How a food delivery rider became a literary star, and what it says about China

Schoenmakers believes some of this appetite is rooted in the pandemic, when delivery workers suddenly became visible as essential workers. It also reflects the growing anxiety of a Chinese middle class that is uncertain about its own economic future.

100 years of workers’ literature

Workers’ literature in China, defined as writing of, by and about the workers, has come a long way since the 1920s. In an Oxford Research Encyclopedia overview, Paola Lovene and Federico Picerni, scholars at the University of Chicago, identify three stages in the evolution of workers’ literature in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Workers’ literature in China, defined as writing of, by and about the workers. (wikimedia Commons)

The first phase, which emerged in 1920-1930, involved factory-based reportage, written largely by left-wing intellectuals rather than workers themselves. It grew out of the League of Left-Wing Writers, founded in 1930, whose members were inspired by the Czech journalist Egon Erwin Kisch.

One of the earliest enduring images of industrial labour appeared in Lu Yin’s 1921 short story, Can You Sell Your Soul?, where a female textile worker begins to imagine herself as nothing more than a perfectly functioning machine. Then came Mao Zedong’s 1942 Yan’an Talks, which dictated that literature should serve the people, above all workers, peasants and soldiers. Initiatives such as Cao Ming’s amateur writing groups in Anshan encouraged hundreds of factory workers to write, though critics have argued that these works often remained constrained by ideology and political expectations.

“For much of the 20th century, this meant literature about workers should be mediated through writers or through officially promoted worker-author figures, such as Zhao Shuli, Hao Ran, etc., the whole apparatus of ‘worker correspondents,” says Dr Nishit Kumar, Assistant Professor at Chanakya University.

“What’s different now is that delivery riders, factory workers and migrant labourers are writing directly from their lived experience without that mediation,” he says, which brings us to the third phase, to which Wang belongs, that emerged during China’s economic reforms in the 1980s, when millions of rural migrants travelled to Shenzhen, Dongguan and Guangzhou to staff the country’s rapidly expanding factories.

Scholars variously describe this body of writing as dagong wenxue (“working-for-the-boss literature”), migrant worker literature, or, borrowing the phrase coined by Dutch sinologist Maghiel van Crevel, “battler poetry.”

“The ‘worker’ of Chinese literature has gone from the state-owned factory employee to the Meituan rider, and literature has had to keep up,” Kumar told The Indian Express.

The third phase’s most internationally recognised figure remains Xu Lizhi, the defining poet of China’s assembly-line generation. His suicide in 2014 drew worldwide attention to his poems of assembly lines, screws and industrial exhaustion through the anthology and documentary Iron Moon. One of his best-known lines follows:

I swallowed an iron moon
they called it a screw

The plight of 16 million riders

There are around 16 million delivery riders in China. (Reuters)

The subject of Wang’s award-winning anthology is his fellow gig workers, who weave in and out of traffic every day, delivering food and parcels, powering one of the world’s largest platform economies. Jibing, who has written around 6,000 poems between deliveries, renders into verse the frustrations, pressures, aspirations and little acts of resilience of around 16 million delivery riders in China (according to the China New Employment Forms Research Center). Rather than depicting workers as symbols of either heroism or victimhood, his poems dwell on the endurance that makes precarious work bearable, and the dignity of work itself.

The poet, who is based in Kunshan, interviewed and surveyed 200 fellow riders while writing Low Flight, and the anthology takes its title from one of its own early lines, one that quietly argues against the assumption that spreading one’s wings must mean flying high, insisting instead that even a modest, low trajectory still counts, in the end, as flight.

Who prescribes that with wings spread one must fly high?
Low flight is also a flight.

That optimism distinguishes Wang from Xu Lizhi, whose poetry came to symbolise the despair of China’s manufacturing boom. While Xu’s poems are populated by screws, assembly lines, machines and bodily erasure, Jibing’s poems return to birds, wind, roads, stars, music and spring.

In the title poem, an ordinary delivery note becomes a small act of magic. The streets a rider crosses are imagined as an instrument, ordered like a keyboard, and the noise rising from ground level becomes part of a larger music, one made by everything in the poem that is straining upward. The image that lingers longest comes near the poem’s end, where Wang wonders whether the human world secretly holds a fifth season, one set aside only for delivery workers.

Thus, instead of presenting gig workers solely through exhaustion or exploitation, Wang imagines them as participants in renewal. “I hope that after reading this book, people will show riders more understanding and patience, and that there will be fewer conflicts,” Wang told China Daily.

Despite his growing literary reputation, he has repeatedly said he has no intention of leaving the job that inspired them. “Financially I don’t need this job to make a living, but I love the vibe of the work, and it keeps me fit,” he told the Global Times. “I want a down-to-earth life, and the award will never change who I am,” he said, in remarks also carried by the BBC.

His commitment to remaining a rider reflects something larger than personal humility. Jibing has often said the job continually introduces him to new lives and unexpected encounters, each delivery offering another fragment of contemporary China. In that sense, continuing to deliver meals is also continuing his research.

His first widely shared poem, People in a Hurry, went viral on Sina Weibo, attracting around 13 million views within a week. The poem grew out of an experience familiar to many delivery riders. A customer repeatedly entered the wrong address, sending Jibing from one residential complex to another. By the time he finally completed the delivery after climbing to the sixth floor of three different buildings, he had already fallen behind on his remaining orders. The customer greeted him with irritation rather than gratitude, asking why it had taken so long and whether he could even find the address, Wang told Our China Story. He was later penalised for the delay. In 2023, Wang published two anthologies, Man in a Hurry and I Clumsily Love This World.

That same tension surfaces again in his poem, ‘Please Forgive’, written after Jibing retrieved a mistakenly delivered meal from a man in the middle of a heartbreak of his own. In it, Jibing asks to be forgiven, not for any particular mistake, but for the sheer speed and disorder of his own movement through the city, for the way riders rush through every street and gap they can find, and he likens this to asking forgiveness of lightning for the scar it leaves across the sky. It is a strange request, since the rider is asking pardon not from the customer but from something closer to nature itself, and it reframes the frantic pace of delivery work as an elemental force rather than a personal failing.

Jibing told Our China Story that he once rushed to deliver food to construction workers at a temple, abandoning his wish to stop and pray because more delivery requests kept arriving. “Why do I need to worship a Bodhisattva when I myself am the living embodiment of one?” he said he remembered thinking. That encounter became the poem The New Temple.

An open question

Workers’ literature is hardly unique to China. Britain’s industrial heartlands produced writers such as Sid Chaplin, who drew on his years in the Durham coalfields, and the miner-poet Tommy Armstrong, while the Great Depression produced American proletarian writers including Tillie Olsen, Meridel Le Sueur and Mike Gold.

In India, Dalit writers such as Omprakash Valmiki, Bama and Sharan Kumar Limbale challenged literary establishments in comparable ways. “Worldwide, literary establishments have struggled to recognise socially rooted writing as ‘literature’ in its own right rather than testimony,” Kumar told The Indian Express. “Even in India, we saw comparable debates around Dalit literature.”

In China, this struggle is shaped by a political tradition that has long used the worker’s class identity, as master of the nation, as a source of political legitimacy, Kumar says. That elevates the worker symbolically, but “the literary establishment still treats their writing as raw material rather than art,” he says.

It is perhaps the emphasis on dignity rather than confrontation that may also explain why Jibing’s work has found institutional recognition, Kumar told The Indian Express.

The significance of Jibing’s award, he says, lies in acknowledgement that China’s changing economy is producing new literary voices. Whether that recognition eventually broadens the canon or simply absorbs selected voices remains, for now, an open question.