Welcome back to the final episode of our three part series and Migrant Work above a Tree in China.

If you haven't listened to the other two episodes yet, I suggest to you go back and listen to those first.

You got twenty Ladders Shobo gon Do Las Young Dodgers.

Before we get started, just a quick reminder that our podcast is brought to you by our Patriot supporters.

Our supports fund our work and in return get exclusive early access to podcast episodes, add three episodes, bonus episodes, free and discounted merchandise, and other content.

For example, our Patreon supporters can listen to all three parts of this series now, as well as an exclusive Patreon only bonus episode that goes into more detail about the mirkerot work at home, some of the writers that we discuss and their influences.

Join us or find out more at patreon dot com slash working Class History link In the show notes, you might remember that this series is being produced and presented with the help of friend of the podcast, Jack Franco, so at this point we'll hand back over to him wag Zone.

In the previous two episodes, we've talked about the harsh social conditions that Chinese migrant worker poetry comes out of.

We also discussed the important role poetry plays in Chinese society.

In this episode, we'll look at issues around censorship and unofficial publications, as well as how the diversity of the working class comes out in the diversity of working class writing, asking questions about who gets included within the term working class itself.

We're joined again by mcgil Gancravell, Professor of Chinese Literature at Leiden University in the Netherlands, an expert migrant worker poetry in China.

McGill spoke to us about working class poetry in China, what it is, who writes it, and who it's for, and how it developed across the last century, the development which is inextricably linked with the country's communist movement.

Another way to look at this culturally specifically would be the genealogy of working class writing in modern China.

Now, then you're really talking about the twentieth and twenty first centuries, and you know, in very broad strokes, I could probably carve that up into three periods.

One, you know, the specialists would call the Republican period, which is roughly the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in the Civil War between the Communists and the Nationalists, where it was by and large and mostly, and I'm going to need to sort of, you know, sweepingly generalize here a little bit, it was by and large intellectuals who produced working class writing, which means that we're talking about writing about the working class as my people who don't necessarily speak from first hand experience.

There's an interesting debate about, you know, defining working class literature, not just in China obviously, right, I mean, is this about the firsthand experience of the author or is it about something else?

You know, is it okay for you to not have lived that life but to write about it.

The second period would then be the high socialist period, where the state actually massively gets behind cultural production from the proletariat for the proletariat, more specifically for the you know, workers, peasants and soldiers or gongwong being in Chinese that were sort of the target audience.

Now there you have a very ambivalent situation because you have a you know, what I call a politically a dignified political subject, right, the worker, so to speak, the vision of the worker.

You have literature that is of this worker, for this worker, perhaps by this worker, but it becomes unclear who actually the writing, depending on where you sit and what kind of archival evidence you have access to, and so on and so forth.

But you have a literature that is, let's say, often very jubilant, right.

It celebrates the motherland, It is about say, you know, it could be about the Korean War, it could be about land reform, it could be about socialist re education, it could be about the new oil rigs in the Far West, etc.

And then in the third phase, and that's what we're talking about today, we move in what you can probably call the post socialist period.

And you know what I said about a transformation of the proletariat into a pre carriat.

So that is another culturally specific framework to sort of place this poetry, as it were.

The literature of these different historical phases also ask questions of what working class writing really means.

Well.

The second and third phase is McGill mentioned, are both written by workers.

In the case of the former, that poetry isn't officially recognized part of the ruling parties state building project.

By contrast, contemporary migrant worker poetry exists in the margins of what is sayable in Chinese society.

The possibilities open to poets were and are in many ways limited, forcing them to improvise, creating an exciting but risky underground movement of so called unofficial publications or DIY poetry that are not within the confines of state censorship and party themes.

McGill is responsible for a unique collection of unofficial poetry journals available outside of China at Leda University.

It is now largely digitized and available online and you can check it out at the link in the show notes.

I think the first thing we'd need to do is to reconsider what publication means.

Right, perhaps if you ask, you know, somebody on the street wherever, you know, your neighbor, somebody who's not a specialist of this sort of thing, has not been exposed to it, you know, what does publication mean?

