Escaping the Workshop: Writers from the Factory in China’s Early Reform Era (1978–1989)

Abstract

This article traces the trajectory of China’s dominant literary field as it shifted from proletarian to intellectual literature in the early reform era. It examines the conditions and cultural logic underlying the striking phenomenon whereby former industrial workers, once incorporated into the literary field, rapidly distanced themselves from the very genre historically rooted in their own industrial experiences, namely, worker literature. Focusing on writers emerging from factories and on Shanghai Literature—a journal once known for publishing worker literature. The article analyzes the reconfiguration of class and identity that accompanied China’s transition from its high socialist past. I argue that socialist worker literature never fully reconciled the structural antagonism between manual and mental labor. In the early reform era, factory-based writers appropriated literature as a mode of symbolic escape and ideological critique. Hence, literature itself became a site where the contradictions of socialist and capitalist modernity were negotiated and contested.

1. Introduction

One afternoon in early September 1982, Zhou Jieren 周介人 called me (Wu Liang 吴亮) and asked me to go straight to his office after work. The “important task” was to have me stand in for the Shanghai Literature (Shanghai wenxue 上海文学) editorial department at a small symposium in Beijing in October, organized by Literary Gazette (Wenyi bao 文艺报), on the topic of “modernist literature.” Zhou explained that Li Ziyun’s 李子雲 has proposed this, because it seemed inconvenient for the editorial department to send someone officially, and Li Ziyun believed it was more appropriate for me to attend as a working-class amateur writer.1 Zhou told me, “You know a bit about modernism, and you’ve read Marx and Lenin—just don’t represent the editorial department.” He added that since May 1981, my serialized work “A New Artist Facing the Self and His Dialogue with a Friend” published in Shanghai Literature had drawn attention from observers in Beijing; some even suspected I was Shanghai Literature’s “promoter of modernism” planted in the field. “You must make it clear to them that you are still a worker—don’t forget that, ever!”.

(Wu 2012a, pp. 78–79, emphasis mine)

By sending Wu—a “working-class amateur writer”—to Beijing to gauge the authorities’ attitudes toward Shanghai Literature’s publication and discussion of modernism, the chief editor Li and the deputy editor Zhou signaled both a cautious commitment to literary reform and a deep anxiety about potential political repercussions. This strategic move reflected a set of ideological tensions: between the orthodox tradition of socialist realism and the long-repressed aesthetic of modernism, frequently denounced as a literary style of capitalist bourgeois; between the more conservative literary establishment in Beijing, represented by Literary Gazette, and the more reform-minded sphere in Shanghai, represented by Shanghai Literature; and between the state-controlled writers’ associations and the individual cultural officials operating within their constraints. As cultural officials themselves, Li and Zhou were not in a position to openly challenge socialist literary orthodoxy or the dominance of the Beijing-centered literary hierarchy. Yet they were cautiously intent on breaking free from the ossified strictures of socialist realism. It was therefore “inconvenient” to send someone officially affiliated with the editorial office. In this context, Wu—an outsider to the institutional system but familiar with both Marxist thought (the ideological foundation of the high socialist past) and modernist aesthetics (the potential direction of reform)—was well-suited for the task. Wu’s identity as a “worker” functioned as a kind of protective amulet—not only for Wu himself, who had published a series of essays on modernism, but also for Shanghai Literature and, by extension, the Shanghai Writers’ Association (SWA). For Li and Zhou, Wu’s working-class background was less about his individual experience than its symbolic alignment with the legitimating language of socialist ideology, in which the abstract figure of the worker had long been politically sacrosanct. Paradoxically, Li and Zhou used the political correctness of the worker’s identity to protect their literary reform in the direction away from socialist worker literature. And yet, this strategic use and the usefulness of Wu’s worker’s identity effectively erased the subjectivity of individual workers and their connection with literature. This paradox points to a deeper historical logic, one rooted in the state’s long project of cultivating (peiyang 培养) industry workers into writers.

The socialist worker writer (gongren zuojia 工人作家) was not a spontaneous emergence but the product of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) deliberate cultivation system. Through work unit (danwei 单位) sponsorship, political vetting, and literary training programs, the Party produced writers whose biographies embodied the ideals of socialist industrial modernity.2 Cultivating such figures was a political task: they were molded into what Antonio Gramsci called “organic intellectuals” (Gramsci 1975, pp. 199–210), considered reliable in both class background and ideological stance.3 Their works were expected to be politically exemplary, narratively optimistic, and aligned with the broader project of socialist construction, making them central to the legitimacy of socialist literature as living proof that industrial workers could also be cultural producers, embodying the merger of labor and art that socialist cultural policy idealized. This system of cultivating worker writers persisted into the reform era after 1978, albeit redirected toward the cultural officials’ goals of literary reform. Yet many of these figures, while initially positioned as worker writers, eventually departed from the worker’s identity and literature toward a more professionalized and elitist literary practice beyond the control of officials. In this research, I use the term “writers from the factory” to distinguish them from high-socialist-era worker writers, emphasizing their identity as writers rather than workers.

The scholarly basis of this state-led project was a robust discourse of “dignified labor,” first developed by leftist Chinese intellectuals during the New Culture Movement (1915–24). On the one hand, intellectuals grew skeptical of the social value of literary work (Wendy Larson); on the other, they “developed a powerful identification with labor as a critique of the capitalist relationships” (Zhu 2023, p. 34). This discourse, which challenged the long-standing hierarchy privileging mental over manual labor, was systematically practiced from the Yan’an period (1935–1949) onward, and was institutionalized and radicalized in the high socialist era (1956–1976), when industrial workers in particular not only gained financial security, social welfare, and educational opportunities to overcome illiteracy, but were also symbolically elevated as the “masters” (zhurenweng 主人翁) of the nation. In parallel, recent scholarship has shown increasing interest in migrant worker literature (dagong wenxue 打工文学) (Paola Iovene, Michiel van Crevel, Justyna Jaguscik, Joel Andreas, Wanning Sun, etc.), which emerged in the late 1980s, when workers—once honored as political subjects—were stripped of their earlier dignity and privileges and relegated to subaltern status under global capitalism.

Along with the rich scholarship on worker literature in the leftist revolutions and on the migrant worker literature following the market reforms, very few studies have focused on the sharp changes in the concept of labor and worker writers in the transitional period of the 1980s, that is, the early reform era. This period witnessed the initial unraveling of the intellectual and political projects that had dignified manual labor, as well as the collapse of leftist revolutionary ideals that had elevated workers within the socialist system. Indeed, even before workers were systematically marginalized under rising capitalism, their symbolic and cultural status had begun to decline. The limited scholarship that addresses the worker literature and worker writers often focuses either on a narrow body of industry-themed Reform Literature from the 1980s, or on individual poets with factory backgrounds who published their semi-underground journals, such as Bei Dao, Shu Ting, and Yu Jian (Pozzana 2019, p. 191). Scholars have yet to undertake an examination of the trajectory of worker literature—its persistence and decline—within the dominant literary field of China’s transitional decade of the 1980s. Consequently, the transformations of worker literature, alongside the rearticulation of worker writers’ subjectivities in the 1980s as distinct from their predecessors in the high socialist era, remain rarely examined in the existing scholarship.

