Those without money count every single coin, today and tomorrow, counting their whole lives away, yet never counting their way to wealth. 

—Sun Cuiying, a female migrant worker in Houjie Township

A few years ago, Iceland’s tourism bureau released a campaign video that offered to liberate office workers from their never-ending grind. The video shows tourists from different countries enjoying their vacation when suddenly, notifications of work emails abruptly ruin their joy. To take care of these “vacation killjoys,” Iceland came up with a thoughtful solution: OutHorse Your Email. Tourists can outsource their email duties to an Icelandic horse, who crafts garbled out-of-office messages by walking on a gigantic keyboard. The video is, without a doubt, adorable. However, it strikes a sensitive nerve when desk jockeys see the “horses-for-hire” roaming freely through snowy mountains and green meadows, typing whenever they please, napping wherever they want. Especially when the idle lifestyle of the Icelandic horses contrasts the life of niuma in contemporary China.

Fan Lixin, Last Train Home, 2009

Documentary, 87 minutes

Courtesy EyeSteelFilm

Literally meaning “cattle and horses,” niuma has taken over mainland China’s internet in recent years and become a buzzword that refers to overworked employees. Just a short decade ago, it was known by another name—the worker. This politically charged term rooted in Marxist theory has never felt alien to the Chinese. But unlike the proletariat figure in Marxist discourse who lost their land in the nascent industrial economy and were forced to sell their labor to the factories in exchange of wages, the image of the Chinese worker varies over time. During the planned economy era, workers in state-owned enterprises in regions such as Northeast China, Hunan, and Hubei were celebrated by the state as the true “working class.” Representing the most advanced productive forces, they were hailed as the vanguards of national development, having enjoyed utmost prestige and guaranteed lifetime employment—the so-called “iron rice bowl.” At the turn of the 21st century, those ridded of the constrictive household registration system and flocked to cities for employment became known as the “migrant workers,” distinguished from the urban residents by their temporary residence permits. Another archaic, derogatory term that was used to describe them was mangliu, directly translated to “blind drifters” meaning a lot of these rural migrants flooded into the cities blindly. Following the coinage of this pejorative were large-scale “concentrated settlements” or “public security measures.” These shifting aliases reflect how mainstream Chinese society’s perception of workers has evolved. These changing attitudes have become visible in the similarly varied portrayals of Chinese workers in non-fiction cinema, which serve as a visual register of such fluctuating perceptions. 

Compared to Lumière Brothers’ groundbreaking work, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon (La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon, 1895), made in the 19th century when capitalism was in full bloom and factories were still seen as a symbol for the prosperous new world under modernization and industrialization, waves of labor movement in the 20^th century had rendered factories synonymous with an exploitative site that seized surplus value from their workers. This period of relentless resistance against oppression also saw the emergence of China’s worker-focused non-fiction cinema. Its first documentary film on workers, The May Thirtieth Shanghai Movement (Wusa huchao), was made in 1925, precisely born out of the Movement’s struggle against colonialism and the fight for workers’ rights. Filmed by Chen Jianran, founder of the Youlian Film Company along with Xu Qinfang and Liu Liangchan, it documented the strikes and protests organized by workers in Shanghai and paid special attention to the violent repression by the colonial police force. [1] The film premiered in Shanghai in June of the same year, and all box office revenues were donated to the workers on strike. During this same period, Soviet film director Vladimir Schneiderov traveled to Shanghai and Guangzhou to film the local cotton mills, the workers’ rallies, and the training sessions of armed workers in Guangdong. These reels were edited into a documentary titled The Great Flight and China’s Civil Wars (Weida de feixing yu zhongguo de guonei zhanzheng, 1925), later renamed Light in the East (Dongfang zhi guang). [2]

