Quotes from this article:
Travelling only at night, the corpse drivers would ring bells to warn off the living, since the sight of the dead migrants was thought to bring bad luck. Though itself somewhat apocryphal, new myths grew out of the practice, as the hopping corpses were transformed into jiangshi, vampire-like creatures driven to feed on the life force of others. Their own blood siphoned out of them by the docks and factories, these migrant workers were transformed into monsters befitting a new reality—one of crumbling empires, civil wars and the insatiable expansion of commodities.
Transporting corpses over a thousand li was not remembrance, then, but a strange sort of survival. The stiff-limbed dead walked from their factories, traversed countries torn by war, famine and other unnamable sufferings to finally settle amongst their kin in the dust of their homeland, a rural world that had only just caught sight of its approaching oblivion.
Today, China itself has become such a wandering specter. The rural world is dying, yet hundreds of millions of workers still seem stuck between their peasant past and a future that fails to arrive. Two decades of staggering economic growth built on a series of credit bubbles have left a legacy of “development” defined by wastelands of apartment complexes sitting next to half-empty factory cities, each year filled with fewer workers and more unmanned machines. While the elite children of the country’s financial and administrative centers collect sports cars and foreign degrees, the children of today’s migrants are guaranteed little more than the fleeting chance to become yet another corpse crushed to pulp in the factory.
A lot of this is reminding me of Blockchain Chicken Farm and the depictions of rural life among the techno-optimist framework.
As growth rates dwindle, the country seems nonetheless driven ahead by an undead, mechanical momentum. Workers are laid off with nowhere to return. Ruralites give up their land in exchange for a fraction of the condos built on them, soon losing their value to an inflating currency. Entire landscapes are poisoned by decades of rapid industrial expansion, while urban centers succumb to man-made landslides, earthquakes and chemical explosions. Riots and strikes proliferate, but fail to cohere into anything larger. The working class has been dismantled. Nothing is left today but dead generations united in their separation, shambling through the fire and the dust.
