Explore the vast range of titles available.

Rural-urban migration within China has transformed and reshaped rural people's lives during the past few decades, and has been one of the most visible phenomena of the economic reforms enacted since the late 1970s. Whilst Feminist scholars have addressed rural women's experience of struggle and empowerment in urban China, in contrast, research on rural men's experience of migration is a neglected area of study. In response, this book seeks to address the absence of male migrant workers as a gendered category within the current literature on rural-urban migration. Examining Chinese male migrant workers' identity formation, this book explores their experience of rural-urban migration and their status as an emerging sector of a dislocated urban working class. It seeks to understand issues of gender and class through the rural migrant men's narratives within the context of China's modernization, and provides an in-depth analysis of how these men make sense of their new lives in the rapidly modernizing, post-Mao China with its emphasis on progress and development. Further, this book uses the men's own narratives to challenge the elite assumption that rural men's low status is a result of their failure to adopt a modern urban identity and lifestyle. Drawing on interviews with 28 male rural migrants, Xiaodong Lin unpacks the gender politics of Chinese men and masculinities, and in turn contributes to a greater understanding of global masculinities in an international context. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars working in the fields of Chinese culture and society, gender studies, migration studies, sociology and social anthropology. Shortlisted for this year's BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Raised to be \"flowers of the nation,\" the first generation born after the founding of the People's Republic of China was united in its political outlook and ambitions. Its members embraced the Cultural Revolution of 1966 but soon split into warring factions. Guobin Yang investigates the causes of this fracture and argues that Chinese youth engaged in an imaginary revolution from 1966 to 1968, enacting a political mythology that encouraged violence as a way to prove one's revolutionary credentials. This same competitive dynamic would later turn the Red Guard against the communist government. Throughout the 1970s, the majority of Red Guard youth were sent to work in rural villages. These relocated revolutionaries developed an appreciation for the values of ordinary life, and an underground cultural movement was born. Rejecting idolatry, their new form of resistance marked a distinct reversal of Red Guard radicalism and signaled a new era of enlightenment, culminating in the Democracy Wall movement of the late 1970s and, finally, the Tiananmen protest of 1989. Yang completes his significant recasting of Red Guard activism with a chapter on the politics of history and memory, arguing that contemporary memories of the Cultural Revolution are factionalized along the lines of political division that formed fifty years before.

Every year over 200 million peasants flock to China's urban centers, providing a profusion of cheap labor that helps fuel the country's staggering economic growth. Award-winning journalist Michelle Dammon Loyalka follows the trials and triumphs of eight such migrants—including a vegetable vendor, an itinerant knife sharpener, a free-spirited recycler, and a cash-strapped mother—offering an inside look at the pain, self-sacrifice, and uncertainty underlying China's dramatic national transformation. At the heart of the book lies each person's ability to \"eat bitterness\"—a term that roughly means to endure hardships, overcome difficulties, and forge ahead. These stories illustrate why China continues to advance, even as the rest of the world remains embroiled in financial turmoil. At the same time, Eating Bitterness demonstrates how dealing with the issues facing this class of people constitutes China's most pressing domestic challenge.

The household registration (hukou) system in China, classifying each person as a rural or an urban resident, is a major means of controlling populatin mobility and determining eligibility for state-provided services and welfare. Established in the late 1950s, it was initially used to bar rural-to-urban migration. After the late 1970s reforms, an inflow of rural migrant workers was allowed into the cities to meet labor demands in the burgeoning export industries and urban services without, however, changing the migrants' registered status, thus precluding their access to subsidized housing and other benefits available to those with urban registration. While there have been many calls for reforming this system, progress has been limited. Proposed reforms have attracted increasing academic and media attention.

Combining on-the-ground reportage and up-to-date research, this pivotal book explains why China has failed to reap many of the economic and social benefits of urbanization, and suggests how these problems can be resolved.