They might say, well, you know, I mean it's like a book or a journal, and it's probably got the stamp of a publisher on EDM ISBN number, that sort of thing, and you know, that kind of definition is not going to get us anywhere if we talk about this kind of cultural production.

So publication, to me essentially is producing something could be a literary text, it could be music, could be you know, you name it, whose audience you no longer control.

Right, If I write a poem, and let's say I live in you know, under a politically oppressive regime, and my poem is politically sensitive and I'm worried about it, then I might, you know, show it to one of my best friends, but I might not even give them a copy.

I might read it to them once and then burn it.

And all of these stories are documented.

Right, this happened in China.

It happened in other places in China, for example, during the Cultural Revolution.

So controlling your audience, but the moment that it is out there and the audience is no longer something that you control, this stuff can travel.

Then as far as I'm concerned, we're talking about publication.

So then you enter into this phenomenon called unofficial publication.

And as it happens, perhaps not entirely coincidentally, for historical reasons and contemporary reasons, there is a very strong tradition of unofficial poetry publishing in China.

It's a hugely impressive and fascinating DIY circuit, and it's really interesting because there's many many shades of gray between the black and white sort of extremes of the spectrum of state sanctioned, state supported, state driven literature orthodoxy on the one hand, and let's say truly underground, politically sensitive, dangerous texts on the other there's all these shades of gray in between.

I think this matters a great deal also to the migrant work of poetry at the Battle of poetry that we're talking about today.

And then you see every possible permutation of let's say, print and online and official and unofficial.

So there's official publications in print and online, those unofficial publications in print and online, like I said, blogs, social media and so on and so forth.

And that means that in order to get a sense of how this poetry entered the public realm in the sense of being published, well, you need to cast your net wide, and you need to discard any illusions of control over actually getting the data that you need because you're not working through the formal circuits of catalogs in libraries and bookstores kept by the publishers themselves and so on and so forth.

For me Giel, this almost functions as a form of work in glass organizing in a country where independent trade unions are non existent and labor unrest is frequently repressed.

This is particularly relevant for migrant workers who are already legally marginalized, with little or no access to formal employment associations or aid.

Their decisions to publish and organize unofficially is a way of claiming this marginal space for themselves, much like the migrant workers home in Peterson we encountered in the previous episode.

As to organizing in the context of talking about working class history and working class literature, as you know, one topic related to working class history, again, we need to clarify what that word means.

If you're talking about labor organization.

There is very little of that in the bottom up sense of the word, in the union sense of the word in contemporary China, in the People's Republic of China, So that is basically out.

And the moment that you know, initiatives like this raise their heads there is you know, the boot's going to come down.

That's basically going to be a repressive movement by the government because they simply won't have it.

One example of the boot coming down on work as initiatives is a struggle which took place at the Shunjun Jassic Technology Factory in twenty eighteen.

Parts of an organizing campaign origining among Maoist students, a group of workers at the Jassic factory started a petition for unionization, which was signed by about eighty workers were approximately ten percent of the workforce At this point.

Employees found out about the union drive and fire the ring leaders.

When the sacked workers demonstrated outside the factory, they were attacked by police, resulting in more protests, this time outside the police station.

Multiple waves of repression subsequently came down and the workers and their supporters, with dozens of activists arrested and Peaking University disbanding their Marxist study society.

The crackdown also expanded to include labor activists with no connections at all to the struggle at Jassic, and in the wake of that struggle, the Chinese state became even more hostile towards labor activism.

Organized and could also mean something else, and that might be interesting to what we're talking about today, because you know, literature happens through institutions, right just like other cultural productions, through universities, through bookstores, libraries, through learned societies, through reading clubs, through you know, the list goes on, and that kind of organizing obviously has been happening in China around this poetry.

And that takes us straight back to what I said about Shase of Gray, because they're very interestingly, we don't get a picture that says the people that write migrant worker poetry are inherently and automatically going to be in opposition to the government line, and so they're going to be have to be quiet and careful and do this in the margins, and you know, let nobody get wind of it and be sort of careful and tread carefully in what they write about.

It's not as simple as that at all, because in fact, the government looking at this, and the government, in its turn, I guess, trying to place this in a genealogy of workers literature in the people's public of China, a tradition that it is proud of, is going to also support this writing.

