Rural Origins, City Lives

Rural Origins, City Lives PDF Author: Roberta Zavoretti
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029599925X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new understanding of rural-urban migration and inequality in contemporary China Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.

Rural Origins, City Lives

Rural Origins, City Lives PDF Author: Roberta Zavoretti
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 029599925X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 221

Get Book Here

Book Description
A new understanding of rural-urban migration and inequality in contemporary China Many of the millions of workers streaming in from rural China to jobs at urban factories soon find themselves in new kinds of poverty and oppression. Yet, their individual experiences are far more nuanced than popular narratives might suggest. Rural Origins, City Lives probes long-held assumptions about migrant workers in China. Drawing on fieldwork in Nanjing, Roberta Zavoretti argues that many rural-born urban-dwellers are—contrary to state policy and media portrayals—diverse in their employment, lifestyle, and aspirations. Working and living in the cities, such workers change China’s urban landscape, becoming part of an increasingly diversified and stratified society. Zavoretti finds that—more than thirty years after the Open Door Reform—class formation, not residence status, is key to understanding inequality in contemporary China.

Urban Lives

Urban Lives PDF Author: Martin Dribe
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197761097
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through the lens of a Swedish industrial city, Landskrona, Urban Lives looks at economic and demographic change at the micro level to understand the societal transformations that profoundly changed people's lives during the twentieth century. Based an original data infrastructure, the book follows individuals across generations and situates them in their social, institutional, and environmental contexts. Chapter authors provide novel insights into the micro-level foundations of long term economic-demographic processes, and cover important research questions related to health, family, migration, and residential segregation.

Seeking a Future for the Past

Seeking a Future for the Past PDF Author: Philipp Demgenski
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472903764
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 297

Get Book Here

Book Description
Seeking a Future for the Past: Space, Power, and Heritage in a Chinese City examines the complexities and changing sociopolitical dynamics of urban renewal in contemporary China. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic fieldwork in the northeastern Chinese city of Qingdao, the book tells the story of the slow, fragmented, and contentious transformation of Dabaodao—an area in the city’s former colonial center—from a place of common homes occupied by the urban poor into a showcase of architectural heritage and site for tourism and consumption. The ethnography provides a nuanced account of the diverse experiences and views of a range of groups involved in shaping, and being shaped, by the urban renewal process—local residents, migrant workers, preservationists, planners, and government officials—foregrounding the voices and experiences of marginal groups, such as migrants in the city. Unpacking structural reasons for urban developmental impasses, it paints a nuanced local picture of urban governance and political practice in contemporary urban China. Seeking a Future for the Past also weighs the positives and negatives of heritage preservation and scrutinizes the meanings and effects of “preservation” on diverse social actors. By zeroing in on the seemingly contradictory yet coexisting processes of urban stagnation and urban destruction, the book reveals the multifaceted challenges that China faces in reforming its urbanization practices and, ultimately, in managing its urban future.

Studies in Urbanormativity

Studies in Urbanormativity PDF Author: Gregory M. Fulkerson
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739178776
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 307

Get Book Here

Book Description
The world has been witnessing a long unfolding process of urbanization that not only has altered the structural basis of society in terms of political economy, but has also symbolically relegated rural people and life to a secondary or deviant status through an ideology of urbanormativity. Both structural and cultural changes rooted in urbanization are connected in complex ways to spatial arrangements that can be described in terms of inequality and uneven development. Through a focus on localities, Studies in Urbanormativity: Rural Community in Urban Society examines the implications of urbanization and its corresponding ideology. Urbanormativity justifies rural domination by holding urban life as the standard against which rural forms are compared and deemed to be irregular, inferior, or deviant. Urban production, as conceptualized in this book, is inherently exploitative of rural resources—natural, social, cultural, and symbolic. As this exploitation advances, a wake of entropic conditions is left behind in the forms of degraded landscapes, broken social institutions, and denigrated communities, cultures and identities. Edited by Gregory M. Fulkerson and Alexander R. Thomas, Studies in Urbanormativity engages a topic on which scholars have been surprisingly silent. Designed for advancing theory and practice, the chapters provide new theoretical tools for understanding the complex relationship between the urban and rural. While primarily intended for scholars and practitioners interested in rural life, rural policy, and community development, the insights of this book will also be of interest to scholars studying various forms of cultural and social domination, as well as identity politics.

