Remaindered Commons: Notes Toward Post-socialist Futures in China vis-à-vis the Black Outdoors

Abstract

This chapter proposes the term remaindered commons to theorize the collective space-making of people whose life is relegated to the margins of systems of capture. I present two stories, the first being about the intimacies and affective relations among women tin miners and how they challenge the Orientalist Cold War research narratives that discuss the rural communes and working units of socialist China in terms of trauma and injury. The second draws on my work as a labor activist in Shenzhen. As part of that work, I documented the location and content of workers’ graffiti on factory bathroom cubicle doors for three years. Building Black Outdoors’ emphasis on space-making and freedom, I argue that the remaindered commons speaks to a livingness beyond the logic of damage, disposability, and loss. The two case studies are remaindered commons that provide an analytical entry point into how the political and socio-spatial relations structuring these women’s experiences of community and resistance make other relationalities possible.

This chapter explores two stories of workers in China to show how the productivism of state socialism and racial capitalism both limit and provide the spatial and material conditions for sociality and freedom. I focus on two groups: Women tin miners in a socialist work unit in a small town in Yunnan Province in the 1970s; and rural-to-city migrants in a Foxconn factory in current-day Shenzhen, China. I analyze their life situations through a theoretical device I am calling the “remaindered commons.” This term refers to the myriad ways that life-making relationally exceeds the productivism of the economic systems, mentioned above, as well as that embedded in certain revolutionary imaginaries, like the co-operative and alternative economy.¹ To the extent that life-making refuses this logic, it accumulates and circulates through spaces otherwise unrecognizable. The remaindered commons is that alter-universe or terrain of the differently relational, which has gone largely untheorized. For those with few material and spatial options, it has been an especially vital source of sustenance.

This chapter, then, is experimental. It is about theorizing the remaindered commons in a way that makes what is refused, legible and revolutionary, queer. My use of “queer” does not simply mean those who identify as LGBTQ2S+ (Fig. 5.1). Rather, it signifies an optic by which to see the liminal and the tangential as onto-epistemological challenges to the dominant order (Gopinath 2018). Such queerness does not follow individual identity, private possession, and singular thriving but insists on the relational freedoms that life-making requires (Nast 2017).

Fig. 5.1

Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City (stills) (Image courtesy of Cai Studio) The still image refers to the second of three gunpowder- and fireworks-based artwork ‘events’ celebrating the six-hundredth anniversary of Beijing’s imperial Forbidden Palace, where Ming and Qing emperors resided (1368–1911). The still shows the miniaturized Forbidden City that Hunan artisans carved out of alabaster. This ‘city’ became the center of a celebratory fireworks display that was, in turn, recorded to create a virtual reality (VR) dream sequence that visitors could experience by donning a VR headset

The large-scale, multi-media, work of New York- and Beijing-based artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, speaks to the relational immediacies, intimacies, and freedom of the queer. Using gunpowder and fireworks, Cai renders relationality’s pleasure spectacular, opening up those involved to its ephemeral, excessive nature. Positioning himself relationally in-between what is ‘doing’ the painting (the gunpowder) and what is recording it (sky, canvases weighted down by boards and bricks, imaginary and real landscapes), Cai shows how what normatively appears is only an infinitesimal part of that which is relationally made (see Schama 2021). Sleepwalking in the Forbidden City visualizes my thinking in that it re-imagines and makes the 600 year old Forbidden Palace (today referred to as the Forbidden City) into a site of excess (Fig. 5.1). Its miniaturization, for instance, stimulated connections between artisans of the present and past, while the fireworks speak to an excessiveness rendered even more excessive and queer through the intimacies of the headset.

Cai’s work brings to bear a different way of signifying that learns and takes pleasure from disrupting, un-doing, and un-making a Symbolic order whose powers to enclose and possess appear under the guise of permanence and the Law. Such un-making is increasingly difficult, given how its poisons have accumulated and how billions excreted from its order are increasingly compelled to live otherwise. That which remains—has been remaindered—becomes a means for engaging worlds long folded into, but exterior to, productivism, whether socialist or capitalist (Tadiar 2015). While the violence and pain of potential extinction most certainly exist, the remaindered commons is a place of unbounded pleasure, its powers yet to be fathomed.

While the two stories presented here do not allow for a generalizable road map for freedom, their distinctiveness is valuable. For, in not scaling up into general promise, they speak to the infinite diversity and generativity of life-making (Lefebvre 2009). My emphasis on space-making is inspired by scholars who have likewise been working to create new discursive means for recognizing and valorizing the living. I am speaking here of those Black scholars theorized around the idea of the ‘Black Outdoors’ (see Carter and Cervenak 2018). While life-making in China is vastly different from that of the Black diaspora, this chapter suggests that similar values obtain and inspire. In this case, ordinary women take pleasure in engaging ways that go against the productivism of state socialist planning. Like the Black Outdoors, the remaindered commons speak to what McKittrick (2021) has called livingness, a form of life-making that exceeds damage, disposability, and loss. For the rural women discussed here, the remaindered commons shows how the political and socio-spatial relations structuring these women’s experiences make other relationalities possible.