So it's not as if this is some sort of phenomenon that's going to be stamped out at the first opportunity.

That very much depends on the message that's coming out of the poetry in question.

The relationship between these unofficial publications and poets and local or state power is ambiguous and not clear, cup Will.

China has a long and proud tradition of work of poetry that the state is keen to embrace.

They are equally careful that expressions of dissent are carefully managed.

This reality of censorship molds the expression of migrant worker poets.

The first thing that I'm made to think of as a China scholar is that the leading role of the Communist Party, you know, that's enshrined in the constitution of the People's Problem of China, and in practice that means that the party very effectively I mean, well, that's a complicated discussion, but yeah, I'm going to say that very effectively rules the place right and you've very definitely got to hand it to them.

And that's not meant to sound sort of, you know, cynical about it.

But it is a large and difficult and complex place, and the challenges for the government also and especially in regard to governance of the working population are immense.

So to really simplify terribly, so to speak, there's a choice that they've been faced with ever since the reform and opening up era started four to five decades ago, of keeping labor cheap in order to make their way into the global capitalist system at high speed, to become a part of that, to ramp up productivity, to create jobs, even if these were precarious jobs, even if they were three D jobs, and so on and so forth.

On the one hand, and the desire that I very definitely ascribed to the Chinese government to make life more livable and make life better and advance the sort of economic standards of life for the working population, that is a big, bad dilemma to deal with.

But when it comes to organizing and to union work, the truth of it on the ground, as established by scholarship and by good investigative journalism, is that the grassroots voice is welcome as long as it doesn't question, you know, policy and that dictates that flow from that.

That that.

Land on these people from on high.

Again, with apologies for a very unoriginal metaphor, but that is how it works, right.

You need to toe the.

Line by three D jobs.

Mguil is referring to the three d's he spoke about in Part one that define the conditions of many migrant work.

Is that is dirty, dangerous, and demeaning.

Now, one of the things that the Chinese government is very good at, and this is not a sarcastic comment but a truly sincere comment, is to tread that very fine line between allowing people to vent frustration, to discuss their situation, to reflect on it, to reflect on other possible futures, etc.

On the one hand, and a lot of this is happening on social media, and prior to social media, was happening in other places and continues to do so right all kinds of in person settings as well, of course, the fine line between allowing people to vent right on the one hand, and allowing them to actually organize, to institutionalize networks, to build a budget, to develop leverage in economic terms, to develop, for example, you know, effective mechanisms of going on strike.

And if you look at the records that are kept by the Chinese government and are actually in the public domain and often cited in foreign media and scholarship as well, on labor unrest in China, you know we're talking about I think you know of thousands, if not more, but I might have this number wrong, but you know, it's a very high number of so called incidents per year per annum, and these are documented.

This is, you know, people I don't know barricading a police station because of local situation surrounding pollution or other issues.

So it's not as if there is no labor unrest, but the moment that this comes close to seriously organized action, that is when the state steps in.

Migrant worker poetry is therefore an important grassroots voice depicting the lives of precariously employed Chinese migron workers, but sometimes gets lost when thinking about the night base.

So they're not just important reports about the lives of real people.

They are also poems that need to be read as works of art, and doing so force as a reader to usk why and how we read about the working clas experience.

As soon as we start talking about, for example, working class writing, but then also a bit more broadly we talk about, you know, subaltern writing or subaltern cultural production and then sub alternity.

You know, it can be a working class background or working class conditions.

It can also be being a woman.

It can mean being gay, It can mean having the wrong ethnicity in the place that you're at right, I mean one that is not appreciated, that is discriminated against, and so on and so forth, and so you get the prefixed literature, you get the literature that is called workers literature, you get the literature that is called you know, women's literature, aboriginal literature, prisoner's literature, queer literature, and so on.

And then the question bounces right back at you, and it can come from various quarters, right, it can come from left field or from where you've expected it that says, okay, so it's this real literature, right, or do we need to prefix it and in order to justify it?

We're only going to read this because it's about workers or buy workers or for workers or whatever we take an interest in the working class.

Are we only going to read it because we feel it's important that women's emancipation happens and therefore we're going to read this stuff.

