In 2014, this quiet 24 year old from rural Guangdong jumped from the 17th floor of a mall in Shenzhen, just across the road from his favorite bookshop. His death reverberated across China, drawing attention to his beautiful and disarming poetry, as well as to the despair of millions of factory laborers across the nation. By evoking images of spare parts, discarded screws and lumps of iron, Xu used China’s most revered classical art form to articulate the degrading experience of modernity.

A few years later, an essay by live-in nanny Fan Yusu also became a surprise literary sensation. “My life,” she began, “is a book that is unbearable to read.” While Fan cared for wealthier people’s children in Beijing, she mourned her “left behind” children in “motherless villages”. She worried that they, too, could “become screws in the world factory and terracotta soldiers on the assembly line”.

Neither Xu nor Fan set out to write political tracts. Their verse and prose were coping mechanisms, efforts of profound humility and humanity, and that’s what made them so heartbreaking. These so-called “bottom-rung”, or diceng, writers forced people at every level of Chinese society to confront the fate of those who had been forsaken during the years of economic uplift, which saw millions of people move from the countryside to the cities in search of factory jobs.

At the time, Marxists and those on the New Left saw migrants as poignant symbols of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) discordant messaging: socialist ideology foregrounded ordinary workers, while free-market economics required their cheap labor and exploitation. Living on the outskirts of new towns and cities without official residence permits (hukou) or access to any form of social security, China’s estimated 274 million rural-to-urban migrants have lost their ideological status. They have gone from being celebrated by the regime as “worker peasants” to the pejoratively labeled “floating population”, “vagrants” or “I-slaves”. These city workers have effectively become illegal migrants in their own country and, unwittingly, central protagonists in China’s contemporary identity crisis. From such despair, a powerful new literary movement has sprung.

China has long had an established literary genre of “bottom-rung” fiction, rooted in a belief that literature should “flip minds” and awaken people to the suffering of others. But now, the confluence of industrialization with widespread internet access in China has given rise to perhaps the largest working-class literature movement in history. These writers are telling their stories on their phones, in literary forums or in self-published worker magazines — whether or not the Party approves of them as “pure” literature.

The latest of these writers to capture China’s imagination is gig worker Hu Anyan, whose memoir I Deliver Parcels in Beijing will be published in English later this month, two years after it went viral in China. At the time of writing, Hu had already worked 19 jobs since leaving school, including as a waiter, bike seller, popsicle wholesaler and delivery driver. As a delivery driver, Hu suffered daily humiliations. He was blamed for failing to keep fresh a notoriously smelly durian fruit, when no one was at home to receive it; penalized for late deliveries even if a customer gave the wrong address; and refused entry to malls because of his garish, low-class uniform.

However, his artistic spirit sustained him. A few years before, Hu’s eyes had been opened to the world of literature when he worked as an unpaid drawing apprentice with a comic book publisher. He and a bunch of fellow anime enthusiasts listened to punk, talked up rebellion and individualism, and read Kafka. “From then on,” he writes, “both work and writing became ways for me to build my spirit.” The group committed to writing and reading “wild works” — edgy underground comics and literature that couldn’t be published anywhere except on subversive online forums — and to rejecting any work that resembled “tamed livestock that had long lost its animal nature”. In an age of intense pragmatism and material ambition, Hu instead devoted himself to the humanities.

In his book, Hu argues that the only way to maintain one’s individuality and sanity in the age of Big Data is to remember what it is that makes us human, and to resist the algorithm at all costs. “What I learned was that so long as I didn’t care about being efficient, if I forgot about my return on investment, then every customer was easy to get along with,” writes Hu, with an almost child-like innocence.

Hu’s memoir has sold more than two million copies in China, and a TV adaptation is already in the works. Its popularity signifies a deep philosophical shift in China, and reflects a widespread feeling that the China Dream is over. Whereas white-collar workers once read factory-worker writers like Xu Lizhi and Fan Yusu with a degree of disconnected sympathy, Hu’s experience of gig work resonated with them. Seeing themselves as products of the “gaokao factory” (China’s incredibly stressful university entrance exams), and competitors in an immensely oversaturated job market, graduates have started to re-brand themselves as “IT peasants”. There’s increasingly a sense of communality with those migrant workers who have felt this despair all along.

For “bottom-rung” workers, the myth of social mobility died long before China’s slowing economy started to worry those higher up the ladder. But in its place, a devotion to the humanities has blossomed. While the majority of lower-rung authors write for no other reason than to process menial work into something meaningful, they have created a growing folk tradition of life outside the system. Migrant dorms and communes are places where artists, vloggers, musicians and writers nurture a freewheeling, troubadour spirit. Picun village on the outskirts of Beijing, which was home to thousands of migrants before it was demolished in 2023, was famous for its New Workers Art Troupe and the Picun Literature Group, in which workers hosted pop-up exhibitions, gigs, plays and poetry readings. More recently, artist Li Liao exhibited his scooter and screenshots from his Meituan “super app” at a gallery in Shenzhen, rural migrant Wang Haijia was dubbed “the courier poet” for his widely shared poem “People in a Hurry”, and 23-year-old Song Yucai become an online sensation for singing on the streets of Chengdu after grueling days out on his bike.