The first story examines the intimacies and affective relations among women tin miners and how they challenge the Orientalist Cold War research narratives that discuss the rural communes and working units of socialist China in terms of trauma and injury. The poverty of these women’s lives helps to foreground the breadth of what remains (is remaindered), that is, the pleasure and care that comes through the relational. The second case study draws on my work as a labor activist in Shenzhen. As part of that work, I documented the location and content of workers’ graffiti on factory bathroom cubicle doors for three years. An analysis of the graffiti shows how improvised life-making subverts the spatial confinement of workers on the shop floor (Simone 2018). In tracing the accumulation of this graffiti over three years, I have come to see the bathroom doors not only as a material means for communicating otherwise but as a medium of sociality and time—a register that elicits a patterning of “call and response”: Workers read what has been written and often respond in kind, a process that creates pathways of affective, collective action. Together, the bathroom doors and goers disrupt the divides between public and private, permanence and ephemerality, visible and invisible, and production and life-making (Muñoz 1996).

The rest of the chapter asks if the improvised life-making of diasporic Black communities has anything to say to the improvised life-making of Chinese workers in socialist and post-Socialist times.² And if the idea of the remaindered commons can be of theoretical use to “the Black Outdoors.”³ I argue that, while the time–space specificities of these contexts cannot be ignored, there may be important resonances in that both point to the untapped power of the relational, where the impetus is not to produce, but to play.

In this sense, I am following South-South referencing, something that began with post-WWII decolonization movements worldwide, from the Non-Aligned Movement and other forms of Afro-Asian solidarity to the Third World and Black Panther movements (Frazier 2014; Prashad 2008). I also follow scholars from East Asia and other Southern geographies exploring unfamiliar paradigms and building thoughts and futures through a tenacious engagement with their specific temporal-spatial problem. In reading the Black Outdoors through China’s post-socialist lifeworlds, I wish to channel life’s potential to unmake the ‘productivism’ of the Anthropocene in the here and now.⁴ The actually existing life-making activities explored here are not meant to forge a single imaginary, which is impossible, anyway (Hall 1993, p.359). Instead, they are meant to show how recognizing and signifying what has been hidden reveals alter-worlds that have always existed and that, if put into planetary play, will open broader post-Anthropocenic spatial futures.

The Commons

Some discussions on the commons are warranted, given its centrality to my argument. On the most fundamental level, it points to certain shared resources, such as land or community welfare initiatives. While the concept may be mobilized by left and right political aims, in most left-leaning traditions, the commons most frequently orbit around Marxian political economy. In Marx’s original formula for the rise of capital, the land on which English peasants labored was the terrain where resources that were once used in common would be captured by capitalist forces bent on primitive accumulation. Workers and peasants worldwide would mobilize this idea of the commons as the roadmap for imagining a utopian society where resources and the fruits of one’s labor would be shared equally in communally based settings (Caffentzis and Federici 2014). Such conceptions, however, risk re-centering production as the phallic pillar of social life, norms, and expectations.

More recently, indigenous, queer, and feminist Marxist scholars have argued against such productivism. Glen Coulthard, for instance, has suggested that indigenous peoples value the land not as a resource to be mined but as the material ground of community, relationships, and survival (Coulthard 2014). Coulthard argues that in white settler contexts, indigenous values of the land should assume primary importance in discussions of the commons. Similarly, Silvia Federici argues that the robbing of women’s land, labor, and bodies must be made central to any analysis of capitalism’s violent processes of accumulation (Federici 1998). José Muñoz’s brown commons further delineates how fugitive subjects greet each other in a temporally different place and time, forming relationships subterranean to racial capitalism’s violence (Muñoz 2020).

The remaindered commons are thus part of a broader effort to diverge from production-centric understandings of the commons to those that entertain relational life. At one level, such divergence is not difficult to do. As Lauren Berlant has pointed out, the commons is an incoherent concept (Berlant 2016, p. 397) that tells us nothing about the relationship between the common and the singular. It is also Eurocentric in that it draws on a very limited pastoral ideal. While Peter Linebaugh (2012) reminds us that all societies have some forms of commons, my intervention here cautions the romanticization of common in the elsewhere or in the precapitalist past. I argue that without dispensing the efforts for public-owned resources for the common good, we can use common to describe relations of solidarity, acts, and practices of intimacy and care initiated by those who dwell on the underside of nationalist modernization, either through socialist or capitalist processes (Millner-Larsen and Butt 2018).

The term remaindered commons, therefore, centers people’s collective activities for life-making that do not stand as something outside of capitalism but remain as a space for survival under the belly of violence. In my second case, for example, factory bathrooms become such a space where affective relations develop through poems and commentary written on the doors of toilet stalls. Workers’ collective affective activities in the bathrooms become the remainder of the global commodity productive regime that exploits their labor power. Yet these acts offer grounds for the reimagination of social life. Remaindered commons also denote a perceptual shift from productivism to the life-making of life, which includes ecological, affective, social, physical, and emotional vitality (Tian 2021, p. 484). In my first story, I describe the experiences of women miners’ life and labor to survive. Their collective efforts to reproduce their life sustained the production of tin but became surplus to the productivism of the Chinese Communist Party’s planned economy. Looking socialism through local women’s life provides a view from below, far away from the center of party politics. Their life and activities for life-making were too uneventful, oftentimes become remaindered by history from the perspective of the Chinese state and by the productive regimes that govern their lives.