It is in this historical gap that the present paper situates itself. The anecdote mentioned at the beginning introduces the central questions concerning the transition of the workers and worker literature in China’s reform era that will guide the analysis. Why, as Cai Xiang observes, literature from the period of reindustrialization more often “departed from industry themes and worker literature” (Cai 2024, p. 230)? Why did Shanghai Literature—once a key platform for cultivating worker writers and publishing worker literature during the Seventeen Years (1949–66)—pivot to champion modernist literature, long associated with capitalist aesthetics? How and why did literary workers—including writers, editors, and critics—emerging from factories during the reform era, such as Wu, come to distance themselves from the workers and literary practices of the high socialist period? And, crucially, how does their previous worker’s identity continue to inform their literary and ideological orientations? By tracing these questions, this paper examines not only the ideological and aesthetic shifts that marginalized industrial themes from dominant literary production, but also the paradox that these shifts were driven by individuals whose own origins lay in the very factories and cultural cultivation programs that socialist worker literature had produced.

I argue that socialist worker literature and the cultivation of worker writers never reconciled the structural antagonism between manual and mental laborers. In the early reform era, the factory-based literary workers appropriated literature as a mode of symbolic escape and ideological critique. As the reform era demanded both a repudiation of socialist orthodoxy and the reinvention of literary practice, the SWA and Shanghai Literature actively promoted democratic literature (minzhu wenyi 民主文艺)—a resurrected yet unfulfilled ideal from the Seventeen Years—as an open platform for literary innovation. However, contrary to editorial expectations, many contributors moved beyond democratic realism and became leading advocates of avant-garde aesthetics. This paper investigates the conditions and cultural logic underpinning the striking phenomenon whereby former industrial workers, once absorbed into the literary field, rapidly distanced themselves from the very genre historically rooted in their experiences as industrial workers.

To this end, I trace the transformation of literary publication and discourse in Shanghai Literature—a flagship journal affiliated with the SWA—through a combination of close and distant reading of its issues published between 1977 and 1989, in order to examine how modernist and avant-garde aesthetics gradually supplanted worker literature as the dominant mode of cultural production. I focus on the Shanghai literary field not only because it was unparalleled in cultivating worker writers and publishing worker literature during the high socialist era—as “worker writers fit better for this big city, where there are the most industrial workers” (Li and Chen 1999, p. 108)—but also because it was historically a site of sharp confrontation between leftist worker literature and bourgeois cultural formations. As Chen Sihe observes, “two traditions emerged in Shanghai literature: one constructed an image of urban modernity through a cultural mode characterized by prosperity and decadence, while the other, from a leftist cultural standpoint, exposed the class divisions of modern urban culture and offered a humanistic critique” (S. Chen 2002, p. 4). Furthermore, Shanghai Literature played a pivotal role in reshaping the literary field by simultaneously initiating modernist debates as early as 1982 that challenged the monopolized socialist literary orthodoxy, becoming the first official journal to publish avant-garde fiction (“The Allure of the Gangdisê Mountains” by Ma Yuan) in February 1985, and developing a new critical discourse—avant-garde criticism—that theorized, explained, and legitimized this emergent fiction. Together, these initiatives not just transformed literary production and evaluation but revealed a significant new tension between working-class and bourgeois cultural discourses in the reform era as well.

My synchronic reading of Shanghai Literature is complemented by an analysis of the collective and individual trajectories of three literary critics who emerged from Shanghai’s industrial workforce and maintained close ties with the journal: Wu Liang, Cheng Depei 程德培, and Cai Xiang 蔡翔. I focus on literary critics not only because they were also active writers, but because critics in particular were regarded as “holding an even higher position than fiction writers” in promoting new literary trends and shaping contemporary Chinese literature (Cheng 2016, p. 71). Moreover, these three critics fortuitously left behind a substantial body of memoirs and critical reflections documenting their experiences transitioning from factory workers to literary professionals. This dual approach—combining textual analysis with biographical study—allows for a nuanced understanding of the complex cultural and ideological shifts during this pivotal era.

2. Shanghai Literature: From Worker Literature to Intellectual Literature

When Shanghai Literature resumed publication in 1977, it continued its focus on worker literature under the leadership of Zhao Zi 赵自, who had previously worked as a reporter for Shanghai Labor Daily (Laodongbao 劳动报) and Worker’s Daily (Gongren ribao 工人日报), two traditional leftist newspaper rooted in the Shanghai working class, thereby reviving the journal’s emphasis on industrial theme and labor experiences. Starting in the same year, Shanghai Literature introduced a special issue titled “One day of hard working” (Dagan de yiri 大干的一日) that prominently featured worker literature to meet the propaganda demands of the early post-Cultural Revolution (1966–76) years. The short stories published in this special issue in 1977 and 1978 were authored by amateur writers from the working class. These literary works continued the theme and style of worker literature from the high socialist era, with a particular emphasis on the workers’ dedication to another round of the Great Leap Forward (dayuejin 大跃进) in industrial production, in response to Hua Guofeng’s speech published in People’s Daily on 20 September 1977, titled “One Hundred Days of Hard Working.” Notably, the editor of this column remarked, “following Chairman Hua’s talk, this column offers sketches of the working class.” At the same time, however, the unnamed editor also specified that “different from common reporting, [we] required [the worker writers] to write about real people and real events” (Bianzhe 1977, p. 20). This guideline points to a core problem of worker literature in high socialist China: the flourishing of industry-themed literature during the high socialist period rarely captured the lived experiences of individual workers; instead, it often subordinated them to state-mandated narratives. Yet this limitation in literary production was not so much an oversight as it was explicitly prescribed by Mao. In Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art, Mao asserted that “life as reflected in works of literature and art can and ought to be on a higher plane, more intense, more concentrated, more typical, nearer the ideal, and therefore more universal than actual everyday life” (Mao 1942). Imposed by this order, worker literature in the high socialist era increasingly diverged from the texture of everyday life and individual experience.

In contrast, the literary works in this column, despite their common industry themes, gradually shifted their exclusive focus from work efficiency and the workers’ dedication to the national construction to the desires and concerns of individual human beings. The emergence of individual workers’ lives—largely overlooked in socialist worker literature—became increasingly evident in narratives centered on their private spaces, including romantic relationships between male and female workers and more nuanced portrayals of female workers. Nevertheless, most worker literature during this period still emphasized productivity through the industrialized depiction of workers’ bodies and characters.

Compared with literature, the illustrations underwent even more noticeable changes over time. While the typical illustrations in the 1977 and early 1978 issues depicted imposing industrial scenes, such as machines in a chemical plant, military trucks, railways, and cranes, the illustrations in the late 1978 issues started to incorporate softer elements, such as flowers. In the issue where the “One Day of Hardworking” column made its final appearance, profiles of engineers and students replaced the machines. They were surrounded by collages of flights, satellites, and high-speed trains. High-tech fields replaced traditional factories, and intellectuals took the place of traditional workers as the new symbols of the New Era. Science and technology supplanted hard work and became the focal point of industrialization. The erosion of the working class’s symbolic political value prefigured the decline of worker literature.

