Dear Marx, I’m Writing to You from China…, by Andrea Ferrario – 7 October 2026

Also available in: Italiano · 中文

A comrade of Xiao Wu, an activist arrested after years of reporting on the situation of Chinese workers, writes a letter to Marx describing how China today oppresses the working class

A few days ago I posted on Facebook and Notes the news of the disappearance of Xiao Wu, a Chinese activist who has spent years informing people about the situation of workers in his country. It has unfortunately been confirmed that he is under arrest, although no reason has been given (one possible sign is that, on the eve of his arrest, a report on the situation of workers that he had circulated online was removed from his account). One of his comrades, taking inspiration from him, has written and circulated on the social network WeChat an interesting “Letter to Marx”, which is at once a denunciation of the condition of the working class in China today and a testimony to the precarious and risky situation of those who now try to carry on fighting in almost impossible conditions. The author, Wen Li Yu Chen (文立于尘, clearly a pseudonym), resorts at various points to a stratagem frequently adopted in texts of this kind, that of asserting that what is being demanded is exactly what the government itself preaches, in order to protect himself from the risks of censorship or even arrest. But what the government in Beijing preaches is more often than not a dead letter, and at a couple of points I have recalled this in a brief note of my own in square brackets. The text was translated from the original Chinese with ChatGPT and revised by me only for the most glaring errors – a.f.

Dear Karl Marx,

I am writing to you because a young man named Xiao Wu has disappeared. Many people know him through a public WeChat account called “East Wind TV of Chiapas”.

For years the account told the stories of workers: the riders who deliver food, the young people who work in offices, the peasants who migrated to the cities to work and who have by now grown old. He was never paid to do it.

Since 14 September, Xiao Wu’s social media accounts have not been updated. His friends have tried to contact him in every possible way, but twenty days have now passed and so far they have received no reply. Where he is, why he cannot be reached, his friends do not know. Nor do we [today we know that Xiao Wu is under arrest, but not where he is being held or why – a.f.].

A public account on WeChat is a space where you write articles on your phone and send them to subscribers. A bit like the newspaper you edited, except that it does not have to be printed or posted. The account’s introduction consisted of a single sentence:

“Impossible news from another world.”

I am writing to you in October 2026. A hundred and forty-three years have passed since your death. We never met and, in theory, I should not take such a liberty. It is just that Xiao Wu dealt with many of the things you also wrote about. I imagine you would like to know how workers are faring more than a century later.

The world really has changed a great deal. Only the hard thing today no longer seems to be how to change it, but rather how to avoid letting oneself be changed by the world.

One

On the streets of the cities, the ones who run fastest of all are the riders on their electric bicycles. Workers like these you never saw. They collect food from restaurants and take it to people’s homes, earning a few yuan for each delivery. There is no factory, no foreman. Orders are assigned by a programme on the phone. If you complete a certain number of deliveries, the programme gives you a bonus.

Xiao Wu had launched initiatives in favour of these workers. He urged people not to order food delivery on days of extreme heat, so as not to offload the risks of high temperatures onto the riders, and he also challenged the use of delivery bonuses as a substitute for protections at work.

You had already written about these bonuses in chapter 19 of the first volume of Capital. At the time the term used was piece wages:

“Given piece-wage, it is naturally the personal interest of the labourer to strain his labour-power as intensely as possible; this enables the capitalist to raise more easily the normal degree of intensity of labour. It is moreover now the personal interest of the labourer to lengthen the working-day, since with it his daily or weekly wages rise.”

More than a hundred and fifty years later, there is practically no need to change a word. Nobody forces them to make more deliveries. They are the ones who “want” to make more. To change a person you do not need to give orders. A well-designed system of incentives is enough.

Summer is the hardest time. Since 2012 we have had regulations on heat-prevention measures providing that, when the maximum daily temperature reaches 40 degrees, outdoor work must be suspended. But the rules concern “work units” and “workers”. Many riders have no employment contract with the platform and, from a legal point of view, the platform is not their employer.

In the summer of 2022 a journalist collected data from public news reports. In thirteen provinces of the country, thirty-five people had died of heat, among them riders, porters, doormen, street cleaners, textile workers and couriers. In the same year, in the early hours of 6 July, in Qingpu, Shanghai, a twenty-year-old university student who was working during the summer holidays unloading parcels collapsed inside an almost completely closed container. He was diagnosed with exertional heatstroke with multiple organ failure. To this day he cannot move on his own. In July of this year the case was definitively concluded and the logistics company was ordered to pay him about 1.11 million yuan. According to the court, the company had been unable to show that it had taken adequate measures against the heat at the time of the accident.