Remaindered commons as conceptual tools offer an opening to our current imagination of the common either as something completely outside of capitalism or something to be found in the ruins of premodern history. My two examples demonstrate how life-making takes place in ways that both converge and diverge with the dominant systems of capture. By centering collective efforts to care for, belong to, and depend on others in ways that endure remaindered commons highlight the doing and making of relations as vital to any collectivity. In this sense, “remaindered commons” is a concept close to recent literature in Black studies on space and gathering, to which the next section will turn.

The Black Outdoors as Analytic-Method

In this section, I provide an “amateur reading” of Black studies and geography, in keeping with my many limits (King et al. 2020).⁵ Black space has always been central to what Rinaldo Walcott calls ‘the long journey towards Black freedom.’ Such freedom, for Walcott, is not the same as emancipation but a refashioning of what it means to be human (Walcott 2021). The centuries-long condition of Black unfreedom means that Black communities are profoundly familiar with libidinal economies of death.

As a gathering of Black joy, Black aliveness represents a conduit of post-Enlightenment racial thinking (Cervenak 2014, p. 5). It builds on thinkers of the Black radical tradition who reconceptualize the question of the human and the afterlife of slavery and plantation logics (McKittrick 2013; Hartman 2007). Black literary scholar Christina Sharpe (2016) has focused on what survives after and despite white supremacist violence. She describes how the slave ships contain, but also produce, the excesses to that violence, which she calls ‘wake work.’ ‘Wake work’ offers a counter-narrative to the liberal democratic imaginary based on private property and the alienated (white) sovereign subject. Conversing with contemporary Black scholars who write aliveness into nothingness, the chapter suggests at least two methodological creations to rework and unsettle the liberal imaginary.

First, the ‘outdoors’ maps the publicness of Black intimacy, relationality, and affective life-making. Black space, similar to feminist and queer spaces, challenges the distinction between public/private by tuning toward the rhythms and actions of liveliness, spontaneity, and wayward relations in the church (Carter and Cervenak 2018, p. 6) in public marketplaces of Jamaica (Sweeney 2020), outside a Detroit liquid store (Stovall 2020), on the street of New York (Hartman 2019), in a Chicago basketball court (Hunter et al. 2016), or in Toronto’s urban queer space (Bain 2017). In these public spaces where Blackness continues to be criminalized, the ability to make affective life out of nothing despite colonial and anti-Black violence gestures toward a relational mode of life-making beyond recognition (Quashie 2021). Indeed, as R.A. Judy (2020, p. 13) has argued, the practices-of-living-in-common, or ‘the thousands and one actions which go to make up the group life,’ articulate conceptions of humanity appositional to the epistemology of raciology and capitalist modernity.

Second, centering Blackness and space challenges the notion of the commons, an anti-capitalist space organized around the proletarianized subject. Leftist imaginaries have been very good at theorizing the hyper-exploitation of capitalism. Yet, in imagining productive counter-endeavors to racial capitalism, they sideline life-making, or, if it is noted, its activities are subsumed into the concept of the common. The gender and race-neutral proletarian commons have long been the center of criticism. Marxist feminists have mobilized reproductive labor as the basis for socially just communities (Federici 2018). Black scholar Fred Moton reminds us to stay with the undercommons, the lifeworlds of the dispossessed (Harney and Moten 2013, p. 96). In Jayna Browne’s reading of the dystopic film, Born in Flames, the spaces of revolution are not in the town hall, in Rancièrian dissensus, or autonomous labor antagonism, but in the unsanctioned and delegitimized spaces of black, brown, and poor women’s kitchens, living rooms and streets (Brown 2018, p. 583). Black studies, especially Black geographies, thus offer conceptual language to describe ways of knowing arising from genres of livingness. These life genres, devalued differently by racial capitalism, have turned to spaces such as the outdoors, where pleasure and joy become the generative beginning of co-worlding planetary collective futures.

While the conditions of thinking for my research are incommensurable to that of Black studies, I want to consider the Black Outdoors literature within Black Studies as offering a methodological approach to questions of human spaces of living and ways of knowing. If, as Alexander Weheliye has argued, bodies suffering from violence are also entry points to other modes of being human (Weheliye 2014, p. 122), I interrogate if China’s nearly thirty years of state socialism (1949–1979)—in which private property did not exist and rural life was collectivized—promoted in any way relational sociality and different ways of knowing.⁶ My interests are how wider sets of political, social, and spatial relations inevitably constitute women workers’ social experiences of community, agency, and resistance.

