By Yan Hen[1] · July 14, 2026 · Source: Workers’ Poetry (WeChat public account)

The upright “standing” posture, the stance of “standing with the vast majority of the working people”: this is the simplest definition of “New People’s Literature and Art.” The twenty songs of Liu Jiming: An Album of Songs from His Lyrics are exactly such a “standing” song. They have blazed a trail for New People’s Literature and Art, and it is a road that will, in the end, take many more people to travel.

Original Editor’s Note: This piece was submitted by a reader. Its subject is well worth discussing, though its style could be plainer. The officially promoted “New Mass Literature and Art” undoubtedly serves the goal of a declassed “governance.” Liu Jiming, through “New People’s Literature and Art,” is attempting a return to the path of class. Historically, both “the masses” and “the people” were once progressive words, aimed at a society of commoners. But then, just as a “Fourth Estate” (the working class) rose up from beneath the “Third Estate” of the French Revolution,[2] the workers’ struggle for their own interests and future demanded a more precise language of class. At times we too use words like “the masses” and “the people” loosely, but “the working class,” or at most “the laboring people (masses),” is our precise language.

The lyrics in Liu Jiming: An Album of Songs from His Lyrics are not only admirable in their aims but of genuinely high quality. The one regret is that the melodies and vocals could only be generated by AI, and AI, at least for now, remains severely limited in artistic creation. Chinese songwriting also still lags far behind songwriting in English. With the right collaborators, this work could rise to a higher level still.

Yan Hen

On May 20, 2026, the noted writer Liu Jiming gave a lecture at Shanghai University titled “‘New Mass Literature and Art’ and the Possibility of ‘New People’s Literature and Art.’” At its heart was one pressing question: now that “New Mass Literature and Art” has been written into the Government Work Report and elevated to a national cultural strategy, how might it become possible to move from “New Mass Literature and Art” to “New People’s Literature and Art”?

This is not a game of wordplay or a tangle of terminology. It is a fundamental question that goes to the very nature of contemporary literature and art. Where “New Mass Literature and Art” is officially defined as “a profound transformation arising from new media technologies and changes in social structure,” and described as “a paradigm shift from ‘writing for the masses’ to ‘writing by the masses, shared by the masses,’” Liu Jiming sees a deeper predicament beneath the surface of prosperity. On the chain of capitalist relations of production, “the masses” exist as consuming subjects, following and constrained by the logic of the market and the ideological control behind it, and they display the characteristics of a “depoliticized politics.”[3]

Not long afterward, songs with lyrics by Liu Jiming began circulating online, and were collected into the albums Singing and Weeping for the People, Volumes I and II.[4] The twenty songs on these albums amount to a vivid practice of “New People’s Literature and Art” and deserve our attention. Taking Liu Jiming’s Shanghai University lecture as a theoretical reference point, this essay attempts to read the album for its significance in blazing a trail for New People’s Literature and Art.

1

The sharpest theoretical point in Liu Jiming’s Shanghai University lecture is his strict distinction between the concepts of “the masses” and “the people.” He states plainly:

“Unlike ‘the masses,’ ‘the people’ is a political concept with a distinct ideological orientation. Workers, peasants and the petty bourgeoisie stand at its center as the subjects who drive history forward. Socialist literature and art stand for taking the position of the overwhelming majority of the people, reflecting real life and the suffering and voices of the laboring people.”

This distinction strikes directly at the central blind spot of the “New Mass Literature and Art” discourse. Today’s narrative of New Mass Literature and Art emphasizes technological empowerment, creation by all, and sharing by the masses: tens of millions of updates a day on short-video platforms, delivery riders publishing poetry collections, cleaners writing works of nonfiction. It all does look like a moving picture of “cultural equality.” But Liu Jiming asks: when the threshold for creation is lowered without limit and the ranks of producers expand without limit, is the “people’s character” of literature and art diluted, instead, into a “mass character” in the sense of a statistical average?

“The masses” are consuming subjects shaped by the logic of the market; “the people” are class subjects with historical self-awareness and political consciousness. The former follow the logic of traffic and clicks; the latter hold to a class standpoint. The former are content with individual expression; the latter pursue collective liberation. “New Mass Literature and Art” may have accomplished the formal shift to “writing by the masses, shared by the masses,” but it has not necessarily realized the substance of “created by the people, shared by the people.”

It is precisely in this sense that the class vision of Liu Jiming’s album takes on a significance beyond mere individual creation. The song “The People” answers this conceptual debate in the sharpest possible way:

Who are the people? Who is spoken of, then forgotten?
Whose names are written beneath the soil, whose carved at the pyramid’s peak?
Jack Ma and I are not the same people
His people are leeks for the cutting, my people are drops of sweat[5]

“Jack Ma and I are not the same people”: this declaration is the distinction between “the masses” and “the people” rendered as a lyric. “Jack Ma” stands for capital personified, and “leeks” are the market’s reifying definition of the masses, while “drops of sweat” are the bodily mark of the laboring class, the material foundation of “the people.” The lyric refuses to fold the tycoons of capital into the category of “the people,” and refuses the false unity of “the people” as a declassed community.

“Ballad of the Beasts of Burden”[6] answers Liu Jiming’s critique of the consumerist trap of “the masses” in another way. The lyric runs: “They say we are beasts of burden / so beasts of burden we truly are.” Whose power is it to “say” so? It comes from the discipline that capital’s discourse imposes on the laboring class. And the lines “Beasts of burden aren’t born, / they’re broken in; / beasts of burden aren’t mute, / they’ve been frightened into silence” reveal a process of awakening as subjects, from “being spoken of” to “speaking for ourselves.” This is exactly the transformation of consciousness from “the masses” to “the people.”

