On the Edge : Feeling Precarious in China

Winner, 2024 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies, Modern Language AssociationCharismatic artists recruit desperate migrants for site-specific performance art pieces, often without compensation.Construction workers threaten on camera to jump from the top of a high-rise building if their back wages are not paid.Users of a video and livestreaming app hustle for views by eating excrement or setting off firecrackers on their genitals.In these and many other recent cultural moments, China’s suppressed social strife simmers-or threatens to boil over. On the Edge probes precarity in contemporary China through the lens of the dark and angry cultural forms that chronic uncertainty has generated.Margaret Hillenbrand argues that a vast underclass of Chinese workers exist in “zombie citizenship,” a state of dehumanizing exile from the law and its safeguards.Many others also feel precarious-sensing that they live on a precipice, with the constant fear of falling into this abyss of