Following the Black geographers’ attention to the spatiality of life-making, I ask: how do my interlocutors appropriate and shape the place of work and life? How, by hacking space and built environment, affective and social life become reproduced? I am especially interested in paying greater scholarly attention to the relational socialities that Chinese women generated in state-mandated, all-women’s working units, factories, and cultural productions. Here, women’s collective life took shape beside state-sponsored socialist productivism, resulting in widespread poverty and trauma. How is it that even though the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) directives effectively suppressed conditions of life, these women still experienced and found pleasure and joy in the mutuality, intimacy, and collectiveness of their lives shared?

Using the Black Outdoors as an analytic opens ways to theorize the life-making of the dispossessed as various undercommons. During socialist China, the rural was the space of revolution hailed by the Chinese Communist Party. For example, during the Cultural Revolution, youth rendered surplus in urban industrial centers were ‘sent down’ to the countryside to learn agrarian life from the peasants (White 2016). In post-socialist mainland China, the rural becomes increasingly the “darker” side of China’s economic reform. The rural represents the space of stagnation and motionlessness that drags China’s developmentalism (Zhang and Li 2015). Glorious images of urban development facilitated by state-sanctioned global capital overshadow the ‘hollowing out’ of small towns and villages in the poorer parts of China, where migrants leave home to work temporarily in nearby cities and mega-cities such as Shanghai, despite being marginalized and excluded in cities.

Regardless of such bleakness of contemporary life structured by regional inequality, urban–rural divide, and patriarchy, examples of commons go wild. My second case examines the unexpected space—toilet stalls in factories. The bathrooms become an affective commons wherein migrant workers’ struggle does not bend on resistance, per se, but on the enjoyment hidden within the interstices of power, impelling life into a ‘beyond.’ Their toilet graffiti provides evidence of the dynamic happenings in the factories despite their cyborg-like work conditions. In making this perceptual shift, I am not romanticizing their affective life-making activities. As Lisa Rofel (2007) professes, the post-socialist Chinese government works to regulate what kinds of desire are recognizable and which are illegal. Many of my interlocutors are not free of monetary desires or what Berlant (2011) calls the cruel optimism for a good life. Making something out of nothing, those at the periphery of the peripheral indeed appear to live trivialized unproductive lives filled with quotidian activities. Yet, it is they who escape enclosure, offering vantage points through which we can view collective potentials and futures.

The Remaindering of Collective Life

I interviewed workers retired from an all-women working unit in a tin mine in the rural area of Yunnan Province, located some eight and six kilometers from the small town and 280 kilometers southeastern of the provincial capital, Kunming. After the communist revolution of 1949, the mine mainly extracted and sold tin to the state-owned Yunnan Tin Corporation.⁷

The mine consisted of different working units, one comprising only twenty women. Although the CCP had established similar women workers’ working units in city-based factories, this woman working unit was the only such formation among tin mining sites in rural Yunnan. Since the reform and opening up in the 1980s, a number of Western scholars began studying women-only production teams. Some analyze if funu (women) as a political signifier and category afforded actual liberation for ordinary women (Barlow 1991). Others studied what these Chinese women’s communes had to say about the relationship between women and the state (Evans 1997; Zhang and Liu 2015; Wang 2017).

Katherine McKittrick helps explore these women-only working units as an organismic resource for imagining the possibilities of ‘relational being’ in China’s past and present. This emphasis requires seeing women workers’ life-making as ways of knowing. I approach the women tin miners not as immobile, fixed objects to be studied. Rather, I ask how these women workers exerted dynamic agencies and how their subjectivities were shaped by what they did, even though the Communist Party set the condition for the collective’s existence.

For example, I met Grandma Lu in a temple, where other retired women workers sometimes gather to pray and help with the temple’s everyday operations. Not a devoted Buddhist, she comes to the temple to meet and socialize with old comrades and friends. Her sharp eyes and the uprightness of her posture set her apart from the other women worshippers. Talking about her experiences as a worker, she speaks pridefully about how she carried sandbags on her back that weighed just as much as she did.

“What men do, we have to do it,” she told me, “Back in the day, there was no way that you can rest just because you are a woman, as long as you were not disabled, you had to contribute to the production of tin.”

Grandma Lu spoke similarly about her experiences of working and living in the mining site with her three children and husband.

Of course, life was hard. My husband was one of the drivers for the state-owned enterprise, so he was always out to deliver raw tin. We did not have enough food, and my three kids, all of them boys, had big appetites. Shi (Grandma Shi, another of my interlocutors) would secretly drop food on my doorstep, sometimes potatoes, sometimes flour. I knew it was her because she has three daughters, and they did not eat a lot…. She has a kind heart.

Grandma Lu paused and continued.

When we were working, all women, it was fun sometimes, we sang while carrying sand or washing the dirt off the newly extracted tin. I think if we were not always hungry back then, there might be more I might miss. So, I remember we were just all sitting together out in the field on the ground, sometimes, we used pieces of paper to sit on if we wanted to keep our trousers clean. The head of the team was Che, she was a tough woman, but you know (referring to me) in Chinese, we have the saying ‘Mouths made of knife, but hearts made of tofu’. She was that kind of person. She was the person who calculated our working points and kept track of the amount of tin. We were not alone, there were many working units washing dirt or moving other materials. What set us apart was that we were all women, chatting and cracking jokes. The man sometimes says we were ‘popo mama (effeminate and slow),’ but that’s how women work; we talk and say things to each other.