It is worth noting that the binary framework often proposed by Western workers’ cinema, which pits capitalists against workers, the interests of the state against individual rights, does not reflect the Chinese condition. China’s early modern history also chronicled the rise of a working class-led political party and the gradual promotion of Marxism into the nation’s dominant ideology. This suggests that the workers’ cinema has not always been a “marginal” medium; its position shifts as the very meaning of “worker” is being redefined. During the nation’s founding period, the worker was given special significance, as a symbol for revolutionary agency, only to be sorted into different social categories after the reform. Likewise, its workers’ cinema has consistently inhabited an ambiguous space between state-sanctioned media and grassroots narratives. During specific times, even the line between the two categories had become blurred. For example, in the late 1920s, documentary filmmaking on workers began incorporating narrative plots, giving rise to a wave of fictional films with working-class protagonists in the 1930s, known as China’s “left-wing films.” Cries of Women (Nvxing de nahan) from 1933 was one example. During the production of these films, the cultural elites seeking national reform found their interests highly aligned with those of the working-class laborers. Workers were not merely subjects being documented; they were also active participants in the creation and circulation of these images, who fueled a bottom-up proletariat revolution. 

During the Socialist Transformations and the three decades of planned economy, the working class played a pivotal role in China’s vision of its future. They became the cornerstone of the new national blueprint. Chinese film scholar Fang Fang characterizes the period from 1949 to 1983 as Chinese documentary filmmaking’s “heroic age.” Despite severe material shortages and technical constraints, the few documentaries produced during this time were dedicated to celebrating national heroes and documenting socialist achievements. [3] With the implementation of joint state-private ownership, film production companies came entirely under state control. The resulting worker documentaries therefore represented the ethos of the state. In “Sanba” Female Power-line Workers (“Sanba” nvzi daidian zupyeban, 1974) produced by the Pearl River Film Company, female electrical workers are seen bravely taking high-risk jobs. [4] These films paint workers as the embodiment of a nationwide idealism: portrayed as heroes in a nonfiction medium, they are simultaneously turned into fiction and highly abstract icons of heroism. 

As economic reforms took hold, documentaries produced by mainstream media in the 1990s began to focus on personal stories. This turn became evident in Hubei Television’s 1998 production Fourth-oldest Sister (Sijie) and China Central Television’s 2002 documentary Zhang Xiyong, both of which capture the lives of laid-off workers as they adapted to a new social reality. This storytelling approach persisted in more recent productions such as CCTV’s 2015 docuseries Craftsmen of the Nation (Daguo gongjiang). Set against the backdrop of a changing society, the series highlights individual stories of diligence and success. It was an attempt to reintegrate workers, who were derailed by systemic reforms, into a brand-new narrative of national development. 

This is not to say that the new turns in mainstream documentary-making aligned the varied values and aesthetics upheld by independent documentary filmmakers. Toward the end of the 20th century, as China’s economy transitioned from plan to market, the growing popularity and accessibility of digital camcorders boosted the development of Chinese independent documentaries and their international exposure. With their lightweight film cameras, independent documentarians slipped into factories and construction sites, places where the mainstream media’s bulky equipment couldn’t or wouldn’t venture. They focused their lenses on ordinary workers, workers who deviated from the historic archetype of the revolutionary proletariat. Their everyday life was their cinema. 

Wang Bing, “Remaining Images,” 1994–2001

102 photographs

Courtesy the artist and Magician Space

Two thematic threads emerged from the independently produced documentaries on workers’ lives at the turn of the 21st century. One is marked by a return to homelands and rural townships: the camera observes the workers from the bygone era of planned economy, documenting their fate after the country’s economic restructuring. Dedicated to the mining community of his hometown, Lin Xin’s Sanlidong (2007) and Gas (Wasi, 2011) are collective portraits of miners from his parents’ generation. Like a ghost, the camera winds through the decays of former mine sites, tracing the trails of mining carts into the darkness of shafts. Its silent eyes beg the question: what do those lost times mean to us? Such imagery recalls the two-hour-long continuous shot in Tie Xi Qu—the industrial era fades into the emptiness on camera, now a blank canvas left for the viewers to fill in. Set against the grim wintry landscape of northeast China, Yu Guangyi’s Timber Gang (Mubang, 2006) follows the life of local loggers. To the forest, they are both intruders from the outside, a stand-in for industry’s encroachment of nature, and an inseparable part, sinking into the endless of nights with the Khingan Mountains. They believe in the spirits of nature like the indigenous inhabitants would, seeking solace from shamans in times of illness. When they die, boats made of lumbers from the forest trees will carry their bodies back to the mountains. They seem to live simultaneously within and without the system. 