The chief editor typically played a decisive role in shaping a magazine’s direction and style, even in the case of officially affiliated publications. After Li Ziyun assumed leadership of Shanghai Literature in 1982, a process of intellectualization in literature began to replace worker literature. Li involved intellectual aesthetics in the magazine, which had been dominated by worker literature. While one of my other articles discussed Li’s subversive support of the discussion of modernism in 1982 as well as her initiative publication of the first avant-garde fiction in 1985 (Zhang 2024, pp. 306–7), I would like to discuss an earlier article by Li, in which she articulated her views on literary reform and outlined her vision for the transformation of contemporary Chinese literature. As early as May 1978, she proposed her understanding of literature under the name of democratic literature in an article named “Art and Democracy” under the pseudonym of “a critic of the magazine.” Li argued that “literature should address the social problems that matter most to people and express what people already feel but may not fully understand, in order to gain their trust and assist them in advancing historical development” (Z. Li 1978, p. 6). She emphasized that the power over literature should rest with the people rather than political leaders. Li’s idea did not necessarily deviate from Mao’s 1942 Yan’an Talks in the sense of art for life rather than art for art’s sake. However, Li’s approach also differed in that she believed intellectuals, including cultural officials and magazine editors, should advocate for the people and guide their understanding, instead of merely learning from workers, peasants, and soldiers. Hence, Li’s vision of democratic literature involved intellectuals on the one hand, and continued the practice of the socialist cultivation system to develop potential writers from the working class. In doing so, Li, along with other officials of the SWA, expanded the Shanghai literary field beyond the homogeneous traditions of proletariat literature in the form of socialist realism, drawing in a new generation of intellectuals—including young amateur writers and literary critics from the factory floor.

These literary professionals from factory broke decisively with the conventions of socialist worker literature, rejecting the formulaic tropes of socialist realism that idealized labor, productivity, and industrial harmony. As a result, Li’s democratic literature led to a fundamental reorientation of literary style, aesthetics, and ethical vision. This does not mean that writers in the early reform era abandoned workers and industrial themes altogether; rather, they reconfigured them in ways that radically diverged from their socialist predecessors. A striking example is Chen Cun 陈村, one of the most prominent writers from factory, whose experimental contributions to Shanghai Literature resonated with Li’s call for literary reform. The originality of Chen’s work and his sustained experimentation earned him the inaugural three Shanghai Literary Prizes in consecutive years, from 1984 to 1986.

His short story “One Day” (yitian一天) illustrated one of Chen’s literary experimentations, which was his eighth literary work published in Shanghai Literature. This story fuses a single day and the entire career life of an industrial worker, Zhang San. The choice of name itself—Zhang San, an equivalence of John Doe—signals anonymity, suggesting that the worker lacks any individuated value and could be anybody or nobody. In Chen’s narrative, Zhang is not only impoverished, unable to afford a bus ride to the factory, but also trapped in bleak domestic conditions that underscore the drudgery and triviality of his existence. The story opens with Zhang waking at dawn. Nearly half of the text is devoted not to his labor in the factory, but to an accumulation of painstakingly detailed, circularly narrated episodes of daily life: his breakfast, packing lunch, conversations with his mother, recollections of his deceased father, and his idle thoughts while walking to work. The narrative voice dwells on minutiae in a mumbling, stream-of-consciousness style. For example,

Mother still got up this early, and still packed rice into the lunchbox. Inside the box she put rice and a few pieces of salted ribbonfish. The ribbonfish was very fragrant. After filling the box, she tied several loops of string tightly around it, so tight that even if there were soup inside, it would not spill. But in fact, there was no soup in the box—only rice and ribbonfish. The ribbonfish had been fried in oil until golden yellow, very beautiful to look at. Fried ribbonfish requires no soup.

(C. Chen 1985, p. 59)

And then, shortly after, the next paragraph repeats with minor variation: “Mother handed the lunchbox to Zhang San. Inside was white rice and golden-yellow ribbonfish. There was no soup. On the outside she had tied it tightly with string, several loops, so that even if there were soup it would not spill” (C. Chen 1985, p. 59). This circular, redundant narration, or a “ruminative realism,” extends throughout the story, reinforcing the monotony and apparent meaninglessness of Zhang’s life.

Situating the story heavily on the domestic sphere, anchoring the narrative in the everyday and the trivial, and using Shanghainese vernacular, such as the habitual use of the sentence-final particle de 的 (“The ribbonfish is very fragrant de”; “Fried ribbonfish doesn’t need soup de), Chen directly resists the conventions of revolutionary worker literature, which was confined to public spaces like the factory, centered thematically on industrial production, and was written in standardized, elevated Mandarin. Even in the sections set in the workshop, the stream-of-consciousness narration persists:

Zhang San never let the stamping machine rest. Since he started working on it, he has stamped countless sheets of metal into countless pinheads. He never had the time to count, and nobody else counted either. Zhang thought, better to leave it unknown. Anyway, it was a lot, a lot. So many pinheads made into so many pins, so many pins bought by so many people, used for so many things, lasting so very long (64).

And then again, in the following paragraph: “So many pinheads could make so many pins, and so many pins were bought by so many people. They could be put to so many uses. Zhang San knew that pins had existed for a long time. Pins are useful things, and useful things are always good” (pp. 64–65). Here, the repetition and exaggerated emphasis on “useful things” produces an ironic effect, highlighting the futility of Zhang’s labor and the emptiness of industrial usefulness. As the narrative progresses, Zhang’s one working day entwines with his entire working life, moving from his first day in the factory at the story’s beginning to his retirement at the end. Through this modernist narrative strategy, Chen dismantles the socialist valorization of industrial labor, stripping away its claimed dignity as the master of the country. Instead, he exposes the banality, tedium, and even absurdity of an individual industry worker.

In sum, the chief editor of an official literary journal exercised considerable influence over the thematic orientation and aesthetic standards of published works. While Zhao continued to uphold the socialist orthodoxy by promoting literature centered on industrial life and working-class experience, Li reoriented the journal toward a more intellectual and experimental direction under the banner of democratic literature. This shift—particularly evident in Shanghai Literature—if not entirely unique, altered the trajectory of socialist literary production including worker literature. Li facilitated this literary reform by mentoring a new cohort of literary workers: amateur writers and critics emerging from industrial backgrounds, who voiced profound skepticism about the dignity of manual laborers. Why, then, did these young literary figures end up diverging from the legacy of socialist worker literature? And why did they steer the project of democratic literature toward a narrower, more elite mode of formal experimentation? The literary studies suggest that their turn was not only a matter of taste; it also unfolded amid the period’s much-discussed tensions within socialist realism. They attempted to reconcile Marxism and humanism and to recover a materialist basis for realist writing in emotional experience and everyday life rather than solely in elements that advanced a socialist ideal. The following sections adopt a socio-economic perspective to discuss these questions, building first on the discussion of the system that cultivated workers into writers.