Grandma Lu’s words expose the shortcomings of the socialist experiment, where women like Grandma Lu were doubly burdened by work and childcare. At the same time, her narratives show how these women lived beside those constraints. Similar to Katherine McKittrick’s reparative lens on Black aliveness, I center my interpretation on how women miners’ relationalities empower and become sites of happiness and joy. Such a reading admits to the freedoms that mutuality brings; in this case, freedom was shored up by hunger and the onerousness of hard labor.

What Grandma Lu’ remembers, then, does not speak to a singularly oppressed subject in that her subjectivity is linked to collective experience. When she recalls her work, it is always in relation to other women comrades. Here, it is not socialist slogans or any concepts of communism that she remembers. Rather, she recalls with pleasure the embodied relations that socially reproduced each other. Their chatting, songs, and mutuality were not part of the productive ‘labor’ for socialist modernization; however, as many Marxist feminists argued, such creative powers are gendered reproductive activities crucial for any kind of production to take place (Miles 1999; Dalla Costa and James 1975). Speaking of the Philippine experiences, Neferti Tadiar (2009, p. 11) discusses how social experiences can become forms of living labor that is subject to exploitation. She understands exploitation not just as the amass of surplus labor but also as ‘the subsumption of the immeasurable time of social cooperation’ (Tadiar 2009, p. 12).

Second, the conceptual ‘outside’ offers possibilities to see the social experiences of women like Grandma Lu as another kind of common existing beneath the state-sanctioned productive working units. Their socially reproductive activities sustain physically and affectively the bodies that produce for state socialism. These activities form unacknowledged network through which they shared care, food, intimacy, and social relationships. For instance, we might consider women’s singing as creative way to coup with harsh working conditions and intense manual labor in the temporal-spatial context of a third world mining site: the place of production is in the mountains, the means of production are women’s hands and their hunger-depleted bodies.

These surplus experiences, as mediating processes between the self and the social reality, were invented by women like Grandma Lu in the political-social-economic context of revolutionary zeal and socialist progress. But such experiences are never exhausted by the dominant political requirement of socialist productivism. Indeed, at the core of my readings is to situate and put into language these strategies and experiences excessive to both the Maoist anti-modernity socialism and the global project of neoliberal capitalism since the end of the Cold War. The collective social experiences of women workers, what Raymond Williams (1978, pp. 121–126) calls “the residual,” are not necessarily bygone pasts buried in the shadows of globalization and marketization. They can be sources for speculations, as well as hopes for the emergent. Indeed, like Grandma Lu’s memories of creativity, we are living with the interventions of our times. In the next section, I turn to the lifeworlds of migrant women workers in a factory in Shenzhen.

The Remaindering of Affect and the Affective Commons

Internal migration in post-socialist China has provided cheap labor for transnational capital for the past three decades. Huge infrastructures such as industrial zones have sprung cross the eastern coast of the country. I focus on one of such industrial zones in Shenzhen, the global hub for producing produce electronic gadgets such as screens, earphones, etc. I argue that migrant workers’ affective life-making is crucial for the operation of the factory. Their affective cooperation constitutes an affective common where intimacy, care, and relationalities become shared resources against the grain of racial capitalist exploitation. The site of my inquiry is the Taiwanese Foxconn cooperation, the industrial leader with the largest factory compound in Shenzhen (seven hundred and fifty thousand square meters). The compound includes two sections: work and life. The working section are mainly factories; and the living section consists of cafeterias, sports courts, hospitals, police stations, and grocery stores. Underlying such gigantic industrial infrastructure are tense labor relations, harsh labor control, and almost uninhabitable life.

Workers, mostly migrants from other parts of China come to work for the slightly higher salaries (four hundred and twelve dollars per month without overtime pay as of 2020). Their migratory routes reflect the deep inequality between urban, coastal, and rural, inland places. While I am not taking “the rural” as spatial–temporal external to the urban, the rural and urban divide needs to be held in tension (Petite and Debarbieux 2013). Indeed, Frederick Mote has forcefully argued for an urban–rural continuum in understanding Chinese spatial histories (Mote 1977). This continuum was disrupted by colonialism since the late nineteenth century, Republican era (1911–1949) urbanization, and Socialist Era (1949–1979) modernization (Visser 2010). During the Mao’s era, cities became producing centers organized by working units and rural spaces by agricultural communes. Such divide persisted during post-socialist era, where the need for cheap labor propelled rural migrants to work in urban centers. While this process might appear to be Marx’s primitive accumulation, the Chinese case proves to be different (Marx 1990 [1976], Chapter 26). The hukou (household administration) system largely prevented rural migrants from becoming urban dwellers, creating a “temporal-spatial”  migration where migrants eventually return to their hometowns with their depleted bodies (Rofel 2016, p. 167).

