Since farmers’ mass migration from the countryside to cities in the 1980s, the self-expression of this group has been vague. From the perspective of cultural communication, there are two new worker cultures: one refers to the new workers as part of the cultural backdrop rather than the foreground from the perspective of others in the mass media, and the other is a more self-expressive new worker culture created through cultural borrowing and cultural appropriation. The former is passive and passively expressed, and the latter is a relatively independent and conscious expression. In the era of mobile Internet, vulnerable groups like new workers have more possibilities for media empowerment. However, amid the dominance of platforms and the Internet traffic economy, the image of new workers as “the landscape from the perspective of others”, is easier to be subject to stereotypes and easier to be popularised as well. This shows that simple technological changes do not necessarily bring about the improvement of social relations.
Compared with the commercialized mass culture and cultural industry, since the founding of new China, a mass literary and artistic system relying on trade unions, the Communist Youth League, women's federations and other mass organizations has been formed to provide cultural and artistic services to groups through grass-roots organizations. In this process, public cultural services have been absent for the new workers who are in a state of mobility because they are neither urban residents nor living in rural areas for a long time. In the middle and late 1990s, some social welfare organizations serving this new worker group appeared one after another, such as the Home of Migrant Girls, and the Home of Workers. In addition to providing legal advice and labor protection to new workers, these public welfare institutions also organized various cultural and artistic activities to enrich the cultural life of new workers. In this context, cultural phenomena such as the "Workers’ Spring Festival Gala", New Workers' Orchestra, New Workers' Drama, New Workers' Literature sprang forth. Different from the image of new workers from the perspective of other groups in mass culture, these new worker cultures tinted with the color of mass literature and art were created by new workers themselves, demonstrating a more subjective form of literature and art. This autonomy does not mean a brand-new culture different from the mainstream culture, but kind of borrowing and appropriation of the mainstream culture. In very much the same way, these public welfare organizations have rented houses in urban villages, and transformed these borrowed spaces into temporary public cultural spaces such as libraries, new workers' theatres, and workers’ museums. This borrowing itself is also a response to Marx's questioning about the "inability to express themselves" of the vulnerable. New workers use the mainstream literary form and other people's language to tell their stories.
It can be said that in the digital age, with the help of mobile Internet and smart phones, new workers have easier access to cultural resources, especially digital technology, which lowers the threshold and cost of people's use of media. However, this does not mean that new workers can create completely independent cultural practices, which require the availability of urban space, the intervention of cultural workers and the creativity of new workers themselves. The cultural borrowing by new workers from mainstream culture is not only a kind of cultural appropriation and transformation, but also a process of forging new culture.
Published on September 9, 2021
Zhang Huiyu is a researcher at School of Journalism and Communication, Peking University