The Inconvenient Generation (Paperback)

Paperback. 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. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic data collected from multi-sited field research, Ling's book traces the journeys of dozens of second-generation migrants from middle school to the labor market in Shanghai and reveals the ongoing process of inclusion and exclusion that shapes the politics of citizenship in urban China. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.…