By Margaret Hillenbrand
Reviewed by Shaoling Ma
MCLC Resource Center Publication (Copyright May, 2025)
Margaret Hillenbrand. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 409 pp. ISBN 9780231212151 (Paperback)/ ISBN 9780231212144 (Hardback)/ ISBN 9780231559232 (E-book)
On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China scrutinizes the role that contemporary cultural forms play in rousing feelings of precarity among the underclass—marginalized rural and urban Chinese populations subject to internal expulsion or what the book terms “zombie citizenship”—and its less disenfranchised counterparts. Rooted in cultural studies but with an ambitious interdisciplinary arc spanning sociology, art history, anthropology, political economy, and the law, Margaret Hillenbrand conceives of performance art, visual art about waste, workers’ poetry, suicidal protests, and short video and livestreaming apps as “factious forms,” which stage and vivify class strife at a time when the Chinese ruling party has banished class as part of its political lexicon. On the Edge extends existing scholarship on the well-acknowledged problems of inequality and migrant labor in the People’s Republic of China by excoriating the less perceptible threats of social descent and civic jeopardy confronting cultural workers, online platform employees, unemployed university graduates, tech workers, and other people not usually associated with the underclass. This book decisively rectifies China’s absence from influential discourses of precarity over the last two decades; more subtly, it marshals resurging discussions in China studies and beyond on the increasingly troubled relation between aesthetics and politics under late capitalism. It is the stakes of cultural production that are most salient in Hillenbrand’s searing study: do aesthetic practices that reincite class as a political category assume or reject their own commodification? In other words, are the cultural practices in Hillenbrand’s consideration independent from the material determinations from which they emerge?
The “Preface” opens with the 2017 fire in Daxing’s Xinjian urban village that forced the mass evacuation of migrant workers, provoking public outrage, an ensuing artistic-activist documentary, and a subsequent scholarly consensus on the disaster’s silver lining of civic solidarity. While the author sets out to examine the “vibrant, iconoclastic” cultural forms shaped by Chinese experiences of precarity (xi), the Daxing fire, doubling as a figurative expulsion, leads Hillenbrand methodologically away from a more conservative reading of cultural production—as shaped by precarity—toward a riskier assertion that culture generates precarity’s “ambient mood of jeopardy” (xviii).
The “Introduction” then delves into the many intersecting concepts that buttress the book’s arguments. Hillenbrand explains her choice of “underclass” as an umbrella term for differently disenfranchised social groups, who, as surplus populations facing formal and informal expulsions, become “zombie” citizens tagged with socio-legal-economic contagion. With this interlacing set of terms, On the Edge centers China in Euro-American discourses of precarity without flattening the former into a cultural particular of a more universalizable genus. Yet, as this dense introduction draws to a close, Hillenbrand also dismantles the numerous conceptual scaffolds made up of the “underclass,” “zombie citizenship” and “precarity,” which, while significant as an interdisciplinary ensemble, appear secondary to the central method of cultural studies. It is cultural productions, albeit more unconventional and relatively underrepresented ones, that stage, or, better yet, aggravate the “darker feelings” of zombie precarity permeating the rest of the book (49). Despite the weight attached to feeling, which appears in the subtitle, the book resists the full lure of affect theory. With nods to Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism” and Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling,” as well as to recent expressions of sang 丧 or “despondent” culture amidst the sense of meaningless competition known as “involution” in the Chinese context, Hillenbrand relies instead on her particular formulation of the cliff edge to capture the spatial-affective connotations of social descent.
Chapter 1, “The Delegators” dissects one of the more suspect cultural producers the book discusses: performance artists who hire migrant workers in ethically dubious and often exploitative live presentations in urban settings. Hillenbrand draws from Claire Bishop’s work to examine a range of such delegated performances, all organized by male artists working in the 2000s, which have mostly slipped under the radar of reviewers and scholars more concerned with targeting feelgood, socially engaged, and hence more legibly progressive contemporary Chinese art—and for good reason. Whereas the chapter begins by evaluating these works, rather generously, as oscillating between reification for reification’s sake and a more critical exposé (60-1),[1] it ends up doing more than simply casting these works as “testaments” to precarity (93). When Hillenbrand writes of how Yang Zhenzhong’s 杨振中 Spring Story (春天的故事), sponsored by the cultural wing of the Shanghai Siemens plant, has workers recite, unbeknownst to them, snippets of Deng Xiaoping’s speech in the atomized mannerism of the assembly line; when she censures Yu Ji’s 余极photographed scroll of rows of female migrants hired to wash his feet in Records of Footwashing (洗足图志), the author instead shows that such performances, through their production processes and circulations, temporarily transform migrant workers into paid art laborers and therefore directly and actively partake in the political economy itself.