Or are we going to read it because it is that particular thing that humans do.

I mean, they speak in various voices, and they use this very particular voice that we call literary.

And there's something about this that does something to us, and sometimes we want to dance to it, or it makes us cry or laugh.

And I don't think that debate is going to go away.

And I don't think that, for example, migrant worker poetry or working class literature at large, you know, never mind the point about class, you know, the question of class formation.

I don't think that they're going to fall on either side of the fence anytime soon.

I think it needs sometimes a fairly aggressive, ongoing conversation of saying, can we just sort of dislodge ourselves?

And it really matters who this we is?

Right?

Who are we referring to?

Am I referring to my academic environment?

Am I talking about a community that I'm somehow a part but also feel like I've been flown into, as in the Chinese poetry scene, where I've been around for yeah, years and decades and people know me, but I'm a stranger and I leave again.

I'm the insider slash outsider thing, right, and ethnographers like to talk about, So who's the we that we're talking about?

Some of these issues around prefixes and insider outside of status can be seen in the work of Mortau a pen name meaning grass on the grave, one of China's foremost LGBTQ poets.

I've been in touch with morshow since twenty sixteen.

He wrote to me at one point when I was doing field work and I was kind of visible on social media in China, and I'd known his work, but i'd never met him in person.

Wonder he dropped me an email, and it was actually fairly indignant, or it became indignant as we proceeded to have had this exchange.

And the gist of it was, so you think you're doing research on battle of poetry, migrant worker poetry, but you know, you haven't really looked at my stuff, and I'm a migrant worker poet, and you know, everybody calls me something else, and you know, in everybody else's defense, I should note here that Muta had a website in the colors of the rainbow flag for a number of years, so you know, you get pigeonholed.

It happens, right, But his point is really valid around the year two thousand, when this stuff was really still beginning to happen.

He actually has poetry in those unofficial journals that is, you know, has titles like what It's like to be a battler, right, or a migrant worker pre carrier's worker.

This dug this Chinese work that we've been circling for a while.

So he should get this recognition.

Despite being a migrant worker who writes poetry about the migrant worker experience, Mutau is rarely considered a migrant worker poet.

Rather, it's his sexuality that takes precedence and how people define his work.

Motau demonstrates how some groups come to be left out, how people think about who the working class is, the fact that his experience of his sexuality is in separate from his experience of class.

Now, Moutol was born in the nineteen seventies in Khunan, which is one of these provinces that supply a large proportion of the migrant workers in contemporary China.

And you know, he went out to work, I think, as his sisters did, and had a fairly shocking story before then of his life at school in a very repressive school system, where he ended up, you know, having a conflict with a teacher.

And now that's kind of a big thing in certainly a rural educational environment in China.

It was actually hard for me to imagine that a pupil could have a conflict with a teacher, which may have been naive on my part, but what I've read about that sort of thing and Also, what I've heard from him kind of explains this idea of well, it doesn't really happen because education is right very tightly in rural context like that, and it's not as if you have any right to even speak up.

But apparently he did.

So there was this conflict with a teacher.

It was a long running conflict.

Parents got involved, asked him to apologize, the school asked him to apologize.

He refused to apologize.

He was kicked out.

So that was the beginning of the working life.

This was when he was about fifteen.

He came also, you know, from a broken home, substance abuse and other things, violence, and so he started making a building a life of his own as a migrant worker, basically as a precarious worker at the very very very bottom of the food chain.

And then one point, you know, he got involved with somebody who said, I'm going to take you along.

There's this place I want to take you to.

So, you know, this person took him to a park I think in Dondola, Provincial capital.

And I'm just simply quoting from an interview I did with Mortar during field work and said, so he said, yeah, and he explained to me what homosexuality was, and all of a sudden everything made sense, and I realized I was gay.

And he said this to me in a very matter of fact tone during the interview, and I was wondering how this worked for him, and how he could kind of say this in this way in the light of his life story in which he had not known about this thing.

And the first introduction to it was a place where you know, people went cruising, right where you'd meet other homosexuals, and all of this was on the sly because this was not meant to be out in the open obviously, etc.

So by hook or by crook, this is another example of this incredible urge to write.