What distinguishes New People’s Literature and Art from New Mass Literature and Art is its insistence on building aesthetic experience out of the materiality of the class body. “Class” is not an abstract concept but a concrete body: calloused hands, aching neck vertebrae, seeping breast milk, broken bones, a brow coated in coal dust. The imagery of pain that runs through Liu Jiming’s lyrics is not sentimental rhetoric but a cognitive device. Through these concrete bodily experiences, the macro-level concept of “class” is turned into lived experience that can be felt, charged with emotional intensity.

“My Worker Brother in the Mine Disaster” is a model of writing the class body. It uses a mine disaster as its point of entry, condensing the collective fate of the laboring class into a handful of bodily images:

Darkness spreads beneath the ground
Rock smashes time to pieces
Your palm is etched with warmth
I hear the last of the smoke

“Your palm is etched with warmth”: the verb “etched” suggests the indelible marks that labor leaves on the body, and “warmth” is life’s last vital sign. The miner’s palm is the bodily organ of labor, and also the last site where life meets death. “I hear the last of the smoke”: smoke is something seen, yet here it is “heard.” This synesthesia suggests a perception beyond the senses. In the darkness, hearing takes the place of sight, and “the last of the smoke” is the passing of life rendered as sound.

The miner’s lamp can’t light the way home
Breath breaks off in the fissure
Mother stands at the pithead
Waiting for a goodnight left unsaid

“Breath breaks off in the fissure”: breathing is the most basic bodily motion of life, and the “fissure” is both a crack in the rock and the rift between life and death. “Mother stands at the pithead / waiting for a goodnight left unsaid”: “a goodnight left unsaid” uses the most everyday, most tender language of family to show how death abruptly cuts off daily life. The mother’s waiting posture, “standing,” is a state of suspension. She does not know whether she is waiting for him to come back up or waiting for the terrible news, and this suspension is itself a kind of torture.

Your name weighs so little
yet it crushes a mountain
When the shift leader calls the roll
there’s always one missing
The dumplings you never ate
are still there in your lunchbox

“Your name weighs so little / yet it crushes a mountain” uses paradox to reveal the double nature of a miner’s life: in capital’s ledgers, it is light as a goose feather; in the memory of loved ones, it is heavy as Mount Tai.[7] The everydayness of the roll call (the shift leader calls it every day), the rupture of “always one missing,” and the material detail of “the dumplings you never ate” restore death to a concrete break in life. The dumplings are still in the lunchbox; the man is gone. This way of writing refuses to poeticize or heroize the disaster. With something close to plain sketching, it lets the cruelty of death speak for itself.

It is worth noting that after the lament, the song turns suddenly to a stirring call for class mobilization:

Brother, oh my worker brother
We can’t live as someone’s beast of burden
We will be the masters of the world
Unite and march on to tomorrow
Brother, oh my worker brother
The road of this world is far too rough
The Internationale
shall surely be won![8]

This turn from mourning to mobilization is exactly what distinguishes New People’s Literature and Art from the mere “writing of individual suffering” in New Mass Literature and Art. It does not stop at showing suffering; it tries to grow class consciousness and the will to act out of that suffering.

“We can’t live as someone’s beast of burden”: here “beast of burden” echoes “Ballad of the Beasts of Burden,” but in a heavier context. It is not a metaphor for the condition of labor but a verdict on the miner’s condition of life. If to live is to be treated as a beast of burden, then death becomes the ultimate indictment of that inhuman condition. The closing line, “The Internationale shall surely be won,” lifts an individual mine disaster into the historical horizon of the liberation of the world proletariat, and gives a song of mourning a transcendent political dimension.

If “My Worker Brother in the Mine Disaster” is a collective lament and a call to class mobilization born at the scene of a disaster, then “Why Are My Eyes Always Filled with Tears: To My Class Brothers” is a more inward, lyrical expression of class feeling. The title borrows the famous lines from Ai Qing’s “I Love This Land”: “Why are my eyes always filled with tears? / Because I love this land so deeply.”[9] But Liu Jiming replaces Ai Qing’s “land” with “class brothers,” carrying out an emotional translation from nationalist lyricism to class identification. Ai Qing’s tears come from love of the land; Liu Jiming’s tears come from aching for his class brothers.

Plow and harrow wear through coarse cloth,
The mine shaft swallows every boyhood day,
Together we shoulder wind and frost, together bear the hunger,
Rooted in the same soil, never torn apart.

“Plow and harrow wear through coarse cloth” is the wearing down of the peasant’s body; “the mine shaft swallows every boyhood day” is the vanishing of the miner’s youth. Set side by side, the two images bring agricultural and industrial labor into a single lineage of the class body. The repeated “together” in “together we shoulder wind and frost, together bear the hunger” is class identification expressed as lyric. “Rooted in the same soil, never torn apart”: the “roots” are both the peasant’s bond with the land and the ties of flesh and blood between members of a class.

The chorus answers the title directly:

Why are my eyes always filled with tears?
For my class brothers, side by side, fighting to survive.
Sharing the cold and hardship, guarding justice as one,
Bound by blood, in life and death as one.
Why are my eyes always filled with tears?
For my class brothers on this land of suffering.
Fists clenched, we greet the dawn together,
With a heart of true devotion, unswerving till death.

