, 63, 65, 67–69, 83, 87–89, 189, 193; self-harm in, 46, 82. See also delegated performance; suicide shows performative eating, 227 Perry, Elizabeth, xix, 280n127 Phoenix Project (sculpture; Fenghuang; Xu Bing), 101–2, 104, 107, 122 photography, 5, 182; of installations, 46, 58, 63, 67–69, 83, 87, 101; of performance art, 58, 63, 65, 67–69, 83, 87–89, 189, 193; of public spaces, 55; of waste art, 46, 101, 102, 105, 106–8, 109, 112, 123, 126, 127 Picun Literature Group (Picun wenxue xiaozu), 35, 37 Picun village. See Migrant Workers Home Pils, Eva, xvi, xvii Plastic China (film; Suliao Zhongguo; Wang Jiuliang), 95, 96, 98, 99, 105, 110, 115–18, 122–24

[ 370 ]  I N D E X

poetry, xix, 95–96, 135, 294n4; repetition in, 132–34, 137–47, 148, 165; rhythm in, 143, 145, 147, 165 poetry, migrant worker, 18, 46, 50–51, 129–66; and activism, 130, 135, 136, 294n4; aesthetics of, 136, 143, 146, 147, 150, 294n7; and class, 132–35, 149, 165, 166, 259; evolution of, 148–50; on labor practices, 129–30; and precarity, 132–35, 148, 164; readership of, 130, 133, 135, 144, 145, 294n5 Poisonous Spider (installation; Du zhizhu; Wang Qingsong), 102–3, 107 “Post-Sense-Sensibility-Alien Bodies & Delusion” (Houganxing-yixing yu wangxiang; Beijing exhibition; 1999), 284n24 postsocialism, 14, 29, 38, 79, 172, 276n80; in Euro-America, 26–27, 262 Pound, Ezra, 140, 143, 143, 146 Pratt, Andy, 126 precarity, 23–31; and anger, 43, 44, 46, 47, 76–80; of artists, 85–86; in capitalism, 26, 118; and citizenship, 260–65; and class antagonism, xviii–xix, 50, 100, 174, 198–201, 323nn19–20; and creativity, 49, 234–37; cross-class, 42–43, 198–201, 258–59, 266; and cultural forms, xi–xii, xix–xx, 6, 45–49; and de facto vs. de jure law, 32; and delegated performance, 60, 62, 66, 67–70, 87, 112; of delivery drivers, 254–57; of digital labor, 210, 234–37; and expulsion, 23, 29, 226, 259–66; and human quality, xvi, 3, 14, 30, 226, 227; and labor practices, xii, xv, 2, 4; management

of, 45–49, 123; and masculinity, 80; and materiality, 112–13; of middle class, 5, 15, 43, 44, 195; and migrant worker poets, 132–35, 148, 164; of migrant workers, 11–15, 18–19, 27–29, 37, 48–49, 273n23; normalization of, 70, 100, 235, 266; and protest movements, 24–25; psychology of, x, 2–3, 12, 42, 123, 175, 242; and rooftopping, 194; in rural areas, 27, 93, 212; short-term vs. permanent, 8, 15, 86, 263; and social media, 208, 209–10, 216, 228, 229, 234–38; vs. solidarity, 34–40, 43, 76–80, 87, 100, 125–27; and suicide shows, 171, 175, 180, 182; tactical distribution of, 77, 79; and tuwei style, 216, 226–28; and waste art, 50, 97, 98–101, 111–12, 120; worldwide, 259; of youth, 236–37 Present.Perfect (film; Wanmei xianzai shi; Zhu Shengze), 209–10, 228–34; found footage in, 228, 231 propaganda: on China dream, xix, 5, 11, 20, 24, 27, 28, 41, 45, 47, 65, 186, 240; self-help, 153–61, 206, 208; on social harmony, xviii–xix, 44–45, 77; state-sponsored, xviii, 42, 65–66, 132–33, 156 protest, political: embodied, 175–77; in Hong Kong, 77; in Ireland, 176–77, 187; passivity as, xx, 265; and precarity, 24–25; in Shenzhen, 38–40; suicide shows as, xix, 170–74; suppression of, 30, 50, 65, 77–78; in Tiananmen Square, 77, 187 psychotherapy, 43–44, 46 Pun Ngai, 31, 35, 42, 170, 199 Pure Plants (poems; Chunzhong zhiwu; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 298n53

