‘New Shanghailanders’ or ‘New Shanghainese’: Western Expatriates' Narratives of Emplacement in Shanghai

Abstract

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 forms of urban citizenship, while excluding other categories of migrants.

Keywords:

• Expatriate
• Postcolonial
• China
• Urban Culture
• Narrative

Notes

1. The larger study included many Japanese, who are not discussed here for reasons of space.

2. Interview with Tian Xiaohong, 19 March 2009.

3. Interview with producer, 16 February 2006.

4. Only 2,000 permanent residency visas have been issued nationwide since the programme began in 2005 (Tian Xiaohong, personal communication).