On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China by Margret Hillenbrand

While precarity has come to structure our contemporary life on a global scale, China remains at the margin of theoretical ruminations on precarity, a framework that has largely been deployed to describe the post-Fordist Euro-American conditions of risk and uncertainty. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China provides a timely intervention by naming neoliberal China as precarious and by illuminating a wide array of conventionally overlooked, conceptually unorthodox aesthetic practices pertinent to the precarious labor and life of China’s migrant workers, the largest underclass in human history. In so doing, Hillenbrand substantiates the conception of precarious life with all its affective intensity and epistemological contradictions, as well as resistant potential and redemptive hope, and exposes the concatenated operation of neoliberalism, post-socialism, and the authoritarian rule that outcasts the large working population to the status of zombie citizenship.

Central to Hillenbrand’s theorization of precarity is the experience of expulsion that leads to the deprivation of civic rights, a process that is encapsulated by the core idea of the book, zombie citizenship. Zombie citizenship, a state of being that is “predicated on forms of social, economic, legal, emotional, and corporeal excommunication” (p. 19), manifests both as a lived reality for China’s underclass of alienation, exploitation, and jeopardy, and as a psychology of imminent fear that is shared intensely across different classes. It thus reveals one of the most fundamental contradictions in Chinese society that precarity figures dualistically as a force of divisiveness across classes and a cultural imaginary of interclass unity, if not yet solidarity.

It is with such critical recognition of the ambivalence and contradiction inherent to the experience of precarity that On the Edge presents five compelling case studies of precarious art. Ranging from delegated performance, waste art, poetry of migrant workers, suicide shows, and livestreaming videos, these cultural practices emblematize “the fear, resentment, strife, and distrust stirred by zombie citizenship” (p. 45). When examining artworks of and by the migrant workers, On the Edge refrains from the usual humanist stance that scholars often deploy to valorize the dignity and creative agency of the underclass. Instead, Hillenbrand selects a set of highly sensational cultural texts that throw into sharp relief the harsh and brutal state of precarious life, and expose the injustice, exploitation, and affective abject in the process of production and representation.

In a time when class is increasingly seen as irrelevant in post-socialist, presumably end-of-class-struggle China, Hillenbrand’s narrative is characterized by the heightened awareness of class: the intense feelings of grievance, anger, and resentment when confronting interclass strife, and the institutional, ethical, and epistemological violence of (not) representing the underclass. In the first two chapters, Hillenbrand turns to the art world of the avant-garde, where artists staged social engagement yet failed to generate genuinely emancipatory politics. Chapter One examines delegated performance works where migrant workers were recruited with minimal compensations and treated with cruelty and contempt that further reduced the already precarious underclass to the status of “deskilled lumpen extras” (p. 60). As Hillenbrand incisively critiques, even with the proclamation of being socially radical, delegated art hardly provokes interclass empathy or solidarity; rather, by othering the underclass into zombie citizenship, this practice partakes in the actual as well as conceptual exploitation of them that exacerbates the already overloaded interclass contention and distrust. Chapter Two zeroes in on waste art, an art form in response to the recent object turn in the Chinese avant-garde. If the previous chapter illustrates that the corporeal presence—already zombified under the manipulative hands of conceptual artists—of the underclass can hardly stand as any affirmation of their agency, then this chapter further contemplates the erasure of their existence, which results in the failure of waste art to meaningfully interrogate the relationship between waste, expulsion, and labor.

From the third chapter onward, the author demonstrates her empathetic, activist intervention by recognizing the agency of the underclass, who create, consume, and even capitalize on their zombie citizenship. These grassroots performances of precarity, however eerie or provisionary, profess radical edges that defy the disciplining force of mainstream or state forces.

Chapter Three focuses on the literary taxonomy and moral economy of migrant literature, and by differentiating workers’ poetry from state-sanctioned publications, the chapter reveals the incongruity and dissonance within this artificially curated genre. Juxtaposing the dissensual voice of migrant poet Zheng Xiaoqiong and narratives of workers life commissioned by the state discourse of “harmonious society,” a contrapuntal pair fraught with tensions, the chapter illustrates how the social underclass is “either loudly declaimed or deliberately silenced” (p. 134).

Chapters Four and Five further heighten the intensity of interclass strife that is already visible or audible in the early chapters. Chapter Four quite literally revisits the performance on the edge, that is, suicide shows emerging from China’s labor protest. The precarious performance embodies class antagonism at its extreme, and yet as a fractious form, it simultaneously fosters the volatile encounter of different class actors only to lay bare their sharing of “imminent vulnerability to outcast status” (p. 200). Chapter Five studies the livestreaming performance of the abject on mobile apps, where microcelebrities with underclass backgrounds ridicule the suzhi (human quality) discourse and develop tuwei (raw, vulgar, lowbrow) subculture to both assert their underclass identities and monetize these attributes.

The book concludes by reflecting on the most violent experience of precarity, the outbreak of COVID-19. In a time when expulsion was openly legitimated in the name of a public health crisis, the Chinese underclass “were forced several steps toward more literal zombiehood” (p. 257), yet it was also a time when precarity became unprecedentedly contagious and was thus transformed into a mutual condition of being. Thus, the author still ends the book with an ambivalently hopeful note of recognizing the shared vulnerability and of envisioning that the physical and affective proximity might spark new, creative responses.

On the Edge makes several critical interventions to our understanding of precarity. First, complementing existing studies of precarity in the social sciences, the book provides a compelling narrative of diverse experiences and expressions of precarity in the cultural world and meticulously uncovers, in particular, dissonant voices from the underclass that forcefully expose frictions in socially engaged art as well as the state discourse of development and prosperity. Second, Hillenbrand positions China at the fore of theoretical discussions of precarity. Engaging with a diverse array of scholarship from both philosophical reflections on citizenship to sociological studies of labor, Hillenbrand explicates the making of a precarious society by the interplay of neoliberal and authoritarian orders.

Beyond neoliberalism and authoritarianism, Hillenbrand introduces a third descriptor, post-socialism, to designate the precarious condition of contemporary China. Witnessing the mounting interclass strife, one cannot help but wonder if post-socialism exists only as a temporal marker that signals the end of socialism in China, or if it reveals the continued relevance of socialism as fragmented memories, affects, and visions that animate antagonistic, defiant feelings of the underclass, thus challenging the seemingly totalizing nature of precarity in contemporary China.