Digital Migration

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2018

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Goodpath was once an agricultural village but is now home to 61 massive factories and 40,000 migrant workers who came from rural China to better their lives. The migrants work very long hours in poor conditions and then spend the rest of their time in cramped rooms, often sharing living space and beds. However most have been able to buy smart phones from the local mobile phone shop and have set up social media accounts on platforms like QQ, the social media giant in China that provides instant messaging, online social games, music, shopping, microblogging, movies, and group and voice chat software. It is in these online worlds that the rural migrants come close to the modern China they came for.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello just before the podcast begins I want to tell you about the assassination.
0:05.0	It's a new podcast series from the BBC World Service.
0:08.0	My name's Owen Bennett Jones and I used to be the BBC's correspondent in Pakistan and for years covered the story of one of the world's best-known politicians, Benazir Bhutto.
0:18.0	Then she was assassinated.
0:20.0	The assassination is all about my 10-year investigation into what happened.
0:24.4	There are already seven episodes with more to come.
0:27.6	Search for the assassination wherever you get your podcasts.
0:31.2	From the BBC World Service, welcome to the latest edition of the
0:35.8	documentary podcast. Every week we bring you a range of stories from our
0:40.2	presenters and reporters across the world.
0:43.0	Please do rate the documentary on your podcast app
0:46.0	and leave a comment.
0:47.1	Let us know what you think. In urban China, factory workers are migrating into a digital world to escape what people would call the real one.
1:06.0	We're seeing workers who might work for long periods of time, maybe 10 hours or 12 hours with overtime and often they're limited to kind of very
1:16.4	short breaks in the day for example they want to leave the production line to go to
1:21.9	the bathroom then they have to ask their supervisor for
1:24.9	permission to do that. I'm Xin Weng. This documentary, Digital Migration on
1:32.4	the BBC World Surface.
1:34.0	It's about the world created online to offset the reality of mountain lives for Chinese factory workers.
1:41.0	I will be meeting some of the factory workers in their
1:44.6	imaginary online worlds. In my work as anthropologists I lived for more than
1:51.9	one year in a factory town in Southeast China called Good Path.
	...

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