I N D E X   [ 371 ]

Qian Jun, 153 Qian, Junxi, 157 Qin Shao, 16 Qing Ga, 91 Qiu, Jack Linchuan, 318n109 Qiu Zhijie, 68 Qu Yan, 91 Qu Yuan, 174–75 race, 21, 22 Radford, Luis, 143, 147, 157 Ragpicker (film; Shihuangzhe), 105 “Ragpicker’s Wine, The” (poem; Baudelaire), 95–96 Rancière, Jacques, 121, 134, 146, 165 Records of Foot Washing (performance; Xizu tuzhi; Yu Ji), 88–91 recycling, 94, 99, 114 Red Shirts protest (Bangkok), 176, 177 Redmond, Sean, 227 Reinhardt, Mark, 130 Remembering (sound installation; Nian; Ai Weiwei), 62 repetition: discordant, 150; in factory work, 71–75, 144–48; in migrant worker poetry, 137–47, 148, 157, 165 Reyes, Xavier Aldana, 22 Rhythmanalysis (Lefebvre), 144 Richaud, Lisa, 48, 123 Ridout, Nicholas, 70 Riefenstahl, Leni, 61 Robbins, Joel, 37 Rogger, Basil, 175–76 Rolandi, Alessandro, 289n84 Rong Rong, 271n6 rooftopping, 193–94, 310n74 Rose Manor (poems; Meigui zhuangyuan; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 149 Rossiter, Ned, 25

“Rumba” (video; Lunba; Cao Fei), 114 “Rumba II: Nomad” (video; Lunba zhi er: youmu; Cao Fei), 114 rural areas: decline of, 13, 212, 319n118; digital entrepreneurship in, 243–44; and human quality, 221; and Kuaishou, 202, 211–12; land dispossession in, x, xiii; migration from, 7, 10, 12–13, 15; precarity in, 27, 93, 212, 234; reconstruction of, 92, 212, 213; and tuwei culture, 215, 216. See also migrant workers sacrifice, logic of: and class antagonism, 6, 93; and economic development, xix, 47–48, 52, 130, 259; and migrant workers, 3, 48, 130; and suicide shows, 200 Saint-Simon, Henri de, 178 Sammond, Nicholas, 225 sang culture (sang wenhua; culture of despondency), 41–42, 265, 281n137 Sassen, Saskia, xii, xiii, 2, 12, 16, 199 Savarese, Nicola, 69, 79, 188 scatalogical art, 203–5. See also tuwei style Schilthuizen, Menno, 104 Schneider, Rebecca, 70, 178 Schram, Sanford, 177 Secrets of My Happiness, The (TV series; Wo de xingfu jinnang), 158 Sehgal, Tino, 60 Selected Poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong (Zheng Xiaoqiong shixuan), 137, 143 Serres, Michel, 114–15 sex work, 88–89, 222 Shanghai, 16, 48, 212, 266; Siemens factory in, 70–76, 286n38 shanzai (counterfeit subculture), 216 Shao Yinong, 55, 56

