The Allure of Being Modern: Personal Quality as Status Symbol Among Migrant Families in Shanghai

Abstract

This paper examines how the powerful suzhi (personal quality) discourse affects the subjective understanding of Chinese migrant workers toward their situation in the city in order to elucidate the microlevel processes that the lower social class acculturate to the dominant cultural capital. Many migrants from the Chinese countryside have remained in Shanghai despite that in doing so, their children are prohibited from taking senior high school and college entrance examinations. In two waves of interviews with migrant parents and children over a 10-year period, parents have justified their decision to remain in the city, reasoning that their children adopt “modern” habits, behaviors and lifestyles, which render them “modernized,” and thus elevate their social status even without a higher education. Cultural discourses with strong connotations of authority and power provide the framework that the migrants use to improve their relative social status at the microlevel. This research foregrounds the consideration of relative social status in decision making and social behavior as a microprocess through which the lower social class subscribes to a cultural discourse that reduces them to a lower position.

Notes

Acknowledgments

Daniel Menchik, Cheris Shun Ching Chan and Gary Hamilton, Jack Barbalet, Liping Wang and Paul Joosse have provided helpful advice on an earlier version of the paper. I also thank Xiaoyan Han and Bill Yuk-Piu Tsang for their invaluable help with the data collection.

Notes

1 The 2010 Chinese census states that there are 221 million migrants. Many bring their children with them, which results in an estimated 20 million migrant children (individuals under 18 years old). In 2010 there were 8.98 million nonlocal hukou migrants in Shanghai—two out of five residents. See The Population Census Office. 2011. Tabulation on the 2010 Population Census of the People’s Republic of China, Retrieved March 10, 2015, (http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/pcsj/rkpc/6rp/indexch.htm)

2 Shanghai has an accumulative point system to determine whether students without local hukou can take higher education exams. This policy came into effect in 2014. If parents achieved a certain number of “points” based on merits, such as occupation and investments in Shanghai, their children can take the examinations. Thus, students with high social economic status can obtain higher education in Shanghai, but not those with low social status (see also Xu and Dronkers, 2016). None of the study respondents benefited from this policy, even those who were financially better off.

3 Even though both migrant parents and children were interviewed in both waves of interviews, in this paper, I focus on the first generation, because the second generation is a different story. The general embrace of urban cultural capital by the second generation is “natural” because many of them grew up in Shanghai. Also, some of them have developed subcultures as resistance to the dominating suzhi discourse (such as the shamate subculture, even though they are usually harshly ridiculed by mainstream culture).

4 The family income is usually the earnings of both parents and sometimes includes working children (the older siblings of the interviewed children).

5 In Shanghai, the average income of migrant workers in 2013 was RMB 2,476 monthly. If both parents worked, the average household income was around RMB 4900. See: National Statistical Bureau (Shanghai Investigation Team). 2014. Ben shi wailai nongmingong shenghuo xiaofei xian’xian shiminhua tezheng (Migrant workers’ consumption in the city resembles that of urbanites). Retrieved March 11, 2015 (http://www.stats-sh.gov.cn/fxbg/201403/267829.html).

6 Those who sent their children back to their hometowns are usually those who (1) could financially afford to do so as one parent needs to accompany the child, (2) have a child who excels academically and will likely perform well in college entrance exams, or (3) have one parent who is convinced that college will give the child and family a better future. The latter are usually individuals with more education, such as high school graduates. Some parents doubt that college can actually give their children a better future (see Tian 2017).

7 The lack of suzhi jiaoyu in rural schools is due to limited resources and the rigorous emphasis on traditional studies (see Murphy 2004).

8 The one-child policy in China meant that wanting more children and wanting a son are outdated perceptions linked to rural life. This man only has one daughter but clearly indicated that, after living in Shanghai for years, he now has a modern perspective because he does not strive for a son or more children.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Xiaoli Tian

Xiaoli Tian ([email protected]) is associate professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD from the Department of Sociology, The University of Chicago. Her research interests include how preexisting knowledge paradigms and cultural norms influence the way people respond to unexpected transformations of their everyday routines. She has written extensively on various forms of social interaction in both online and offline contexts. Her writings have been published in American Journal of Sociology; Qualitative Sociology; Modern China; Information, Communication and Society; Journal of Contemporary Ethnography; Media, Culture and Society; Studies in Media and Communications; Chinese Sociological Review, Symbolic Interaction, Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, among others.