Changle Lu is the Street of Eternal Happiness in Shanghai, the most populated city in the world, in a country going through rapid change.

Most of the stories we hear about China in the news are about issues: the economy, national security, human rights. We hear much less about are people, the people affected by these issues in concrete ways. As a foreign correspondent Marketplace reporter Rob Schmitz immersed himself in his neighbor’s stories, walking the street and meeting middle-aged women who have new money-making opportunities, young people who are looking for meaning in a hectic urban landscape, and the workers who move from job to job to job to try to pass a little more than what they have to their children.

If you’d like to hear more from Rob, you can see him tonight at our Crawford Family Forum here at KPCC where he’ll be in conversation with our All Things Cnsidered host, Nick Roman . You can find more information about that here.

Guest:

Rob Schmitz, China correspondent for Marketplace; his new book is “Street of Eternal Happiness: Big City Dreams Along a Shanghai Road” (Crown, 2016); he tweets