Book Review-International Migrants in China's Global City, the New Shanghailanders by James Farrer (original) (raw)
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As in the early twentieth century, Shanghai has again become a site for Western settlement. This paper focuses on case studies of long-term Western settlers—those in the city more than five years—and how they situate themselves in the city through their ‘narratives of emplacement’ or stories of a personalised relationship to the city. Settler stories reference both a postcolonial nostalgia for the lifestyles of the 1930s Shanghailanders, and a newer post-socialist model of cosmopolitan citizenship for mobile urban elites, related to the state-sponsored ideal of the ‘New Shanghainese.’ Taken as a whole, expatriate narratives of emplacement construct an idealised image of a culturally cosmopolitan, locally integrated and economically successful immigrant entrepreneur. Few settlers may actually live up to this ideal, but these narrative strategies allow settlers to construct imagined links to a place and polity that substitute for more substantive for forms of urban citizenship, while excluding other categories of migrants.
2019
https://www.amazon.com/International-Migrants-Chinas-Global-City-ebook/dp/B07M6Z9PW6 Long a source of migrants, China has now become a migrant destination. This book analyzes the development of Shanghai’s expatriate communities, from their role in the opening up of Shanghai to foreign investment in the early 1980s through to the explosive growth after China joined the World Trade Organization in 2000. Based on over 400 interviews and 20 years of ethnographic fieldwork in Shanghai, it argues that international migrants play an important qualitative role in urban life. It explains the lifestyles of Shanghai’s skilled migrants; their positions in economic, social, sexual and cultural fields; their strategies for integration into Chinese society; their contributions to a cosmopolitan urban geography; and their changing symbolic and social significance for Shanghai as a global city. In so doing, it seeks to deal with the following questions: how have a generation of migrants made Shanghai into a cosmopolitan hometown, what role have they played in making Shanghai a global city, and how do foreign residents now fit into the nationalistic narrative of the China Dream?
A Tale of Two Cities: Shanghai and Hong Kong
In his landmark work, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China 1930-45, Leo Oufan Lee ends the book with an ode to the past glory of Shanghai and an anticipation of the thriving financial centre and cosmopolis, Hong Kong, as a transformed continuation of old-time Shanghai. For Lee, the tale of these two cities is essentially concerned with and illustrates a particular type of translocal urban culture in China. Shanghai’s capacity to be all at once a space of negotiation, domination, and appropriation, prompted Mu Xin (木心 1927-2011), the eminent Chinese diaspora writer, to refer to what Lee understands to be the “flowering of Shanghai modern” as “deformed splendour”. In its time old Shanghai had the reputation of being the most “open” city in the world, the one place in China that was free from the control of a debilitated and bureaucratic state apparatus, giving it an air of freedom that drew in both political reformers and intellectuals, both prostitutes and adventurers. The other side of this freedom and openness, however, was a certain isolation—a linkage to the world that went together with a de-linkage from the rest of China. There was always something very fragile about Shanghai cosmopolitanism. After 1949, Chinese communism, born in Shanghai, quickly made Shanghai’s urban culture no more than a memory. In Hong Kong, there was little interest in nationalism. Hong Kong could never have been a city nation like Singapore, but only a hyphenation, a concept that Abbas adopts to refer not to the conjunctures of ‘East’ and ‘West’, but to the disjunctures of colonialism and globalism. It therefore accepted its colonial status as a priori and turned towards the international, fully exploiting its position as a port city or, in Mao’s picturesque phraseology, as “a pimple on the backside of China”. As Abbas argues, if colonialism in Hong Kong had a certain benign-looking aspect to it, it was because it was a mutant political entity and a living demonstration of how the relative autonomy that comes from economic success could be based on dependency. While Shanghai was multiple and polyvalent, Hong Kong was single and paradoxical. Considering the growing conflicts on a civil level between the mainland and Hong Kong, some, including local public intellectual Leung Man-tao and activist organisation Co-China, argue that Hong Kong should not lose the principles and morals that made it unique, that instead of the growing sense of hostility and exclusivity towards the torrent of tourists and immigrants from the mainland, Hongkongers may want to exhibit openness, kindness and equal fairness: the fruit of civil society. Simultaneously, we see the dramatic move of a Chinese official tearing out a single-page advertisement for Taiwan’s Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange at the 20th conference of the European Association of Chinese Studies (EACS). It seems that at a time when nationalism and localism are both emerging, such cosmopolitan spirit should perhaps be reflected upon and rekindled.
11. Shanghai: The Biography of a City
Landscape Biographies
Shanghai is an example of a city with a layered landscape biography along the lines of Marvin Samuels, but with an equally rich representation in popular culture, which has developed simultaneously with the city. Through expressions in, for instance, cinematography, comics or advertisement, millions of people around the world have encountered Shanghai, and these images determine the 'image' of the city to a great extent. The translation to this popular culture has led to a kind of reductionism, through which-following Wohl and Strauss-the city can be accessed. These images can even be seen as a type of immaterial heritage. Of course, both biographies are closely related to each other, but several elements show discrepancies. An example of this is the fictional element (the free interpretations in popular culture), the adaptation of western or eastern perspectives on the city and the western desire for the exotic. Still, both biographies appear to play an important role in the profiling and positioning of the city in the present time. Formerly, controversial elements of the landscape biography were used for 'scripting' the urban space, and the characteristics that were previously abhorred are resurfacing after the decades of attempted communist 'correction'. The use of both physical heritage and the 'character' of the city is the key to a successful 'reintegration' of Shanghai in the global community.
