1. Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
2. Kirk Denton and Michel Hockx, Literary Societies of Republican China (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008).
3. Lu Yin, “Linghun keyi mai ma?,” in Xiaoshuo Yuebao 12, no. 11 (1921): 17–23. English translation, Lu Yin, “Factory Girl,” in Chinese Women Writers: A Collection of Short Stories by Chinese Women Writers of the 1920s and 1930s, trans. Jennifer Anderson and Theresa Munford (Hong Kong: Joint Publishing Co., 1985), 85–94.
4. Benjamin Kindler, “Labor Romanticism against Modernity: The Creation Society as Socialist Avant-Garde,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 32, no. 2 (Fall 2020): 43–99; and Xiaobing Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde: The Modern Woodcut Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 43–72.
5. Kirk Denton, “General Introduction,” in Modern Chinese Literary Thought: Writings on Literature, 1893–1945, ed. Kirk Denton (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), 48–49.
6. Feng Miao, “Education as a Continuation of Revolution: Everyday Life and the Communist Education of Petty Urbanites in 1930s China,” Twentieth-Century China 42, no. 2 (May 2017): 138–160; and Charles Laughlin, “1936, May 21: One Day in China,” in A New Literary History of Modern China, ed. David Der Wei Wang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 420–426.
7. Cheng Fangwu, “From a Literary Revolution to a Revolutionary Literature,” trans. Michael Gotz, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8, no. 1 (1976): 34–37, reprinted in Denton, Modern Chinese Literary Thought, 269–275.
8. Jiang Guangci, “Guanyu geming wenxue” (On Revolutionary Literature), Taiyang Yuekan 2 (February 1928): 13, quoted in Tang, Origins of the Chinese Avant-Garde, 67.
9. Charles Laughlin, Chinese Reportage: The Aesthetics of Historical Experience (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 13–14.
10. Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Guest Editor Introduction: Proletarian Arts in East Asia,” Positions 14, no. 2 (2006): 251–278; and Heather Bowen-Struyk, “Japanese Proletarian Literature during the Red Decade, 1925–1935,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, June 28, 2017; and Anup Grewal, “A Revolutionary Women’s Culture: Rewriting Femininity and Women’s Experience In China, 1926–1949,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012.
11. On the concept of a “Common People’s Literature,” see Chen Pingyuan, “Literature High and Low: ‘Popular Fiction’ in Twentieth-Century China,” in The Literary Field of Twentieth-Century China, ed. Michel Hockx (Honolulu: Hawaii University Press, 1999), 113–133.
12. Qu Qiubai, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” trans. Paul Pickowicz, Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8, no. 1 (1976): 50.
13. Qu, “The Question of Popular Literature and Art,” 50.
14. Yurou Zhong, Chinese Grammatology: Script Revolution and Literary Modernity, 1916–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 5.
15. Chen, “Literature High and Low,” 131.
16. Edward Gunn, Rewriting Chinese: Style and Innovation in Twentieth-Century Chinese Prose (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
17. Siting Jiang, “Centralization and Heteroglossia: The Dazhongyu Debate,” Unpublished manuscript, June 20, 2021.
18. Xiaobing Tang, “Street Theater and Subject Formation in Wartime China: Toward a New Form of Public Art,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review 18 (March 2016): 21–50; and Chang-tai Hung, War and Popular Culture: Resistance in Modern China, 1937–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).
19. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 16–18.
20. Rudolf Wagner, Inside a Service Trade: Studies in Contemporary Chinese Prose (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 346–349; and Anup Grewal, “Transnational Socialist Imaginary and the Proletarian Woman in China,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 15, no. 2 (2013).
21. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 114–115.
22. Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 139–141.
23. Ding Ling, “Bayue shenghuo,” Jindai Wenyi 2 (1936): 304, partly adapted from the translation in Laughlin, Chinese Reportage, 140.
24. Mao Dun, “Chuncan” (Spring Silkworms), in Mao Dun, The Shop of the Lin Family and Spring Silkworms, Chinese-English Bilingual Edition, trans. Sydney Shapiro (Hong Kong: The Chinese University Press, 2003), 110–167; and Mao Dun, Midnight, trans. Hsu Meng-hsiung and Archibald Charles Barnes (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1979). On Mao Dun’s method of writing, see Laughlin, “1936, May 21: One Day in China,” 422.
25. Lao She, Rickshaw Boy, trans. Howard Goldblatt (New York: HarperCollins, 2010).
26. Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art.” A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary, trans. Bonnie S. McDougall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1980), 60.
27. Mao Zedong’s “Talks at the Yan’an Conference,” 69.
28. Xiaomei Chen, “Worker-Peasant-Soldier Literature,” in Words and Their Stories, ed. Ban Wang (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2011), 65–84.
