Michelle Dammon Loyalka, Eating Bitterness: Stories from the Front Lines of China´s Great Urban Migration

Abstract

Taking eight migrants’ stories as examples, the journalist Michelle Dammon Loyalka paints a vivid and detailed picture of everyday life in one of Xi’an’s urban villages (Ganjia Zhai) based on extended interviews she conducted in 2007. At the time of the interviews, the neighbourhood, which hosts an estimated 30,000 migrants, was about to be demolished for urban upgrading as part of Xi’an’s economic development program, which is a focal point in the Chinese government´s policy to further devel..