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

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.