China's 'Delivery Poet' Wang Jibing Is Elected Vice-Chair of the Suzhou Writers Association

Wang Jibing has spent his life in jobs that leave no time for writing. Before he became, at 50, a food-delivery rider in Kunshan — the oldest rider at his station — he had worked on construction sites, dredged sand, run a street stall and collected scrap. He left school after junior high. On September 28, the Suzhou Writers Association elected the 56-year-old one of its vice-chairmen, a seat on the governing body of one of China's most established municipal literary institutions.

The congress, covered by Qianjiang Video and the Beijing Evening News, chose the novelist Ye Mi as chair and six vice-chairs, Wang among them. It is the latest turn in a career that has already confounded the categories Chinese literature keeps for people like him. Writing in the gaps between deliveries — he has said he used the minutes waiting for restaurant orders to draft on his phone — Wang built a following for poems about the people the gig economy moves through: other riders, strangers at doorways, the city at speed. The work carried him to the Lu Xun Literary Prize, among the most prestigious honors in Chinese letters, and the "delivery poet" (外卖诗人) became a national figure.

His election says two things at once. It is a mark of how far China's writers' establishments have opened to writers from outside the salaried cultural class — a gig worker joining the leadership body that a decade ago would have been staffed entirely by professors and magazine editors. And it is a reminder of how large delivery work has grown: the riders who thread every Chinese city now number in the millions, and Wang, who joined their ranks as a middle-aged man desperate for income, has become the most literary testament to what that labor feels like from the saddle.

The other vice-chairs elected alongside him are novelists and children's authors with conventional literary careers. Wang's presence among them drew celebratory coverage across state and commercial outlets — a story the Chinese internet consistently embraces when it surfaces, of talent arriving from below. His own account of the honor has been modest; the congress's closing line, that the new leadership would "unite the city's literary workers to scale new peaks," could have come from any year of the association's history.

What happens to a poet once the institution catches up with him is the open question his election leaves. Wang has said the riding kept the poems honest; the vice-chairmanship comes with standing and, presumably, less time in the saddle.