A rich literature now addresses the experience of China’s labour force, the motor behind the country’s extraordinary economic rise. Within it, a distinct strand has tackled questions of class consciousness and agency. Much less has been written about workers’ cultural expression—or about Chinese representations of labour within the artistic field. In On the Edge, Margaret Hillenbrand, a scholar of modern Chinese literature and visual culture at Oxford, examines both, across high and low forms. Hillenbrand’s first book, Negative Exposure (2020), explored the question of ‘public secrecy’ in China, going beyond issues of censorship and amnesia by drawing on the mass of visual material spilled across Beijing’s Panjiayuan flea market—old photos, curios, knick-knacks, documents, uniforms, Maoist memorabilia, antiques. For Hillenbrand, these are ghostly evidence of events that are unforgotten yet have in many respects become unspeakable: the 1937 Nanjing Massacre, the Cultural Revolution, Tiananmen. Her study of ‘photo-forms’—including artworks such as Xu Yong’s Negatives (2014), 64 colour negatives of his photographs of the crowds in Tiananmen in May and June 1989—explored the ways in which ‘the collective decision not to talk’ conspired to keep the past in a state of ‘restless quiescence’.

On the Edge also deploys socio-political concepts and cultural texts to parse contemporary contradictions. But rather than focussing on events that are known but ‘unacknowledgeable’, Hillenbrand’s main subject here is ubiquitously visible yet not truly seen: China’s vast army of rural-migrant workers. She defines them as a new ‘precariat’, borrowing a term coined by the English labour sociologist Guy Standing to describe the situation of post-Fordist gig-economy workers in the Global North. On the Edge concentrates above all, however, on how ‘precarity as a structure of fearful feeling can permeate the social world’. She points out that the sheer number of precarious workers in the prc, and its repressive mix of authoritarianism and neoliberalism, mean that China ‘should be a core crucible for current thinking about precarity.’ Yet this is not a Westerner’s defence of vulnerable subalterns. Agency is a crucial theme; Hillenbrand devotes keen attention to cultural forms that involve the active or creative engagement of peasant-workers, ranging from artworks and documentaries to popular fiction and videos posted on social media. This dual focus—precarity, as a pervasive structure of feeling, and agency, as asserted by rural-migrant authors, poets, artists and livestreamers—gives the book its critical edge.

Hillenbrand opens with a consideration of the work of avant-garde artists who incorporate peasant-workers in their performance pieces. As she notes, the relations between the sophisticated artists and the workers vary along a spectrum from collaboration to exploitation. In Spring Story (2003), a video work by Yang Zhenzhong, factory employees at their workstations each say a few syllables to camera; edited together, these form the words of Deng Xiaoping’s famous Southern Tour speech at Shenzhen, which unleashed China’s manufacturing boom. Despite its evident sympathy for the workers, Hillenbrand argues, this ‘delegated performance’, devoid of reflexivity, ultimately reifies their atomized condition. In the case of the Gao Brothers’ Twenty Hugs for Hire (2001), exploitative labour relations became an explicit part of the work. The duo, avant-garde artists based in Beijing, went back to their hometown in Shandong to recruit migrant workers at the local labour market for their performance piece. It was staged in an abandoned workers’ assembly hall, where the hired hands were instructed to strip naked and embrace each other. The project included a transcript of the haggling over terms and conditions. Hillenbrand is critical of these staged scenes of class strife but ascribes a certain testimonial function to them—allegorizing the way that workers are ‘zombified en masse for the benefit of their so-called betters’, they provide ‘vital testaments to a precarious age’.

She goes on to consider the work of China’s ‘waste artists’, who use industrial detritus to create strange new forms of social and ecological critique. One prominent example is Xu Bing’s Phoenix Project (2008–16), an acclaimed installation of two giant mythical birds welded from corrugated iron, rods, bolts, broken shovels and other building-site debris. People generally scavenge this type of material from construction sites for re-sale or recycling, and Hillenbrand notes that waste artists like Xu Bing themselves enact the role of scavenger. Yet although Phoenix Project speaks to ‘the intersection of waste, precarity, compromised rights and class friction’, she points out, labour is missing: ‘there are no actual ragpickers in this installation’. A similar absence is noted in Wang Qingsong’s Poisonous Spider (2011), a work made from spirals of barbed wire adorned with everyday trash such as plastic bags, an old shoe, a scratched cd, a wilted lettuce. She also questions the artist’s self-identification as a waste picker in Yang Yongliang’s From the New World (2014), a composite photo-work which subverts the aesthetic of traditional Chinese landscape painting—mist-clad mountains, winding rivers—by collaging digital images of rubble and waste. Ingenious as they are, these artworks show the ‘reigning presence’ of waste, with human figures missing; if they tell ‘oblique stories’ about lived experience, it is ‘almost despite themselves’.

By contrast, Chinese documentary makers have made the lives of precarious migrant workers a central theme; a sub-genre has focused on the experience of ragpickers and trash sorters. From many notable works, Hillenbrand highlights Wang Jiuliang’s Plastic China (2016), which stands out for its frank yet nuanced exploration of what it means to live and work amidst the rubbish of the globalized world. The film maintains a steadfast focus on the subjectivity of its main character, the 11-year-old Yijie’s, who toils with her family, migrant workers from Sichuan, in a small plastics recycling workshop in Shandong, sifting through the mass of trash to find plastic items that can be shredded into vats of grey-brown slurry, and finally transformed into pellets for re-use. On the Edge highlights Yi-Jie’s sharp commentary and the discriminating interest she takes in the detritus among which the family lives. She is a waste artist herself, as Hillenbrand observes.

Turning to fiction, On the Edge examines the representation of China’s migrant workers in different literary genres. Hillenbrand analyses a seemingly marginal state-endorsed magazine, the bi-monthly Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend—popular among Pearl River Delta workers during its 2000–12 run—which churned out ‘problem stories’ by remolding the raw material sent in by its readers into formulaic plotlines. One recognizable genre features ‘class downfall’: from a position of hubristic wealth and power, the protagonist is plunged into an abyss of misery and humiliation, but overcomes the difficulties through sheer grit to resume a position of responsibility and acclaim, now purged of selfishness and pride. According to the magazine, these stories are designed ‘to console people who crave spiritual succour in the midst of poverty’. Hillenbrand is sharply critical of the narrative tone adopted by the magazine’s staff writers, who use free indirect discourse and fake oral accounts to ‘ventriloquize migrant workers and artificially fine-tune their powers of speech’. In her reading, these stories are the Party’s way of managing the affective lives of the precariat; similar tropes are now being recycled for the unemployed graduates of the 2020s, the ‘lying flat’ generation.

These hackneyed tales are contrasted with the extraordinary poems produced by migrant-workers themselves, much celebrated in China. One of these poets, Zheng Xiaoqiong, used her acceptance speech for a literary prize to invoke the tens of thousands of fingers lost in industrial accidents in the Pearl River Delta’s factories: ‘I often wonder, how far would those severed fingers reach if they were joined in a line?’ Hillenbrand explores the ‘discordant’ character of Zheng’s verse, as if it were reverberating to the clang of factory machinery, notably in the poem ‘A Thirty-Seven-Year-Old Woman Worker’: