Discourse, Identity, and China's Internal Migration

Product Description
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.
Review
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. -- Nancy Hornberger, University of Pennsylvania, USA


Drawing on a wealth of data from Beijing’s migrant neighborhoods, Dong Jie offers a timely analysis of conversational, social-ideological, and institutional scales interacting in the identity-work of migrant children and adults in contemporary China. This book presents thought-provoking materials on China’s internal migration, language diversity, and urban schooling. -- James Collins, University at Albany/SUNY, USA
About the Author
Dong Jie is tenured Associate Professor of Linguistics at Tsinghua University, China. She is the author of Discourse, Identity, and China’s Internal Migration (2011, Multilingual Matters) and The Sociolinguistics of Voice in Globalising China (2017, Routledge).
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Discourse, Identity, and China's Internal Migration
The Long March to the City

By Dong Jie
Multilingual Matters


Copyright © 2011 Dong Jie
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84769-420-1


Contents

Acknowledgements,
Transcription Symbols and Conventions,
1 Introduction: The Long March to the City: An Ethnography of Discourse and Layered Identities among China's Internal Migrants,
2 A Roadmap into the Issue,
3 Scale 1: Interaction,
4 Scale 2: Metapragmatic Discourses,
5 Scale 3: Institutions,
6 Conclusions and Reflections,
Appendix 1: Overview of Data Collection,
Appendix 2: Chinese Texts and Pinyin Transcripts of Examples,
References,
Index,





CHAPTER 1
Introduction: The Long March to the City: An Ethnography of Discourse and Layered Identities among China's Internal Migrants

Identities and Coca-Cola Cans
'Identity' is the focus of this research. Identity-making discourses such as 'he is a Dutchman' and 'she is a teacher' frequently circulate in our daily lives. In conferences we wear a badge with our names so that our interlocutors have an idea of whom they are talking to; while travelling abroad, people should remember to carry their ID, that is, passports or identification cards, and be prepared for potential police inspection – this can be crucial for groups such as Turks and Africans in some of the Western European metropolises; on meeting new colleagues we often exchange information on where we come from, our nationalities, what jobs did we do before. And as a Chinese, I find myself engaged in a constant task of explaining my name: which is my given name, which is my surname and in what circumstances I would rather use an English name.
Indeed, we are involved in identity rituals around every corner of our life. The question it raises – the question of 'who am I' – often touches something dearest to our hearts, something we hold fast, whereas a challenge of it by others can easily offend us. Identity means different things on different oc