The absence of laboring bodies in art, however, can invite the same critique as their hypervisibility. Hillenbrand’s question in Chapter 2 is effectively simple: what do we make of “waste” artworks that are oddly devoid of the actual figure of the waste picker? Contemporary Chinese visual culture’s favor for ecological themes and object-oriented, materialist aesthetics deprive the underclass waste workers of their subjectivity and account for their presence on the cliff’s edge, while the artists themselves sift, collect, and aestheticize junk. Like the delegated performances of chapter 1, the resulting visual forms maintain a bleak one-way street between artists and the exploited underclass. Hence while scholars Hillenbrand cites such as Nicholas Bourriaud and Michele Serres have conceptualized waste as crossing the object-subject and human-non-human divides, only two works, Wang Jiuliang 王久良’s documentary Plastic China (塑料中国, 2016), and Li Jikai 李继开’s series of paintings, The Waste Pickers (拾荒者, 2014), self-consciously depict actual waste pickers and refuse as generating co-constitutive subject-object relations. Theory and practice diverge once more; waste art, most of it anyway, visually reproduces the rift between the artworld and the lowly work of waste picking and its found objects that inspires the artists. Given this rigid social differentiation, it is difficult to see how art contributes to the book’s definition of precarity as a dark feeling threatening both actual waste pickers and artists. That is to say, Hillenbrand’s thesis that precarity inhibits solidarity certainly holds, but the accompanying argument that such precarity extends beyond the lowest underclass to the artists themselves stands on shakier grounds. Ultimately, the chapter’s provocative suggestion of ragpicking as a “method” for mounting interclass tensions risks being a privilege only for the artist and critic.
If chapter 1’s exploitative “bodyworks” parallels chapter 2’s appropriative “waste works,” chapter 3 makes a contrapuntal pairing between two sets of texts formally premised upon iteration: the highly regulated lexicon in Zheng Xiaoqiong’s 郑小琼migrant worker poems, and the formulaic twinning of self-reliance and humility in a state-endorsed magazine for migrant workers, Migrant Worker’s Bosom Friend (打工知音). As the structural bridge of the five-chapter book, “The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists” is the only chapter devoted to literature and the print medium. Through deft close readings of Zheng’s use of poetic imagery arranged around affective and environmental lexical axes, which also zoom out to detect a recursive pattern across a thirty-seven poem corpus, Hillenbrand commends such rhythms for expressing the numbing, iterative drudgeries of factory work. Such praise for Zheng’s positive transposing of aesthetic form to material production, however, begs the question of why, in chapter 1, Hillenbrand assesses Yang Zhenzhong’s Spring Story negatively, despite the fact that it depicts the Siemens factory workers’ segmented speech in ways that also mimic their everyday production line work. An easy answer may be that class identity makes the difference. Zheng, despite her later departure from these more politically charged poems, started out as a migrant worker herself. On the other hand, Migrant Workers’ Bosom Friend, which claims to feature real-life stories of migrant workers but whose formulaic rags-to-riches and riches-to-rags stories are penned by professional editors and journalists, thus offers a negative, reifying case of repetition much like Yang’s Siemens-sponsored, delegated performance.
As I observed at the beginning of this review, it is the stakes of cultural production, of what makes a work recognizable as “cultural” in the first place (47), that On the Edge defiantly raises. Chapter 4, “The Cliffhangers,” confronts these questions full on. Unlike the works in the first three chapters, suicide shows are performed by the most desperate of workers, most of them in the construction industry, who threaten to jump off high buildings if their wage arrears are not paid. Hillenbrand’s analysis grants these performers’ rights to the cultural means of obtaining their economic value. Incorporating Marx’s insight that surplus value under capitalism is created by workers in-excess of their paid wages, I would add that if a suicide show ends happily—where the boss shows up to pay—what the performance, widely posted on video-sharing sites, ends up enacting is still a cruelly compressed vision of the circuit of production, exchange, and circulation in which the worker is trapped, whether they are physically on or off the ledge. The codification of the suicide shows on social media into its own recognized genre open to platform extractions—the subject of the next chapter—would thus dialogue well with recent works on the relation between art and wages, of which Leigh Claire La Berge’s Wages Against Artwork: Decommodified Labor and the Claims of Socially Engaged Art (2019) is exemplary. In light of the above, the remaining chapter’s assessment of “real” artists who imagine the rooftop, cliffhanging, and other vertiginous scenarios as partaking in socio-affective modes of uncertainty similar to the suicide-show performers deserves further analysis. Suffice to say that it is not simply the cultural performativity of suicide shows that are made possible by “the tense interface between different social groups” (199): the sum of capitalist relations necessitates this “interface.”[2]