3. From Factory to the Shanghai Writers’ Association: The Cultivation System in the Early Reform Era

It was a longstanding political task of the CCP to cultivate industrial workers into literary professionals through institutional mechanisms such as the national and regional writers’ associations, whose authority rested not only on political credentials but also on the literary merit and output of their members (Hong 2018, p. 198). Although this tradition continued into the 1980s, it changed significantly in two aspects: the selection of writers and the institutional approach to literary production. Rather than privileging political reliability, literary aptitude and experience—often identified “through unsolicited submissions,” as Chen C. recalls—became the dominant criteria (Wu et al. 2008b, p. 97). This change paralleled broader national reforms in talent evaluation, such as Deng Xiaoping’s reinstatement of the college entrance examination (gaokao 高考) in 1977, which replaced politically driven admissions policies with merit-based standards. In 1985, Ru Zhijuan 茹志鹃, then president of the SWA, was the first in the reform era to recruit five industrial workers—Wu Liang from the Shanghai Food and Refrigerator Manufacturing Factory, Cheng Depei from the Shanghai Dye and Chemical Industry Plant No. 5, Chen Cun from a Production Team, Zhao Changtian 赵长天 from Shanghai Cable Factory, and Zong Fuxian 宗福先 from Shanghai Heat Treatment Factory—into the SWA, filling the only new positions that year. As Chen later recalled, Ru “failed to recruit Wang Anyi [that year],” despite her status as both her daughter and already one of the most prolific writers in contemporary Chinese literature. All five worker-writers had already published in literary journals, particularly Shanghai Literature, through which Ru, Li, and Zhou identified their talent, selected them, and facilitated their transfer.4 When the literary potential of amateur worker writers was recognized, the SWA extended support far beyond expectation. As Wu recalls, “at a meeting around 1982 or 1983, Zhou repeatedly expressed his appreciation of my articles. I told Zhou that I had many ideas I wanted to write about, but lacked the time [because of my factory job]. I still wonder how those words affected Zhou, who later tried to help me secure a leave of absence for creative writing. The SWA provided me with a living stipend, as the factory had stopped paying my salary (Wu et al. 2008a, p. 101).” Such cases reveal that the SWA not only selected new literary talent but also created the institutional and material conditions necessary for workers to transition into professional writers, thereby reshaping the cultivation system of the 1980s.

The process of selection went along with that of training through writing workshops and discussion seminars held at both grassroots and institutional levels. For instance, in 1978, Cheng joined a reading group organized by the Hongkou District Library, which later recommended his work for publication in Shanghai Literature (S. Chen 2023, p. 6). Seen by Shanghai Literature, Cheng began attending the magazine’s amateur writers’ meetings organized by Zhou and others (Cheng 2016, p. 70). In 1981, Wu also joined. These programs—often hosted by professional writers’ associations or amateur institutions such as local libraries, Workers’ Cultural Palaces (gongren wenhua gong 工人文化宫), and radio stations—were part of a longstanding infrastructure for cultivating worker writers, inherited from the literary policies of the Seventeen Years. Yet, different from the Seventeen Years, the professional institution of the SWA played a much more active role in developing amateur young writers in the 1980s. For them, literary cultivation was no longer a political task imposed from above but an initiative pursued by the literary officials of the SWA and Shanghai Literature, who deliberately selected writers that conformed to their literary idea(l)s, such as democratic literature.

What most distinguished this new cultivating system was the affective dimension it created. While during the high socialist era it was a rather cold “system” in which established writers, editors, and critics delivered lectures and mentorship (Hong 2018, p. 226), in the 1980s the established and the young formed much closer personal bonds. In addition to symposia, numerous memoirs recount frequent private meetings and informal exchanges through which Li and Zhou offered direct support to worker writers. In this way, the official system of writer cultivation developed into a sphere where “the distinction between public and private realms blurred,” and, as a result, individuals were “bound to one another by human closeness,” a sense of what Jürgen Habermas highlights as “humanness” (homme) (Calhoun 1992, pp. 11, 21). This essential humanness not only resisted the ruling power of the official literary system but also laid the groundwork for a more sustained and institutionalized form of cultivation.

Building upon this affective foundation, the SWA came to resemble a school that cultivated writers, editors, and critics through a structured combination of mentorship and symposium. Young writers were assigned by Li and Zhou to present their views on specific literary works, and upon publication, they received detailed feedback to help refine their ideas (Q. Li 2019, p. 40). Many writers later likened the Association and Shanghai Literature in the 1980s to a literary university “marked by a strong scholarly atmosphere” (Cheng and Bai 2008, p. 48)—a dynamic space where young writers rapidly matured through rigorous seminars and intellectual exchange between amateurs and professionals. The attractiveness of this system lay in its unique position: during the 1980s, writers’ associations on both national and regional levels carried as much weight as the newly revived universities in developing professional writers and critics. As Hong Zicheng notes, writers’ associations had wielded more power than academia in literary creation, criticism, and institutionalization up till the 1990s (Hong 2018, p. 198). For this reason, although East Normal University, whose Chinese literature program is among the most prestigious in China, specifically recruited Wu and Cheng, the SWA remained more attractive to them (Cheng and Bai 2008, p. 48). The support and benefits afforded by the SWA were of a kind that universities could not rival.

Most strikingly, rather than exercising strict control over literary style and ideology, as was the case in the high era, Shanghai Literature in the 1980s functioned as an open platform for literary exploration, seeking to break with socialist literary orthodoxy and monopoly while responding to the demand for literary democracy. For this purpose, Ru established a Theoretical Research Office within the editorial department specifically to accommodate Wu and Cheng prior to their official transfer to the SWA. This newly created institutional space laid the groundwork for the journal’s influential literary criticism in the latter half of the 1980s. As Cheng recalled, “In 1984, Wu Liang and I spent our days reading, writing, and conversing with writers and critics from across the country in that small office. It was also there that many of us discussed topics that would later become milestones in the history of contemporary Chinese literature.” (Cheng and Bai 2008, p. 49). Furthermore, cultural officials no longer required the writers from the factory to focus on industrial themes or represent proletarian life. Key figures of the Reform Literature—such as Jiang Zilong 蒋子龙, Zhao Changtian, and Zong Fuxian—also almost abandoned worker-centered narratives after 1982.

In short, although the system for cultivating amateur writers in the 1980s preserved certain institutional continuities with the high socialist past, it was redefined by new values: a commitment to individual talent, a loosening of ideological constraints, and a reorientation toward literary experimentation and open discourse under the evolving rubric of democratic literature. This shift also altered the status and identity of the worker writer. Unlike their predecessors during the high socialist era—many of whom were frequently subject to political suspicion and were at times sent back to the factory floor—worker writers in the 1980s were no longer expected to maintain their working-class status. During the Cultural Revolution, socialist worker writers who had left manual labor for literary work were often accused of betraying their class identity and were forced to return to factory jobs, in response to Mao’s idea that writers should temper themselves by living amongst the laborers—“they must for a long period of time unreservedly and whole-heartedly go among the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers” (Mao 1942). By contrast, those who emerged in the 1980s increasingly shed their worker identity as they transitioned into full-time writers and critics, nor did they show much interest in reviving socialist worker literature. The following sections turn from the vantage point of Shanghai Literature and the cultivation system to that of the worker-writers themselves, tracing their gradual estrangement from the working class—a trajectory that illuminates long-standing tensions between two historically contested identities: the writer and the worker, or the mental and the manual laborer.

4. Deviation from Factory: Literature as a Way of Escape

The shifts in writers from mass-oriented to elite literature in the 1980s must be situated within China’s liminal historical moment transitioning from high socialism to the reform era. As such, both early Marxist discourse and the majority of Western critical theories premised on capitalist society prove analytically insufficient here. Crucially, this was neither the era of the New Culture Movement—when Confucian hierarchies privileging mental over manual labor were first openly critiqued and Marxism entered Chinese intellectual discourse—nor a context predicated on capitalist social relations. As such, both early Marxist discourse and the majority of Western critical theories premised on capitalist society prove analytically insufficient here. Rather, during the decades of high socialism, the working class enjoyed political veneration, while intellectuals were systematically disenfranchised and, at times, subjected to severe persecution in the protracted class struggle. In particular, during the Cultural Revolution, schools were closed, and most books and cultural venues were banned. Political propaganda became the dominant form of education, supplanting both formal instruction and access to diverse reading materials.