“Side by side, fighting to survive” sums up the condition of the laboring class with precision. Not “striving,” not “hustling,” but “fighting to survive.” This is a more fundamental, existential category: squeezed by capital, every day for the laboring class is a struggle simply to go on living. The bodily gesture of “fists clenched” echoes “gripping the wrench in my hand” in “Ballad of the Beasts of Burden.” The fist and the wrench are both material marks of the class body at the moment of awakening. “Unswerving till death” gives class feeling a continuity that outlasts any single life.

The second verse widens the spatial reach of class identification:

We drink from the same muddy river,
We tread the same barren ground,
No north or south, no east or west,
All proletarians are one.
These tears are no feeble sigh,
They are heartache for what each has endured,
They are a fire in the breast that won’t go out,
To win a world where all are equal.

“We drink from the same muddy river / we tread the same barren ground”: “muddy water” and “barren ground” are not romanticized rural images but the shared material condition of the laboring class. “No north or south, no east or west / all proletarians are one” directly echoes the global class imagination of “The New Internationale,” but in a plainer, more emotional form. “These tears are no feeble sigh / they are heartache for what each has endured / they are a fire in the breast that won’t go out”: these three lines reinterpret “tears” in class terms. Tears are not weakness but a mixture of “heartache” and “fire.” Heartache is empathy; fire is anger. Together they form the double structure of class feeling.

Seen side by side, these two songs show two dimensions of Liu Jiming’s writing of the class body. “My Worker Brother in the Mine Disaster” is eventful and narrative: through a specific mine disaster, it moves from the scene of catastrophe to collective mourning and then to class mobilization. “Why Are My Eyes Always Filled with Tears” is lyrical and introspective: with tears, a secretion of the body, as its central image, it moves from an individual emotional response to collective class identification. The first looks outward, toward social reality and political action; the second looks inward, toward the structure of feeling and the formation of the subject. Complementing each other, they make up a complete map of the class body as written by New People’s Literature and Art.

2

In the first part of his Shanghai University lecture, Liu Jiming systematically traced three major stages of the people’s literature and art tradition in the history of China’s new literature: the left-wing literature and the movement to popularize literature and art of the 1930s; the Yan’an literary tradition; and the socialist literature and art of workers, peasants and soldiers from the 1950s through the 1970s. He stressed that New Mass Literature and Art is not an isolated product of technology, and must be examined within this century-long tradition of people’s literature and art.

This historical survey provides an important frame of reference for understanding Liu Jiming’s songwriting. Several of the album’s works draw their aesthetic power precisely from a dialogue with this tradition.

“The New Internationale” is a contemporary reawakening of the tradition of “The Internationale.” It keeps the classic transliteration Yingtenaxiong’nai’er, and with its spatial imagination, “from Detroit to Dongguan / the assembly line stretches into an alliance,” translates the slogan “Workers of all countries, unite!” into a political imagination suited to the conditions of global capitalism in the twenty-first century. It carries on directly from left-wing literature’s mission of “reflecting the plight of the toiling masses, the insulted and injured,” while widening the view from the nation-state to the whole world.

“I Forgive None of Them” is a direct homage to the spirit of left-wing literature as embodied by Lu Xun. The lyric “Let them resent me / I forgive not a single one” recreates Lu Xun’s uncompromising stance,[10] while “the hypocrisy of the intellectual class / the capitalists’ mangy running dogs / the Qing queues were cut off long ago / but the queue in the heart remains”[11] continues Lu Xun’s twofold critique of “hypocrisy” and “servility.” This year marks the 90th anniversary of Lu Xun’s death, and also of the dissolution of the League of Left-Wing Writers,[12] which makes the song’s commemorative meaning all the more profound.

“I Am an Old Gun of the Post-Revolutionary Age” (adapted from the preface to the English edition of Black and White) takes the form of a family history: “My great-grandfather’s petition yellowing in the rains of the Republic / my grandfather’s opium pipe putting out the last of the starlight / my uncle’s New Fourth Army uniform hanging from the old house’s beam / the steelyard of Land Reform that weighed the rice, and weighed the turns of history too.”[13] These objects form the bloodline of one family, and at the same time the material vehicle of the people’s literature and art tradition from the Republic to the New China.

It is worth noting that in his lecture Liu Jiming did not affirm the people’s literature and art tradition unconditionally or nostalgically. He acknowledged that the forms of literature and art must inevitably change as times change; the core is to hold on to “the people’s standpoint,” not to copy old models. This dialectical attitude also shows in his songwriting: it pays tribute to tradition without replicating it, takes up its mission while renewing its forms.

The most critically incisive part of the lecture is Liu Jiming’s dissection of the internal predicament of New Mass Literature and Art. Taking “amateur writing” as an example, he pointed out that in the course of being absorbed into the mainstream, these works “steadily lose their heterogeneity and critical edge, displaying the features of ‘an absence of values, a vacuum where class should be, and criticism struck dumb,’” and are gradually shaped into “inspirational stories.” Their representative writers “rise from the bottom to the middle,” becoming “the perfect illustration of proletarians turning petty-bourgeois, achieving upward mobility and personal success.”

This critique hits squarely on the malady of New Mass Literature and Art. Liu Jiming’s album, by refusing to be made “inspirational” or to be “co-opted,” offers another possibility for New People’s Literature and Art.

“A-Ying” is the most representative example. Liu Jiming adapted this lyric from a narrative poem he wrote in 2018, “The Nursing Worker,” and it has something of the calm of a documentary. A-Ying was “only asking for an answer on behalf of the man who lost his hand,” yet she was taken from the workshop to an interrogation room. The bodily detail of “the milk seeped out / soaking the front of her shirt” refuses any beautification or sentimentality. At the end, “A-Ying’s breasts ached again with fullness / her child / she didn’t know where.” There is no “comeback,” no “rescue,” only pain left hanging. This refusal to offer cheap solutions is a systematic resistance to the “inspirational narrative.”