Thus, it is to the digital interface that chapter 5, “The Microcelebrities” turns. Here, Hillenbrand zooms in on the spectacularization of the abject in the Chinese app Kuaishou 快手, whose users, a majority of whom hail from the rural countryside as well as China’s third- and fourth-tier cities, have originated the tuwei 土味 style—approximately translatable into lowbrow, crude, bawdy, and offensive content—that reject the state’s moral economy of “human quality” or suzhi (素质). Hillenbrand contends that performers who belch and gorge on worms, feces, and even light bulbs in front of the camera revel in their status as zombie citizens unfit to join the plethora of audience-pleasing, meticulously dolled-up, and filtered microcelebrities on other livestreaming platforms. The social tensions and ostensible threat that such extreme parading of underclass taste ignite are most apparent in the vitriol hurled at Kuaishou videos on websites such as Bilibili, Zhihu, and Wukong. While such trolling postures as class superiority, it also paradoxically effects the opposite: performances of abjection, as Julia Kristeva reminds us, repulse while still drawing the spectator toward the menacing proximity of the cliff edge. In contrast, Zhu Shengze’s 朱声仄 documentary Present.Perfect (完美现在时, 2019), which edits together footage gathered from Kuaishou and other livestreaming sites, strips them of tuwei’s raw energies and fatalism in favor of a visual cohesion that, argues Hillenbrand, aesthetically disciplines low-brow performers to stay within their class. Like chapter 3’s drawing of the thin but unerasable line between vocalizing and ventriloquizing the underclass, the creator’s class identity plays a not insignificant role. This is how On the Edge’s insistence on culture as “factious forms” cautiously acknowledges workers’ creative agency as a function of class antagonisms and exploitations.
On the Edge centers each of its chapters on a specific figure or cultural producer skirting the edges between citizenry and non-citizenry, the reifier and reified. Following this schema, in the Conclusion Hillenbrand distinguishes health workers, hagiographically depicted in state- and grassroots-led art, from delivery drivers, whose zombiehood, fueling public fears of infection, crystalizes precarity’s dark feelings. While the virus only recognizes bodies as vectors of transmission, its logic is ultimately social and thus always uneven. I thus find the notion of informal or “flexi-expulsion” (xiii), which Hillenbrand first raised in the preface, returning in her conclusion to substantiate how discourses about expulsion are in turn caught in their own “digital enclosures,” to invoke Mark Andrejevic’s term. Controversies around Fang Fang’s 方方 Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City (武汉日记), and the online, xenophobic backlash toward the book’s Chinese-English translator, Michael Berry, is a case in point.[3] The Xi government’s zero-Covid policies became global targets of both liberal critique and anti-liberal praise, while everyday Chinese online experiences in the Weibo and WeChat multiverse were selectively disseminated over the Anglophone internet. Insofar as histories of the global pandemic remain to be written, it is fair for Hillenbrand to remain skeptical of any conclusive sense of shared precarity.
As for my opening question of whether aesthetic practices that reincite class as a political category can be wrested from their material determinations, On the Edge proffers a resounding no. And yet, this response only begets further reflections on culture and its material base’s exact relationship, the affinities and contradictions of which have troubled cultural studies in the past and will continue to do so in the future. As such, the book extends earlier scholarly inquiries into aesthetics and politics, such as Ban Wang’s The Sublime Figure of History: Aesthetics and Politics in Twentieth Century China (1997); Kang Liu’s Aesthetics and Marxism: Chinese Aesthetic Marxists and their Western Contemporaries (2000), and joins more recent works such as Hentyle Yapp’s Minor China: Method, Materialism, and the Aesthetic (2021); Petrus Liu’s The Specter of Materialism: Queer Theory and Marxism in the Age of the Beijing Consensus (2022); and Jennifer Dorothy Lee’s Anxiety Aesthetics: Maoist Legacies in China, 1978-1985 (2024). Hillenbrand extends post-post critique’s return to questions of social and ideological relations and invites further inquiries into the Maoist legacy of elevating culture to a revolutionary tool alongside György Lukács’ questioning of the possibility of the work of art under capitalism—without dogmatically parroting either the Chinese or Western Marxist traditions. At times, the book’s sustained close readings of its case studies obviate the need for intersecting theoretical terms; repeated overlays of “zombie citizenship,” “cliff’s edge,” “the underclass,” and “precarity” often encumber the book’s overall clarity and conceptual conciseness. Such minor contestations aside, I commend On the Edge for its unwavering moral intelligence.
Shaoling Ma
Cornell University
NOTES:
[1] Here, Hillenbrand draws from Claire Bishop’s distinction.
[2] For an elaboration of the digital interface and capitalism, see Seb Franklin. 2024. “Reproduction at the Interface.” Representations 1 (Feb. 2024): 63–91.
[3] See Choy, Howard Y. F. “Review of Wuhan Diary: Dispatches from a Quarantined City.” MCLC Resource Center Publication (Aug. 2020).