29. Cai Xiang, Revolution and Its Narratives: China’s Socialist Literary and Cultural Imaginaries, 1949–1966 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 307–308.
30. Hong Zicheng, A History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, trans. Michael M. Day (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill 2007), 79; Xin Ning, “Political Lyric,” in Wang, Words and Their Stories, 119–134; Li Yehong, “Yongkai xianhe: sh*tan Li Ji shiyou shi de chuangxin wenti” (Opening New Paths: On the Problem of Innovation Li Ji’s Oil Poetry), Shi Tansuo 2 (1982): 112–118; and Li Chunhui, “Women huhuan Li Ji” (A Shout Out to Li Ji), Shikan 12 (1990): 54.
31. Cao Ming, Shiji fengyun zhong bashe (Trudging through a Turbulent Century) (Beijing: Renmin Chubanshe, 1997), 147.
32. On the reception and transnational circulation of The Motive Force, see Nicolai Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism: The Chinese Literary Universe, 1945–1965 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 85–92. Milena Doleželová-Velingerová criticizes the novel for its poor artistic execution. See her Selective Guide to Chinese Literature, 1900–1949: The Novel (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 1988), 32.
33. A contrasting trope is that of workers destroying the machines or sabotaging the factories controlled by the Nationalists. See Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 312–313.
34. Volland, Socialist Cosmopolitanism, 75.
35. Lily Xiao Hong Lee, Bibliographical Dictionary of Chinese Women, Volume 2: The Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 2002), 35.
36. Cao, Shiji fengyun zhong bashe, 230.
37. Cao, Shiji fengyun zhong bashe, 231.
38. Li Yunde 李云德, for instance, went on to publish fiction on mining and became well known all over China. His novel Seething Mountains (Feiteng de qunshan 沸腾的群山, 1966) was translated into Japanese in 1972 and made into a movie in 1976. On the Anshan group, see Xie Baojie, “‘Xinde wenxue liliang’ de peiyang—yi shiqinian shiqi Cao Ming yu Anshan gongren zuozhe de chengzhang wei lie” (Nurturing the “Power of the New Literature”—the Case of Cao Ming and the Growth of the Anshan Worker Writers in the Seventeen Years), Wenyi Lilun yu Piping 2 (2018): 81–88.
39. Xu Guangfu, “Dao xin guang zhi qian” (Before Going to the New Factory), in Houlang tui qianlang: Anshan qingnian chuangzuo xuanji (Waves upon Waves: Selected Writings by the Anshan Youth), ed. Cao Ming (Tianjin, China: Baihua Wenyi Chubanshe, 1958), 14–35. The banter exchange is on p. 29.
40. Cao Ming, “Tan sange gongren de zuopin” (On the Writings of Three Workers), Renmin Wenxue 8 (1958): 14.
41. On the theoretical sources of the Maoist concept of “life,” see Benjamin Kindler, “Toward a Partisan Aesthetics: Zhou Yang, Chernyshevsky, and Life,” Made in China 5, no. 1 (2020): 118–123.
42. On Workers’ Culture Palaces, see Jack Linchuan Qiu and Hongzhe Wang, “Working-Class Cultural Spaces: Comparing the Old and the New,” in China’s Peasants and Workers: Changing Class Identities, ed. Beatriz Carrillo and David S. G. Goodman (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2012), 124–146. On the Tianjin and Shanghai groups, see Xie Baojie, “Shiqinian shiqi Tianjin gongren xiezuo de lishi kaocha” (Historical Investigation of Tianjin Workers’ Writing in the Seventeen Years), Wenyi Lilun yu Piping 5 (2010): 61–66; and Xie Baojie, Zhuti, xiangxiang yu biaoda, 1949–1966 nian gongnongbing xiezuo de lishi kaocha (Subject, Imagination, and Expression: A Historical Survey of Worker-Peasant-Soldier Literature from 1949 to 1966) (Beijing: Beijing Daxue Chubanshe, 2015), 68–83.
43. Wan Guoru, “Huanle de libie” (A Happy Farewell), Renmin Wenxue 3 (1960): 52–54.
44. Xie, “Shiqinian shiqi Tianjin,” 65.
45. Cai, Revolution and Its Narratives, 332.
46. Xiaofei Tian, “Mao Zedong Publishes Nineteen Poems and Launches the New Folk Song Movement,” in A New Literary History of Modern China, ed. David Der Wei Wang (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 625–629.
47. Liu Xijie, “Gongren shiren,” Shikan 1 (1976): 34–35.
48. Maghiel van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation of Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, no. 2 (2017): 245–286.
