The Urbanization of People

The Politics of Development, Labor Markets, and Schooling in the Chinese City

The Urbanization of People
Eli Friedman
RRP:
NZ$ 66.99
Our Price:
NZ$ 55.27
Paperback
h216 x 140mm - 352pg
24 May 2022 US
International import eta 10-30 days
9780231205092
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Amid a vast influx of rural migrants into urban areas, China has allowed cities wide latitude in providing education and other social services. While millions of people have been welcomed into the megacities as a source of cheap labor, local governments have used various tools to limit their access to full citizenship. The Urbanization of People reveals how cities in China have granted public goods to the privileged while condemning poor and working-class migrants to insecurity, constant mobility, and degraded educational opportunities. Using the school as a lens on urban life, Eli Friedman investigates how the state manages flows of people into the city. He demonstrates that urban governments are providing quality public education to those who need it least: school admissions for nonlocals heavily favor families with high levels of economic and cultural capital. Those deemed not useful are left to enroll their children in precarious resource-starved private schools that sometimes are subjected to forced demolition. Over time, these populations are shunted away to smaller locales with inferior public services. Based on extensive ethnographic research and hundreds of in-depth interviews, this interdisciplinary book details the policy framework that produces unequal outcomes as well as providing a fine-grained account of the life experiences of people drawn into the cities as workers but excluded as full citizens.
This is an enormous endeavor well accomplished. Backed up by rich fieldwork and painstaking research over many years, this book tells a poignant story of China' s prodigious urbanization, on the back of a huge migrant labor class, through their and teachers' struggles in the arena of education. Friedman also advances a provocative and rigorous theorization of the process linked to the state-designed sociospatial hierarchy and biopolitical machinery. -- Kam Wing Chan, University of Washington A revealing study of migrant schools as the lever of China' s unique project of ' just-in-time' urbanization. Friedman shines an essential light on the human struggles among migrant children, parents, and teachers and the rigid sociospatial class and citizenship hierarchies that lock them in place even as they move to the cities. A must-read for scholars in education, labor, development, urban, and China studies. -- Ching Kwan Lee, University of California, Los Angeles In this magnificently researched and troubling study of China' s urbanization process, Friedman situates migrants-teachers, children, parents, education activists-at the center of a tale of exploitative, unequal development, in which rural migrants are simultaneously highly valued and yet treated as outsiders, easily disposed of. A phenomenal piece of work in every way. -- Ralph A. Litzinger, Duke University
Eli Friedman is associate professor and chair of international and comparative labor at Cornell University' s ILR School. He is the author of Insurgency Trap: Labor Politics in Postsocialist China (2014) and coeditor of the English edition of China on Strike: Narratives of Workers' Resistance (2016).
Status: Indent title, imported to order
ISBN-13: 9780231205092
Published: 24 May 2022
Published In: United States
Imprint: Columbia University Press
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Format: Paperback
Height: 216mm
Width: 140mm
Pages: 352

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