Subaltern China

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. Drawing on rich and extensive fieldwork, the author illuminates the harsh reality of inequality and discrimination experienced by China’s rural migrant workers, who have become the nation’s “subalterns.” Sun focuses especially on how workers use media and cultural practices to negotiate everyday injustice, and to emerge with hope and dignity. This engaging and compelling book will be essential reading for all concerned with the increasing centrality of media and the cultural politics of representation in our highly digitalized and mediated world.