“How Far Is the Road Home, Really?” likewise refuses the narrative frame of “personal striving.” “The doctor says, no money, then please check out / the police roll up the window and pretend not to see”: the disabled at the bottom of society are abandoned at once by the hospital and by the system of power. “I think of Monkey fanning out the Flaming Mountains / but who will carry my pain for me?”[14] Between the solution of myth and the suspension of reality opens a gap that cannot be closed. The song’s sense of injustice is New People’s Literature and Art’s direct answer to “an absence of values … criticism struck dumb.”

“Elders and Neighbors: To My Empty-Nest Village”[15] extends the critical view from individual misfortune to collective fate. “In the days of the collective / we ate from the same pot / now there are more pots / but each eats alone / and it’s gone cold.” These lines, which ask “which step, exactly, / sent us the wrong way,” are the very opposite of what Liu Jiming described in his lecture as “reducing all social contradictions to economics and technology rather than grasping them in their essence and totality.” They try to restore a grasp of real contradictions as a “totality.”[16]

3

Although Liu Jiming did not specifically discuss questions of form in his lecture, his three paths for building New People’s Literature and Art (reconstructing the class standpoint, awakening class consciousness, and restoring a critique of the totality) provide a theoretical framework for understanding the formal explorations of his album.

“Song of the Online Left” describes the life of today’s young leftists in a voice that mixes self-mockery with self-awareness. “Two a.m. and I’m still reading the Manifesto / every word like a hammer / striking between the joints of my bones”: theoretical reading is turned into bodily experience. “At daybreak I close every window / and walk to my workstation / as if walking to the front”: cyberspace and real space are not cut off from each other but are two sides of the same coin. The song sets academic language (“the formula of surplus value,” “dialectics”) alongside daily life (“the screws on the assembly line,” “the workshop’s white fluorescent lights”), making “revolutionary discourse” part of everyday life and making “everyday life” political. This is exactly how “awakening class consciousness” is carried out at the level of form.

“Having Tea” uses highly restrained metaphorical narration to write about a subject that cannot be spoken of directly. “Having tea,” an everyday act, becomes in the lyric a metaphor for the disciplining power of the state:[17] “Swallowed, it’s the rules / spat out, it’s what you used to be”; “Swallowed, it’s tea / spewed out, it’s lava.” The ending, “Like that word left unsaid / forever / impossible to swallow,” lifts the theme to an existential plane. This way of “saying without saying” may well be a necessary strategy for New People’s Literature and Art in the space for expression available today.

“Ballad of Lying Flat” introduces a male–female duet, presenting different faces of “lying flat” from gendered perspectives. “Back then they sang / My home is on the Songhua River / today we sing / my dream sits on top of housing prices”:[18] setting the phrasing of a song of the anti-Japanese resistance beside the predicaments of life today produces a powerful historical irony. “Lying flat / is not surrender / it’s our last position”:[19] this definition reinterprets “lying flat,” from a passive personal choice, as “a protest against the absurd.” This effort to re-politicize an everyday behavior that seems “depoliticized” is a distinctive path for New People’s Literature and Art in the present context.

The song “Lament for Qu Yuan” holds a special place in the album. It is both a lyrical presentation of a historical tragedy and a self-interpretation of the structure of feeling of New People’s Literature and Art.

Generation after generation of King Huai, generation after generation of Jin Shang
Generation after generation of honest men driven from the court
Your tragedy has played for two thousand three hundred years
The stage has changed, but the lines are still the same[20]

These lines raise Qu Yuan’s tragedy from an individual misfortune to a structural tragedy of history. But the lyric does not stop at the pessimism of historical determinism:

You question Heaven, Heaven gives no answer
This world just isn’t worth it
And still you can’t bear to let it go[21]

“Can’t bear to let it go” is exactly the emotional foundation that sets New People’s Literature and Art apart from nihilism. Even after acknowledging the cruelty of history’s cycles, one still cannot bear to let go of this world, cannot bear to abandon the “common folk” who are still suffering. The “can’t bear to let go” of “Lament for Qu Yuan” and the “remembering” of “I Forgive None of Them” speak to each other. The first is an emotional drive that refuses to give up; the second is an ethical choice that refuses to forget. Together they form the structure of feeling of “singing and weeping” as a method: the “song” is the singing of one who cannot let go, the “weeping” is mourning for suffering, and singing and weeping as one is how New People’s Literature and Art persists through the low ebb of history.

“That Year, I Was Thirteen: Written for the 50th Anniversary of Mao Zedong’s Death” uses the frame of a personal coming-of-age story to show the emotional process by which class consciousness is formed. It is both Liu Jiming’s heartfelt remembrance of a great revolutionary leader and his solemn declaration that he will “always stand on the side of the oppressed.” From the boy’s “half-understanding” to the understanding that came in his sixties after “passing through factories / through villages / through changing times,” the lyric bears witness to an awakening of class consciousness, from “reciting the poems” to “understanding the poems.” “Not because you stood on the highest mountain / but because you bent down / and took the hands of workers and peasants”: this bodily gesture of “bending down,” together with Qu Yuan’s “can’t bear to let go” in “Lament for Qu Yuan” and the definition of the people as “those who bend, those who sweat” in “The People,” forms the emotional ethic that runs through the whole album: standing with those who suffer.

