Discourse, Identity, and China's Internal Migration

The Long March to the City

By (author) Dong Jie

Publication date:

19 August 2011

Publisher

Multilingual Matters

Dimensions:

210x148mm
6x8"

ISBN-13: 9781847694201

Rural-urban migration has been going on in China since the early 1980s, resulting in complicated sociolinguistic environments. Migrant workers are the backbone of China's fast growing economy, and yet little is known about their and their children’s identities – who they are, who they think they are, and who they are becoming. The study of their linguistic practice can reveal a lot about their identity construction as well as about transitions in Chinese society and the (re)formation of social structure at the macro level. In this book, Dong Jie presents a wide range of ethnographic data which are organised around a scalar framework. She argues that three scales – linguistic communication, metapragmatic discourse, and public discourse – interact in complex and multiple ways.

Through her insightful ethnographic exploration of rural-urban migrant identity in neighborhoods and schools of Beijing, Dong Jie has achieved the ambitious purpose of documenting both the rapidly changing face of China’s super-diverse cities and the theoretical value of a scaled approach to the study of linguistic processes of identity construction.