Walking on the Edge: The Poetry of Chinese Rural–Urban Migrants

Rural–urban migrant workers (nongmingong) emerged as a distinct social subject in the 1980s and 1990s, providing the low-priced labour-force to the labour-intensive industry developing after the start of market reforms. The social and human price has been steep, as migrants have limited access to basic public services in the cities unless they manage to obtain a urban household registration, thus (re)producing conditions of marginality, exploitation and precarity. Against this background, the chapter addresses the body of poetry they have produced to discuss key questions of displacement (from social, emotional and affective viewpoints), spatiality (countryside and city, and urban marginalisation), the perceived possibilities – and material limits – of autonomous agency, and the role of the art itself to give voice to multiple subjectivities from this social group. The discussion is substantiated by the textual analysis of two specific poets, Liu Dongwu and Wu Xia, who offer different generational, social, and aesthetic perspectives on the experience of rural–urban migration. Besides offering an overview of migrant workers’ poetry, the chapter approaches it as a window into the identity impasse experienced by rural-urban migrants as a result of the systemic exclusion and discrimination they face.