[ 372 ]  I N D E X

Shen Mengyu, 40 Shenzhen, 157, 158, 160, 167, 212; protests in, 38–40. See also Foxconn City Shi Tiesheng, 163 Shi Xiaobing, 215 Shu Yong, 63–65 Sichuan earthquake (2008), 62 Siemens factory (Shanghai), 70–76, 286n38 Sierra, Santiago, 60, 83, 86 Siu, Helen, 17, 19 Slouching Ge You, 42, 281n137 Smile Behind the Mask, The (street art; Kouzhaoxia de weixiao), 247–49 Smith, Chris, 42 social credit system, 30 social harmony, 20, 39, 210, 265; vs. class antagonism, xviii–xix, 44–45, 47, 78, 166, 199; vs. digital hustle, 245; and migrant worker poets, 133, 135, 149; in Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, 153–54; parodies of, 238; vs. Present. Perfect, 234; propaganda on, 44–45, 77; vs. transgressive cultural forms, 47, 49; vs. tuwei culture, 224 social media: anger on, 43–44; and authenticity, 221, 232, 317n105; censorship of, xvii, 52, 210–11, 234, 238, 241, 243; class on, 209, 220, 221, 222–26, 318n109; and Covid19 pandemic, 249; and Daxing fire, xvii–xviii; fake pro-state messaging on (50 cent party), xviii; and hustle, 237; international, 232; and precarity, 45, 208, 209–10, 216, 228, 229, 234–38; relational labor on, 221–22; rooftopping on, 194; satire on, 238–42; sites on, 209, 222–25, 227, 228, 231; spectators

on, 209, 220, 227; suicide shows on, 180–82, 187–88; tuwei style on, 215–26, 233, 238–42, 244; vigilantism on, 225; and youth, 236–37. See also Kuaishou; livestreaming social mobility, 8, 135, 234; downward, 40, 98, 157–61, 165, 258–59; parodies of, 240–42, 245; rhetoric of upward, 11, 13, 127, 224; and suicide shows, 200 Social Sensibility project, 289n84 SoengJoengToi (under the balcony), 91 solidarity, xvii–xix, 129; and activism, 76–77, 78–79; and collaborative art, 92, 286n41; and Covid-19 pandemic, 247, 249, 258; cross-class, 4–6, 34–40, 160, 210, 271n6; and Daxing fire, xvi–xvii; and delegated performance, 61, 62, 63–65, 87; and fractious forms, 264, 266; intellectual-worker, 35, 38; and Jasic protests, 38–40; vs. precarity, 34–40, 43, 76–80, 87, 100, 125–27; and the state, 39–40, 271n6, 280n128 Solinger, Dorothy, 14 Song, Hojin, 221 Song Dong, 68, 97 Sontag, Susan, 61 South Africa, 21 South Korea, 217–18, 221 Soviet Union, 26 “speaking bitterness” (su ku), 135, 146, 164 Spring Story (performance; Chuntian de gushi; Yang Zhenzhong), 70–76, 285n38 Stam, Robert, 106 Standing Committee, National People’s Congress, xvi

I N D E X   [ 373 ]

state, the: and cognitive dissonance, 12–15; and Covid-19 pandemic, 249; and de facto vs. de jure law, 32–33; and delivery drivers, 255; and human quality, 219, 226; and informality, 261–62; petitions to, xvi–xvii, 47, 174, 175, 183, 243; policies of, 7, 10–11, 12–15, 22, 32–33, 245; propaganda of, 42, 65–66, 132–33, 156; and rooftopping, 194; and scatalogical art, 206; and social safety net, 24, 183; and solidarity, 39–40, 271n6, 280n128; and suicide shows, 196; and tuwei culture, 52, 211; and underclass, 7, 10–11; and urban planning, 184–85, 189; on zombies, 22 Stein, Gertrude, 212 Still Life (film; Sanxia haoren; Jia Zhangke), 109–10 Strasser, Susan, 96 Street Life (film; Nanjing lu), 105 Su Hua, 236, 243 subaltern (diceng), 7, 8 suffering, narrative of (kunan xushi), xix, 37, 48, 129–30 suicide shows (tiaolou xiu), 167–201; aesthetics of, 51, 171, 178, 180, 187, 189, 194; and architecture, 183–89; authenticity of, 171, 179, 307n49; choreography of, 180–83, 188; and class antagonism, 170, 175, 180, 195, 259, 264; and construction industry, 172–74, 183–84; as creative performance, 177–80, 187, 307n49; and delegated performance, 66, 168–69, 188; as embodied gesture, 196–98, 200; and expulsion, 51, 169, 170, 199; and film, 170, 194–95;