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Many white-collar workers are following their lead, turning back to the humanities, and even returning to the countryside to work the land. Having been warned against studying non-vocational subjects by anxious parents and strident educational influencers, the young have decided they no longer want earning potential to shape their decisions. Interest is growing in rural reconstruction movements such as the Bishan project — a rural commune committed to bringing modern ideas and culture back to traditional village life that was shut down by the local government in 2016. And people continue to intentionally set up libraries and artistic communities away from cities. The countryside is once again becoming a place of the imagination.

Rattled by the prospect of graduates turning into a bunch of work-shy hippies, Xi Jinping announced in 2021 that it was necessary to stop what he called this trend of “involution” and “laying down”. One way to do this was to “disrobe”. In a public ticking-off of disillusioned university graduates, state broadcaster CCTV suggested they consider “taking off the long gown”. This is a reference to a story by one of China’s most revered writers, Lu Xun, in which failed scholar Kong Yiji insists on wearing the “long gown”, the sartorial symbol of wealth and education, in contrast to the “short jackets” worn by the poor and uneducated. The moral of the story is that status is a trap and those who cling to it are obtuse and conceited. By continuing to ally itself with Lu Xun, a writer beloved by Mao, the CCP is trying to shift the focus away from its own economic responsibilities towards China’s workforce to the moral responsibilities of the individual.

One proponent of disrobing is Ding Yuanzhao, a graduate of Oxford as well as China’s two most prestigious universities, Tsinghua and Peking, who this year was forced to sign up as a delivery driver when he couldn’t find a suitable job. It offered him a stable income, he told the Oxford Mail cheerfully, and it enabled him to “make a contribution to society”. He will not be the last scholar destined for a wardrobe change.

In her science fiction story Folding Beijing, Chinese novelist Hao Jingfang imagined a future in which the different classes of society were physically separated into three spaces, and that traveling between them was a criminal offense. Now it seems possible that white-collar and blue-collar workers are folding into one. Automation, algorithms and AI pose existential threats to everyone’s role in society; all workers will end up competing for similar jobs. In such a world, literature offers an opportunity to live beyond the rat race.

China’s vast lucrative web novel industry, the largest in the world, brilliantly illustrates the peculiar nature of “Chinese socialism” in recent years. The combination of unfettered economic growth with often severe restrictions on free speech has transformed online authors from writers into aspiring tycoons. The result is a consumerist vacuum, where authors hoping to follow in Tang Jia San Shao’s footsteps churn out vast quantities of work with little literary value or originality.

Tang Jia San Shao is known for both for his epic xianxia (immortal hero) fantasies in which lowly “cultivators” rise up the ranks to unmatchable omnipotence, as well as his dogged work ethic: he holds the Guinness World Record for 86 months of daily serialised chapter updates on Qidian, a webnovel platform backed by Tencent, one of China’s most influential tech giants.

He may be one of the rare success stories, but he has inspired millions of xieshou (writing hands) to churn out thousands of words a day in the hope of selling their own IP. As a rule, titles with the highest number of readers within a pay-per-view system, including Ashes of Love and The Untamed and Duolou Continent, are turned into lucrative TV dramas, computer games or manga series.

Tech companies such as China Literature and Qidian have morphed into shameless “IP cultivation” empires, overseeing a somewhat psychotic, dog-eat-dog world in which popularity is the only metric that matters. “Help readers fantasise about what they lack,” instructs the testosterone-heavy platform Qidian in its writing guide. With an estimated 450 million active readers, and as many as 25 million titles to choose from, competition is merciless and exhausting. If a title doesn’t get enough eyeballs, the platform cancels the book.

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Writers, desperate to keep readers, often resort to brazen and desperate tactics — offering “red packets” (bribes) or plagiarising so they have more content to post. One trick to getting more views is to make novels insufferably long, with some online books exceeding six million words. Another is to turn each chapter into a cliff-hanger. Owing to its trashy, short-term thrills, Chinese readers dub webfiction yiyin or “YY” for short, a phrase that has evolved to mean “mental porn” or an addictive, guilty pleasure.

Writers’ grasping tactics are mirrored in the personalities of their status-obsessed and borderline sociopathic protagonists. Heroes are known for their “shamelessness” and for intentionally humiliating (“face-slapping”) their opponents. Many will stop at nothing to acquire wealth and status, smiting anyone who obstructs their path to becoming the richest tycoon in the world or the most supreme being in the universe. In short, online fiction is often a fantasy in which brute individualism pays off, written and read by self-described diaosi — “penis hairs” or “losers” — for whom reality is a communal struggle.

Last year, all this suddenly ground to a halt when beleaguered and exhausted writers downed tools following a regime change at Tencent. By temporarily making content free to read and taking over the copyright of all works until 50 years after the death of the authors, Tencent planned to both strip writers of their revenue and deny them any hope of precious IP.

