| Sumario: | This article explores how The Piano in a Factory (Gang de qin, 2010, directed by Zhang Meng) stages a form of workers' transnational musical micropolitics through its layered soundscape. Animated by the timbres of accordion and piano and by a repertoire that blends folk, revolutionary, and popular music, the film transforms music into a critical medium through which laboring subjects negotiate value and dignity in postsocialist China. Set in the early 2000s amid the privatization of state enterprises and mass layoffs, the film renders audible the socioeconomic trauma of neoliberal restructuring. The narrative centers on Chen Guilin, a laid-off worker who, alongside former coworkers, builds a piano from scrap metal to secure custody of his daughter. This improbable act of collective labor embodies China's passage from state socialism to partial market capitalism (or "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), a transition that commodified life and recoded labor from collective vocation to precarious survival. Within this shift, music offers a language for registering the changing valuation of labor and human worth. The film's sonic dialectic between accordion and piano crystalizes this critique. The accordion evokes socialist international traditions and collectivist memory; the piano signifies cosmopolitan status and privatized desire. Their contrapuntal interplay articulates a struggle over class identity, expressing not merely nostalgia but a longing for structures in which labor retains symbolic and affective value. The article traces the political histories of these instruments, examines the affective force of workers' music-making, and reads the symbolic convergence of music-making and instrument crafting as a sonic homage to socialist labor.
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