Out to Work

Out to Work PDF Author: Arianne M. Gaetano
Publisher: Hong Kong University Press
ISBN: 9888208535
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 185

Get Book Here

Book Description
Out to Work is a fresh, engaging account of the lives of a group of rural Chinese women who, while still in their teens, moved from villages to Beijing to take up work as maids, office cleaners, hotel chambermaids, and schoolteachers. By pursuing new opportunities afforded by migration and strategically applying accumulated knowledge and resources, these women were able to forge better lives for themselves and their families. But as this book also makes clear, broader social inequalities persist to make these women's futures precarious. "This book's unique approach offers readers an intimate look at the impact of labor migration on young women over a ten-year period. We follow Gaetano's informants as they adapt to Beijing, visit their home villages, and move on to new jobs and postmarital homes. Gaetano does an excellent job showing how these young female migrants navigate constraints and challenges, enhancing their own and their family's social and economic status."—Hong Zhang, Colby College "This fresh, highly readable book demonstrates vividly how gender norms and rural-urban inequalities not only shaped women's identities and aspirations but also had palpable physical and material consequences for them. Yet despite the discrimination and hardship they experienced, they were able to build better lives for themselves. Gaetano's book convincingly shows that labor migration has increased many rural women's possibilities for exercising agency."—Rachel Murphy, University of Oxford

The Inconvenient Generation

The Inconvenient Generation PDF Author: Minhua Ling
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503610772
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Get Book Here

Book Description
After 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.

Cutting the Mass Line

Cutting the Mass Line PDF Author: Andrea E. Pia
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 142144884X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 340

Get Book Here

Book Description
"This book is aimed at rethinking social scientific approaches to collective action by exploring China's ongoing water crisis from the vantage point of Huize County, a water-stressed, ecologically damaged, multi-ethnic area of rural Yunnan Province"--

The Invention of Tradition in China

The Invention of Tradition in China PDF Author: Suvi Rautio
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9819738393
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 267

Get Book Here

Book Description


Routledge Handbook of Chinese Culture and Society

Routledge Handbook of Chinese Culture and Society PDF Author: Kevin Latham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351718754
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 603

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Routledge Handbook of Chinese Culture and Society is an interdisciplinary resource that offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary Chinese social and cultural issues in the twenty-first century. Bringing together experts in their respective fields, this cutting-edge survey of the significant phenomena and directions in China today covers a range of issues including the following: State, privatisation and civil society Family and education Urban and rural life Gender, and sexuality and reproduction Popular culture and the media Religion and ethnicity Forming an accessible and fascinating insight into Chinese culture and society, this handbook will be invaluable to students and scholars across a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, area studies, history, politics and cultural and media studies.

The Art of Useless

The Art of Useless PDF Author: Calvin Hui
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231549830
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 167

Get Book Here

Book Description
Since embarking on economic reforms in 1978, the People’s Republic of China has also undergone a sweeping cultural reorganization, from proletarian culture under Mao to middle-class consumer culture today. Under these circumstances, how has a Chinese middle class come into being, and how has consumerism become the dominant ideology of an avowedly socialist country? The Art of Useless offers an innovative way to understand China’s unprecedented political-economic, social, and cultural transformations, showing how consumer culture helps anticipate, produce, and shape a new middle-class subjectivity. Examining changing representations of the production and consumption of fashion in documentaries and films, Calvin Hui traces how culture contributes to China’s changing social relations through the cultivation of new identities and sensibilities. He explores the commodity chain of fashion on a transnational scale, from production to consumption to disposal, as well as media portrayals of the intersections of clothing with class, gender, and ethnicity. Hui illuminates key cinematic narratives, such as a factory worker’s desire for a high-quality suit in the 1960s, an intellectual’s longing for fashionable clothes in the 1980s, and a white-collar woman’s craving for brand-name commodities in the 2000s. He considers how documentary films depict the undersides of consumption—exploited laborers who fantasize about the products they manufacture as well as the accumulation of waste and its disposal—revealing how global capitalism renders migrant factory workers, scavengers, and garbage invisible. A highly interdisciplinary work that combines theoretical nuance with masterful close analyses, The Art of Useless is an innovative rethinking of the emergence of China’s middle-class consumer culture.