49. Jason McGrath, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Shuyu Kong, Consuming Literature: Best Sellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); and Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mahyem, and Money (Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill, 2008).
50. van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation,” 259.
51. van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation,” 256.
52. Zhang Huiyu, “Literature as Medium: The Development and Cultural Space of New Workers Literature,” unpublished manuscript, trans. Federico Picerni.
53. Liu Dongwu, Dagong wenxue de zhengti guancha (A Comprehensive Survey of Migrant Worker Literature) (Guangzhou, China: Huacheng Chubanshe, 2012), 308.
54. See Chris Smith and Pun Ngai, “The Dormitory Labor Regime in China as a Site for Control and Resistance,” The International Journal of Human Resources Management 17, no. 8 (2006): 1456–1470; and Jenny Chan, Mark Selden, and Pun Ngai, Dying for an iPhone: Apple, Foxconn, and the Lives of China’s Workers (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2020).
55. Xu Lizhi, “Terracotta Army on the Assembly Line,” in Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, ed. Qin Xiaoyu, trans. Eleanor Goodman (Buffalo, NY: White Pine Press, 2016), 196 [translation slightly modified by the authors].
56. Xu Lizhi, “I Fall Asleep, Just Standing Like That,” in Ghost in the Machine: The Poetry and Brief Life of Foxconn Worker Xu Lizhi, ed. Pacific Rim Solidarity Network, trans. Friends of Nao (Shenzhen, China, 2014), 13.
57. Maghiel van Crevel, “Misfit: Xu Lizhi and Battlers Poetry (Dagong shige),” Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16, no. 1 (2019): 85–114.
58. Xu Lizhi, “A Screw Plunges to the Ground,” in Qin, Iron Moon, 197.
59. van Crevel, “Misfit.”
60. Xie Xiangnan, “Orders of the Front Lines,” in Qin, Iron Moon, 79.
61. Xie Xiangnan, “Let’s Have More Poets Like Xie Xiangnan,” in Qin, Iron Moon, 81.
62. Justyna Jaguścik, “Intersections of Class, Gender and Environmental Concern in Contemporary Chinese Poetry: Zheng Xiaoqiong and Her Writing from Below,” in Kobieta w oczach kobiet: Kobiece (auto)narracje w perspektywie transkulturowej (Woman in the Eyes of Women: Women’s (Auto)Narratives in a Transcultural Perspective), ed. Joanna Frużyńska (Warsaw, Poland: University of Warsaw Press, 2019), 244–254; 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 Books, 2015), 55–76; and Zhou Xiaojing, “‘Slow Violence’ in Migrant Landscapes: ‘Hollow Villages’ and Tourist River Towns in China,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 24, no. 2 (2017): 274–291.
63. 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): 993–1010; Zhou Xiaojing, “Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poems on the Global Connection to Urbanization and the Plight of Migrant Workers in China,” Verge: Studies in Global Asias 2, no. 1 (Spring 2016): 93–94; and van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation.”
64. Zhang Qinghua, “Who Touches the Iron of the Age: On Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry,” Chinese Literature Today 1, no. 1 (2010): 35.
65. Jaguścik, “Intersections of Class,” 249.
66. Zheng Xiaoqiong, Sanluo zai jitai shangde shi (Poems Scattered on the Machine) (Beijing: Zhongguo Shehui Chubanshe, 2009), 59–60. Translation modified from Xiaoqiong Zheng and Xiaojing Zhou (Translator), “Eight Poems,” Chinese Literature Today 6, no. 1 (2017): 107, which however skips one verse. See also Jaguścik, “Intersections of Class,” 249; and Federico Picerni, “Metamorfosi operaie: Corpo e alienazione in alcuni poeti operai cinesi,” Costellazioni, Numero Nove: Corpo, March 13, 2020.
67. Zheng Xiaoqiong, “Yuyan” (Language), Poetry Internaltional Archives, English translation by Eleanor Goodman, 2019.
68. Federico Picerni, “A Proletarian Nora: Discussing Fan Yusu,” Made in China Journal 5, no. 1 (2020): 125–129.
69. Fan Yusu, “I Am Fan Yusu,” trans. Manya Koetse, What’s on Weibo, May 10, 2017.
70. This formulation comes from Lü Tu, Zhongguo xingongren: wenhua yu mingyun (China New Workers: Culture and Destiny) (Beijing: Falü Chubanshe, 2015).
71. Guo Jinniu, “A Massively Single Number,” translation in Claudia Pozzana, “Poetry,” in Afterlives of Chinese Communism, ed. Christian Sorace, Ivan Franceschini, and Nicholas Loubere (London: Verso, 2019), 191–192.