Edward Burtynsky, Manufacturing #17, 2005

Chromogenic print

Courtesy Zeitgeist Films

The other thread traces the massive wave of migration in the 1990s. Films of this category follow the footsteps of migrant laborers seeking employment in metropolitan areas, moving from villages to cities, from China’s wilder west to its urban east. In writing about the film Manufactured Landscapes (2006), a documentary on Edward Burtynsky’s eponymous photo series of China, Zhang Xiaodan pinpoints the potent message underlying both the photos and the film: “Modernization in China has altered the trajectory of people’s lives as well as the landscapes of their nation.” [5]  Among the countless changes brought by urbanization, the fractured landscapes that ensued rural-to-urban migration was indeed its most noticeable evidence. Consequently, China’s “floating population” had become one of the nation’s most pressing social issues of the early 2000s. In their host cities, rural migrants struggled to access the same rights and social benefits enjoyed by local hukou holders—the registered urban residents. This problem was especially pronounced among construction workers. The whirlwind of urban development created an enormous demand for construction labor, but workforce protections failed to keep pace. From his “Migrant Labor” documentary series, Hu Jie’s short films House Demolition Workers (Chaifang gong, 1997) and Scaffolders (Jiazi gong, 1998) were a jarring note that disrupted the city symphony of the late 1990s. The narration of Scaffolders begins with “a friend of mine …”—an opener that would become a meme on Zhihu, China’s equivalent of Quora. Today, we already know that this friend could be anyone. In Hu’s film, this “friend” is Xiao Zheng, who leaves his wife and elderly mother at home to work as a scaffolder in Nanjing. Though the biggest wish of his wife is for him to find a job that doesn’t require aerial work, Xiao Zheng must climb up the scaffolds even without a safety harness. This “friend” is also twenty-year-old Xiao Shen. He keeps his work secret from his parents and spends his nights curled up on a tiny bed barely a meter wide. House Demolition Workers reveals the recruitment process common in construction work, which relies on the hometown connections of the contractor, known colloquially as baogongtou, to gather a team of migrant laborers. It also provides insight into the gender dynamics in migrant families: workers often migrate as a family unit, with contractors’ wives taking on the additional duty of cooking communal meals for male workers. 

Zhou Hao, Houjie Township, 2022

Documentary, 55 minutes

Courtesy the artist

Deleuze argues that nomadic movements dissolve the spatialized structure of hierarchy and produce a new, smooth space, which entails more freedom for individuals. Here, the nomadic soldier and the worker follow “a shared line of flight.” [6] It is because of this very potential of movement that human mobility inevitably falls under the control and confines of existing structures. For local governments, population influx at a massive scale was clearly understood as a new public security challenge. To capture migratory movements, some directors utilized the movability of the camera itself. For example, in Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home (2009), the camera physically follows migrant workers as they shuttle between the city and the countryside. Others responded with non-movement, using the stillness of space to contrast the incessant flow of workers. During the making of his 2002 film Houjie Township, director Zhou Hao’s camera never left Santun Village, an urban village in Dongguan, with most of the shooting taking place at one location—a rental building known to the local police as “No. 4432.” But under the camera’s fixed stare, migrant workers are always on the move, making brief stays in one of the rooms before hurrying to their next lodging. For the city’s law enforcement, Houjie was a breeding ground for crime. Qi Xiaoguang’s Women’s Dormitory (Nvzi sushe, 2010) adopted a similar approach, which was shot inside a “women’s dormitory”—a hostel that charged a daily rate of just 2 yuan. Its earliest tenants were female migrant workers who fled the countryside and the domestic violence back home. With a gig market located right downstairs, the cramped hostel created a transitional zone for rural women, an exit from rural society and an entrance to the urban world. Nevertheless, despite the physical mobility of these female workers, they were never able to fully escape this transitional space. Their circumstances recalled the invisible divides that segregate the folding city in Hao Jingfang’s novella Folding Beijing: stuck in the folds of society, these women seemed to have untethered themselves from the constraints of their rural past, yet unable to fully integrate into an urban life with their limited wages from manual labor. 