In the eighth chapter of Capital you told the story of another twenty-year-old. At the end of June 1863 the London newspapers published, under the headline “Death from simple over-work”, the story of the milliner Mary Anne Walkley. To prepare dresses for a ball, she and sixty other women workers had worked for twenty-six and a half consecutive hours, thirty women crammed into the same room. On Friday she fell ill and by Sunday she was already dead. You quoted a sentence from an article in the Morning Star of the time:

“Our white slaves, who are toiled into the grave, for the most part silently pine and die.”

Last summer, the department responsible for labour published a circular asking platforms to extend the time allowed to riders for deliveries on very hot days, to reduce the length of continuous work and to increase heat allowances. What was in Xiao Wu’s appeal and what appears in that circular are almost identical.

Two

A young man who worked in sales and customer service for a transport company resigned, and his former employer demanded compensation of 800,000 yuan. In exchange for a non-compete agreement, the company had been paying him 300 yuan a month.

Anyone who signs this kind of contract cannot be hired by a firm in the same sector for one or two years after leaving the job, and if they breach the agreement they must pay compensation. Originally the law limited its application to managers, senior technicians and other employees bound by confidentiality obligations. But researchers at the Southwest University of Political Science and Law analysed 556 court rulings and found that 79 per cent of the people subjected to these restrictions fell into the category of “other employees bound by confidentiality obligations”. Of these, 77 per cent worked in customer service, sales, reception, security or cleaning.

Xiao Wu said that this amounted to being forced to “pay a ransom to be free”.

In the fourth chapter of the first volume, explaining how labour power becomes a commodity, you wrote:

“He must constantly look upon his labour-power as his own property, his own commodity, and this he can only do by placing it at the disposal of the buyer temporarily, for a definite period of time […] if he were to sell it rump and stump, once for all, he would be selling himself, converting himself from a free man into a slave, from an owner of a commodity into a commodity.”

You also wrote that the worker’s freedom has a dual meaning. He can dispose of his labour power as a commodity and, at the same time, he has no other commodity to sell, he is “short of everything necessary for the realisation of his labour-power”. The non-compete agreement extends the period in which labour power is sold, from the years spent in the employ of the firm to the period after resignation as well. And when many people sign it, little by little everyone ends up accepting the idea that one must pay to leave a job.

In August last year, the Supreme Court published a judicial interpretation providing that the scope of restrictions on competition must be proportionate to the trade secrets to which the worker has had access. Restrictions that exceed those limits are invalid.

“From a free man into a slave”, “pay a ransom to be free”, “restrictions that exceed those limits are invalid”. They are all speaking of the same thing.

Three

The generation that once left the countryside to work in the cities largely continues to work still today. It has simply grown old.

The 2025 Monitoring Report on Rural Migrant Workers, published in April this year, shows that the country has over 300 million rural migrant workers, with an average age of 43.3. One in three is over fifty. When they grow old, they can count on the basic pension of the social insurance system for urban and rural residents, which starts at a little over 160 yuan a month [a little over 20 euros – a.f.].

In the appeals circulated to look for him, his friends reported an opinion of Xiao Wu’s. According to him, the dominant idea that “peasants must necessarily go to the cities to work” stems from a vision that considers the city the natural centre of economic and social life and the countryside a place one has to leave. In this way, to the inequalities created by institutions to the disadvantage of rural areas there is added a devaluing judgement on peasants and on those who choose to stay in the villages.

His criticism was aimed precisely at this way of thinking, as if by nature peasants had to abandon the land and staying in one’s village meant not having done anything important in life.

It may sound like a radical claim. But even the State Council’s five-year action plan for a new urbanisation, published in 2024, states that giving up the right to the management of agricultural land, the right to use land for rural housing and the right to share in collective proceeds cannot be made a condition for obtaining urban residence. Moving to the city should not mean that peasants have to give up the countryside.

At twenty-four you too took the side of the poor of the countryside. In October 1842 the Rhenish provincial assembly wanted to pass a law that would treat even the gathering of dead branches in the woods by the poor as theft. In the Rheinische Zeitung you wrote, in the “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”:

“We demand for the poor a customary right, and indeed one which is not of a local character but is a customary right of the poor in all countries.”

Later, in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, you recalled that it was precisely in that period that you found yourself for the first time “in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests”. This is what first drove you to the study of economic questions.

Four

Young people today call going to work “going to the grave” and describe themselves as “beasts of burden”. Some prefer to resign rather than work overtime.