He began writing poetry, and he's another example of these people who know their way around the tradition and read widely in classical poetry but also in contemporary poetry.

And the Internet came around, and musshow was clever and was quick to see that the Internet was going to be the next big thing, and he somehow taught himself, you know, to be a programmer and to build websites, to know that this thing was around, and to join you know, chat rooms and all these various media that you have and had on the internet in China at the time, and to take poetry online.

And he was one of the earliest people who did this.

And there was a reason for this because he was gay and he was writing about being gay, and he was doing this in very graphic terms, not only in graphic terms, but also in very graphic terms, right including same sex scenes that you know, left very little to the imagination in the good sense of the word.

And so he actually came out as gay in an unofficial poetry journal in the year two thousand run by one of his closest friends who's an ecological activist now who published you know, best friends, and they came from the same place as well, poetry in this journal.

And it's so incredibly courageous, I mean, to publish this stuff, which is very outspokenly gay in subject matter, you know, both for the editor of this unofficial journal, because these things can be stamped out right at the drop of a head, and for the author of course, for Morthau and Morsaw is just eminently fearless, very impressive person also in personally to interview, gentle direct, fearless and I think you know you've got the evidence.

You don't need my ethnographic field work to know that it's fearless if you look at what he's done.

It's important to understand the context that Mortal was writing in.

Homosexuality was only decriminalized in China in nineteen ninety seven.

It was only in two thousand and one, so one year after Mutsau came out as gay in an unofficial poetry journal, that being gay was no longer considered a form of mental illness and well, in more recent years, LGBTQ plus identities in cities like Paiging and Shanghai can be expressed through dedicated cultural spaces.

They still remain taboo, as can be seen in the twenty seventeen law on Internet Regulation, where online content can be edited or even banned if it concerns what the state deems abnormal sexual behaviors, such as same sex relationships.

This context is essential to understanding the importance of Mortar's work.

Now we'll hear his poem working for the Boss in a Black Factory, translated and read by mcgil Vankroull.

A black factory in China refers to the type of factory that makes a complete mockery of any sort of labor rights or protections, providing informal or illegal employment, usually isolated from the public, with workers often living and site.

Working for the boss in a black factory.

This is a privately owned black factory.

They will lock away your ID and your wages.

The boss is eating well, big fat babyface.

He's happy for eighteen out of twenty four hours, and for precisely that period of time, sixty garment workers rush around with no breaks.

The men are bent over like skinny dogs.

The women's eyes are red like a rabbit's.

They are overworked.

They eat and sleep together, and the women's buttocks often rub against the thighs of the men.

But there's no sex drive in any direction.

It's almost breakfast time.

That good old thug of a cook jerks off like crazy and shoots his load into the vat of porridge.

This matter is duly observed by the boss, and for some reason he suddenly gives him a raise.

So you know, I'd call this vintage multar poetry, not just because he wrote it almost twenty five years ago, but also because what we see is a very recognizable mix of something that is ultimately political rage.

Right there is rage there but ultimately this is this is about social relations, political relations in society, but also human compassion and a great deal of black humor that you know, sort of threads its way throughout his erva as well, and it breaches taboos, which is something that you know, Musa has done fairly fearlessly for the last couple of decades.

Not just political taboos.

There's other poetry where he's more explicitly political, for example, when he talks about the police force, or he talks about politicians, but also in this case a taboo on sexuality and on sort of you know, non sanitized representations of sexuality.

And this is a taboo that has appeared in various shapes and guys is throughout the history of the People's Republic of China and is there still today.

So in that sense, I think it is a really important sort of milestone text in the larger context of battler poetry, also because it reminds us of the need to take an intersectional perspective and to not just, for example, classify this person as China's first openly gay poet, which is something he also is, right, which is a person he also is, but you know, one of China's earliest battler poets and one of the most explicit ones, And in that sense it reminds us that, you know, literature is just as complex and messy as life.

Mortal's work in exploring the daily experience of a gay migrant worker is able to question more than one aspect of today's China.

More critiques China's neoliberal economic reforms and the oppressive black factories that have come with it by focusing on another part of the social margins, the sexualization that defines a migrant worker experience.

