Last Train Home

PBS Premiere: Sept. 27, 2011Check the broadcast schedule »

Discussion Guide

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Like so many of China's rural poor, Zhang Changhua and Chen Suqin left behind their infant children for grueling factory jobs in the city. Every spring, 130 million Chinese migrant workers compete for train tickets that will enable them to spend the New Year's holiday with the families they left behind in their home villages. Last Train Home documents their journey — a mass exodus that is the world's largest human migration. The epic spectacle reveals a country tragically caught between its rural past and industrial future. As an outreach tool, the film forces viewers to look at the human cost of China's ascendance as an economic superpower and confront the ways in which poverty and policy fracture families.

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