China’s modern economic prowess has been driven, in large part, by a vast pool of migrant labour: people streaming from the countryside to the cities in search of work in the factories that make the world's products. In 2021, there were at least 171 million migrant workers across the country.

By then, Zhen Xiaoqiong had left her own factory jobs near Dongguan and launched a new career as a poet. Between 2006 and 2015, she had also compiled interviews of her fellow workers. The profiles she wrote of them showed the soul-numbing hardship of their lives in such detail that they were considered too incendiary to release in China.

This past week, Equator published four of these stories, the first such publication anywhere in the world. They were translated by Eleanor Goodman, who has known Zheng for more than a decade. Here, Goodman writes about her first encounter with Zheng, and about the unflinching honesty of her work.

Eleanor Goodman

When I first met Zheng Xiaoqiong in 2013, she was introduced to me as a rising star of the Chinese poetry scene. I was a young, unpublished visiting scholar at Peking University, and she had been tasked with showing me around some edifying ancient site in Guangzhou, about which I remember nothing. Our conversation was so absorbing that we talked well past the start of the city’s notorious rush hour. Zheng debated trying to hail a cab to the literary banquet

we were due at, but this was before the ubiquity of Didi and ride share apps. Finally, she told me to climb on her motor scooter, instructing me not to put my feet down no matter what happened. As we ripped through traffic, Zheng’s dark hair streaming in my face and the car horns blaring as we swerved around them, I thought to myself: This woman is either a little unhinged or totally fearless.

It wasn’t until I began translating Iron Moon, an anthology of 21 migrant worker poets, that I came to understand Zheng’s position within Chinese poetry circles. She burst onto the scene as a migrant worker poet, after labouring for seven years in factories around Dongguan. She wrote powerfully of 12-hour days on the assembly line, denuded rural landscapes, illegal business practices, the GDP, physical mutilation, prostitution, mental scars, capitalism, left-behind families, amenorrhea, unpaid wages, despair, loyalty, love. She wrote primarily about the lives of those around her, her poems restoring individuality and agency to people stripped of everything but their usefulness as cogs in the machine.

But those cogs have names and backgrounds, desires and convictions and creative impulses. As the still-lamented worker-run Museum of Migrant Worker Culture and Art – once located in the worker village of Picun outside Beijing, it was demolished by officials in 2013 – amply demonstrated, these people do not just silently endure the global capitalist system. They are painters, filmmakers, fiction writers, poets, photographers, memoirists, musicians, composers, playwrights, multimedia artists. They are, in other words, people with the same creative urges as anyone else. But to make art bone-tired from endless 12-hour days on your feet, never knowing if your work will ever be seen, let alone taken seriously, and might very well get you in trouble with the duty manager, you have to be a little unhinged, or else totally fearless.

We asked Goodman to recommend five migrant artists and writers who capture the experiences of China’s workers.

Migrant Culture Workers

• The street musician, songwriter, porter, and former music teacher Sun Heng co-founded the Picun NGO Migrant Workers’ Home and served as the Director of the Museum of Worker Culture and Art. He sings sensitively about the many social and practical issues migrant workers face.

• The “worker who died for your iPhone,” Xu Lizhi, became known as a symbol of assembly line workers after taking his own life in 2014. A few of his poems are here, and more will appear in my translation Assembly Line Sculpture, forthcoming in 2026.

• Wang Liuyun grew up in rural poverty in Hunan and cleans office buildings in Beijing for a living. She has also built a reputation online and in the art world for her spectacularly colourful and expressive paintings.

• Lijia Zhang now writes in English, but she was born in Nanjing and worked in a missile factory as a young woman. She’s written a moving memoir, Socialism is Great!, as well as a novel, Lotus, centred around prostitution in contemporary Shenzhen.

• The director of We Were Smart, Li Yifan, is not a migrant worker. But the documentary is part of a new crowdsourced filmmaking movement and is composed largely of footage taken by workers with their cell phones, showing intimate moments of hardship, joy, connection, and ebullient self-expression.

Alongside Zheng’s oral histories, we published a set of photographs taken by Zhan Youbing, himself a rural transplant who worked in factories in Guangdong for close to a decade. Here is Zhan, in his own words, recounting his surprising turn to photography, and his project to document the lives of his fellow workers.

Zhan Youbing

I come from a rural background, but I was never interested in farming. In 1995, after being discharged from the People’s Armed Police, I faced a choice: either to return to Miaotan, my native mountain village in central Hubei, to accept the crushing fate of an agricultural labourer, or to follow my sister, who had secured a job at a toy factory in Guangdong through a state labour scheme. I chose the latter. For three decades I worked there – first in Shenzhen, then in Dongguan – as a security guard as an administrative manager. At one point I managed a team of nearly 500 security personnel at an electronics factory.

I came to photography by accident. The electronics factory published an internal newsletter, whose overworked editor asked me to assist with taking pictures. That is how I learned that photography is not difficult, and that is how I caught the bug. In 2002 I purchased a second-hand camera and a textbook of the New York Institute of Photography; in 2005 I began uploading images to my blog; and in 2012 I left to become a photojournalist. In all I have amassed some 1.7 million photographs and 14 terabytes of video footage.

Migrant workers have been my constant subject. My parents were uneducated and could not afford to visit Guangdong; so I sent them pictures to explain what factory life is all about. Gradually the historical significance of our experience dawned on me. People around the world buy products that are “Made in China”, but no one knows about the people who make these products.

This July, after my photobook Thirty Years of Migrant Labour was published, many workers shared their thoughts about it on social media. Let me quote a few of their responses:

“This is the authentic record of China's migrant workers on the assembly line – a testament of conscience!”

“My youth was exported along with the products. I came to work in Dongguan in 2007, and it’s nearly twenty years now.”

“In the nineties, I worked for eight years as a sewing machine operator, doing overtime until my hands were sweaty and black. I was left with no time to spend with family or raise children. My days were lost to threading needles and pedalling machines. By the end, I still couldn't sew a whole garment myself.”