The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai’s Edge
Research book or monograph (author)
Other information
AbstractAfter three decades of massive rural-to-urban migration in China, a burgeoning population of over 35 million second-generation migrants living in its cities poses a challenge to socialist modes of population management and urban governance. In The Inconvenient Generation, Minhua Ling offers the first longitudinal study of these migrant youth from middle school to the labor market in the years after the Shanghai municipal government partially opened its public school system to them. Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data, Ling follows the trajectories of dozens of children coming of age at a time of competing economic and social imperatives, and its everyday ramifications on their sense of identity, educational outcomes, and citizenship claims. Under policies and practices of segmented inclusion, they are inevitably funneled through the school system toward a life of manual labor. Illuminating the aspirations and strategies of these young men and women, Ling captures their experiences against the backdrop of a reemergent global Shanghai. More than a case study of China’s internal migration, this book exposes the structure and exercise of power in everyday life that maintains inequality despite economic growth and mass migration.
Acceptance Date04/10/2018
All Author(s) ListMinhua Ling
Edition1st
Year2020
Month1
PublisherStanford University Press
Place of PublicationStanford, CA, USA
ISBN9781503610767
eISBN9781503610774
LanguagesEnglish-United States
Keywordsurbanization, migrant youth, education, inequality, citizenship, urban governance, youth culture, urban studies, China, Asia Studies