Writing the Memory of Labour Precarisation in China: The Case of the Dongbei Renaissance

If precarity is, as Hillebrand (2023, p. 24) puts it, “a master concept for the contemporary,” and China is “a core crucible for current thinking about precarity,” the impact of the market reforms inaugurated in the country in the late 1970s is the basic starting point to analyse how this precarisation process unfolded and the impact it has had on people’s conscience and imagination. This chapter explores how Chinese writers captured this process, particularly the precarisation of labour caused by the closure or privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) in the 1990s. After introductory snapshots into the literary landscape of the 2000s and 2010s and how it responded to these events, we will then move to a closer investigation of a recent artistic and literary phenomenon, known as the “Dongbei Renaissance.” We have chosen to focus on writers grouped under this denomination (which encompasses also cinema and music) because they have given voice and visibility to two generations marked by the trauma of precariousness: the old working class once belonging to SOEs, and their children, the so-called second-generation poor (qiong er dai).