Featuring everything from sports stadiums to shopping malls, hundreds of new cities in China stand empty, with hundreds more set to be built by 2030. Between now and then, the country's urban population will leap to over one billion, as the central government kicks its urbanization initiative into overdrive. In the process, traditional social structures are being torn apart, and a rootless, semi-displaced, consumption orientated culture rapidly taking their place. Ghost Cities of China is an enthralling dialogue driven, on-location search for an understanding of China's new cities and the reasons why many currently stand empty.

Given that Chinese migrants with rural hukou status are not considered full citizens in their urban destinations, rural-urban hukou conversion signifies full citizenship attainment in urban China. We assess causal effects of three major types of urban hukou attainment—merit-, policy-, and family-based hukou conversion—on migrants’ psychological well-being in middle-and later-life. We further examine how hukou matters—how periods and hukou destinations alter the values of specific urban hukou and their psychological health implications for individuals. We use the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (2015 data) and life his tory data (for 2014) for analysis. To assess the extent to which the salmon effect contributes to estimation bias for migrants, we compare results from a sample with current migrants and one with current and returned migrants. To address for selection into hukou conversion, we adopt inverse probability–weighted regression adjustment methods. We show that the salmon bias significantly dampened causal estimates. Merit- and policy-based hukou conversion has protective effects on psychological well-being. Policy-based converters have better psychological health than other types of converters. Hukou conversion in the pre-1978 period conveys greater psychological benefits than that in the post-1998 period, when economic and social values of urban hukou have decreased. Hukou converters in the cities with the most resources enjoy better psychological well-being than their counterparts in other cities. Our study joins the emerging literature in investigating how citizenship conveys advantage in health and well-being. We discuss these results in the global context as well as the context of China’s decades of evolution of hukou policy and the urbanization process.

Cities bring together masses of people, allow them to communicate and hide, and transform private grievances into political causes, often erupting in urban protests that can destroy regimes. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has shaped urbanization via migration restrictions and redistributive policy since 1949 in ways that help account for the regime’s endurance, China’s surprising comparative lack of slums, and its curious moves away from urban bias over the past decade. Cities and Stability details the threats that cities pose for authoritarian regimes, regime responses to those threats, and how those responses can backfire by exacerbating the growth of slums and cities. Both cross-national analyses of nondemocratic regime survival and in-depth investigation of China’s management of urbanization detail this urban threat. In response, many regimes, including the CCP, favor cities in their policy-making. Cities and Stability shows this urban bias to be a Faustian bargain, stabilizing large cities today but encouraging their growth and concentration over time. The Chinese regime created a household registration (hukou) system to limit urban migration while attempting to industrialize, allowing urbanites to be favored but keeping farmers in the countryside. As these barriers eroded with economic reforms, the regime began to replace repression-based restrictions with economic incentives to avoid slums by improving economic opportunities in the countryside. Yet during the global Great Recession of 2008‒9, the political value of the hukou system emerged as migrant workers, by the tens of millions, left coastal cities and dispersed across China’s interior villages, counties, and cities.

Perceived discrimination is associated with poorer psychological adjustment and greater problem behaviors among rural-to-urban migrant adolescents. Yet, the predictors and the consequences of distinct changing patterns of perceived discrimination are less clear. The current study sought to identify distinct patterns of perceived discrimination trajectories and examine the developmental implications of these patterns among 385 Chinese rural-to-urban migrant early adolescents (Mage = 10.49, SDage = 0.69; 62% boys). Four distinct patterns of perceived discrimination trajectories, i.e., Low-stable (79.59%), Decreasing (9.08%), High-stable (6.11%), and Increasing (5.22%), were identified. Predictors including resilience, family support, peer support, and demographic characteristics (i.e., gender and school types) contributed to differences in pattern membership. Moreover, the Low-stable pattern exhibited more favorable distal outcomes (i.e., lower levels of social anxiety and loneliness and higher levels of self-esteem) than the other three patterns; the Decreasing group had lower levels of loneliness than the High-stable group. The findings extend the understanding of the predictors and consequences of perceived discrimination among rural-to-urban migrant early adolescents from a developmental perspective.