China’s Workers’ Literature Revival | China Books Review
Once a socialist genre beloved of Mao, laborers’ or “battler” literature has seen a revival in the era of the gig economy. Two new books in translation illustrate the mass appeal.
Reviewed: • I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Hu Anyan, tr. Jack Hargreaves (Astra House, October 2025). • Adrift in the South by Xiao Hai, tr. Tony Hao (Granta, April 2026). China used to be poor but equal, mostly. Over the past half-century, since the Reform era started in 1978, it has grown to be a lot richer and a lot less equal. Shanghai’s wealthiest may bolster the bottom lines of Italian fashion brands, but hundreds of millions of working-class Chinese scrape by on subsistence wages. One might expect that a population raised on socialist ideals would not look kindly on excessive…
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