Media Representation Of Migrant Workers In China

How are different groups of people such as sex workers, migrant workers, rural cadres and homosexuals represented in China’s media? How accurately do representations created by the media reflect the lived experiences of Chinese people? Do Chinese people accept the representations and messages disseminated by the media? Can they use the media to portray their own interests? How are media practices in China changing? Have new technologies and increased access to international media opened up new spaces for struggle in China? The essays in this volume address these questions by using a combination of ethnography and textual analysis and by exploring representation in and usage of a range of media including instant messaging, the internet, television, films, magazines and newspapers. The essays highlight highlights the richness, diversity, and sometimes contradictory tendencies of the meanings and consequences of media representations in China. The volume cautions against approaches that take the representations created by the media in China at face value and against oversimplified assumptions about the motivations and agency of players in the complex struggles that occur between the media, the Chinese state, and Chinese citizens.

Migrant workers and public media in China - Media discourse analysis from a sociolinguistic perspective - Newspaper representation of migrant workers in China's newspapers - White-collar migrant workers in public media - Construction of migrant workers' identities on a TV talk show - Media representation and practice in Chinese contexts

Behind China’s growing economic and political power is a vast underworld of marginalized social groups. In this powerful and timely book, Wanning Sun focuses on the country’s hundreds of millions of rural migrant workers, who embody China's most intractable problems of inequality. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author argues that despite the critical role their labor has played in enabling and sustaining the country’s remarkable economic growth, workers and peasants have become the nation’s “subalterns.” Sun focuses especially on the role of media and culture in negotiating the unequal relationships that exist between various social groups. She shows that in the face of the harsh reality of injustice and discrimination, China’s rural migrants engage in media and cultural practices that are at once both mundane and profound—invariably imbued with hope and dignity, and motivated by the dream of a better life. Exploring the cultural politics of inequality in post-Mao China, this engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world.

Significant socio-political changes in China have had great impact on Chinese discourse. Changes to the discourse have become an increasing focus of scholarship. This book examines contemporary Chinese discourse and social practice in China with a focus on the role that language plays in the on-going transformation of Chinese society. With a view to producing new insights into the interdependence between discourse and social practice, this volume explores how discourse has been changing in a context-dependent way; how social practice can lead to shifts in the use of discourse; and how identities and attitudes are constructed through language use. Largely based on empirical studies, this book indicates that Chinese discourse has not only been an integral part of social change, but also Chinese discourse itself is changing, reflecting ideologies, values, attitudes, identities and social practice. The book is a great resource for scholars in diverse disciplinary studies including linguistics, communication, education, media and political studies concerning contemporary China.

This volume contributes to the burgeoning field of research on stance by offering a variety of studies based in natural discourse. These collected papers explore the situated, pragmatic, and interactional character of stancetaking, and present new models and conceptions of stance to spark future research. Central to the volume is the claim that stancetaking encompasses five general principles: it involves physical, attitudinal and/or moral positioning; it is a public action; it is inherently dialogic, interactional, and sequential; it indexes broader sociocultural contexts; and it is consequential to the interactants. Each paper explores one or more of these dimensions of stance from perspectives including interactional linguistics and conversation analysis, corpus linguistics, language description, discourse analysis, and sociocultural linguistics. Research languages include conversational American English, colloquial Indonesian, and Finnish. The understanding of stance that emerges is heterogeneous and variegated, and always intertwined with the pragmatic and social aspects of human conduct.

This multidisciplinary volume, the first of its kind, presents an account of China’s contemporary transformation via one of its most important yet overlooked cities: Shenzhen, located just north of Hong Kong. In recent decades, Shenzhen has transformed from an experimental site for economic reform into a dominant city at the crossroads of the global economy. The first of China’s special economic zones, Shenzhen is today a UNESCO City of Design and the hub of China’s emerging technology industries. Bringing China studies into dialogue with urban studies, the contributors explore how the post-Mao Chinese appropriation of capitalist logic led to a dramatic remodeling of the Chinese city and collective life in China today. These essays show how urban villages and informal institutions enabled social transformation through cases of public health, labor, architecture, gender, politics, education, and more. Offering scholars and general readers alike an unprecedented look at one of the world’s most dynamic metropolises, this collective history uses the urban case study to explore critical problems and possibilities relevant for modern-day China and beyond.

This book attempts to document and analyse the complicated role new media play in the adaptation and integration of China’s new generation of migrant workers. By analysing the interviews and observations of more than 500 migrant workers under the age of 25 between 2010 and 2015, the author tries to understand how new media shape the experiences of this significant group of people at different stages of their lives. This study profiles the daily life of this new generation of migrant workers and examines the intricate connections between media and the reconstruction of migrant workers’ identity, as well as their urban life adaptation and social inclusion. Not only is their interaction with new media a key factor in decisions to migrate to the city in the first place, but it continues to play a crucial role in how their outlook on life, sense of identity, lifestyle, personal relationships, and aspirations change as they navigate their new environment. These findings reveal the impact of new media on China’s accelerating urbanization and modernization. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of contemporary China studies, and those who are interested in the urbanization of China in general.