Transient dwelling: trains as places of identification for the floating population of China

What is it about?

There are some 200 million internal migrant workers in China who are key to the global export industries but typically on the lowest rungs of the social ladder. This paper takes their annual Spring Festival struggle to go home and visit family as a point to unpack the hardships they face and their inbetween status as at home now in neither country or city. It loks at this by using the poetry written by these migrant workers

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Photo by hiurich granja on Unsplash

Photo by hiurich granja on Unsplash

Why is it important?

China's floating populat of 200 million migrant workers are both vital to globalisation and suffer poor living and working conditions. Most studies have focused on their experiences and struggle in the cities as 'second class citizens'. Instead this paper looks to their experience being 'transient' and not fully part of any social order. It does this by picking up the emergence of the genre of 'migrant worker poetry' to ask what this literary geography shows us on their mode of dwelling across places.