Three hundred million Chinese have left the countryside for the cities since the 1980s, in a flood wave of labor migration that has fueled China’s rise. Known as ‘battlers,’ they belong to a new underclass who face exploitation, discrimination, and harrowing insecurity. And they write poetry. Battler poetry speaks of being ground down in the factory workshop, of being forced into sex work, of being robbed of your youth. It has made its way into mass media and labor activism, and developed uneasy relations with the literary establishment. It aligns with writing elsewhere in the world that shows the power of poetry as an expression of sociopolitical identity. Who are China’s battler poets? Where do they find the time and energy, after a 12-hour shift on the assembly line or on a courier moped in big-city traffic? What is their poetry like? Who reads it? What happens when it travels abroad? How has the Chinese state responded? What can battler poetry tell us about the nexus of aesthetics and social experience, in a world where inequality reigns?China’s Battler Poetry tells the gripping story of an ‘unlikely’ genre. Building on textual and cultural analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and the collection of underground source material, it sits at the interface of the humanities and social science. It is driven by a desire to understand poetry as both art and social practice, looking at its words through the lifeworlds of its authors and the other way around.