Rurality/urbanity, then, organizes social differences i post-socialist China as much as it did in the socialist era. Most migrant workers face urban dwellers’ discrimination, state violence, and harsh labor discipline on the shop floor. For example, at Shenzhen Foxconn, most migrants, in their twenties and thirties, work over ten hours every day in either daytime or nighttime shift, with almost no time to rest. On the shop floor, they are asked not to use their phones, to take less bathroom breaks and to work as hard as one can—their salaries and commissions are depended on the amount of iPhones, play stations, or headphones they assemble. These are just some stories I have gathered working as a labor activist in China.

These unbearable labor regulations and working conditions are literal death-production. Starting from 2012, news of workers committing suicides in Foxconn factories across China emerge every year. The Foxconn factories have become the space of productivity for capital but unproductivity for life, becoming an uninhabitable space produced by global capital’s need for surplus value and cheap labor. And in middle-class urban dwellers’ imaginaries, Foxconn becomes the dark space overwritten by China’s self-congratulatory image of progress.

My approach to the inhospitable factories, however, takes a perpetual shift. While I can critique the deep-seated patronage system and the “co-authorship” between Shenzhen government with transnational capitalists in manufacturing the dark zones of uninhabitability (Liu 1999, p. 790; Yan 2008), I see edges emerge from the surface of impossibility. Learning from Black geographies attention to the space of possibility, I introduce my encounters with life-making by way of two scenes in the factory washrooms. I ask what counts as an archive of freedom, resistance, and politics in post-socialist China today, and how to dwell with the quotidian (Arondekar 2009; Manalansan IV 2014).

The first scene is a poem written by a worker on the door of a toilet stall in the men’s bathroom (Fig. 5.2): From the top of the line, the poem reads:

Fig. 5.2

(Source author)

The author took a photo of a poem inscribed inside a cubicle door in a Foxconn factory bathroom, written by an unknown worker (2019)

Verse

Verse Leaving my hometown with ambitions to a new place I find myself working on an ordinary assembly line My body is always sore after a day of work But the shop floor manager insists we continue Despite our tiredness and sweat Overtime till eleven-thirty at night is the norm But we are still scored by the manager for not doing enough!

The poem describes the writer’s journey: leaving their hometown and facing the harsh working conditions in the factory. The confrontational tone in the poem expresses the author’s dissatisfaction with and sorrow about migrant life. Even though the writer’s identity is unknown, and it is also unclear how many have read the poem, the act of writing such affective experiences onto the door of a toilet stall might as well be a form of “minor resistance.” Such creative acts are, therefore, cultural means of responding to dominating relations of production and thus question what we conventionally understand as “organized resistance,” “public art,” and “freedom” (Pun 2005). The choice of writing the poem on the door of the washroom—a space both private and public—also disrupts how we imagine the divides between material/immaterial and freedom/confinement.

The second scene, photographed by my friend, captures asynchronous conversations between several female workers while taking bathroom breaks (Fig. 5.3).

Fig. 5.3

(Source Author)

Workers dialogue with one another across space–time by writing on a bathroom’s cubicle door, each piece of writing becoming a potential site to which anyone can respond. The arrow indicates a comment is written as a response; the identity of the writers and the time of these writings are unknown

The main question on the inside of the toilet door reads:

“if I leave him, I feel sad, but I am not happy if I continue being with him, what can I do?”

The first round of comments from other workers:

“1) You can cheat on him; 2) Just keep trying; if you lose him, you might regret for a lifetime; 3) Being sad is temporary, but being unhappy for a lifetime is not a wise choice.”

Additional comments for 2):

2.1 “leave him, time will heal everything;

2.2 I am heartbroken for you.

Additional comments for 3): leave him!

The conversations started with one migrant woman asking if she should leave someone who makes her unhappy, even though leaving him upset her. The responses varied. Someone wrote that she should cheat on him, while others persuaded her to leave him as time would heal the pain. One respondent wrote that she should stick to it; otherwise, she might miss her “true love.”

Unlike digital forms of communication where correspondences might live in different places worldwide, these comments are left by workers taking breaks between shifts, often on the same assembly lines. The highly compressed capitalist time requires repetitive kinesthetic movement of the body: her eyes are attuned to the product in her hands, her hands have to assemble fast, and her ears are accustomed to the sound of the machine. The body’s affective, locomotory, and communicative ability is rendered surplus to the process of commodity production, which requires an almost cyborg-like soulless figure, yet; such abilities are not exhausted by the spatial-tempo rhythms of the factory. Young migrant workers find new ways to adjust to the conditions of work: the moving assembly lines, the factory clock time, and life chances in a highly neoliberal regime of regulation. In this sense, the conversations about personal love crisis might be a testament to the larger crisis of disembodiment in everyday life on the assembly line. That is, the maintenance of life is put on hold in the factory where “the crisis” of the life-making of life becomes ordinary (e.g., no talking, fewer bathroom breaks). Such life-making is only to continue in the bathroom, where the body responds to natural needs such as releasing oneself. It is also in lateral spaces such as the washroom, we encounter life-making besides the brutality on the shop floor.

