Rediscovering a Lost Utopia Craftsmanship in A Bite of China

The transition from socialist to post-socialist China goes hand-in-hand with a devaluation of human labor. In China today, human labor has been alienated, reified, and stripped of embodied practices, affective value, ecological awareness, and cultural memory. But countervailing trends arise and challenge alienated labor. In this essay, I explore how quotidian handiwork, commonly considered low-value and inefficient, is represented as new forms of sentimental qualities, artisanal intelligence, and ecological wisdom by examining the first season of the recent popular 2012 documentary series A Bite of China (Shejianshang de Zhongguo). I investigate how this documentary depicts craftsmanship in food-making as new structures of human-human, human-object, and human-nature relations in the domain of work. In an attempt to critique and redeem labor, dehumanized by technology and industrialization, the documentary's valorization of craftsmanship problematizes our separation between the socialist and post-socialist vision of labor. A reflection upon industrial production and the handicraft tradition invokes the socialist aesthetics of non-alienated labor and indicates an effort to envision a more idealistic Chinese labor condition.