PRODUCED ON THE PRODUCTION LINE: THE POETRY OF CHINESE MIGRANT WORKERS (2001-2020)
Main Article Content
Abstract
This paper examines how Chinese migrant worker poetry has voiced China’s second industrialization. As producers and products of this transformation, migrant workers’ verse presents a four-layered spectrum of industrialization imagery: material landscape, wounded body, spiritual reaction, and reconstructed consciousness. It maps three subjectivities—Swallowing, Soft, and Unbending Existentialisms—exercising practical agency yet refusing heroic and alienation narratives. Measured against the worker-peasant-soldier literature of the first industrialization, convergence and divergence appear: both eras produce industrial literature by laboring subjects, yet the collective heroic “We” yields to fragmented individual voices, whose poetry, unlike intellectual writing, presses close to China’s reality from the bottom. The paper reads this poetry as testimony born of the contradictions driving socialist industrialization, where machine meets flesh, institution meets human, giving rise to both the labor and its verse.
Keywords
migrant worker poetry, second industrialization, industrialization imagery, subjectivity, practical agency
Article Details
References
Chai, G. (2025). 中国百年工业文学大系：诗歌卷 [Chinese Industrial Literature over the Past Century: The Poetry Volume]. Beijing: Chinese Worker Publishing House.
Li, J. 钻井队长的故事（节选）[“The Story of a Drilling Team Captain” (excerpt)], 304–305.
Liu, B. 纺织工人歌 [“Song of the Textile Workers”], 247.
Liu, Z. 致机器 [“To the Machine”], 440.
Wang, J. 鞍钢赞歌 [“Ode to Anshan Steel”], 451.
Wei, G. 六公里 [“Six Kilometers”], 318.
Wu, Y. 化肥工人致煤矿工人 [“Fertilizer Workers to Coal Miners”], 462.
Xu, C. 新的工厂建成了 [“The New Factory Is Built”], 284.
Chen, N. (2019). 炸裂志 [Records of Explosion]. Xi’an: Taibai Literature and Art Publishing House.
Chen, S. (2015). 当代“打工诗歌”现代性意蕴分析 [“An Analysis of the Modernist Implications of Contemporary ‘Migrant Worker Poetry’”]. Journal of Nanjing University of Science and Technology 28 (06), 40–44.
Hu, A. (2023). 我在北京送快递 [I Deliver Packages in Beijing]. Changsha: Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House.
Jia, Y. (2025). 中国百年工业文学大系：史论卷 [Chinese Industrial Literature over the Past Century: Theoretical Volume]. Beijing: Chinese Worker Publishing House.
Jing, L. (2017). “我的诗篇”：从“文本”到“现象”——中国当代工人诗歌文化矛盾 [“ ‘The Verse of Us’: From ‘Text’ to ‘Phenomenon’ — Cultural Contradictions in Contemporary Chinese Worker Poetry”]. Journal of Guangxi Normal University 53 (02): 89–95.
Krenz, J. (2023). “Playing with Liquid Fire: Reading Chinese Dagong Verse Through Classical Poetry Tradition and Vice Versa.” Journal of the European Association for Chinese Studies 4: 75–121. https://doi.org/10.25365/jeacs.2023.4.krenz
Kunze, R. (2019). “Writing Workers in Post-socialist China: Migrant Worker Poetry and Its New Left Reception.” Oriens Extremus 57 (2018–2019): 145–169. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27197051
Li, et al. 2018. 中国当代阶级阶层变动（1978—2018）[Changes in Social Stratification and Class Division in Contemporary China (1978–2018)]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press.
Liu, C. (2023). 诗歌为道：关于“打工诗人”的社会学研究 [Poetry as a Way: A Sociological Study of Migrant Worker Poets]. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press.
Liu, D. (2006). 从乡村到城市的精神胎记：中国“打工诗歌”研究 [The Spiritual Birthmark from Village to City: A Study on Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry]. Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House.
Liu, D. (2012). 打工文学的整体观察 [A Holistic Observation of Migrant Worker Literature]. Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House.
Luo, D. (2022). 中国打工诗歌四十年精选 [Forty Years of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry (1981–2021)]. Foshan: Foshan Periodical Publishing House.
Luo, G. and Tian, Y. (2020). 旁观他人之痛——“新工人诗歌”、“底层文学”与当下中国的精神状况 [“Watching the Pain of Others：‘New Worker Poetry,’ ‘Subaltern Literature,’ and the Spiritual Condition of Contemporary China”]. Literary and Artistic Contention 9: 28–38.
Ouyang, J. (1997). 谁去谁留 [Who Goes, Who Stays]. Changsha: Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House.
Pun, N. (2005). Made in China: Women Factory Workers in a Global Workplace. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Pun, N. (2016). Migrant Labor in China: Post-socialist Transformation. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Qin, X. (2015). 我的诗篇：当代工人诗典 [The Verse of Us: An Anthology of Contemporary Worker Poetry]. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House.
Qin, X. (2016). Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry. Translated by Eleanor Goodman. Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press.
Qin, X. and Yang, L. (2019). 再低微的骨头里也有江河：《我的诗篇》六人诗选 [Even in the Lowest Bones There Are Rivers: An Anthology of Six Poets from The Verse of Us]. Xi’an: Taibai Literature and Art Publishing House.
Todorut, I. (2024). “Mobilizing Workers’ Poetry: A Pedagogical Journal.” TDR: The Drama Review 68 (1): 170–184. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204323000539
van Crevel, M. (2019). “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry.” Chinese Literature Today 8 (1): 127–145. https://doi.org/10.1080/21514399.2019.1615334
Wang, J. (2023). 赶时间的人：一个外卖员的诗 [The Man Racing Against Time: The Poetry of a Food Deliveryman]. Beijing: Taihai Publishing House.
Wang, J. (2024). 低处飞行 [Flying Low]. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House.
Xu, L. (2015). 新的一天 [New Day]. Beijing: The Writers Publishing House.
Xu, Q. and Luo, D. (2007). 中国打工诗歌精选（1985—2005）[Selected Migrant Worker Poetry of China 1985–2005]. Zhuhai: Zhuhai Publishing House.
Zheng, X. (2008). 郑小琼诗选 [Selected Poems of Zheng Xiaoqiong]. Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House.
Zheng, X. (2013). 女工记 [Women Workers]. Guangzhou: Huacheng Publishing House.