72. Guo Jinniu, “Going Home on Paper,” in A Massively Single Number, ed. Yang Lian, trans. Brian Holton (Emerson Green, Bristol: Shearsman Books, 2015), 120–121.
73. On the notion of “imaginary nostalgia,” see David Der-wei Wang, Fictional Realism in Twentieth-Century China: Mao Dun, Lao She, Shen Congwen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 247–289.
74. “Jasic Detainee #1: The Story of Worker-Poet Mi Jiuping,” Labor Notes, November 5, 2018, translation in Claudia Pozzana, “Poetry,” 196.
75. Sorace holds that contemporary worker poetry takes place precisely in the void produced by the loss of the “Communist horizon,” and as a reaction to “the eternal recurrence of the capitalist present.” See Christian Sorace, “Poetry after the Future,” Made in China Journal 5, no. 1 (2020): 130–135.
76. Justyna Jaguścik, “Cultural Representation and Self-Representation of Dagongmei in Contemporary China,” DEP–Deportate, Esuli, Profughe 17 (2011): 121–138; and Amy Dooling, “Representing Dagongmei (Female Migrant Workers) in Contemporary China,” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China 11, no. 1 (2017): 133–156.
77. The problem is critically examined in Sun, “Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class.”
78. van Crevel, “Misfit,” 108.
79. This question has emerged most clearly in relation to poetry, but holds valid for contemporary workers’ literature at large. See also Heather Inwood, “Between License and Responsibility: Reexamining the Role of the Poet in Twenty-First-Century Chinese Society,” Chinese Literature Today 1, no. 2 (2011): 48–55.
80. See John Lennon and Magnus Nillson, eds., Working-Class Literature(s): Historical and International Perspectives (Stockholm, Sweden: Stockholm University Press, 2017).
81. See Grewal, “Transnational Socialist Imaginary.”
82. A full list is available at MCLC Resource Center, from Ohio State University.
83. See also Wanning Sun, “Poetry of Labour and (Dis)articulation of Class: ‘Northern Girls’: Cultural Politics of Agency and South China’s Migrant Literature,” Asian Studies Review 38, no. 2 (2014): 168–185; and Wanning Sun, “Dark Intimacy and the Moral Economy of Sex: Rural Migrants and the Cultural Politics of Transgression,” China Information, October 2020.
84. Dooling, “Representing Dagongmei.”
85. Inwood, “Between License and Responsibility.”
86. van Crevel, “Walk on The Wild Side: Snapshots of The Chinese Poetry Scene,” MCLC Resource Center, December 21, 2017, 38–44; van Crevel, “Misfit;” van Crevel, “The Cultural Translation;” van Crevel, “Debts: Coming to Terms with Migrant Worker Poetry,” Chinese Literature Today 8, no. 1 (2019): 127–145; and van Crevel, “No One in Control: China’s Battler Poetry,” Comparative Critical Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2021): 165–185.
87. Pozzana, “Poetry,” 190.
88. Yun Li and Rong Rong, “A Middle-Class Misidentification: Self-Identification in the Autobiographical Poetry of Chinese Female Peasant Workers,” Positions 27, no. 4 (2019): 773–798.
89. Federico Picerni, “Strangers in a Familiar City: Picun Migrant Worker Poets in the Urban Space of Beijing,” International Quarterly for Asian Studies 51, no. 1–2 (2020): 147–170; and Picerni, “A Proletarian Nora.”
90. Haomin Gong, “Toward a New Leftist Ecocriticism in Postsocialist China: Reading the ‘Poetry of Migrant Workers’ as Ecopoetry,” in China and New Left Visions: Political and Cultural Interventions, ed. Ban Wang and Jie Lu (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2012), 181–202; 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): 257–279; and Jaguścik, “Intersections of Class.”
91. Hongwei Bao, “Queering the Global South: Mu Cao and His Poetry,” in The Global South and Literature, ed. Russell West-Pavlov (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 185–197; and Hongwei Bao, Queer China: Lesbian and Gay Literature and Popular Culture under Postsocialism (London: Routledge, 2020), 125–136.
92. “I Speak of Blood: The Poetry of Foxconn Worker Xu Lizhi,” China Labour Bulletin, November 10, 2014. Essays on the translation of workers’ poetry include Eleanor Goodman, “Translating Migrant Worker Poetry: Whose Voices Get Heard and How?,” Journal of Modern Literature in Chinese 14, no. 2 (2017): 107–127; Eleanor Goodman, “Working with Words: Poetry, Translation and Labor,” in Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, ed. Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 45–67; and Lucas Klein, “Mediation Is Our Authenticity: Dagong Poetry and the Shijing in Translation,” in Chinese Poetry and Translation: Rights and Wrongs, ed. Maghiel van Crevel and Lucas Klein (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 201–224.
