Premium Essay

Xu Lizhi’s Suicide

In: English and Literature

Submitted By lism815
Words 724
Pages 3
The story of Xu Lizhi’s suicide, and Jia Pingwa’s novel, they both reveal a difficult and tired life of lower class Chinese’s in the current social-economic turmoil of China. Over past decades, the rapid growth of the Chinese economy results huge economical gap between city and rural area due to the different of development. Although, China has been an attractive destination for global corporations due to its low wage rate and lack of labor right, however, more than 36% of the population live on less than $2 a day and get through difficult life to support their family as a side effect of fast economy growth. In this sense, Most of workers left from rural area of China, where extreme poverty forces them to leave their home, and come to urban area in search of employment.

Xu Lizhi was an exploited industrial worker of Foxconn, which is a huge supplier of Apple. He is originally from rural area of Jieyang, Guangdong and began his working life on the assembly line. Industrial workers of Foxconn have been worked in poor environment, lived in a tiny shared dormitory and endured sweatshop work for excessive and forced overtime. Lizhi was also one of these migrant workers who worked “standing straight like iron, hands like flight” on the assembly line without day and night. His life was nothing but an iron machine; however, he had a passion on literature. Before he suicides himself to reveal this social absurdity, He left lots of writings that criticizes irrational and inhumane working condition and laments their hard fate and homesick.

Jia Pingwa’s novel ‘Happy’ was also written in this same sense of theme. A guy who named his name ‘Happy Liu’ by himself, always has positive and happy attitude towards his life even though his life unhappy itself. This contradiction makes his life look like more tragedy. He migrated from rural area to Xi’an and barely makes ends

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