I’m a professor of Chinese studies, and I’m especially interested in what the close study of culture can reveal about aspects of contemporary Chinese life that are usually dominated by the perspectives of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and political scientists. I’m fascinated not so much by how cultural practices reflect social change but by how they sometimes make it happen, particularly in societies where overt political action is blocked. As my book picks show, I’m intrigued by the inventiveness and drive of people who create culture, often new forms of culture, under conditions of oppression, exploitation, and duress.
My book probes precarity in China through the lens of the dark cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated. I argue that a vast underclass of workers exists in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards. Many others also feel precarious, sensing that they live on the brink of dispossession and disenfranchisement.
On the Edge traces how people use culture to vent taboo feelings of rage, resentment, distrust, and disdain in scenarios rife with cross-class antagonism. It puts both the distinctive Chinese experience and the vital role of culture at the heart of global understandings of how entrenched insecurity and civic jeopardy fray the bonds of the social contract.
This anthology contains many of the poems that first made me realise that grim working conditions among China’s underclass were producing an extraordinary cultural response.
The writers of these poems are people who’ve left their rural homes behind to seek a living in the nation’s big cities, places that need their labor but grant them only a chilly welcome. Their poetry, superbly translated here, is about the factory floor, the assembly line, the roar of machines: it’s about amputated fingers, fluorescent lights, ID cards, and tower cranes.
It’s also about homesickness, love affairs, lost hopes, and camaraderie. For me, the book’s most powerful poem is its last, written by Xu Lizhi, who worked in a Foxconn factory making parts for Apple, shortly before he committed suicide in 2014:
I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw
I swallowed industrial wastewater and unemployment forms
bent over machines, our youth died young
I swallowed labor, I swallowed poverty
swallowed pedestrian bridges, swallowed this rusted-out life
"Iron Moon is a monumental achievement. It redraws the boundaries of working-class poetry for the new millennium by incorporating at its center issues like migration, globalization, and rank-and-file resistance. We hear in these poems what Zheng Xiaoqiong calls "a language of callouses." This isn't a book about the lost industrial past; it's a fervent testimony to the horrific, hidden histories of the 21st century's working-class and a clarion call for a more cooperative and humane future."-Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain Elementary
Eleanor Goodman is a writer and translator. Her translation of work by Wang Xiaoni, Something Crosses My Mind,…
This path-breaking book was a huge inspiration to me as I began to dig deeper into the relationship between culture and labor in contemporary China.
By the time Sun’s book came out in 2014, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists inside and outside China had already carried out extensive studies of the largest migration in human history and the scorching inequalities that mass movement of people has generated. But Sun shows in compelling detail that this exodus from the Chinese countryside is a deeply cultural movement, too.
Blending ethnography with probing and compassionate analysis of poetry, videos, photography, and activist protest, Sun argues that culture can be the crucible of political consciousness for working people trapped in the grinder of underclass life. I’ve returned to this book again and again.
Behind China's growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the country's hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody China's most intractable problems of inequality. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author argues that despite the critical role their labor has played in enabling and sustaining the country's remarkable economic growth, workers and peasants have become the nation's "subalterns."
Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows…
In 2010, I became aware of appalling news stories about multiple suicides at the giant factory complexes in South China which churn out high-spec Apple devices. Shortly afterwards, a team of researchers went into the field to find out exactly what was happening at Foxconn, the vast multinational at the heart of this transpacific electronics supply chain.
On the one hand, the story they uncovered is about a predatory labor regime which relies on sweatshop brutality to get results. On the other, the authors document the vibrant cultural life that Foxconn factory workers have developed in order to survive and protest: poems, songs, open letters, photos, and videos.
As it exposes the murky origins of shiny gadgets, the book also spoke to me as a testament to the power and potential of committed activist scholarship.
Suicides, excessive overtime, hostility and violence on the factory floor in China. Drawing on vivid testimonies from rural migrant workers, student interns, managers and trade union staff, Dying for an iPhone is a devastating expose of two of the world's most powerful companies: Foxconn and Apple.