At twenty-six, in Paris, you wrote the collection of notes that would later become known as the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. There is a passage that, if they read it, would probably make them smile:

“The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. He feels at home when he is not working, and when he is working he does not feel at home […] as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labor is shunned like the plague.”

Here, the right not to work overtime is provided for by law. In August 2021 the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security and the Supreme Court jointly published a series of exemplary cases on overtime, clearly establishing that the so-called “996”, from nine in the morning to nine at night six days a week, violates the legal limits on extending working hours and must therefore be considered invalid. [In reality that decision has remained a dead letter, and imposed overtime, very often unpaid and very long, remains enormously widespread in China – a.f.]

Xiao Wu went further. He wanted to create an “Institute for the Abolition of Work”, to discuss the possibility of working four days and resting three, and of how to eliminate the stigma that attaches to those who do not work. Writing about him, his friends have quoted a sentence of yours and Engels’s from The German Ideology, the one in which you imagine a society where one can “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner”.

In your own family someone had already proposed something similar. In 1880 your son-in-law Paul Lafargue wrote a pamphlet entitled The Right to Be Lazy:

“A strange delusion possesses the working classes of the nations where capitalist civilization holds its sway. This delusion is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny.”

Lafargue maintained that workers should work only three hours a day and spend the rest of the time idling and feasting. I do not know what you thought when you read it. Later Engels, in a letter to Bernstein, wrote that the so-called French “Marxism” was “an altogether peculiar product” and that you yourself once said to Lafargue: “If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist.”

The most radical way in which the world changes people consists in making them love what it wants them to do.

Five

In August 1866 you prepared instructions for the Geneva congress of the First International:

“A preliminary condition, without which all further attempts at improvement and emancipation must prove abortive, is the limitation of the working day […] We propose 8 hours work as the legal limit of the working day.”

Three years after your death, on 1 May 1886, the workers of Chicago took to the streets to demand the eight-hour day. That date would later become Labour Day.

More than thirty years later, in August 1922, the Secretariat of Labour Organisations launched a movement for labour legislation here, presenting a Draft Labour Law. It demanded the eight-hour day, a minimum wage and the protection of women workers and minors, and also argued that “the rights due to workers must be enshrined in the Constitution”.

Afterwards all these things became law. Article 36 of the Labour Law, in force since 1995, establishes that daily working time may not exceed eight hours. Article 43 of the Constitution states that workers have the right to rest. In March 1994 the working week was 44 hours. Just fourteen months later, in May 1995, it moved to five days and 40 hours a week, the two-day weekend system we have today [widely disregarded today, so much so that just last month a massive movement was born to denounce companies that deny their employees a free weekend – a.f.]. Since last year, Labour Day has brought two days of holiday [here too reality is very different: Chinese people are forced to work at weekends to make up for most public holidays – a.f.].

Your name appears in the preamble of our Constitution.

In Capital you set against the “pompous catalogue of the ‘inalienable rights of man’” the “modest Magna Carta of a legally limited working-day”, which “shall make clear ‘when the time which the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins’”. In the third volume you went further still:

“Beyond it [the realm of necessity] begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.”

There is also less good news. Last year, the weekly average of hours worked by employees of the country’s firms was 48.6 hours, more than four hours above the legal limit.

It took little more than a year to go from a six-day to a five-day working week. Asking today whether it is possible to cut another day is no more subversive than it was then.

Six

Every year, around New Year, an informal group of authors publishes a long text entitled Review of Episodes of Violations of Workers’ Rights. Publication began in 2021 and the 2025 edition was already the fifth, more than a hundred thousand characters long. The authors change their signature every year. They use names of dishes, followed by a long series of pseudonyms. They collect, one by one, the episodes involving riders, factory workers, peasants and office workers that occurred during the year. It is work done without any payment. The 2025 edition had been published on Xiao Wu’s own account. Just before all trace of him was lost, it was deleted.

In the preface to the 2022 edition, the editors expressed a number of wishes. One of them was:

“We hope to remember one another, to remember that there are still many unhappy people, and that each of them is unhappy in their own way.”

As young men, you and Engels did the same thing. In 1845 Engels was twenty-four, and on the first page of The Condition of the Working Class in England he wrote a letter to the workers:

“I wanted more than a mere abstract knowledge of my subject, I wanted to see you in your own homes, to observe you in your everyday life, to chat with you on your condition and grievances.”

During your years in London you went every day to the reading room of the British Museum. You consulted the Blue Books of the British Parliament and the half-yearly reports of the factory inspectors, copying into your notebook, one after another, the information on the hours at which children entered and left the various factories. An inspector named Leonard Horner appears several times in the book, whom you described as the factory owners’ tireless inspector.