4

In his Shanghai University lecture, Liu Jiming did not offer a complete blueprint for New People’s Literature and Art. Instead, with the judgment and the call that “a new era will inevitably produce new masses, new masses will inevitably have a new literature and art, and the new mass literature and art should also be a new people’s literature and art,” he left the question open for practice to answer.

Liu Jiming’s album is a sample of that practice. In a cultural context where “the people” has been hollowed out into an empty signifier and the language of class has been systematically driven out, it raises again, in song, the forgotten questions: Who are the people? Who is singing for whom? Whose voices are heard, and whose are sunk to the bottom of the shaft?

Across the whole album, “Black Is Black, White Is White,” with its classically elegant, compressed language and its unquestionable moral judgment, forms a distinctive ethical coordinate.

The lyric opens by laying out a world of inverted values through a set of paired images:

The kiln fire’s last warmth, the old-time ardor fading
Feasts in grand halls weave cords of fame and gain
How many first ideals are bought and sold at any price
How much true devotion lies buried by the vulgar world

“The kiln fire’s last warmth” suggests that the burning ideals of the past are now only embers; “feasts in grand halls” is the scene of pleasure where power and capital collude today. “How many first ideals are bought and sold / how much true devotion lies buried”: these two lines sum up precisely the spiritual condition of the post-revolutionary age. Every value once held dear can be priced and sold; every passion that once burned is buried by the logic of the vulgar world. “The tattered scroll spread open / the interrogation of the years / a cry set down on paper / and no one heeds it”: the “tattered scroll” is a relic of history, the “cry” is present-day resistance, and both are cast into the silence of “no one heeds it.”

It is in this context of “muddy waves churning / turning the world’s black and white upside down” that the chorus makes its moral judgment in a voice that admits no doubt:

Black is black, mud can never wash it clean
White is white, pure frost will take no dust
Let vanity weave a thousand mazes
Inch by inch, our backbone won’t bend a fraction
Black is black, the false will show their face at last
White is white, the first ideal stays ever new

“Black is black / white is white”: this seemingly simple declarative sentence carries a startling force in an age saturated with value relativism. When every line between right and wrong has been dissolved by postmodern discourse into a “discursive construction,” when “truth” is demoted to one “perspective” among many, to reaffirm that black and white must not be confused is to reaffirm the ethical ground of criticism. “Mud can never wash it clean,” “pure frost will take no dust”: the opposition of mud and frost is a difference at the level of ontology, not a disagreement at the level of epistemology. “Inch by inch, our backbone won’t bend a fraction”: the pairing of “inch” and “fraction” uses the smallest units of measure to insist on a moral stance that permits no compromise. Even the loss of “a fraction” would be a betrayal of one’s backbone.

The second verse further develops the opposition between “backbone” and “fawning”:

The blast furnace falls silent, the old fervor gone
By lamplight at a cold window, ideals take root[22]
Some fawn on the powerful and take the shortcut
Some stand tall and face the wind and dust

“The blast furnace falls silent” is set beside “by lamplight at a cold window”: the first is a symbol of collective labor in the industrial age, the second an image of the lone intellectual holding fast. After “the blast furnace falls silent,” there are still those who let “ideals take root” “by lamplight at a cold window.” This is perseverance at the ebb tide of history. “Some fawn on the powerful and take the shortcut / some stand tall and face the wind and dust”: “fawning” and “standing tall” are two utterly different bodily postures, the one bent in climbing upward, the other upright against wind and rain. “In a humble room there survive / a scalding conviction / a faint cry / keeping watch in search of truth”: the “humble room” stands against the “grand hall,” the “faint” against the “grand,” but “scalding” and “keeping watch” give the conviction in that humble room a spiritual warmth beyond its material conditions.

At its close, the song raises individual perseverance into testimony across historical time:

Along this hundred-year road, writing testimony for time
The sparks never die, marching on toward the dawn[23]
……
One round of wine hides a thousand threads of power
A thousand luxuries turn to dust in the end
Good and evil have the years to bear them witness
Right and wrong, not a hair’s breadth may blur

“A hundred-year road” places individual moral choice within the longer view of history. “Testimony for time” suggests that the values held fast today may go unrecognized, but will in the end find their place in history. “The sparks never die” echoes the fear in “That Year, I Was Thirteen” that “the sparks you left behind / might go out for good,” and the promise in “I Forgive None of Them” that “we still remember.” The sparks are kept alive not by a great wind but by every individual “by lamplight at a cold window,” guarding them “inch by inch” with their backbone.

Within the album’s critical system, “Black Is Black, White Is White” provides the ethical premise for its critique of social reality. If black and white can be confused, if good and evil can be deconstructed into a matter of perspective, then the indictment of class oppression in “The People,” the questioning of systemic injustice in “A-Ying,” and the critique of capital’s logic in “Ballad of the Beasts of Burden” would all lose the ground they stand on. So this song is not a direct critique of social reality. It reinforces the ethical foundation that makes critique possible at all. It answers a more fundamental question: in the fog of value relativism, on what grounds do we say that some things are wrong?

If “Black Is Black, White Is White” offers the fortitude that “will not bend,” then “Homecoming” (theme song of the TV film Renjing) offers the gentle warmth of “homecoming.” One hard and one soft, one outward and one inward, the two songs complement each other along two dimensions of New People’s Literature and Art: moral ethics and spiritual homecoming.

