DgcityA Chinese poet who spent years delivering takeout orders on an electric bike has won one of the country’s top literary honours, becoming the first food-delivery rider to receive the Lu Xun Literature Prize. Wang Jibing’s collection “Low Flight” was honoured this year for poems that record the working life of China’s millions of platform riders in plain, direct language.
The title catches how riders move through the city: low to the ground, fast, threading between cars and threading against the clock. Wang writes of slippery roads in storms, the brief exchange at a doorway when a customer meets a courier, and the solitary ride home under streetlights after the orders stop. There is little ornament in the verse; the pressure of the delivery timer supplies its own rhythm.
Wang’s path to the prize tracks the shape of China’s new working class. He held a series of jobs before joining the platforms, and the daily reality of routing, ratings and weather became his material rather than an interruption to writing. The poems treat riders not as a social problem to be pitied but as observers with an unmatched view of the city, its stairwells, office lobbies and late-night kitchens.
The Lu Xun prize, named for the foundational figure of modern Chinese literature, carries unusual weight for a debut from outside literary circles. Past winners have typically come from established writing, editing or academic backgrounds. Wang’s recognition reflects how Chinese poetry has opened to voices from factory, construction and platform work, aided by social media where short poems circulate quickly among fellow workers.
Since the prize, Wang has kept one foot in the everyday economy he describes. He and his wife run a small family store, and he has spoken carefully about the attention, wary of being turned into a feel-good story that erases the conditions the poems describe. The work itself resists that simplification: it notes moments of kindness without softening the fatigue, the danger and the algorithmic pressure.
For readers, “Low Flight” does something more lasting than novelty. It adds a new figure to Chinese poetry’s long cast of wanderers, the traveller, the exile, the riverside walker: the rider crossing a rainy city with someone else’s dinner balanced behind him, noticing everything on the way.
