The radio program Open Source had a special roundtable discussion program yesterday on “China: The Biggest Migration Ever”, (link) featuring Peter Hessler, Li Zhang, Leslie Chang, and Kenneth Roberts:
China’s “floating population” is rapidly shifting the country from an agrarian society to an industrialized one ” thereby changing the social fabric of the countryside and creating an urban youth culture with strong hints of individualism, materialism, and feminism. We hope to draw the big economic, social, and political picture of how China is changing and also learn the particular stories of individual migrants: why they left home, what factory life is like, how they learn to make their way in the world, and what it’s like to return home to a sleepy village with traditional mores.