It is on the premise—namely, class divisions had already been largely nullified by decades of proletarian movements, and amid the destitution of formal education—that I examine the plights and anxieties of worker writers. Deprived of material and cultural resources, they differed sharply from their counterparts in the New Cultural Movement, who had sincerely regarded manual labor as “positive alternatives to the negative work of a writer or scholar” (Larson 1991, p. 8). By 1972, even the illusory sense of purpose found in revolutionary fervor had dissipated: “Rationing, shortages, and monotony left our generation of newly minted urban workers no chance to develop excessive material desires. The tempestuous, civil war–style revolution had ended, and we had ultimately returned to the day-after-day grind of monotonous labor and the trivialities of everyday life” (Wu 2011, p. 168). For Wu as well as other factory workers alike, the factory was not a site of productive inspiration but of relentless discipline: “labor is not only strenuous, repetitive, and demanding, but extended over decades, it can result in physical and psychological dullness and numbness” (Wu 2011, pp. 26–27). Wu’s spiritual needs remained unmet, leaving literature as his only refuge. Indeed, the proletarian revolution, far from liberating workers, failed in its foundational aim of transforming them into unalienated human beings. Instead, the working class remained tethered to a barren terrain of depleted cultural resources. In addition to the suffocating conditions of the shop floor, overcrowded and inadequate housing in Shanghai was another hardship faced by industrial workers. For example, Cheng lived in an “attic without windows,” and “perhaps it was the cramped living conditions that made the world of literary imagination the only place where his spirit could soar with joy,” as his fellow literary critic Chen Sihe notes (S. Chen 2023, p. 6). Consequently, Wu and Cheng were compelled to channel their surplus energy and passion into an “illusory realm” (Wu 2011, p. 164).

In this atmosphere of cultural paucity, reading and writing became a means of escape from the dreary quotidian of factory life. According to Wu,

What did that life of scarcity before 1976 mean to me at the time? The days flowed by like water, yet the world beyond me did not belong to me—it was not the world I wanted. It was imposed upon me, imposed upon everyone. I would come home each day exhausted, yet still read without putting the book down—not out of a hunger for knowledge, but out of a hunger to escape. Every so often, I would feign illness; once the sick note was in hand, it became a stolen holiday for myself.

(Wu 2011, p. 14)

Constrained by the oppressive conditions of their work and living environments, Wu and Cheng turned to individual and collective reading as an alternative refuge. Wu frequently feigned illness to secure time for solitary reading, while Cheng accumulated a modest personal library within the workshop (Wu 1988, p. 229). Their intense dedication to reading rendered them relatively ineffective as rank-and-file frontline workers—further alienating them from the factory milieu. During the 1970s, they consumed whatever materials were accessible, primarily nineteenth-century Russian literary criticism, Marxist texts, official magazines and newspapers, and neican (internal reference publications), preceding the growing influx of translated Western literature.5 They also participated in both informal and officially organized reading groups: Wu read with a circle of friends, while Cheng joined amateur reading and writing workshops hosted by the Hongkou District Library. Notably, both had their first literary reviews published in Shanghai Literature, having been referred by established authors with whom Wu and Cheng frequently corresponded to discuss their interpretations of the authors’ works. While workshop spaces were often solitary and insular, membership in the SWA offered these amateur writers relatively greater openness and freedom. Chen Cun, for example, vividly invoked the term fangchulai (to be released 放出来)—a word typically reserved for liberation from confinement—to characterize Ru’s role in transferring them from the factory to the SWA (Wu et al. 2008a, p. 101). When manual labor deteriorates into an involuntary, subsistence-level wage-earning activity, literature—and the comparatively open Shanghai literary milieu—served as a vital refuge.

5. Deviation from Workers: A Reexamination of the Working Class

Wu’s detestation to workers and the working class stems not only from his firsthand experiences in the factory during the Cultural Revolution but also from his critical theoretical reflections on Marxism. As he notes,

My reverence for the working class completely vanished starting from the January Storm. The Worker-Peasant Red Guard teams were vulgar, violent, and ugly […] They hanged students who had made mistakes out of the fourth-floor windows of Xiangming Middle School and brutally beat them, taking pleasure in terrifying timid students […] I think Marx deliberately used the term “proletariat” instead of “working class” for a reason […] The latter has no inherent sanctity whatsoever […] No wonder Lenin later said, “Marxism cannot spontaneously arise within the working class; it must be imparted to the working class from outside” […] Ideas come from libraries, from books that record ideas […] So why did it suddenly become “the working class must lead everything”?

(Wu 2011, p. 27)6

Wu’s alienation from the working class arose not only from his and his family’s victimization during the Cultural Revolution—when violence was often enacted by the working class—but also from his intellectual upbringing, which placed trust in the very foundations dismantled by socialism: books and knowledge. Fundamentally an intellectual “reduced” to factory labor, Wu justified his critique of the working class by invoking Marx, the most politically authoritative figure within communist ideology. Ivan Franceschini and Christian Sorace’s insight on the proletariat echoed Wu’s criticism. They argue that the so-called “great proletariat,” to which workers had been ideologically bound, persisted only as “a conceptual notion, a political aspiration, and [a] birth announcement” (Franceschini and Sorace 2022, p. 18). In reality, the working class neither successfully “awaited the birth” of the proletariat nor had their “chains” removed (Franceschini and Sorace 2022, p. 17). Nevertheless, while criticizing the working class, Wu’s perspective on the core issues underlying the propaganda surrounding the working class was incisive:

I was myself a member of the working class. I had no interest in the worker images in the paintings. Although workers’ status is indeed low, they do not need empty praise […] What they need are labor unions, improved working conditions, higher wages, and shorter working hours! You praise the workers, you put on a show glorifying them, yet none of you are willing to actually be workers yourselves”.

(Wu 2011, pp. 115–16)

Wu, who “never considered himself a peasant or worker,” advocated for workers’ rights from the standpoint of a New Enlightenment intellectual of the early reform era (Wu 2011, p. 86).7

