Writing Against Peripheralization: Glorifying Labor in Chinese Socialist Literature

Abstract

Abstract:This essay examines the political and aesthetic aspects of labor in Chinese socialist literature and argues that beyond its purpose of economic development, the glorification of labor also aimed to build an egalitarian society that would put an end to the alienation of labor. However, the disastrous consequences of the Great Leap Forward have shown that the advocation of selfless labor needs boundaries. Labor has been depoliticized and commodified since the post-Mao reforms. Migrant workers' literature acts as a form of cultural resistance to the alienation of labor in postsocialist China under global capitalism.