As the leading manufacturer of iPhones, iPads and Kindles, and employing one million workers in China alone, Taiwanese-invested Foxconn's drive to dominate global electronics manufacturing has aligned perfectly with China's goal of becoming the world leader in technology. This book reveals the human cost of that ambition and what our demands for the newest…
I really enjoyed this bracing and saucy novel as a cheery counterpoint to the many much bleaker artistic works about migrant life. It charts the life and times of the young women who journeyed to the economic heartlands of South China in search of work during the 1990s and early 2000s.
The protagonist is Xiaohong, a young woman so mesmerizingly voluptuous that everyone in the novel, from its narrator down to the most incidental character, is hopelessly distracted by her bosom. At times, I did find this metaphor for personal capital in a precarious era a bit overblown.
But as Xiaohong moves from job to job – hair salon, toy factory, hotel, hospital – I realized that the fixation with her body is a way of marking both her vulnerability and her resilience as a woman on the move, if not necessarily on the up, in a society that has been transformed by surging migrant labor.
Qian Xiaohong is born in a sleepy Hunan village, where the new China rush toward development is a distant rumor. A buxom, naïve 16-year-old, she joins the mass migration to the boomtown of Shenzhen where she navigates dangerous encounters with ruthless bosses, jealous wives, sympathetic hookers and corrupt policemen. Moving through a grinding succession of dead end jobs, Xiaohong finds solace in her close ties with her fellow "northern girls," who quickly learn to rely on each other for humor and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures. This coming-of-age novel explores the inner lives of a generation of young, rural…
This book made a big impact on me because it shifts the study of culture in working-class China from familiar genres such as poetry to the vast domain of the digital.
Qiu argues that a working-class network society has taken firm shape in 21st-century China, made up of migrants, laid-off workers, retired people, young people, and small-scale entrepreneurs. In one sense, these people are the “information have-less” because they belong to the social classes typically on the wrong side of the digital divide.
But Qiu’s book shows that cheap internet access and extensive cell phone penetration in China have enabled the “have-less” to create class identity through their use of information technology. From community-building to memory-making, the book really nuanced my understanding of digital networks as a transformatively cultural force.
An examination of how the availability of low-end information and communication technology has provided a basis for the emergence of a working-class network society in China.
The idea of the “digital divide,” the great social division between information haves and have-nots, has dominated policy debates and scholarly analysis since the 1990s. In Working-Class Network Society, Jack Linchuan Qiu describes a more complex social and technological reality in a newly mobile, urbanizing China. Qiu argues that as inexpensive Internet and mobile phone services become available and are closely integrated with the everyday work and life of low-income communities, they provide a…
Benghazi: A New History is a look back at the enigmatic 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, its long-tail causes, and devastating (and largely unexamined) consequences for US domestic politics and foreign policy. It contains information not found elsewhere, and is backed up by 40 pages of citations and interviews with more than 250 key protagonists, experts, and witnesses.
So far, the book is the main -- and only -- antidote to a slew of early partisan “Benghazi” polemics, and the first to put the attack in its longer term historical, political, and social context. If you want to understand some of the events that have shaped present-day America, from political polarization and the election of Donald Trump, to January 6, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, Russian expansionism, and the current Israel-Hamas war, I argue, you need to understand some of the twists and turns of America's most infamous "non-scandal, scandal.”
I was in Benghazi well before, during, and after the attack as a US diplomat and co-director of a medical NGO. I have written three books, and have been a contributor to The NYT, Foreign Affairs, Forbes, Salon, The Financial Times, Newsweek, and others.
On September 11, 2012, Al Qaeda proxies attacked and set fire to the US mission in Benghazi, Libya, killing a US Ambassador and three other Americans. The attack launched one of the longest and most consequential 'scandals' in US history, only to disappear from public view once its political value was spent.
Written in a highly engaging narrative style by one of a few Western experts on Libya, and decidely non-partisan, Benghazi!: A New History is the first to provide the full context for an event that divided, incited, and baffled most of America for more than three years, while silently reshaping…
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