Compared with Wu’s direct and elitist critique of workers and the working class, Cai—who came from a working-class family—exhibited a more complex and ambivalent attitude marked by tension toward both the factory and its workers. On one hand, Cai, like Wu, expressed discomfort in the foundry where he was employed, which “seemed like a vast coal depot—dark sky, dark ground, dark walls”; the workers appeared numb, estranged, and indifferent—“the only things visible on the people coming and going were their white eyes, glaring starkly against the gloom” (Cai 1995, p. 44). Moreover, like Wu, the rigid discipline and regimented schedule of the factory proved difficult for him—a Sent-down Youth recently returned from the comparatively relaxed countryside—to adapt to. Hence, he claimed, “I did not like the factory, nor would the factory like me” (Cai 1995, p. 44). Cai’s disaffection for the factory stemmed not only from its stifling environment, both physically and symbolically, but also from his discomfort with the alienating effects of industrialization and modern urban life. Yet, paradoxically, Cai expressed a profound affinity with individual workers who, as he described, were “sentimental, gloomy, and nostalgic,” sharing his own dislike for the factory. This common ground enabled him to build rapport with senior workers, engaging in camaraderie through joking, occasional swearing, and sharing cigarettes (Cai 1995, p. 45). Unlike Wu, who regarded the factory as a place from which he constantly sought escape, Cai’s portrayal of the factory and its workers is imbued with a strong sense of compassion. For example, whereas Wu smoked to “numb himself” (Wu 2011, p. 27), for Cai, smoking functioned as a means of forging close bonds with fellow workers. Indeed, Cai demonstrated profound sympathy for the workers, attributing the root of their plight to the failures of the high socialist era—particularly those in power—and most notably to the Cultural Revolution. Different from Wu who condemns the brutal conduct of workers toward intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution, Cai contrasted the workers with factory leaders who emerged from rebel factions; these leaders not only “lacked skills and expertise” but also abused their authority, becoming “corrupted and degenerated.” (Cai 2009, p. 333). He claims, “it wasn’t that the workers distanced themselves from politics; rather, it was the politics of that time that drove the workers away. So, in my impression, there were still ‘workers’ then, but the ‘working class’” as a leader’s class in the idealistic narrative of the communism (Cai 2009, p. 334). For Cai, workers symbolized the essence of humanity but were hijacked as political puppets of the proletariat and profoundly disenfranchised during the Cultural Revolution; consequently, they too became victims of political violence.

Cai’s affinity with workers stemmed both from his working-class upbringing and his leftist political stance. Raised as a child and neighbor among ordinary industrial workers, he witnessed firsthand the dignity, solidarity, and human warmth of the workers’ community. He grew up in Caoyang New Village: a residential complex established by the CCP in 1952 to house “model workers and progressive producers” in Shanghai, and residents of Caoyang New Village were provided with comprehensive services and amenities that addressed their work, living, and leisure needs (Frazier 2022, pp. 230–39). The Village stood as a symbolic model illustrating the CCP’s commitment to offering the working class unalienated “lived spaces”—conceptualized by Henri Lefebvre as “bodily” integrated and interconnected social environments in which individuals “lived” their everyday life with senses and interpersonal interaction (Lefebvre 1991, p. 40). It privileged workers not only through superior material conditions but also by fostering a new mode of life that synthesized manual and mental labor. Within this framework, life in the Village during the high socialist era, as Cai depicts, was imbued with dignity and humanity. Accordingly, despite their impecuniosity, the residents of the Village “firmly upheld their moral code, showing profound loathing and contempt for embezzlement and theft” (Cai 2004, p. 41). Furthermore, the Village was imbued with vitality and human warmth, fostered by the “rustic simplicity” of “that generation of workers,” many of whom had been peasants prior to their urban relocation. As Cai describes,

in our building, the kitchen and toilet were still shared, and although petty squabbles among the women were sometimes inevitable, more often there was a warm sense of kinship in the air. Every household kept its door open, and adults and children alike would wander in and out of one another’s homes for a chat. There were always one or two homes that served as the building’s informal clubs: after dinner, people would gradually gather there to drink tea, smoke, and talk about matters in the factory or sigh over the changes in the world. Some would tell stories, others would sing opera from their hometowns, and whenever the huqin [a bowed string musical instrument] began its plaintive, creaking song, we would rush over at once—the music would carry us into an enchanting, incomparable world.

(Cai 2004, p. 42)

Cai perceived in these socialist workers a sense of premodern harmony that closely aligns with the Marxist ideal of an unalienated worker’s life.

In summary, shaped largely by their differing family backgrounds, the two factory-born writers articulated markedly divergent perspectives on workers and the proletarian revolution during the high socialist era. Nonetheless, both ultimately distanced themselves from the working class, albeit for contrasting reasons. Wu gradually turned away from Marxism and the legacies of Russian literary criticism. Instead, he engaged in literary experimentation aligned with what the CCP condemned as bourgeois Western literature, thereby distancing himself from the politically charged realm of socialist workers and worker literature. Conversely, Cai lamented the disintegration of the dignified working class amid China’s accelerating capitalist transformation, as Chinese workers were relegated to subaltern status within the rapidly reemerging class hierarchy.

6. A Reexamination of Worker Writer and Worker Literature

As Huang Ziping observes, already in the high socialist era, while a sense of dignity was imposed on the concept of labor, “labor was regarded as noble within the symbolic order, yet in the concrete world it was devalued”; for this reason, laborers sought to transcend their condition by becoming writers (Huang 2019, p. 122). Yet, for worker writers, even after entering writers’ associations, this aspiration often turned into a dilemma: they found themselves unable to move beyond industrial themes and, as a result, unable to produce literary works in the broader sense (Liu 2019, pp. 45–46). In the 1980s, nearly all factory-born writers shed their worker identities and distanced themselves from worker literature. Notably, unlike Cai, who gradually adapted to the factory environment and forged friendships with fellow workers, the factory remained a nightmare from which Wu dreaded returning. Accordingly,

My nearly fourteen years in the factory left me with memories of near-servitude that were etched into my very bones. Yes, ever since I strode out of that factory in 1985, head held high, to become a professional writer, my only recurring nightmare has been returning there to work again. In my dreams, I wake in despair to the realization that I am still a drudge, and that becoming a writer was nothing but a dream.

(Wu 2011, pp. 96–97)

Wu’s unease in the factory was not merely an example of what Claudia Pozzana regards as “experiments in emancipation from factory despotism” (Pozzana 2019, p. 191), but also reflected the deeper, inherent issue of class differentiation between manual and mental labor—a divide Chinese leftists both debated and sought to eliminate, yet ultimately failed to overcome. Despite the factory worker’s politically elevated status, this role corresponded to a subordinate social and economic position. If, as Hong observes, “transferring down to work in a factory” was a “method of punishment” for professional writers (Hong 2007, p. 40), transferring “up” from factory work to a writers’ association represented a significant social and political promotion. This hierarchy between worker and writer is not only deeply rooted in the Confucian tradition privileging mental over manual labor but was also paradoxically reinforced by the socialist system. Despite the nominal abolition of class divisions based on economic capital and market exchange typical of capitalist societies, the CCP established a rigidly hierarchical social structure delineating four independent categories of identity—cadre, worker, peasant, and mass. Writers were classified as cadres, thereby enjoying privileges not just in income and social benefits but also in symbolic capital.

Although developed within a critique of capitalism, Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of economic, cultural, and symbolic capital provide a particularly useful framework for illuminating the privileges and disenfranchisement experienced by workers during the transition from high socialism to the reform era. While my research does not concern a capitalist context, I nonetheless draw on Bourdieu’s framework as an analytical tool to clarify the shifting economic and social positions of workers in relation to writers during these transitional years. Granted, as Cai observes, “the real subaltern in China was in the countryside” (Cai 2004, p. 42). In comparison, industrial workers in Shanghai enjoyed a measure of economic security at a modest level in the high socialist era, which was still the case in the early reform era. They enjoyed various benefits promised by the socialist revolution, including “job security, relatively equal income, medical care, and pensions.” (Wang 2019, p. 74). Within the eight-level wage system for workers, although highly skilled laborers earned substantially more than the average, lower-ranking workers remained economically disadvantaged, to which Wu, Cheng, and Cai belonged. By contrast, professional writers had maintained relatively high incomes and benefits during the Seventeen Years and became even more financially prominent in the 1980s. Beyond their salaries, they received considerable manuscript fees—a pattern that persisted into the reform era. Wu recounts that, even as an amateur writer, the manuscript fee he earned in half a day equaled a month’s wage working as a maintenance technician at the factory (Wu 2012b, p. 17). Two years after his recruitment into the SWA, the organization helped him “solve his housing difficulties” (Wu 2012b, p. 119). Thus, the economic capital Wu accrued by transitioning from ordinary worker to writer was substantial.