The language of “Homecoming” stands in sharp contrast to the fierce critique of the rest of the album. It goes back to an understated reticence close to classical poetry:

The river’s voice washes over the road we came by
Whose footsteps lingered in the wind and rain
That year’s diary, the scrawled handwriting
Records springs and autumns left unfinished[24]

“The river’s voice” is a metaphor for time, and also a geographical marker (the Yangtze). “The road we came by” and “footsteps in the wind and rain” create a backward-looking perspective: not charging forward in action, but looking back on the road after the storm. “That year’s diary / the scrawled handwriting” is a material remnant of personal history, and “springs and autumns left unfinished” are unrealized ideals and a mission not yet fulfilled. This state of being “unfinished” shares a spiritual structure with the promise to “keep walking”: both are about pressing on within an “unfinished” historical process.

Rain and shine along the muddy road
Someone looks up and counts the stars
Who buried the seeds in the soil
Yet lifted the firelight over the hills

The “muddy road” is the hardship of walking at the bottom of society; “counting the stars” is the posture of looking up toward the light in the midst of hardship. “Burying the seeds in the soil” and “lifting the firelight over the hills” form a parallel pair: seeds root downward, firelight shines upward, and both point to perseverance in darkness. The “seeds” speak to “the seeds you sowed” in “That Year, I Was Thirteen,” and the “firelight” forms a thematic polyphony with “the sparks never die” in “Lament for Qu Yuan” and in “Black Is Black, White Is White.”

The chorus lifts personal fate into a broader view of life:

So many rises and falls in this human world
Who is planting hope in the fields
Through the long, long night, hold tight the dream in your hand
Waiting for a redemption like spring wind and gentle rain[25]

“So many rises and falls in this human world” is a sweeping sense of historical change. “Through the long, long night, hold tight the dream in your hand”: the gesture of “holding tight” forms a cluster of “gripping” images with “gripping the wrench in my hand” in “Ballad of the Beasts of Burden” and “fists clenched” in “Why Are My Eyes Always Filled with Tears.” The difference is that the gripping in “Ballad of the Beasts of Burden” is a prelude to struggle, while the holding tight in “Homecoming” is perseverance while waiting. The tension between the two is precisely the double face of “singing and weeping” as a structure of feeling: one must grip the wrench to change things, and also hold tight to the dream in order to wait.

In the human realm, black and white are interwoven
Even pain bears witness for time
Asking nothing of success or failure, we go against the tide
Only because there, where the lamplight flickers low, someone sings and weeps[26]

“In the human realm, black and white are interwoven” directly echoes the theme of “Black Is Black, White Is White”: in the chaos of black and white intertwined, the judgment “black is black / white is white” is still needed. “Even pain bears witness for time” raises personal pain to the level of historical testimony, in thematic counterpoint to “along this hundred-year road, writing testimony for time” in “Black Is Black, White Is White.” “Asking nothing of success or failure, we go against the tide”: “asking nothing of success or failure” is a rejection of utilitarianism, and “going against the tide” is the solitary journey outside the mainstream. “Only because there, where the lamplight flickers low, someone sings and weeps” is the line that names the album’s title. “Where the lamplight flickers low” is a marginal, forgotten place, and “someone sings and weeps” is the posture of insisting on making one’s voice heard there.

Surging waves, a single leaf of a boat
Bones of iron ring true, silence is a roar
At the crossroads overgrown with thorns
The first ideal is the only North Star

The image of “a single leaf of a boat” among “surging waves” captures precisely the position of New People’s Literature and Art in today’s cultural landscape: alone and small, but not giving up the voyage. “Bones of iron ring true, silence is a roar”: in mainstream discourse, “silence” is often taken for submission, but here it is redefined as a form of “roaring.” This echoes the metaphor of what “cannot be swallowed” in “Having Tea”: where the space for expression is compressed, silence itself can be a form of protest. “The first ideal is the only North Star”: the North Star is the guide for one who has lost the way, and the “first ideal” is the only coordinate for crossing the fog of values.

The song ends by returning to the opening image of the river’s voice, completing a circular structure:

Looking back on the rugged road we came
Green hills as far as the eye can see: that is home
The river’s voice still flows on to the east
The one on the bank has grown white-haired

“Green hills as far as the eye can see: that is home” is the most philosophically suggestive line in the song. The “green hills” are natural geography, and also a spiritual home not yet polluted by the logic of capital. This “home” is not a hometown in the physical sense but a spiritual settling. When one has walked the “rugged road” and looks back to see “green hills as far as the eye can see,” that is home. “The river’s voice still flows on to the east / the one on the bank has grown white-haired”: the passing of time and the aging of the individual are set side by side, but “the river’s voice still flows” suggests something eternal beyond the individual. Perhaps it is the history of a class, perhaps unrealized ideals, perhaps the long river formed by all those footsteps that “keep walking.”

Seen side by side, “Black Is Black, White Is White” and “Homecoming” reveal a clear spiritual structure. The first answers the question of “how to judge”: in a world where black and white are interwoven, hold fast to the moral judgment that “black is black / white is white.” The second answers the question of “how to find rest”: amid wandering and solitude, find a spiritual home in “green hills as far as the eye can see.” The first is an ethics of critique with its blade turned outward; the second is a self-settling with its blade turned inward. Together they make up the complete condition of the subject in New People’s Literature and Art: it needs the fortitude that “won’t bend a fraction,” and also the composure of “green hills as far as the eye can see: that is home.”