These harsh realities have proven Deleuze’s proposal—that physical movement alone can counter the social production of space co-conspired by capitalism and power—a symptom of wishful optimism. A migrant worker poured out their grievances in an online post: living in an urban village in Guangzhou, they survived on one meal a day. Someone commented: “I’m so jealous of the migrant workers (dagong ren) today. Nobody asks for your temporary residence permit on the streets anymore. No more beatings from security guards, no more being called mangliu by newspapers. You even got to voice your complaints on the internet.” This remark drew pushback from fellow netizens. Through their debates, we can catch a glimpse of the conditions of two generations of workers, of what has changed and what has not. Since the early 2000s, with the household registration system further loosened, migrant workers have received increased access to basic rights. These included governmental policies that ensured their children’s right to education, as documented in Bitter Sweet Ballad (2023). Produced by Tsinghua University’s Tsingying Film, the documentary captures the life of students in a “migrant school.” But some situations remained unshakable: the population decline failed to enforce a structural change of the labor-intensive industries, and the poor work environments in manufacturing facilities showed no sign of improvement. Ironically, new technologies only added to the workers’ struggles: digital labor platforms exploited the crowdsourcing model to evade the responsibilities of labor protection; e-commerce companies forced workers into voluntary overtime through unconscionable contracts … With benefits from the economic upswing almost depleted, the society found itself in a painful stagnation. The collective dull ache tingled through the NetEase News documentary 30 Years of Laboring Like This (2024), which is no longer extant on the Chinese internet. Perhaps, one of the few remaining consoling changes was: the new generation of workers is no longer silent. The aforementioned online rebuttal was a sign of them standing up for themselves, and their counter-arguments were proven true by short-form videos circulating social media. 

Li Yifan, Sha Ma Te, Wo Ai Ni (We Were Smart), 2019

Documentary, 125 minutes

Courtesy the artist

Emerging technologies have outlined another potential line of flight, a new escape route through the cinematic medium. While the financial inaccessibility and learning curve of the digital film camera remained a challenge for some, smartphones with built-in cameras and short-form video platforms have taken down a substantial barrier for grassroots filmmaking. The traditional media landscape had typically rendered workers a voiceless crowd: unable to speak for themselves, they must be spoken for by media professionals. Unlike their parents’ generation, the workers of contemporary China are active producers of short videos online and prolific documentarians of their daily life and work. Some documentary directors therefore “crowdsourced” young workers as their collaborators. For example, the production team of We Were Smart (Sha Ma Te, Wo Ai Ni, 2019) purchased from assembly line workers 915 videos they filmed in their workshops. The incorporation of these video clips enabled a more intimate portrait of the world lived by these young workers with dramatic hairdos. We Were Smart subverts the image of lower-class workers typical of fictional films: the worker is no longer a middle-aged man squatting in the corner with a cigarette in their mouth but a baby-faced teenager. His mouth is always chewing on betel nuts, just to get through the night shifts without dozing off. For them, cigarettes and coffee are too much of a luxury. Their strange “Shamate hair” is one of the last proud manifestations of Youth. 