As Black scholar Fred Moten has poetically foregrounded in his work The Undercommons, the liminal space exceeding legitimacy and visibility constitutes a space out of which life and livingness emerge; both the poem and the conversation as opportunities to see the liveliness and intimacy on the shop floor. Here, intimacy is not just the conventional concept of heterosexual love and a patrilinear family network. Fundamentally, intimacies are the social relations anchored by the built environment and the institutionalized forms of daily life. They build material and social life while being shaped and constrained by forces outside of our immediate control (Povinelli 2006).

Built environments such as factories produce dominant regimes of domination and social relations. On the shop floor, managers, as the spokesperson for capital, oversee and discipline workers’ productivity. Such relations are marked by unfreedom, coercion, and self-regulation. Among workers, kinship and tongxiang (village affiliations) relations provide preformatted reference for identification and meaning-making. Many workers come to factories via introductions by people from the same village; some form social bondage based on villages, towns, and regions. These relations, however, are oftentimes organized by patriarchy, fraternal sociality, and familistic controls (Lee 1996).

Both kinds of dominant regimes are at work in the factories and life outside of work. Nevertheless, we can still see the poem and the conversation as not simply meaning-making but also as the social life-making of affective life. In the first scene, the writer left the poem for others to read. We can speculate that others may resonate with the emotions expressed in the poem, creating intimate connections among people who use that cubicle. The writing itself is also a social critique of factory life, serving as a subterranean affective ambience in the heart of capitalist accumulation. The writer’s subversive use of private cubicles as a form of public pedagogy, even though they might not be aware of, points to the ways in which built environment is not a fixed totality—rather, material objects are also open-ended for remaking and reshaping, and people’s life-making capacities become part of the built environment.

The writing of the poem might be an individualist performance, yet the bathroom door as a semi-public space provides possibilities for collective reading of the poem as people come and go. In their efforts to put into language their collective experiences of labor exploitation, migrant workers’ creative use of the bathroom door, a place associated with wastes and mess, create immaterial and affective commons wasted by capital’s desire to commodify their labor power and surplus to visible narratives of social movement and class struggle.

Sarah Cervenak’s concept of gathering is relevant here. While her focus is on how Black people’s gathering might unsettle Western philosophy (Cervenak 2021), I consider how from the standpoint of migrant workers in China’s global factory, even within spaces of confinement, we might also see different modes of gathering and relationalities. In the second scene, we might consider commenting on their interlocutory writings as the embodied genre of life-making. Let’s consider the communicative, cognitive, and affective abilities of human bodies as vital to life-making. We might see the conversations as affective social cooperation unexhausted by the incorporation of labor into the globalized, universally measurable time of capital enabled by global logistics (e.g., just-in-time production) and into the standardized spatial representation of the factory.

Migrant workers’ improvising usage of bathrooms alludes to an affective common existing under the radar of capitalist production. Their care for a fellow woman in crisis suggests that the gendered logic of affective cooperation is capitalist exploitation’s product and object. On the one hand, the built environment of the factory and the productive regime produce the material conditions and necessity for their affective labor. On the other, maintaining capitalist production, such as the never-ending assembly line, requires their seemingly excessive affective labor and cooperation. Feminists have argued that for women, it is impossible to distinguish between laboring and living. The affective labor (e.g., writing on the door of a toilet stall) performed by women are testament to women’s constant laboring for life other than themselves. Such undifferentiated time between laboring and living prepares women workers to participate in the rhythm of factory production. In other words, the making of affective commons are practices of social reproductive labor that capitalist production in the factory cannot do without. So, for example, the conversation might have prevented another tragic suicide.

Their reparative acts of writing and conversing, mediated by the door of a toilet stall, create lateral spaces and time exterior to and folded into migrant workers’ everyday life on the shop floor. Their life-making is thus enacted as relational encounters of different bodies surface through their intimate, cognitive, and affective connections. Like Grandma Lu, who spoke of “embodied joy” always as a relational feeling, the tracks of life-making for migrant workers are to be found beneath the proper political arena of organized labor antagonism, which the Chinese government tries hard to censor. The traces of life-making, then, are perhaps only perceptible in the lateral space where the private and the public converge.

Starting Again

Throughout this chapter, I have used Black geographies’ emphasis on pleasure and alternative space to bear on labor and gender in post-socialist China (McKittrick 2006). As I insist at the beginning, anti-Blackness in North America, with its rootedness in plantation slavery logic, is not comparable to my interlocutors’ experiences of difference in socialist and post-socialist China. Conversation, not comparison, is my aim here. To see how the methodological and epistemological means of finding joy and pleasure through prefigurative modes of relationship within the Black Outdoors might speak to the remaindered commons; a place where life finds itself continually through ingenuity. In being disallowed from the material benefits of productivism, the dispossessed must live continually through ingenuity. This honing of the dispossessed life’s capacity to appropriate and forge socialities speaks volumes to what a world based not on production might look like.

