Table of Contents

Preface: Trial by Fire
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Grasping the Precarious
1. The Delegators
2. The Ragpickers
3. The Vocalists and the Ventriloquists
4. The Cliffhangers
5. The Microcelebrities
Conclusion: Viral Precarity
Notes
References
Index

About the Author

Margaret Hillenbrand is professor of modern Chinese literature and culture at the University of Oxford. Her previous books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (2020).

Reviews

Hillenbrand examines the precarity of life for the outcasts of Chinese capitalism, indispensable yet unwanted, living in a state that she calls “zombie citizenship.” Her analysis of a wide range of fractious, rebarbative cultural productions by China’s underclass reveals how links between precarity, labor, life, and art generate new spaces for understanding protest, class, exploitation, and control.
*Leigh K. Jenco, author of Changing Referents: Learning Across Space and Time in China and the West*

Brilliant and perceptive, this book explores “precarity” as an affective and material human condition in China. Expressed through art forms and cultural practices, precarity unleashes unmanageable and undisciplined feelings that haunt the regime as much as society. This is one of the most original works on contemporary China I have ever read.
*Ching Kwan Lee, author of The Social Question in the 21st Century: A Global View*

Revealing vital connections between creativity and precarity, On the Edge features incisive and nuanced analyses of Chinese avant-garde art, migrant worker poetry and video, documentary cinema, and livestreaming performances. This inspiring book should be essential reading for all students of contemporary art, media, and society.
*Jie Li, author of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China*

On the Edge engages with precarity as a critical issue of our time. Coupled with its theoretical sophistication, the scope of its subject matter, its analytical strength, and its eloquence, this makes it a key intervention. Combining social engagement and aesthetic sensitivity, this scholarship is as imaginative as it is rigorous.
*Maghiel van Crevel, author of Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money*

Hillenbrand is as searing and uncompromising in her critique of the power of the state and neoliberal market as she is sensitive and compassionate to rural migrant labourers. The book is definitely not “China for Dummies”, nor will it leave you with a feelgood aftertaste. But you’ll be rewarded with a deeper appreciation of the moral complexity that is essential to understanding China.
*The Conversation's "Best books of 2023"*

Hillenbrand records the thrashing of the Chinese body politic in a way that makes this book necessary reading for anyone interested in the wages of drastic economic disparity, in China or beyond.
*Critical Inquiry*

[An]exceptionally sophisticated and rich book.
*China Quarterly*

A seminal work that offers a multifaceted understanding of precarity in contemporary China. Hillenbrand’s interdisciplinary approach and her ability to connect disparate cultural forms provide a fresh perspective on how insecurity and instability shape both individual and collective experiences in China.
*China Perspectives*

This new work by a literary and visual studies scholar at Oxford is a tour de force of interdisciplinary scholarship.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*

Hillenbrand’s book has the potential to spark discussion not only within the specific field of Chinese studies but
also across the disciplines, as she conceptualizes precarity in a way that sharpens our understanding of the current phase of late capitalism.
*Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews*

Urgently addresses the struggles of Chinese workers in an unstable labor market, the disillusion of the Chinese Dream, and the consequences of China’s economic downturn.
*Taiwan Lit*

On the Edge is an exemplary piece of comparatist cultural studies...Tightly argued, nuanced in its analysis, and eruditely referenced, the book is both illuminating and sobering. It is a must-read for researchers of contemporary China as well as those in the highly interdisciplinary and protean field of precarity studies.
*Chinese Literature and Thought Today*

On the Edge presents a new way of understanding and talking about precarity and the subaltern experience in contemporary China, and its approach to social inequality is sophisticated as well as innovative.
*The China Journal*