For the critic Conwei Boo most place as a migrant, working class homosexual poet also questions away homosexual identity has developed in China following its decriminalization in nineteen in ninety seven, providing an alternative view from the more visible middle class homosexual circles in major cities to which he has no access.

One of the best appropriations of political jargon ever has to be the term comrade poetry or comrade literature in China meaning gay literature right queer literature by extension.

You know.

One of the top scholars in this regard is Barhumwey at the University of Nottingham, who's done more than anybody to bring cultural production and queerness to a wider public, not just including academics.

And he's also one of the first who wrote on Mutau, on this poet in an academic fashion and stress the importance of an intersectional perspective, meaning we're not going to look at this person from a single perspective and essentialize them down to their homosexuality or essentialize them down to their migrant workerhood or their poverty or their you know, leading role as an internet poet.

I mean that's a perspective I could work with.

I could, you know, write on internet poetry and make Muhol a pioneer.

And people have probably done this.

So this intersectional perspective is very, very interesting, and it takes us to a poethood that is full of sarcasm and humor, and the fearlessness that I talked about just now is visible, among other things, in this biting sarcasm about you know, local government officials and what they do when nobody's looking.

Take a wild guess.

It is brilliant when he has a poem about uncle policemen and you can say this sort of thing in Chinese much in the same way you could do this in English or in Dutch for that matter.

This is, you know, this avunckilar feeling of it's going to be this protective person, that the wonderful policeman who's going to make sure that we're all going to be safe, who arrest somebody, and this somebody is actually the protagonist of the poem.

And then, as it turns out, you know, uncle policeman arrests him I think because he's stolen a bicycle or some sort of thing, and takes him home and grooms him and you know, makes love to him, and this is all very spectacular, and he says, you know, the mirrors on the wall of the apartment came crashing down, and this was the extent of their love making, et cetera.

And Uncle policeman was in high heaven and so was our little culprit, you know, words like that.

So it's I mean, it's sarcasm from start to finish, and it brings in all of this stuff of you know, political power relations brought down to the level of you know, the power of a policeman on the street in an authoritarian society.

But also you know, queerness, homosexuality, and the rest of It's incredibly rich, He.

Got the lad.

Dodgers that marks the end of our third episode, and China's migrant worker Poets.

We hope that these episodes have given a few glimpses into the lives and experiences of people all to offer hidden from sight, not only literature and art, but more generally.

Despite their place at their center of global capitalism, the likes of Juang Xiao, Chong Shuli, Joe, Usha Shaohai, and Moutau, among many many others take us back to the original meaning of poetry to make these workers of so many different walks of life are poets, whether it's on the assembly line or putting pen to paper.

Please read and share their poetry.

You can find all the poets and poetry we've spoken about in the show notes and in the online transcript tells you.

We also have a bonus episode where we go into more detail about some of the topics we discussed in the main episodes, like the relationship between more of a work of poetry and the Chinese state, the New Labor Art troup whose music we're using for these episodes, and the international reception of Chinese mirgant worker poets like Jungshau Chong and shule Jur.

That bonus episode will be available soon exclusively for our supporters on Patreon.

It is only support from you, our listeners, which allows us to make these podcasts, So if you appreciate our work, please do think about joining us at patreon dot com slash Working Class History link in the show notes.

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If you'd like to learn more about microt worker poetry in China, then check out the web page for this series, where you'll find images, a full list of sources, further reading, and more.

We've also got a great selection of books available about Chinese history and our online store, and you can can get ten percent off them and anything else using the discount code wh podcast link in the show notes.

Thanks also to our Patreon supporters for making this podcast possible.

Special thanks go to Jameson D.

Saltzman, Jazz Hands, Fernando Lopezoheda and Jeremy Kuzumano.

Our theme tune for these episodes is a young man from the village by the new labor Art troup from the Migrant worker Home on the outskirts of Beijing.

Thanks to them for letting us use it.

You can buy it or stream it on the links in the show notes.

This episode was edited by Jesse French.

Anyway, that's it for today and I hope you enjoyed the episode and thanks for listening.

Listener Jing bingbos y'a, jing jingu cool Galaina.

Wana coumento.

Do the code