ABSTRACT
Moving away from Guo’s and Han’s literary works and entrepreneurial practices that reinforce and contest the mainstream ideology of China Dream simultaneously, Chapter Three zooms in on the other end of the youth spectrum, namely, young precariats driven to the margins of a neoliberal youth economy. In the Chinese context, this social stratum-in-the-making mainly consists of migrant workers and “ant tribes” (floating populations of unemployed or underemployed college graduates) whose lives are dominated by deprivations, risks, and precarities. This chapter focuses on a close analysis of a set of alternative youth literary works about and by these young precariats at the interface of a larger socio-economic restructuring and a shifting literary genealogy of representing the working-class subject. Lu Nei’s Young Babylon deals with a young industrial worker, a disappearing subject in the genre of contemporary Chinese youth literature. Fang Fang’s The Individual Sadness of Tu Ziqiang follows a rural youth’s privatized hope of joining the urban creative class with self-betterment and self-exploitation of his youthful body vis-à-vis his every reality of living as an abject member of the “ant tribe” on the peripheries of the urban modernity. In addition, thanks to the widespread use of “small” media (decentralized social media in contrast to state-controlled mass media), the creative writings of belittled young migrant workers also get disseminated far and wide. In the place of a utopian vision of a progressive and expansive modernity, the central trope for rite of passage has been reinvented as a retrotopic journey to turn backward in time and inward to a geographic and psychological interior, in the opposite movement of a futuristic, rising China with a splurge of youth economy.