as fractious forms, 198, 200; and labor disputes, 51, 170, 172–74, 178, 182–83; and law, 183, 195–98; as media events, 173–74; mockery of, 179–80; photography of, 189, 193; and precarity, 78, 171, 175, 180, 182; as protest, xix, 170–74; psychiatric causes of, 175; and scatalogical art, 206; on social media, 180–82, 187–88; and traditional remonstance, 174–75; and visibility, 51, 171, 178, 184–89, 196; and wage arrears, 172–74, 178, 182–83; and zombie citizenship, 169, 173, 195, 196, 199, 200 suicides, 123, 173–74, 305n17 Sun, Wanning, 148–49, 173, 179, 307n49 Sun Heng, 10, 35 surplus-ing, 15–20, 23 surveillance system, 30 suspension (xuanfu), 30–31 Swider, Sarah, 310n79 Tan, K. Cohen, 281n137 tangping (lying flat), 245, 265, 270n40 Tannen, Deborah, 146 Taussig, Michael, 96 Ten Bos, René, 196 Thailand, 176, 177 Thieme, Tatiana, 237 Third Way of Love, The (film; Di san zhong aiqing), 194–95 “Thirty-Seven-Year-Old Female Worker, A” (poem; Sanshiqi sui de nügong; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 139–42 This Person Is For Sale (performance; Ciren chushou jiage mianyi; Zhu Fadong), 111 Thompson, Nato, 92

[ 374 ]  I N D E X

Thrown to the Wind (installation; Longjuan feng; Wang Zhiyuan), 291n33 Tiananmen protests (1989), 77, 187 Tibet, self-immolation in, 174 Tilly, Charles, 170, 180 To Raise the Water Level in a Fishpond (performance; Wei yutang zenggao shuiwei; Zhang Huan), 67, 292n44 Together with Migrants (performance; He mingong zai yiqi; Song Dong), 68 “Toilet Wars” (videos; Daoshi laoba), 202–3 toxic sublime, the, 104–5, 122 Trash Village (film; Laji de cunzi), 105 Trendy Peasants—Eight Brothers (sculpture; Shishang nongmin ba xiongdi; Liang Shuo), 123 Trottier, Daniel, 316n88 Tsianos, Vassilis, 2 Tsing, Anna, 99 tuwei style, 208–10; aesthetics of, 206, 214, 216, 233, 317n105; censorship of, 52, 211, 242, 243; and class, 211, 219–20, 222–26; and gender, 218–19; vs. human quality, 217–25; and hustle, 237; on Kuaishou, 215–22, 233, 238–42, 244; parodies of, 241–42; and precarity, 216, 226–28; vs. Present. Perfect, 234; and regional accents, 216, 217, 219; social media mockery of, 222–26 12 Square Meters (performance; Zhang Huan), 203–5 20 Hugs for Hire (performance; 20 ge guyongzhe de yongbao), 57–58, 69–70, 83, 84, 285n33 24 City (film; Ershisi chengji; Jia Zhangke), 110 Tyler, Imogen, 226

underclass (xiaceng jieji), xv–xvi, 2–12, 272n20; anger of, 43, 44, 47; and artists, 111, 124–25, 130, 148, 292n42, 292n43; and collaborative art, 92; and de facto vs. de jure law, 32–33; in delegated performance, 49–50, 61, 63, 67, 68, 70, 121, 122; digital labor of, 52, 216, 231, 235, 237, 243–45; diversity of, 9–10, 11, 40–41; downward mobility to, 40, 98, 157–61, 166, 258–59; elite ventriloquism of, 51, 132–35, 154, 162–64; expulsion of, 8, 15–20; and global media, 232; and human quality, 208, 218–19; and livestreaming, 228–34; vs. middle class, 127–28, 271n6; in Present. Perfect, 229, 231–34; resilience of, 35, 48, 123, 133, 159, 162, 182–83, 249, 277n87; and scatalogical art, 206; and sex work, 88–89; and suicide shows, 170, 171, 199; terms for, 7–8, 271n8; and viral infection, 257–58; visibility of, xvi, 3, 29, 63, 127; voices of, 129–66; and waste art, 50, 98, 99–101, 113; zombie citizenship of, xv–xvi, 2, 70. See also migrant workers; tuwei style unemployed, urban, 11, 15, 29, 40, 43–44, 76, 80, 268n8 “Unite Is Strength” (zhongzhi chengcheng; National Museum of China exhibition; 2020), 249, 253–54, 255 Urban Amber (photographs; Dushi hupo; Han Bing), 107–8 urban areas: evolution in, 104; hierarchy of, 212–13; lower-tier, 212–14, 216, 221, 234–35; vs. rural areas, 13, 212, 221, 319n118; state planning in,