More important still, these two songs form deep intertextual links with the rest of the album. “The sparks never die” in “Black Is Black, White Is White” echoes the “sparks” of “That Year, I Was Thirteen” and the “remembering” of “I Forgive None of Them.” “Someone sings and weeps” in “Homecoming” names the album’s central image directly; “burying the seeds in the soil” echoes “the seeds grow in my blood and bone” in “That Year, I Was Thirteen”; and “the first ideal is the only North Star” provides a spiritual coordinate for the social critique of “The People,” “A-Ying,” “Ballad of the Beasts of Burden” and others. Without perseverance in one’s first ideal, critique loses its direction; without an imagined “home,” wandering is nothing but exhaustion.

From the perspective of New People’s Literature and Art, the significance of these two songs is that they prove New People’s Literature and Art to be not only an art of social critique but also an art of spiritual construction. It points outward toward the political goal of class liberation, and also inward toward the settling and steadfastness of the individual soul. This is a direct answer to the “absence of values” that afflicts New Mass Literature and Art: New People’s Literature and Art has not only the cutting edge of critique but a foundation of values; not only cries of anger but a gentle homecoming.

5

New People’s Literature and Art must rebuild a class vision in content, but it also faces the task of aesthetic innovation in form. How can it avoid becoming a copy of the old propaganda art? How can it hold to a class standpoint while remaining artistically open? Liu Jiming: An Album of Songs from His Lyrics shows a wealth of formal exploration.

“Ballad of Lying Flat” introduces a male–female duet, presenting different faces of “lying flat” from gendered perspectives. The man faces being devoured by the “wolf culture” of the workplace; the woman faces being turned into an object by the demands for a house and a car on the marriage market. “Back then they sang / My home is on the Songhua River / today we sing / my dream sits on top of housing prices”: setting the phrasing of a song of the anti-Japanese resistance beside the predicaments of life today produces a powerful historical irony. “Lying flat / is not surrender / it’s our last position / lying flat / is not laziness / it’s a protest against the absurd”: this definition reinterprets “lying flat,” from a passive personal choice, as “a protest against the absurd,” and so carries out a political reassessment of “lying flat” as a social phenomenon.

“Song of the Online Left,” in a voice that mixes self-mockery with self-awareness, describes the life of today’s young leftists. “Two a.m. and I’m still reading the Manifesto / every word like a hammer / striking between the joints of my bones”: theoretical reading is turned into bodily experience. “We use the formula of surplus value to work out this world / and the answer we arrive at / is covered with the wounds of class”: the fusion of academic language with the pain of reality creates a distinctive “theoretical lyricism.” “At daybreak I close every window / and walk to my workstation / as if walking to the front / Revolution is not a dinner party[27] / I know / but every line of code / every repost / is driving a stake into the ground / for the day that is bound to come”: the song weaves together cyberspace and real space, the study of theory and daily practice, individual action and the laws of history, making “revolutionary discourse” part of everyday life and making “everyday life” political.

“Having Tea” uses highly restrained metaphorical narration to write about a subject that cannot be spoken of directly. “Keyboards shatter the midnight / the screen reflects a face / ideals steeped in hot water / taste a little salty”: “keyboard” and “screen” sketch the working conditions of today’s knowledge workers. “Please come downstairs with me / someone would like a chat”: “a chat” is a euphemism for the disciplining power of the state. “Tea / tea / whose heart is scalded / swallowed, it’s the rules / spat out, it’s what you used to be / Tea / tea / whose fate is bitter / the words you deleted / have all grown into nails”: the opposition of “tea” and “lava,” the tension between “swallowing” and “spewing,” and the paradox of “deleted words” that “grow into nails” together form a complete system of metaphor. The ending, “Like that word left unsaid / forever / impossible to swallow,” lifts the theme to an existential plane. What is silenced is not only a particular political position but every soul that refuses to be disciplined. This way of “saying without saying” may well be a necessary strategy for New People’s Literature and Art in the space for expression available today.

Finally, a word on “I’m Willing…”, the opening song of Volume I. I have saved it for last because this lyric carries a very special meaning. It is special not only because it comes from a short poem Liu Jiming wrote earlier, which has already circulated widely online, but because what it conveys serves, in a sense, to name the theme of the whole album. With four repetitions of “I’m willing,” the lyric builds a clear map of the spirit, showing the writer’s extraordinary clarity and courage. The image of the mast of one who sails against the current lifts solitude into a way of being; the metaphor of the martyrs’ phosphorescent fire turns “sacrifice” into a light that shines for others. Most moving of all is the third stanza: in a climate where “currying favor with the rich has become the fashion,” “defending the dignity of a class” is not only a moral choice but a renewed affirmation of historical subjectivity. And the allusion to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale links the refusal of lies with the innocence of childhood, giving resistance a poetic legitimacy. The lyric builds step by step in its structure, from individual solitary courage to the dignity of a class, from a glimmer in the dark to a shout in broad daylight. Its emotional intensity keeps rising, preserving a last lyrical stronghold for spiritual independence. This almost classical sense of the sublime, amid the torrent of materialism, reads like an avant-garde manifesto walking at the front of its time. It has the power to shake the heart, and in thought and feeling it provides a perfect annotation to the whole album.

It should be specially noted that all the lyrics on the album were set to music and sung by AI, achieving a seamless fusion of literature, music and artificial intelligence. The result is a distinctive artistic style and listening experience different from traditional songs. It is a pioneering development in the field of popular music, and deserves dedicated analysis and study.

