The Inconvenient Generation

Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai's Edge

Minhua Ling

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781503610767, 9781503609976
• eBook ISBN: 9781503610774
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Education General
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Coming of Age in an Urban Growth Dilemma
• 1 Living on the Periurban Edge
• 2 The “Reproduction Without Cultivation” Problem
• 3 Outsiders in Public Middle School
• 4 “Bad Students Go to Vocational Schools!”
• 5 To Go Home or Not
• 6 Buying Belonging
• 7 “No Good Prospects in Shanghai!”
• Conclusion: Next-Generation Shanghai
• Appendix 1: China’s Policy Changes over Migration Management
• Appendix 2: Brief Biographies of Migrant Youth Mentioned in This Book
• Notes
• Glossary
• References
• Index