Author: Yuan Xiaoliang
Title: Men leaving home : life stories of rural-urban migrants in a Chinese village
Degree: M.Phil.
Year: 2012
Subject: Rural-urban migration -- China.
Migrant labor -- China.
Rural men -- China.
Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations
Department: Department of Applied Social Sciences
Pages: x, 196 p. : ill. ; 30 cm.
Language: English
Abstract: A great social transformation has been undertaken in China since the economic reform in the late 1970s. During this process, a large-scale rural-urban migration emerged as a distinctive phenomenon and social concern. To understand this controversy phenomenon, enormous researches with various viewpoints were conducted. However, most of studies either focused on the demographic, economic and social characteristic of the migration or emphasized on migrants' social psychological mechanisms in the migration. Underlying these researches, a dominant perspective of viewing migrants as victims and passive actors of the social structure is obvious. Moreover, most of the researchers not only ignore the migration in the Maoist period but also neglect the gender difference between migrants. In order to reveal men's experience and agency in migration, this research brings biographical research methods and men's study perspective in researching male migrants' experience. It takes three generations of migrants from a Chinese village as a case to explore men's experience. Data is collected by searching the relevant documents, in-depth interview and participant-observation and analyzed in interpretive approach. In a word, the research attempts to give voice to powerless migrants and propose a discourse as reference for the further studies.
Rights: All rights reserved
Access: restricted access

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