As noted above, the significant cultural capital acquired by worker writers such as Wu, Cheng, and Cai derived from extensive reading, even during a period marked by scarcity of books. This cultural capital contributed to the production of social distinctions, particularly during China’s transition to the reform era, even within a nominally non-capitalist society. In history, on the one hand, most accounts of socialist worker writers—whether by the worker writers themselves or by scholars—consistently emphasize their impoverished family backgrounds and limited literacy, which rendered them politically correct exemplars and underscored the achievements of the socialist system’s writer cultivation. On the other hand, cultural capital functioned as a formidable barrier preventing worker writers in the high socialist era from gaining full recognition in the literary history. Their relatively low educational foundation largely constrained their creative scope, confining their writing predominantly to factory-related themes. As a result, contrary to the original cultivation ideal—that one could “write when holding the pen and work when putting it down”—these writers found themselves trapped in a predicament of being unable either to write professionally or to return to factory work after joining the writers’ associations. By contrast, factory-born writers of the 1980s generally received basic schooling prior to the Cultural Revolution and became largely autodidactic through avid sequential exposure to Russian and Western literature and criticism. Thus, they entered the SWA as already experienced readers and writers. As Pierre Bourdieu argues in Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, “all cultural practices and preferences in literature, painting, or music are closely linked to educational level and secondary to social origin” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 2). For writers in the 1980s, their educational attainment and social origins—though only marginally distinct from those of proletarian workers—continued to shape their tastes for bourgeois literature, with “the influence of social origin [being] strongest in […] avant-garde culture” (Bourdieu 1984, p. 2), even at a time when class divisions were officially declared abolished.

In this sense, moving from a factory to a writers’ association signified more than a change in workplace—it marked a profound shift in symbolic capital. The designation of “worker,” once imbued with the prestige of political centrality, had during the reform era lost much of its value. By contrast, the status of “cadre”—reserved for intellectuals and administrators in the socialist hierarchy—had come to embody the nation’s new symbolic investment in knowledge and cultural authority. This reclassification exposes the inherent paradox between political symbolism and social rank. In sum, the experiences of worker writers highlight the failure of the socialist revolution to overturn the entrenched hierarchy privileging mental over manual labor. While the socialist system conferred symbolic prestige upon workers as the “masters of the country,” this recognition proved politically expedient but socially fragile. In practice, economic, cultural, and symbolic capital remained disproportionately concentrated in the hands of writers, whose cadre status ensured higher income, educational opportunities, and institutional support. The boundary between worker and writer was thus never genuinely transgressed: in the high socialist era, the political limitations required worker writers to retain their identities as workers, while in the 1980s, those who became professional writers effectively shed their worker identities. The asymmetry of capitals between workers and writers demonstrates that the socialist promise of erasing class distinctions not only fell short but ultimately reinforced the very hierarchy it sought to abolish. This paradox directly leads to the question of professionalism versus amateurism, for it was precisely through the negotiation of these categories that the worker writer’s identity was defined, contested, and ultimately dissolved.

7. Between the Amateur and the Professional

The transformation of identity involved not only the passage from worker to writer but also the shifting (dis)identification with amateurism and professionalism. Worker literature, historically associated with amateurism, was rooted in an ethos of accessibility and collective participation rather than literary prestige. However, in the reform era, as literary institutions increasingly emphasized talent, originality, and professional recognition, worker writers sought to shed the amateur label and establish themselves as professional writers. Professionalism, once viewed with suspicion, became a marker of legitimacy and cultural authority.8 Through the cultivation system, “amateur literary enthusiasts” from factories were transformed into “professionals” (S. Chen 2023, p. 5), with membership in a writers’ association serving as a major marker of professionalization. Yet, the distinction between amateur and professional writers has never been straightforward. Both terms have carried shifting, sometimes contradictory connotations, which evolved across different historical and political contexts.

In the high socialist era, worker writers were typically seen first and foremost as workers, and only secondarily as amateur writers. Their literary development was often framed as a means to “balance the proportion of professional writers,” who were primarily drawn from the intellectual class (Liu 2019, p. 47). Worker literature was also categorized as mass literature, intended for ordinary readers rather than for intellectuals or literary elites. Despite formal membership in writers’ associations, peer recognition was often seen as a more meaningful validation of one’s literary status. For instance, Jiang Langping 姜浪萍, a worker writer during high socialism, once stated that she aspired to write a monumental, artistically accomplished work in order to be recognized as a professional writer (Liu 2019, p. 47). However, even when worker writers were politically exemplary—having successfully transitioned from proletarian illiterates to published writers—their status remained unstable. Admission to a writers’ association did not necessarily guarantee recognition as a creative writer. Often, they were assigned editorial roles in literary magazines rather than encouraged to continue literary production, until their work was judged by peers to meet professional literary standards.9 In this sense, becoming a professional was never simple—and yet after the Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, it was also politically risky.

In the reform era, amid loosening ideological constraints and an urgent demand for new literary talent, amateur writers had publishing opportunities comparable to those of professionals in official magazines. On the one hand, the nominal identities of worker or amateur writer mattered less than the quality of the texts they produced, a view largely shared by cultural officials. For instance, when Wu first visited Zhou at Shanghai Literature to discuss his manuscript, he absented himself from work and arrived still in his worker’s uniform (Wu et al. 2008b, p. 97). This case recalls the anecdote at the beginning of this article, in which the worker’s identity was invoked for political purposes but never taken seriously in the realm of literature. In certain respects, the amateur writer from the factory could even be regarded as more professional than officially recognized writers. On the other hand, unlike their high-socialist-era counterparts who struggled to reconcile worker and writer identities and who “never successfully grew into professional writers” (Liu 2019, p. 53), factory writers of the 1980s often shed their worker identity entirely upon transfer to writers’ associations, thereby gaining official recognition as professional writers and acquiring notable economic and symbolic capital. However, under Shanghai Literature’s enduring literary ideal of democratic literature, the distinction between professional and amateur remained paradoxical in perception. As writers and critics from factory pushed literature in increasingly elitist and experimental directions, the literary editor Zhou expressed concern and began actively promoting amateur writers and their works (Jin 2017, p. 84), not only in support of the ideological goal of literary democracy, but also with an eye to the emerging literary market, which, however, falls outside the scope of this article.

At the same time, as literature became increasingly academized, university training supplanted writers’ associations as the primary criterion of professionalism. Non-academic critics such as Wu and Cheng thus emerged as an amateur counterpoint to institutional authority. Embracing a sense of amateurism, Cheng modestly called himself a “professional reader” rather than a “condescending literary critic” (S. Chen 2023, p. 7), and Wu half-bitterly, half-proudly referred to himself as “still having a feeling of being an amateur” (Wu et al. 2008b, p. 97). Their passion for literature, rather than a purely intellectual-oriented approach, positioned them as the most professional amateurs of literature. Their incisive understanding of literary works, keen perception of the trajectory of literary development, and contributions to shaping contemporary Chinese literary history demonstrated a high degree of professional skill. Yet, their approach to literature—as an object of love rather than a formal vocation—retained the character of literary amateurism. Their sense of amateurism became a mark of distinction—positively setting these critics apart from their academically trained counterparts—and, as I will argue in the next section, embodied a lingering legacy of the worker-writer ethos.