I N D E X   [ 375 ]

urban areas (continued ) 184–85, 189; worldwide art in, 249–52 Urban Fictions (photographs; Dushi yanyi; Xing Danwen), 189–92 Urban Peasants (sculpture; Chengshi nongmin; Liang Shuo), 123, 124 van Crevel, Maghiel, 38, 136, 294n4, 298n54 Verran, Joanna, 22 video streaming, 52, 167–69, 200– 201, 202–45. See also Kuaishou; livestreaming vigilantes, 209, 224–25, 316n88 visibility: and banishment, xiii, xvi, 1–2; in delegated performance, 63, 122; and expulsion, 2, 20, 23; of new workers, 11; and repetition, 146; in suicide shows, 51, 171, 178, 184–89, 196; of underclass, xvi, 3, 29, 63, 127; and urban hierarchy, 212–13; in waste art, 120–22 Vortherms, Samantha A., xiv Wacquant, Loïc, x, 259–60 Wang, Meiqin, 59, 82, 91 Wang Dezhi, 10, 35 Wang Hui, 1, 4, 34, 42, 78, 111, 159, 276n79 Wang Jin, 68, 111 Wang Jiuliang, 95, 105, 110, 115, 122 Wang Qingsong, 67, 102–3, 104, 107, 111, 127 Wang Xiaodong, 213 Wang Yuexiang, 162 Wang Zhiyuan, 97, 291n33 waste art, 47, 94–128, 259; and activism, 122–25; aesthetics of, xix, 50, 96–98, 101, 105, 107–9, 111–15, 121–24;

and animals, 101–4; appropriation in, 50, 98, 128; dehumanization in, 112–14; in Euro-America, 96–97, 105; and excess of materiality, 100; and expulsion, 50, 97, 128; and film, 105, 110, 113; and informal economy, 94, 97, 100, 128; and installations, 101–3, 104, 112, 291n33; lack of human presence in, 104–6, 111; and landscape painting, 109–10, 112; materiality of, 104, 106–10, 112, 114; object vs. subject in, 113–14, 127; photography of, 46, 101, 102, 105, 106–8, 109, 112, 123, 126, 127; and precarity, 50, 97, 98–101, 111–12, 120; subject vs. object in, 114–20, 125; and underclass, 50, 98, 99–101, 113; visibility in, 120–22 waste pickers: and artists, 97–98, 101, 106, 108–9, 120, 126; as robots, 114; as subject vs. object, 115–20 Waste Pickers, The (paintings; Shihuangzhe; Li Jikai), 118–20 Watkins, Jonathan, 75 Wei Ke, 309n65 Wen Hui, 68 Weng Fen, 91 When the Bough Breaks (film; Weichao), 105 “Where There’s a Will There’s a Way” (column; Ai pin cai hui ying; Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend), 156–57 Whyte, Martin, 47 Whyte, Martin King, 277n95 Williams, Raymond, 46 Wolf, Margery, 174 women, 34, 174; migrant, 88–91 workers: as heroes, 84, 175, 249, 291n37; laid-off, 7, 10, 14–15, 16, 26, 154, 300n69; peasant, 13; and waste art,

