Why read Subaltern China?

Book cover of Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media, and Cultural Practices

Book description

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…

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Why read it?

1 author picked Subaltern China as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Margaret Hillenbrand

Author

This path-breaking book was a huge inspiration to me as I began to dig deeper into the relationship between culture and labor in contemporary China.

By the time Sun’s book came out in 2014, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists inside and outside China had already carried out extensive studies of the largest migration in human history and the scorching inequalities that mass movement of people has generated. But Sun shows in compelling detail that this exodus from the Chinese countryside is a deeply cultural movement, too.

Blending ethnography with probing and compassionate analysis of poetry, videos, photography, and activist protest,…

From Margaret's list on The best books on the cultural lives of China’s 300+ million migrant workers.