[EXCERPT] “Life on a Ledge: From On the Edge” by Margaret Hillenbrand
Click HERE to read an essay
by Hillenbrand on On the Edge.
Margaret Hillenbrand. On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, Columbia University Press, 2023. 408 pgs.
Limbs dangle from the edge of a high-rise; a protestor is bent double, incapacitated by vertigo on top of a tower crane; a small cluster of men balances, like birds perched on a telegraph wire, on the ledge of a skyscraper; others hang silently from scaffolding as if they were acrobats, but with stricken, tearful faces; a man, persuaded down from the top of a department store, can barely stand, and has to be supported by firefighters as his legs give way; protestors scale towers that are visibly still under construction, as the sound of wind and snow howling on the rooftop muddies the audio; huge yellow inflatable mattresses are blown up and positioned on the street in readiness for the jump (figures 1-3).1 All these are moments from suicide shows posted on video-sharing sites such as YouTube, Bilibili, iQiyi, Pear Video, and Tencent Video over the last ten years. What’s more, several of these scenes recur again and again across the many videos of suicide shows available online, which follow a relatively fixed choreography and order of play. They constitute, as such, the basic visual language of this protest form, and it is a language which allegorizes the queasy jeopardy of life on a ledge, the precarious state in which millions of workers in contemporary China find themselves subsisting. Precarity, it should be made clear, is seldom crudely co-terminous with fragility. It is a condition in which brittleness often co-exists with resilience, and the visual language of the suicide show closely captures this dialectic in the courage and tenacity of the protestors. Yet it should also be noted that this is not the perky kind of resilience which was immortalized in the Great Depression-era photograph “Lunch atop a Skyscraper,” in which eleven construction workers ate sandwiches and shared smokes on an iron girder, while swinging their legs hundreds of meters above the New York streets. The image, staged in 1932 to promote the new Rockefeller Building, acquired its iconicity in large part because of the men’s insouciance, and the way that mood became a cipher for American fortitude and optimism in the face of extreme economic shock. Deeply integral to the photograph is the connection between “hard work and high hopes,”2 and the implicit conviction that resilience will bring its own rewards, even as the abyss beckons.
Several suicide shows by contemporary Chinese construction workers instantly recall that fabled image for those viewers who are familiar with it. But the rooftop, and its interplay of risk and hardiness, is parlayed into a different set of meanings here. Precariousness, as mentioned earlier, suggests both hanging in the balance and being suspended there at someone else’s mercy, only a plea away from falling. Suicide shows create a metaphoric structure in which the violent dynamics of the cliff edge are inscribed onto urban space. Waiting for wages that never come is, indeed, to be poised at the brink of an abyss: a black hole in which, as the testimonies in the videos make clear, lie not just hardship, eviction, and hunger, but also divorce, separation from children, and estrangement from home and family since there is no money to make the annual journey back at Chinese New Year – the loss of all the things which allow those consigned to zombie citizenship to cling to their humanity. Like balancing on a precipice, the difference between payment and non-payment, between wages and arrears, is a gut-churning knife-edge. Rather than the brio of the New York construction workers, China’s cliffhangers show their hardiness via the physical toll that high altitude takes on them—the vertigo, the wobbly legs—whilst still persevering with the performance script. This visual vocabulary is backed up by the lexicon of despair that can be heard on the soundtrack of these shows. Again and again, viewers hear terms such as “forced into a hopeless position” 被逼无奈 (beibi wunai); “hounded to death” (bisi 逼死); “extreme measures” 极端的方式 (jiduan de fangshi); “to take a desperate path” 走投无路 (zoutou wulu); “to make an unwise move out of utter helplessness” 无奈出此下策 (wunai chuci xiace); and to fight for “money earned in blood and sweat” 血汗钱 (xuehanqian).
Meanwhile, all that holds the jumper back from the finality of the sheer drop is the chimera of payment: the outside chance that the rule of law will, after all, apply to him if—paradoxically—he takes that law into his own hands. This is why a core section of many suicide shows focusses on the chaotic process in which the emergency services call the boss; the boss shows up, all of a sudden flush with cash to pay wages when before apparently there was none; and these bright red banknotes are perilously conveyed to the rooftop. This sequence, a stock staple of the suicide show genre, allegorizes the strategic caprice of the law in China: the money is always there, it’s just that gaining legal purchase on it is as slippery as gripping hold of a rope on a cliff face in high winds. This same notion of the law as an utterly contingent thing surfaces in different form via the mattresses that the emergency services inflate and place at the bottom of the building to cushion the jumper’s fall. On the figurative plane, they are an ironic stand-in for the social safety net (shehui anquanwang 社会安全网) that is never furnished for so many of China’s floating population, who cannot access registration-based rights. Social safety nets, by definition, are wraparound and fixed in place, so their mutation into a portable mattress, wheeled out, blown up, and placed at a guesstimated spot on the street becomes further visual code for what it means to be consigned to zombie citizenship.
Footnotes
- See YouTube, “Wei taoxin mingong shouchi 40 wan baitiao hanlei jiti tiaolou” 为讨薪民工手持40万白条含泪集体跳楼 [Tearful migrant workers seeking wages stage a group suicide show while clutching promissory notes worth 40,000 yuan], YouTube.com, June 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5l01S7yPPs; YouTube, “Beijing shipai Zhongguancun wu mingong yu tiaolou wei taoxin chucixiace” 北京实拍中关村五民工欲跳楼为讨薪出此下策 [Footage from Zhongguancun in Beijing of five migrant workers seeking wages who rashly threaten to jump from a rooftop], YouTube.com, June 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2NXnxugCso; Pearvideo.com, “Baogongtou wuding taoxin, gongdifang qu 30 wan laiquan” 包工头屋顶讨薪, 工地方取30万来劝 [Labour contractor climbs onto a roof to protest unpaid wages, site manager produces thirty thousand yuan to persuade him to come down], September 5, 2017, https://www.pearvideo.com/video_1149055; and Tencent Video, “Lingbi yiwei taoxinzhe yu tiaolou, jingcha xiaofang chenggong jiuren!” 灵璧一位讨薪者欲跳楼, 警察消防成功救人! [In Lingbi a person seeking wages threatens to jump from a rooftop and is successfully rescued by police and emergency services], January 25, 2017, https://v.qq.com/x/page/p0369lrsdwd.html. ↩︎
- Jesse Newman, “Revisiting a Lunch at Perilous Heights,” New York Times, September 20,
2012, https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/20/revisiting-a-lunch-at-perilous-heights/. ↩︎
How to cite: Hillenbrand, Margaret. “Life on a Ledge: From On the Edge.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Oct. 2026, chajournal.com/2026/10/30/ledge.
Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on literary and visual studies in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan, particularly cultures of protest and secrecy. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), which was awarded the Modern Language Association’s Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies in 2024. She has recently completed a new book examining the cultural politics of the face in Chinese visual culture in an era of biometric surveillance, cosmetic surgery and masked protest.