My Take | When a Chinese migrant worker reads Heidegger

A migrant worker by the name of Chen Zhi has become an internet sensation on the mainland in recent weeks. His case sparked so much online attention that even the state-owned China Daily has jumped into the fray. The reason? The 30-year-old university dropout has caught the philosophy bug. When he is not travelling from city to city looking for work, he reads the great German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He even taught himself English so he could translate an introductory text. His story probably first surfaced late last month from a Heidegger chat group in Tencent’s Guyu Lab where participants discussed how they could help him publish his Chinese translation of American academic Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction. An op-ed in China Daily thinks it’s wonderful that a worker is devoted to high-level intellectual pursuits. Wasn’t that exactly how Karl Marx imagined what workers in a communist paradise would do? It said: “The original meaning of philosophy in Greek is to love wisdom. In this sense, everyone will look up at the stars, ask questions about life, and have the right to pursue and love wisdom, regardless of whether they are college students or migrant workers. “Chen Zhi’s curiosity about ‘what is the essence of our consciousness and the essence of vision’ is the embodiment of love and wisdom, and the incomprehension and doubt of life become his stepping stone into the palace of philosophy.” Chen’s touching story even caught the eye of Slavoj Zizek, the influential Slovenian philosopher. “Mao Zedong famously said in the 1950s: ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom. Let a hundred schools of thought contend’,” he wrote in rt.com. “Today, we should say: Let a hundred Chen Zis study philosophy – for only in this way will we find a way out of our sad predicament.” But that’s only one part of the story that China Daily has played up. The equally, if not even more important, part of his story is told in a profile, also in Guyu Lab. It shows the extraordinary hardships and exploitation of migrant workers in China. Indeed, the work conditions Chen described remind me of those in Victorian England decried by Marx. “Machines never rest, and people cannot rest,” Chen told the writer. Boy, that line is straight out of Capital, on the endless working day and night of the endlessly exploited worker, only China’s factories today are cleaner. The report said: “[Chen] occupied a place in a huge factory, and he often worked non-stop from 8.30 in the morning to 8.30 in the evening. Monthly earnings were around four or five thousand yuan, barely enough to eat. “For a while, he was in charge of repairing machines in a camera factory. He was wearing a blue dust-free suit on the job, and his eyes were exposed. Without a stool, one stands the whole day. There are no windows, and the time is only displayed on the computer. It is impossible to play with a mobile phone, there is nothing to bring in, only people can go in. If there is any characteristic of this kind of life, it is repetition and emptiness.” According to an official survey report, there were about 285 million migrant workers nationwide in 2020. The report continues: “They depend on the machines in the factory to survive … In 2011, he worked in Beijing and lived in a basement of six or seven square metres rented in Tongzhou. There were no windows, it was damp and dim. “He lived by himself, and all his belongings consisted of a bed and a table. When reading, he used the bed as a chair. There was no toilet in the house, so he had to go to the public toilet outside. The environment was so bad, but there was nothing to do. He bought a tablet with an LCD screen and read an e-book in the basement. During that time, he worked on the English-Chinese translation and read Heidegger’s Being and Time once. Migrant’s death in Taiwan highlights labour system’s failings “Over the years, he has been to five places to work, Guangdong, Fujian, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Beijing. Whenever he goes to a city, he will go to the local library to read books. He often said that philosophy is his passion and mission.” Sadly, he thinks little of himself. “He seemed incompatible with his social identity, and his family felt that he was not working honestly and wanted to read some philosophy books,” the report said. “He started to become anxious, but there was nothing he could do, and in the end, he just let it go … now he is the most desolate person. He judged himself a ‘useless person’. He has never forgotten that he is still a migrant worker. He is often discriminated against because of his status.” I sincerely hope he will find a good job as a translator and academic.

.css-1m2rp1p{color:#34b8b5;}My Take | When a Chinese migrant worker reads Heidegger

My Take | When a Chinese migrant worker reads Heidegger