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Xiao Hai left home at age fifteen as one of roughly three hundred million domestic migrant workers whose labor has contributed to China's rise since the 1980s. He was a factory worker in a string of cities for a good dozen years: think assembly line, overtime, exploitation, alienation. To counter the pressures of this life, he wrote poetry. In 2016 he settled in Picun, a village on the outskirts of Beijing made famous by an NGO called the Migrant Workers Home. The Home aims to advance migrant workers' social identification through cultural education. To this end, the migrant worker community works with academic and cultural professionals, media professionals, and members of the state's cultural apparatus. This interaction takes shape in a "shared space" (in Dai Jinhua's words) of cultural production and experience that blurs distinctions of official and unofficial culture and their easy association with political power and resistance, respectively. As a member of the Picun Literature Group who expertly navigates this space, Xiao Hai has become a representative of the Picun "brand," building a mediagenic public persona in the process. Who is Xiao Hai? What does his writing say? What other actors and factors shape his persona? What can we learn from all this about the nexus of precarious labor and cultural production? The stories of Picun, Xiao Hai, and migrant worker literature subvert simple oppositions of grassroots versus state discourse and unofficial versus official culture. Instead, they foreground the complexity of relations between the individual, community, and the state in China today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the transnational literary interactions in the early modern Sinographic sphere by examining the late Chosŏn writer Yi Tŏngmu's reading of an early Qing text, Liuxi Waizhuan, and its resonance in his compilation of Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ. Reconsidering the unmediated communicability of the Sinographic text, it demonstrates the ways in which Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ decoupled Liuxi Waizhuan from its local conditions of production and circulation and relocalized it to fit Chosŏn Korea's agenda of repositioning itself in the changing Sinocentric order after the downfall of the Ming. Between delocalizing and relocalizing the Sinographic text, the compilation of Noeroe Nangnak Sŏ participated in the constantly shifting meanings of loyalty to the fallen Ming, thereby diversifying the repertoire of the shared civilization in early modern East Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay examines the circulation and consumption of foreign literature in socialist China, showing that even during the most xenophobic times of High Maoism, Chinese readers had access to foreign literature through a variety of channels. An unstated though widely shared commitment to the intrinsic value of foreign culture, I argue, reveals deeply ingrained cosmopolitan practices that belie a nationalistic surface rhetoric. To trace the interest in and commitment to foreign literature, this article inspects three distinct yet overlapping modes of literary circulation: the private sphere, the restricted public sphere of internal publications, and the open public sphere. Access to foreign literature was limited, but the flow of transnational culture never stopped, as editors and readers alike perpetuated an intellectual framework that was grounded in the valorization of transnational culture and that predated the People's Republic's founding in 1949. These findings call for a reevaluation of Chinese socialist cultural consumption and production from a transnational perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]