Withering Spring: Precarious Labour Migrancy, Class, and Capitalism in Xu Lizhi’s Poetry

Xu Lizhi has become one of the symbols of rural–urban migrant workers’ poetry in present-day China, mainly due to his suicide in 2014, at the age of 24, while he worked at Foxconn’s Shenzhen factory. This chapter examines Xu’s poems in the context of precarity and class, focusing on the theme of youth and the structural conditions of what Chinese rural–urban labourers’ precarious migrancy, better described as precarious labour migrancy. By so doing, the chapter demonstrates that, despite a personal and idiosyncratic writing style that distances him from being a figurehead of the most typical Chinese workers’ poetry, Xu’s poetry nevertheless exposes the shared experience of exploitation of many Chinese migrant workers, advancing a critique of the contemporary mode of production from a class-based perspective. The analysis concludes that Xu’s first-person narrative can be seen as a collective voice for Chinese migrant workers, reflecting a nascent class consciousness.