In April 1880, at the age of sixty-one, you prepared for the French Revue socialiste a Workers’ Inquiry made up of 99 questions. 25,000 copies were printed and distributed throughout France. Question number 21 was:

“Mention the accidents which have taken place in your personal knowledge.”

More than a hundred years later, this work is no longer done by inspectors or even by newspaper editorial offices, but by a group of people who are not paid and leave behind only pseudonyms.

Remembering is also a way of not letting oneself be changed. When what happens is put down in writing, it is harder for it to end up being accepted as normal.

Seven

The last article published on Xiao Wu’s WeChat account dates from 15 February 2026. It was a poem. After writing for so many years about workers, the last thing he left was a poem. Xiao Wu also read Palestinian poetry and took an interest in the situation of Iranians. In the spring of 1865 your daughters Jenny and Laura gave you a questionnaire. Asked what your favourite maxim was, you answered: “Nothing human is alien to me”. It is a sentence that fits Xiao Wu perfectly.

You too wrote poems when you were young. In the autumn of 1836 you arrived in Berlin and wrote for Jenny, who had stayed far away in Trier, three collections of poems: two Books of Love and a Book of Songs. Later you stopped writing poems and moved on to Capital. With Xiao Wu it seems to have been the other way round.

A year earlier, at seventeen, you had written at the secondary school in Trier a school-leaving essay entitled “Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession”. Eight years ago, on 4 May 2018, during the ceremony for the bicentenary of your birth, a passage from it was read:

“If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions […]”

Your first job was at a newspaper. In October 1842, at twenty-four, you took over the editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung. In January 1843 the King of Prussia chaired a government meeting at which it was decided to suppress the paper as of 1 April. On 31 March its last issue came out. Around that time you wrote an article criticising the Prussian rules on press censorship. It could not be published in your country and had to be printed in Switzerland:

“You admire the delightful variety, the inexhaustible riches of nature. You do not demand that the rose should smell like the violet, but must the greatest riches of all, the spirit, exist in only one variety?”

Demanding that the spirit have only one form is also a way of changing people.

Eight

The day on which Xiao Wu became unreachable was 14 September. Exactly a hundred and four years earlier, on the same day, 17,000 workers of the Anyuan mines and railways, in China, had begun a strike. Their slogan was: once we were beasts of burden, now we want to be human beings.

After the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung you left, one after another, Paris, Brussels and Cologne, and then settled in London, where you would live for over thirty years. In your first London years the whole family was crammed into two rooms in Soho, and several of your children died while still small. They were very hard years. But at least anyone who wanted to write to you knew what address to send the letter to.

You are buried in Highgate Cemetery, in the north of London. On the gravestone is engraved a sentence you had written in a notebook when you were little more than twenty: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”

Everything Xiao Wu said, you had already said too. And your name appears in the preamble of our Constitution.

Your generation asked itself how to change the world. In our day the world changes too fast and has become all too good at changing people. It manages to make us believe that making a few more deliveries is a personal choice, that paying in order to be able to resign is the most natural thing in the world, that staying in one’s village means being a failure, that working twelve hours a day is passion for one’s work. In a world like this, even remembering that things should not be like this has become difficult.

You said that the problem is to change the world. Today the problem has become not letting ourselves be changed by the world.

I do not know where to send this letter. Perhaps, as the introduction to Xiao Wu’s account put it, it is only a piece of news that cannot be delivered, arrived from another world.

And yet I hope that, in this world, at least one message can reach its destination:

Where is Xiao Wu?

With respect,

Wen Li Yu Chen

4 October 2026

Translator’s note: The quotations from Marx, Engels and Lafargue are given in the wording of standard English translations (largely the texts on the Marxists Internet Archive and in the Marx-Engels Collected Works) rather than translated back from the Italian, so they may differ from what the Chinese author quoted. Chapter numbers follow the author; in English editions of Capital the passages on piece wages, the working day and the sale of labour power are in chapters 21, 10 and 6 of volume 1.

Andrea Ferrario is an Italian international politics blogger with a focus on East Asia. He has collaborated with the weekly magazine Internazionale and is co-editor of the website Crisi Globale.

The Chinese original of this letter, by Wen Li Yu Chen (文立于尘), appeared on 4 October 2026 on the WeChat account 她意定 and is archived by China Digital Times. The Italian version, translated from the Chinese and introduced by Andrea Ferrario, first appeared on Andrea Ferrario’s Substack. This English translation was first published on the Left Renewal Blog.

Dear Marx, I’m Writing to You from China…, by Andrea Ferrario – 7 October 2026

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