Contact Space: Shanghai. The Chinese Dream and the Production of a New Society
Within the context of understanding the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and the city of Shanghai, the aim of the study is to explore ‘space’ in Chinese Communist Party rhetoric, Shanghai spatial planning discourse and personal intercultural engagements. By the term ‘space’, the author refers to an understanding of societal production that integrates space as part of the analysis, taking into account the interplay between official statements on nation building, regional and urban planning, concrete built environments and people’s situated understandings of space. With this in mind, the tripartite aim establishes an understanding of how the Chinese Communist Party envisioned the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and Shanghai, how the Shanghai Municipal Government has implemented the Chinese Communist Party’s visions for the city and how young Chinese talk about their experiences of the changes taking place in Shanghai in interviews about intercultural communication in the city. The tripartite understanding of the opening up of the People’s Republic of China and Shanghai is established by the term ‘contact space’. By this term, the author illustrates and analyses the phenomenon of the opening up processes taking place in the People’s Republic of China and Shanghai, and also develops an analytical tool that allows for an analysis of how the opening up involves several integrated levels of the Chinese society. By the combined use of sociology of space and postcolonial studies, the author shows that the Chinese Communist Party encouraged a controlled insertion of capitalism within the one-party system to modernize the country. Several cities, such as Shanghai, were designated to lead the country into a modern, prosperous, socialist state. Emerging into state-sanctioned capitalist spaces within the one-party rule, the localities were named ‘special economic zones’ and ‘open coastal cities’. Through a land-leasing system, demolition and renovation of selected built environments, the author shows that Shanghai is acquiring the material and visual components of a global city. The author illustrates that the Shanghai Municipal Government produces contemporary Shanghai into a twenty-first-century post-revolutionary city anchored in ancient China, the city’s colonial heritage and Mao’s socialism. By the interviews, the author demonstrates that the city of Shanghai emerges into a contact space conditioned by its colonial history and more recent changes, the city’s geographical location and representations in literature. Illustrating China’s emerging society, the interviewees engage in culture and language exchanges, work at international companies and take part in the city’s leisure and entertainment spaces. Belonging to the emerging Chinese middle-classes, the interviewees demonstrate how they create their own contact spaces (one-to-one occasions and group gathering initiatives) and make use of established contact spaces in Shanghai (universities, language schools, international companies, leisure and entertainment spaces). The author also concludes that Shanghai’s emerging society is based in China’s own developmental discourses but also globally recognized patterns of social hierarchies and capitalist urban space.
Forming foreign enclaves in Shanghai: state action in globalization
Urban spatial restructuring in the globalization process is contingent and non-uniform due to the multiplicity of interactions among the different actors involved. The burgeoning literature on Chinese cities suggests that local forces play an active role in many disciplines. One of the primary places to study such interaction is the foreign enclave, a residential concentration intended for foreigners (including ethnic foreigners and ethnic Chinese from overseas) that is emerging in many large Chinese cities. However, the local authorities’ role in the formation of foreign enclaves has not been systematically examined. This article considers how the local authorities interpret the development of foreign enclaves and then how they design and implement strategies for them. Using the case of Gubei New District, the first and largest cluster of foreign housing projects in Shanghai, the article argues that developing foreign enclaves is central to the local governments’ pursuit of structural competitiveness. An examination of this process may shed some light on the local authorities’ dynamic response to the globalization of housing markets in Chinese cities, with shifting strategies corresponding to the varying perceived interests.
Between the worlds: Shanghai's young middle-class migrants imagining their city.
In this paper, I use the case study of Hui, a young woman who lives in suburban Shanghai, to explore the migration experience of educated Chinese youth, who come to live, study or work in this city. A young middle class enjoys privileged access to China's global urban modernity. They are also increasingly sharing space with the "global classes" of transnational privilege. However, the image of common urban space, in which the aesthetic distinction between global-elite lifestyles and local aspiration is increasingly blurred, does not necessarily translate into common access to this space and to its hierarchies of hospitality and opportunity. Middle-class migrants are aware of their status as outsiders, whose successful integration in the city hinges not only on strategies of emplacement but also on performing the exclusive cosmopolitan repertoire that Shanghai has built for itself. Despite promises of safe bourgeois arrival, they often remain "in-between", with a sense of vulnerability in a competitive urban environment, and struggle with divided emotional and social attachments. In this paper I look at emerging suburban lifestyles in Shanghai, which are becoming part of the Chinese urban repertoire. Many young professionals are being squeezed out of the housing market in central locations. While some may choose to continue living with their parents to save money for home ownership, others buy apartments further out. Though replicat-ing many of the bourgeois dreams that have informed "Western" suburbia, the urban form that is developing in China is also different and its middle-class imaginaries are less readily connected to the sensorial promises of the Chinese global city.