New Books In East Asian Studies

On the podcast today, I am joined by Minhua Ling, Assistant Professor in the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong to talk about her book, The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant youth coming of age on Shanghai’s edge, which was published in 2019 by Stanford University Press. 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 Chinese socialist modes of population management and urban governance. In The Inconvenient Generation: Migrant Youth Coming of Age on Shanghai's Edge (Stanford UP, 2019), Minhua Ling offers the first longitudinal study of these migrant youth as they come of age at a time of competing economic and social imperatives. Through richly textured ethnography probing into the policy-making behind urban governance and its segmented inclusion, Minhua Ling offers an earnest voice to the aspirations and experiences of second-generation young men and wo