[ 376 ]  I N D E X

101–5, 107, 108–9. See also migrant workers Wrestling: One and One Hundred (performance; Shuaijiao 1 he 100; He Yunchang), 80, 84–87 Wu, Haoran, 220, 317n105 Wu, Jieh-min, xiv, 10 Wu Hung, 122–23 Wu Wenguang, 68 Wukong (social media site), 223 Xi Jinping, 38, 266, 280n128 Xiang Biao, 15, 30–31, 44 Xiaohai, 130, 298n54 Xie Xiangnan, 130 Xing Danwen, 97, 106–8, 109, 189 Xinjian Village (Daxing District): evictions from, 4, 16, 48, 99, 268n14; fire in, ix–xii, xvi–xviii, 2, 14, 208 Xinjiang, 53, 262 Xu Bing, 97, 101–2, 104, 107, 122, 229–30 Xu Duo, 35 Xu Lizhi, 130, 296n20 Xucun International Art Commune (Xucun guoji yishu gongshe; Qu Yan), 91 Yaeger, Patricia, 105, 122 Yan, Hairong, 148 Yan Hairong, 282n151 Yang, Jie, 43, 44, 45, 79, 158, 175 “Yang Ni” (poem; Zheng Xiaoqiong), 242 Yang Yongliang, 97, 109, 110 Yang Zhenzhong, 70–76, 285n38 Yangdeng Art Cooperative (Yangdeng hezuoshe; Jiao Xingtao), 91 Yao Lu, 97 Yi Gu, 92

Yi Jie, 94–95, 96, 99, 105, 115, 122, 124, 128 You, Haili, 140 Young Migrant Workers Art Troupe (Dagong qingnian yishu tuan), 35 Yu, Au Loong, 38 Yu, Chongxin, 272n20, 273n23 Yu Hua, 203 Yu Ji, 88–91 Yu Yang, 298n51 Yuan Yue, 300n69, 301n77 Yue laoban, 238, 320n130 Yun Li, 271n6 Zhai Wenting, 215 Zhang, Ge, 232, 234 Zhang Dali, 111, 122–23, 125, 292n42, 293n55 Zhang Huan, 67, 111, 203–5, 206, 292n44 Zhang Linna, 43 Zhao Dayong, 105 Zhao Liang, 67 Zheng Bo, 91, 92 Zheng Xiaoqiong, 37, 129–51, 294n4, 296nn20–21; acceptance speech of, 129; aesthetics of, 136, 143–44; and disharmony, 51, 147–48; evolution of, 150; and Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, 156, 157, 161, 165–66; and repetition, 137–47; works by, 18, 136–44, 147–48, 150, 151, 242, 297n33, 298n53 Zheng Zhuoran, 216 Zhihu (social media site), 209, 223, 224, 225, 227, 231 Zhong Yanshan, 105 Zhou Guoping, 163 Zhu Cheng, 203 Zhu Dake, 88

I N D E X   [ 377 ]

Zhu Fadong, 111, 121, 292n42, 292n43 Zhu Shengze, 209–10, 228–34 Zhu Yu, 206, 311n10 zombie citizenship, xiii–xvi, xviii, xix; and aesthetics, 7, 45–47, 62; and cognitive dissonance, 2, 12–14; contagion of, 40–45, 52; and cultural forms, 5–6, 11–12, 45–46; and de facto vs. de jure law, 33; and delegated performance, 60, 66, 68, 70, 76, 86, 87, 93; and delivery drivers, 257–58; and digital labor, 235, 245; and expulsion, 15–20, 263; and Folding Beijing, 1–2; and human quality, 208; and Kuaishou, 225, 241, 243; and lower-tier cities,

214; and magazines, 51, 155, 163; and migrant worker poets, 134, 148, 164; of migrants, 13, 38, 83; of new workers, 11; and pandemic, 52, 265; and postsocialism, 26–27; in Present. Perfect, 229, 233, 234; vs. resiliance, 182–83; vs. solidarity, 5, 6, 40, 43; and suicide shows, 169, 173, 195, 196, 199, 200; and tuwei culture, 220; of underclass, xv–xvi, 2, 7, 8, 70; and waste art, 50, 97, 98, 99, 106, 113, 121; and zombies, 23 zombies, 3, 21–23, 177 Zou Jinhong, 156 Zou Xueping, 105 Zuo Jing, 91 Zyrd, Michael, 228

[ 378 ]  I N D E X