The dispute was eventually resolved, but it lit an old ideological fire amongst writers who are both victims, and advocates, of this mercenary genre of fiction. “This is class struggle,” said one writer. “The bourgeoisie and capitalists only pursue profits, their pores ooze dirty blood, they squeeze the proletariat for every drop of oil they can.” And they are not wrong.

This is a time of yawning differences between rich and poor in China, with the old Communist guarantee of lifetime employment — “the iron rice bowl” — a distant memory. The CCP has failed to protect gig economy workers from exploitation by big Chinese corporations. An obvious example is the country’s 300 million “floating” migrant workers, once foregrounded by the socialist revolution, who work gruelling hours and are denied basic rights in Chinese cities.

People have been trying — and failing — to remind the CCP that it is supposed to be a Left-wing party for some time. This may explain Xi Jinping’s current “Common Prosperity” drive promising to close a gaping wealth divide in Chinese society — and re-assert the primacy and socialist credentials of the Party. Actors, representative of a burgeoning idol culture and the new uber-class of celebrity, have become a soft target: they are conspicuously rich and have legions of adoring fans.

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Thirty-year-old Deng Lun, swooning star of hit TV show Ashes of Love, is just the latest celebrity to be put in the stocks in China for tax evasion, resulting in a grovelling public apology, a $16.6 million fine and the suspension of all his online social media accounts. He seems to have got off lightly: Alibaba’s Jack Ma, tennis star Peng Shuai and actress Vicki Zhao all briefly disappeared. The CCP doesn’t take kindly to any individuals, except the great leaders of course, having that kind of kudos. Popularity or influence can be as dangerous as dissidence.

Yet Xi’s crackdown extends well beyond celebrities. Chinese writers are also being reined in, with the CCP insisting that all art needs to “take patriotism as its muse” and “serve the people and socialism”. Unsurprisingly, given the popularity of online fiction and its TV spin-offs, the government has imposed “socialist ratings” upon online writing platforms, and a “rectification” process if the score is too low. Tang Jia San Shao’s latest novel about a cultural relic restorer is apparently intended to support an application for Beijing’s World Heritage Status.

Writers are now encouraged to write fantastical tales about “red heroes” to support the CCP’s re-booted socialist agenda. “Heroic figures that save the world and humanity, as created in the work of many internet writers, are in essence or spiritually the same as the heroes in red stories,” says the deputy general of the Shanghai Writers Association, Xue Shu.

What’s more, online writers and readers are incentivised to personally censor any inappropriate content they come across: suicide, effeminate men, the past, politics, sex or, in fact, anything below the neck. A moral society is seen as integral to the legitimacy of the Party, following an ancient Confucian principle that the government should uphold good behaviour. This is one of the main reasons why Chinese literature has long been co-opted as a didactic, rather than artistic, medium.

So, what is left when cultural industrialists and authoritarian governments have had so much control over content? Both have contributed to the homogenisation of mainstream Chinese culture, gutting it of distinct, individual voices and replacing it with dull, lifeless tropes. And both big business and Big Brother keep asking young writers to effectively saw off the branches they are sitting on.

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One online writer, who goes by the name of Tiaowu, tried second guessing what would prevent his webnovel from being censored: he removed any details involving fights, religion, or lesbians. But chunks of his story kept disappearing. “You can cut off the leaves, you can cut off the branches, and the tree will live,” he wrote. “But they had me f**king cut off the entire f**king trunk.”

But there is still hope. A number of Chinese artists and writers follow neither the restless opportunism of the market, nor submit to the ever shifting and growing demands of the Party. These people, according to novelist Ge Fei, “go the other way”, often using publishers in Taiwan or, until recently, Hong Kong.

There are the surrealists born in the Fifties and Sixties — Yu Hua, Yan Lianke, Can Xue, Su Tong Mo Yan — who grapple with censored history and the absurdity of the present day in an innovative and bewitching mode known as May 35 (the imaginary date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre), in which they use metaphor, satire, surrealism, and fractured time frames to address difficult topics. Yan Lianke’s novel Dream of Ding Village is a haunting account of China’s hushed-up AIDs crisis in rural Henan, written as fiction to avoid censorship.

Meanwhile, lowly migrant workers sublimate their unacknowledged hardships on the production lines into beautiful verse in self-published magazines. Cheeky comic book writers foreground strangely subversive themes such as laziness and mediocrity as a way to poke fun at both online superheroes and the hard-working and tech-savvy youths that throng propaganda posters. And science fiction writers conjure up future societies that sit beyond the reach of political correctness and accountability.

It is unlikely these writers will ever build their own Disney World — let alone earn $18 million a year. But that’s not their aim. The diverse, not often read, landscape of Chinese fiction is full of free spirits, who stay under the radar to paint a truer portrait of Chinese society than economics and party politics reveal. According to an ancient Chinese proverb, which might be banned were it written now: “The twisted tree lives its life, while the straight tree ends up in planks.”