Escaping the Workshop

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

Bibliographic Data

ID20249278
AuthorsSandy JS Zhang (0009-0008-9425-6862), Sandy J S Zhang (Southern Utah University, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume14
Issue10
Pages189
Publication date2025-09-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHumanities (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2076-0787 • E-ISSN: 2076-0787
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/h14100189
OpenAlexW4414540984
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited4

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

Ideology · Modernity · Proletariat · Publishing · Reform movement · The Symbolic · Chinese history and philosophy · Industrial Relations

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