The two remaindered commons demonstrate that to speak of post-Anthropocenic futures is to speak of life-making, here and now. Starting from life-making, we might grasp the promises of a world of abundance. Women miners, for instance, mutually depended on others to reproduce themselves as laborers for the socialist planned economy and as desiring and complex subjects. Such interdependency suggests that social and ecological co-operations are crucial for our survival and that the human species depend on other life forms. The post-Anthropocenic world is already here. The unfreedom and bondage those women experienced as producers and life-makers demonstrate the centrality of starting with life-making for a different roadmap of the future. Women miners’ social and spatial entanglement with each other, the mountains, and the mine open new ways of thinking about reproductive relations with other life forms and ecology. Their experiences, while centering on the life-making of their bodily needs, point to the actually existed possibility of life after the Anthropocene: life activities organized around enabling and making other life.

Remaindered commons foreground aliveness that remains despite the pervasive presence of violence. For Black studies scholars, to grasp the life-making of Black life in the diaspora requires an optical shift from the liberal recognition toward the gathering of Black people free from containment. Unexpected spaces offer ample examples of Black freedom and aliveness (ife 2021; Sweeney 2019). The second case study in this chapter centers on outsourced labor and the possibilities of their freedom. Workers who perform menial, repetitive labor serve the comfort and smooth technology of the liberal subject, who performs immaterial, creative labor for the global economy (Atanasoski and Vora 2019; Nast 2020). Many have termed this servitude the international divide of labor. Here, I am attuned to how workers live on and through moments of abjection, exploitation, and erasure. Therefore, the workers’ strategic occupation of the bathrooms opens existing possibilities for spatial futures after the Anthropocene: life occupying spaces for a short period of time for material or affective life-making. Such moments are often left over, excessive, quotidian, structurally existing in normative or dominant projects, and sometimes not radical in any sense. Yet the actors of these activities seek to reproduce aspects of life in relation to others around them, forming remaindered commons that demand dwelling-with, standing-besides, and prefiguring-together.

Remaindered commons also draw attention to life-making that does not scale up but runs horizontally. Each locale of my inquiry tells a story about aliveness in different temporal-spatial contexts, and each is distinct with histories and relations to globalization as spatial processes (Katz 2001, p. 1229). As a social-justice-oriented scholar, I hold these actually existing/existed ways of living in tension with my desire for general applicability. The mining women’s social reproductive labor is to be forgotten as China enters the global economy, and so are their social experiences, memories, and personal stories. These experiences are rendered residual by the arrival of the capitalist remaking of China. The potential of such experiences ought to be silenced, surplused, and wasted by the hyper-developmentalist state and future-oriented global financial capital in China. The poems and conversations on the door of the toilet stalls are remaindered commons that subsist yet are leftover by the spatial regime of the factory that enables their emergence. As laborers for global commodity production, the participants of discussions written on the bathroom doors are hyper-invisible. Their invisibility as laborers and agential actors suggests that the happening of the social requires our attention to the present, where life-making takes place.

Notes

• 1. I take “life” in this article to mean all living beings, including humans. Because my focus is on migration and humanitarian rescue narratives that centre on human beings; for clarity’s sake, life is denoted mainly to humans even though ‘human’ carries the “over-representation of European man.” See, Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 2003. 

• 2. For the sake of consistency, I will use socialism to describe the time between 1949 and 1979. While there are differences between socialism and communism, most scholars would agree on using socialism to describe China between 1949 and 1979. Economically, not all aspects were managed by the Chinese Communist Party. For example, other parts of my project on the tin mine also discuss how the mine sold raw tin to the state-owned manufacturing company. Further, The Party prefers to use ‘the first stage of socialism’ to describe the time period. For a detailed account on the history of economic thought in China, see, Karl, The Magic of Concept.

• 3. Moten and Hartman, “The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman”. https://fhi.duke.edu/videos/black-outdoors-fred-moten-saidiya-hartman

• 4. By post-socialist, I mean no temporal separation between socialist era and the reform era. The “post”refers to “as an effect of,” “in relation to,” and “recursive of”socialist era. I also want to use “postsocialism” to name contemporary leftist commitment to prefigurative politics, something other than capitalist or state socialist, something based on the reproduction of life, ecology, and the environment.

• 5. Amateur reading refers to an ethics of engagement in which there is no pretense of absolute knowledge or mastery. It is also an ‘ethics of humility’ that acknowledges perfect intellectual beings are always uncertain and perhaps impossible to arrive at. My particular reading here is conditioned by and carries within it my formidable years growing up in mainland China, my activist histories and my own experiences of queer migration and diaspora. See, Eng, Halberstam and Munuz, “What’s Queer about Queer Theory Now?”.

  My use of ‘Black Studies’ encampasses a range of inter-discplinary scholarships by Black-identified scholars in North America. For the purpuse of this chapter, my focus is on Black geogrophy scholarships that centers on life and space making by Black peoples. The Black Outdoors is part of such scholarships, offering an opportunity to consider the joy and revoluntionary potentials of Black spaces.

• 6. During the socialist era, land, agriculture, commerce, and industry were nationalized. The rural area was organized around communes while urban factories consisted of working units.

• 7. Contrary to popular belief that the socialist state controls all economic life, the operation of the mine, in fact, depended on the amount of tin they sell. While a large portion of the profit went to the local government after paying workers’ salaries, the mine kept 15% of the earning to support the kitchen and kindergarten.