8. The Worker’s Legacy Beyond Literary Professionalism

How exactly did their experience as writers from factory differentiate Wu, Cheng, and Cai from academically trained critics?10 Their approach to literature offers the clearest answer. While their lack of formal education excluded them from the academic literary establishment, Yang Qingxiang suggests that “this lack of formal training was a form of liberation, freeing them from the historical burden of Soviet-influenced literary theory” that had dominated earlier criticism, as well as from the Western literary theories that came to predominate Chinese literary criticism following the so-called “Year of Methodology” in 1985 (Wu et al. 2008c, p. 73). As a result, their views often demonstrated remarkable accuracy, timeliness, and aptness in discerning the problems and shifting trends of China’s cultural, economic, and literary reform. Unlike university-educated scholars, who were often overwhelmed by successive waves of Soviet and later Western literary theory and sought to impose these frameworks on emerging Chinese literature, Wu, Cheng, and Cai relied instead on an intuitive power of feeling (感觉力), which Wu contends was often repressed by the intellectualized vocabulary of critical discourse (Wu et al. 1985, p. 158). This “power of feeling” growing from the lived experiences rather than academia bears close resemblance to Raymond Williams’ notion of “structures of feeling” or “structures of experience”—the actively lived and felt experiences, values, and affective orientations of a particular social group, articulated in personal forms at a given historical moment. Just as Williams identified such emergent structures in the rise of a new class in eighteenth-century England, similar dynamics were at play during the turbulent reform era of China. In contrast to “ideological systems of fixed social generality, categorical products, or absolute formations,” structures of feeling capture the emergent, often unarticulated modes through which people experience and respond to shifting social, political, and cultural conditions, and thus possess a distinctive power of foresight (Williams 1977, pp. 128–35). This capacity to register lived realities beyond official ideology enabled Wu and Cheng to discern, earlier than many of their contemporaries, a cohort of writers destined to reshape the literary field and to anticipate literary trends that resonated with China’s broader social transformations in the 1980s. Their criticism was thus characterized by clarity, pragmatism, historical awareness, and a close engagement with texts and authors—qualities grounded in their worker backgrounds rather than a priori academic theory.

As a result, Wu and Cheng became two of the most influential and prolific literary critics of the 1980s experimental literature scene, and Cai remained steadfast in his editorial post at Shanghai Literature for as long as eighteen years. They were among the first to critically engage with newly emerging literary phenomena, including avant-garde fiction. Wu, for example, was the first to explore the relationship between literature and the newly emerged consumer culture and to initiate a distinct strand of urban literary criticism prior to the translation of Western urban literary theory into China.11 Focusing on each individual creative writer, Cheng undertook the monumental task of compiling an archive of over one hundred writers active between 1977 and 1986. By meticulously tracing their works and literary development, he pioneered in-depth reviews of emerging experimental authors such as Jia Pingwa, Wang Anyi, and Mo Yan. As Li Qingxi notes, “When Depei keenly noticed the rise in avant-garde fiction, most critics had yet to sense the breath of a literary revolution” (Q. Li 2023, p. 18). And Cai, following Zhou, continued to promote democratic literature by publishing amateur writers, positioning this as a form of balance to the overwhelming dominance of avant-garde fiction. His scholarship—rare in this regard—was characterized by a sustained focus on the legacy of leftist revolution and the recurring possibility of restoring labor’s dignity.

Despite these groundbreaking contributions, Wu, Cheng, and Cai were conspicuously absent from the academic rewriting of literary history that began in 1988, where university-trained scholars took precedence. For instance, in 1989 Shanghai Literature, the once-prolific Wu and Cheng almost vanished from literary criticism section. In particular, the three issues of special column “A Club of Critics,” dedicated to the discussion of avant-garde literature, featured exclusively academic critics, thereby sidelining its initiators Wu and Cheng. From this moment onward, literary criticism became fully institutionalized within the academy, marginalizing those without formal credentials. This marginalization reflected the powerful role of cultural capital. Both Wu and Cheng stopped writing after the early 1990s. As Wu explains, the reason was that their literary friends had “dispersed (sanle 散了),” most of whom had entered academia, which operated under a different discourse (Wu et al. 2008c, p. 75). With the rise in literary scholarship from the 1990s, the SWA diverged from the academic sphere, leaving only Wu, Cheng and Cai within the Association, continuing to read literary works, while their former peers in academia shifted toward professional literary scholarship.

In sum, Wu, Cheng, and Cai’s trajectory from factory workers to members of the SWA, while limiting their academic legitimacy, enriched their critical vision with grounded intuition and historical sensitivity rarely matched by their university-educated counterparts. The sidelining of such voices in favor of institutionalized scholarship raises important questions about whose perspectives are valorized in literary history and how the dynamics of class and education continue to influence the production and reception of cultural knowledge. This legacy invites us to reconsider the boundaries between professionalism and amateurism in literary criticism and to explore how alternative, experience-based modes of critique might still contribute vital insights in contemporary literary discourse.

9. Conclusions

This study has interrogated the underlying logic behind what came to resemble a quasi-common sense in 1980s China: that it was more advantageous to be a writer than a worker. Despite more than six decades of leftist revolution in the twentieth century, the entrenched hierarchy privileging intellectual over manual labor was never fundamentally dismantled. Class distinctions persisted, albeit in shifting configurations: while the high socialist period symbolically exalted industrial workers as the “masters of the nation,” cultural authority and institutional privilege remained concentrated among those who produced, circulated, and evaluated texts. The reform decade of the 1980s further accentuated this asymmetry. Intellectual literature gained ascendancy, while worker literature—once a cornerstone of socialist cultural legitimacy—was steadily displaced, revealing the structural gap between workers and writers across historical conjunctures, though for historically specific reasons in each case.

By examining the official literary field in Shanghai, this paper has highlighted the dramatic shift from a people-oriented literature to an elite one, and, more strikingly, the tension between the ostensibly worker literature promoted on the surface and the underlying elitist aesthetics that increasingly defined the field. This transformation revealed a deep paradox: even as the discourse of working class persisted at the level of ideology, the field’s actual practices gravitated toward exclusivity and aesthetic elitism. It was only when literature receded from the center of political power that workers could begin to claim a measure of literary authorship within unofficial cultural spaces.

The trajectories of writers from the factory thus make visible both the durability of cultural hierarchies and the fragile, historical conditions under which laboring subjects could participate in literary production. Ultimately, the shifting relationship between labor and literature not only reveals the limits of revolutionary discourse in dissolving entrenched class divisions but also highlights how literature itself became a site where the contradictions of socialist and capitalist modernity were negotiated and contested. In this sense, the trajectories of China’s worker writers resonate with broader debates on the uneasy relationship between labor, culture, and class worldwide, reminding us that the struggle to bridge the divide between intellectual and manual labor is a persistent, if unresolved, question of modernity itself.