China has witnessed radical economic, political, and social transformation in the last three decades. Cultural critics, as A. James Gregor (2000) stated, have abandoned the idea to make sense of China’s development in Marxist categories (205). Marxism has, to some extent, lost explanatory immediacy, aside from occasional attempts of revival (Morgan, 2004). On the other hand, we have seen an increase in ethnographically or journalistically inspired works on China’s new economic and social conditions during the last 10-15 years by authors such as Petrus Liu (Queer Marxism in two Chinas, 2015), Wing-Chung Ho (2010), and Leslie T. Chang (Factory Girls, 2008). This session joins those scholars in their descriptive approach to the working and living conditions in contemporary China and engages critically with Marxism as an explanatory political or historical theory regarding China’s development. Further, this session steers away from grand narratives of history and turns to emerging individual voices today: How do migrant workers perceive the changes in economy and styles of living? What motivates them to move into cities? How do young Chinese evaluate the new economic possibilities for their future? Nonetheless, we wish to raise the question of Marxism’s relevancy for the actual working conditions of individuals. We contend that a re-evaluation of Marxist concepts under these new conditions allows productive discourses to emerge and contribute to a nuanced understanding of China’s social transformation.

We have selected three panelists in total and limited the time of each paper to 15 minutes, which allows 30 minutes for discussion. We will begin with “Beyond Alienation and Exploitation – A Comparative Perspective on Working Conditions in China” by Maximilian Gindorf. He offers a comparative analysis of early 19^th century perspectives on labor from Europe (by Marx and Engels specifically) and contemporary analyses of working conditions in China. He argues that 19^th century descriptions of work, especially the ideas of alienation and exploitation, have fundamentally shaped the Western understanding of “work” which then influences interpretations of contemporary China. Such transfers create and reinforce the idea of a Chinese “lateness” and tend to predict its future development based on Western experiences (e.g. Rozelle and Hell in Invisible China, 2020), while overlooking the actual individual voices (often migrant workers) who participate in the market economy.

Following, Rebecca Liu proposes a rereading of Marxist theories of the labor contract in the contemporary context of China’s multinational Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in her paper “Labor, Race, and Time in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.” She explores how migrant workers from China’s rural population come to the BRI sites with the promise of high wages but, upon arrival, find exploitative and unsafe working conditions, without the legal frameworks to challenge such conditions. Most recently, during the pandemic, many Chinese migrant workers also found themselves stranded abroad, resulting in forced labor conditions long after the expiration of their initial contracts. She directly engages with petitions and social media correspondences of BRI workers. Her paper argues against Marx’s idea that contracts are a representation of the unequal exchange of labor-power for wages, and instead contends that contracts secure in this case the reproduction of a “global China” that spans across Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

The session ends with a paper by Dan Luo entitled “The Path to a Critical Utopian Consciousness in Contemporary Chinese Science Fiction”, in which she offers a reading of laboring condition and migrant workers in three influential Chinese Science Fiction stories, Little Smarty Travels to the Future (Ye Yonglie 1978), Folding Beijing (Hao Jingfang 2014), and The Waste Tide (Chen Qiufan 2013). While Little Smarty asserts pleasant labor conditioned by a largely absent state, the other two texts deny personal fulfillment through labor in the neoliberal context. Instead, they locate hope, individual transformation, reconciliation, and even revolution, in the posthuman existence of migrant workers. She then argues that each text helps define a critical utopian consciousness that challenges a Marxist classless sociality while affirms possibilities of workers’ empowerment.

All papers engage critically with key Marxists’ concepts such as alienation, exploitation, labor, contract, utopia and hope, under the contemporary conditions of work in China, question their applicability to the individuals that live under such conditions, and offer alternative ways to rethink our ideas of work. Still, each paper offers a unique and complementary approach to our topic: historical, sociological, and literary. With sufficient time for discussion, we engage with the audience and encourage nuanced responses about working in China today.