Sun Hong, This is Life, 2020

Documentary, 82 minutes

Courtesy Daxiang Dianying

This is Life (2020), produced by Tsingying Film, is a documentary composed entirely of user-generated content (UGC). Hoping to appeal to mainstream cinema goers, it adopts a relatively mellow tone. Crowdsourced from 509 creators, the film is a montage of short video clips directly taken from social media platforms, all in vertical formats. Unlike the brutal candor of We Were Smart, This is Life tries to weave an image of the “everyday poetics” through cinematic editing. A worker carrying bags of cement is likened to an athlete poised in front of the starting line; the video of a female scaffolder raising her hands midair is juxtaposed with an image of the Olympic torch held up high. Admirers of the film lauded it as an “ode to the laborers,” that it “aims to inspire through a positive, uplifting emotional connection, not an anatomy of societal issues through its purposefully induced pain.” [7] It was also praised for demonstrating a humanitarian ethos and respect for ordinary workers. Its critics considered it an over-romanticization of migrant labor, pointing out the film’s potential exploitation of workers. After the premiere of City Dreams in 2019, the film was another attempt by the elite culture makers at uniting grassroots narratives and national discourse, and bringing it to mainstream cinema. It was a different attempt: with the camera being handed down, the romanticizing filter can no longer obscure the authentic footage of real life. The workers today are expressing themselves with creativity, and their creative expressions are displayed on big screens—this, in itself, signals new possibilities. 

Li Yifan, Sha Ma Te, Wo Ai Ni (We Were Smart), 2019

Documentary, 125 minutes

Courtesy the artist

Coincidentally, the gravity of the term “worker” was gradually dissolved. In the Chinese language of today, worker proper is primarily found in academic and legal texts. The new generation of workers often jokingly self-identify as dagongren and niuma. On Douyin and Xiaohongshu, a search for the keyword “dagongren” yields a massive number of videos and content about workers, uploaded by the workers themselves. The search results also include a number of content by the traditionally defined white-collar workers. The lack of social welfare and the pervasive issue of overwork have blurred the long-established boundaries between manual labor and office work as well as their associated social classes. As college graduates share the struggle of finding a high-paying job with decent benefits, they too label themselves as dagongren or niuma in self-deprecation. 

With “workers” from any class background becoming “dagong creators,” the expansiveness of participatory filmmaking on short-form video platforms has moved beyond traditional documentary-making and its reliance on one or a few key creators. It also distinguishes itself from community-based filmmaking initiatives that, led by cultural elites, are meant to empower the masses. This emergent mode of filmmaking is not “represented” by any artist or anyone’s work, because its panoramic portrayal of the present is made of countless pieces of individual stories, recorded by these individuals. Food delivery drivers taking selfie videos, everyday vignettes dispatched from construction sites and factories, nostalgic music playing on the phones of homesick Uyghur workers, along a shore far from home, Hmong scaffolders forming choirs on WeChat, singing the songs of their native mountains, and the invisible labor in domestic spaces—one after another, they appear before our eyes, on our tiny glowing screens. These video fragments are less a spontaneous act of documenting by a “community-for-itself” of young workers than a faint flicker of the light of life, shone through individuals who, under the crushing weight of industrialization, resist a fate of alienation. Nevertheless, this collective has undoubtedly grown into an alternative archive of contemporary Chinese workers’ life history. Perhaps, for today’s documentarians who focus their cameras on the workers, who seek to make documentaries of and for our time, the mission has extended beyond bringing cameras into factories. They must find ways to excavate and preserve these archives, guiding them through the algorithmic barriers into wider view. 

Notes:

1. Fang Fang, A History of Documentary in China (China Drama Publishing House, 2003), 40–43.
2. Ibid, 58–61.
3. Ibid, 117. 
4. A Brief History of News Film in China (Nanjing University Press), ed. Liu Guodian, 134–41. 
5. Zhang Xiaodan, “A Path to Modernization: A Review of Documentaries on Migration and Migrant Labor in China,” International Labor and Working-Class History (2010), 174–89.
6. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, trans. Jiang Yuhui, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Shanghai Bookstore Publishing House, 2010), 582.
7. Zhan Qingsheng, “In the Age of Filmmaking-for-All, This Is Life Is an ‘Unprecedented’ Experiment in Cinema,” Beijing Youth Daily Art Criticism (Beiqing Yiping), January 29, 2024. 

Text by Noeng Naz

Translated by Sixing Xu

Noeng Naz is an unemployed drifter, a student in visual anthropology, and an ethnographic documentary filmmaker.