The road ahead for this undercurrent of New People’s Literature and Art, pulled apart and obscured by all sorts of discourses, is bound to be full of hardship. It will find it hard to win support from the mainstream literary establishment, and just as hard to gain a foothold in a cultural market dominated by capital. But as the song “That Year, I Was Thirteen” puts it:

Fifty years have passed, and some have long forgotten you
But the seeds you sowed have grown into my blood and bone
I have nothing I can offer you
Except to stand, as you did,
On the side of the vast majority of the working people

The upright “standing” posture, the stance of “standing with the vast majority of the working people”: this is the simplest definition of “New People’s Literature and Art.” The twenty songs of Liu Jiming: An Album of Songs from His Lyrics are exactly such a “standing” song. They have blazed a trail for New People’s Literature and Art, and it is a road that will, in the end, take many more people to travel.

For the rest of my life, let me be a soldier
And walk the road you didn’t finish, walk on, walk on…

[1] Yan Hen (烟痕, literally “trace of smoke”) is the author’s pen name.

[2] The “Third Estate” was the commoners of pre-revolutionary France, as distinct from the clergy (First Estate) and the nobility (Second Estate). The editor uses “Fourth Estate” in its older sense of the proletariat, not in the modern English sense of the press.

[3] “Depoliticized politics” (去政治化的政治) is a term closely associated with the Chinese scholar Wang Hui.

[4] 歌哭 (gēkū), “singing and weeping,” is a classical expression for pouring out one’s feelings through both song and lament. It recurs throughout the essay as a key term.

[5] Jack Ma is the founder of Alibaba. In Chinese internet slang, “leeks” (韭菜) are ordinary people, especially small investors, who are “harvested” again and again by the rich and powerful, just as leeks grow back each time they are cut.

[6] 牛马 (niúmǎ), literally “oxen and horses,” is current Chinese slang in which overworked employees mockingly describe themselves as beasts of burden. The essay once refers to this song as 《牛马歌》 instead of 《牛马谣》; the title has been unified here.

[7] An allusion to the historian Sima Qian (c. 145–86 BCE): “All men must die; but one death may be heavier than Mount Tai, another lighter than a goose feather.” Mao Zedong famously quoted the line in “Serve the People” (1944).

[8] 英特纳雄耐尔 (Yīngtènàxióngnài’ěr) is the Chinese phonetic transliteration of “Internationale,” preserved in the standard Chinese version of the anthem, whose refrain ends “英特纳雄耐尔就一定要实现” (“the Internationale shall surely be realized”).

[9] Ai Qing (1910–1996), one of the most important modern Chinese poets. “I Love This Land” was written in 1938, during the War of Resistance against Japan.

[10] From Lu Xun’s essay “Death” (1936), written shortly before he died: “Let them go on resenting me. I, for my part, forgive not a single one of them.”

[11] “The capitalists’ mangy running dogs” (资本家的乏走狗) is Lu Xun’s famous epithet from his 1930 polemic against the critic Liang Shiqiu. The queue, the braid Han men were forced to wear under the Qing dynasty, is a recurring image in Lu Xun’s fiction for the servile mentality that outlived the dynasty itself.

[12] The League of Left-Wing Writers, founded in Shanghai in 1930 with Lu Xun as its leading figure, dissolved in 1936. Lu Xun died in October of the same year.

[13] The title plays on the Chinese word 枪 (qiāng), which means both “gun” and, in 烟枪, “opium pipe.” The New Fourth Army was a Communist-led army during the War of Resistance against Japan. Land Reform (土改) was the redistribution of land from landlords to peasants in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

[14] In the classic novel Journey to the West, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, borrows a magic palm-leaf fan to put out the fires of the Flaming Mountains so the pilgrims can pass.

[15] “Empty-nest” (空巢) describes rural villages where the working-age population has left for the cities, leaving behind the elderly and children.

[16] “Totality” (总体性) is a key concept in Marxist theory, especially in the work of Georg Lukács: the grasp of society as an interconnected whole rather than as isolated phenomena.

[17] In mainland China, being “invited to tea” (被喝茶) is a well-known euphemism for being summoned for questioning by the police or state security.

[18] “On the Songhua River” (《松花江上》, 1936) is a famous song of exile and grief about the Japanese occupation of Northeast China. It opens with the line “My home is on the Songhua River in the Northeast.”

[19] “Lying flat” (躺平) is a social movement and catchphrase that emerged around 2021 among young Chinese: a refusal to take part in relentless competition, overwork and consumption.

[20] Qu Yuan (c. 340–278 BCE) was a poet and minister of the state of Chu. Slandered by the courtier Jin Shang and others, he was banished by King Huai, and finally drowned himself in the Miluo River. He is remembered as the archetype of the loyal, upright official rejected by a corrupt court. His long poem “Tian Wen” (“Heavenly Questions”) poses a series of unanswered questions to Heaven.

[21] “This world just isn’t worth it” (人间不值得) is a popular recent internet catchphrase expressing weary disillusionment.

[22] “A cold window” (寒窗) is a traditional image for long years of solitary study in poverty.

[23] The first character of this line in the source (祖) appears to be a typographical error, most likely for 这 (“this”). It has been translated accordingly.

[24] “Springs and autumns” (春秋) means the years, but also evokes the Spring and Autumn Annals, the classical chronicle traditionally attributed to Confucius; hence, recorded history.

[25] 春风化雨, “spring wind and transforming rain,” is a classical idiom for gentle, nourishing influence, originally used of a good teacher.

[26] An allusion to the Song dynasty poet Xin Qiji (1140–1207), in his lyric “Green Jade Table: The Lantern Festival”: after searching the crowd a thousand times, the poet turns his head, and there is the one he seeks, “where the lamplight flickers low.”

[27] From Mao Zedong’s “Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan” (1927): “A revolution is not a dinner party.”