Migrant construction workers wait on a bus after their shift in Beijing. It is estimated that there are 40 million construction labourers in China, many of them coming to largers cities for work

Instead of following her friends into a white-collar office job in a glistening new Chinese skyscraper after she graduated with a masters degree in mathematics and computer science from the elite Sun Yat-sen University in 2015, Shen Mengyu became an assembly-line worker in a car parts factory.

“My career choice is not whimsical,” she wrote about her factory job. “It’s deeply planted in my understanding of the current conditions of the workers and in my belief that they must be changed.”

“Should I be entitled to a brighter future simply because I was born into a well-off family?” she wrote. “I am thinking of the 40,000 fingers cut off every year in the Pearl River delta, and the 280 million peasant workers who have devoted