Suchergebnisse

For the last century immigrants from the northern part of Jiangsu Province have been the most despised people in China's largest city, Shanghai. Called Subei people, they have dominated the ranks of unskilled laborers and resided in makeshift shacks on the city's edge. They have been objects of prejudice and discrimination: to call someone a Subei swine means that the person, even if not actually from Subei, is poor, ignorant, dirty, and unsophisticated. In this book, Emily Honig describes the daily lives, occupations, and history of the Subei people, drawing on archival research and interviews conducted in Shanghai. More important, she also uses the Subei people as a case study to examine how local origins - not race, religion, or nationality - came to define ethnic identities among the overwhelmingly Han population in China. Honig explains how native place identities structure social hierarchies and antagonisms, as well as how ascribing a native place identity to an individual or group may not connote an actual place of origin but becomes a pejorative social category imposed by the elite. Her book uncovers roots of identity, prejudice, and social conflict that have been central to China's urban residents and that constitute ethnicity in a Chinese context

The way in which to analyse and subsequently eliminate the vast inequalities that structured Chinese society was a major concern of Communist Party officials when they took power in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s a number of political campaigns were launched which sought to reduce class differences as well as to eradicate the discriminatory practices of the Han Chinese towards peoples identified as national minorities, such as Tibetans and Uighurs. The successes and failures of these campaigns have been the subject of numerous studies by western scholars, who have described and attempted to analyse the persistence of social inequality in the decades since 1949. Yet the analyses of Chinese officials and western scholars alike, focusing on class and ethnicity, have overlooked a form of inequality that is perhaps most basic to China's largest urban centre, Shanghai, namely that based on native-place identification.Throughout the 20th century, social inequality, discriminatory practices and popular prejudice in Shanghai have been largely based on or correlate to a distinction between people of different local origins. Sometimes local origins have coincided with class, as people from one district tended to dominate the elite while natives of another area constituted the majority of the poor. But often native-place identity has itself been the basis of prejudice and inequality. This pattern has persisted in the decades since 1949, not because government campaigns attacked the problem and failed, but rather because the problem has largely been ignored, neither fitting the officially recognized categories of class nor of ethnicity.

The article examines the persistence of inequalities based on local origins by focusing on the experience of Subei people, natives of northern Jiangsu province, in contemporary Shanghai. After explaining who the Subei people are, it explores the process through which Subei people continue to be placed in a subordinate status in the labour market, and then the ways in which prejudice against Subei people persists and shapes popular thought and culture. (DÜI-Sen)

Yu Luojin achieved instant notoriety in 1980 with the publication of her scarcely-fictionalized autobiographical story "A winter's fairy tale". It is essentially the story of Yu Luojin's tragic experience during the Cultural Revolution. This story triggered a debate in China about the nature of love, marriage and the morality of divorce. After a brief sketch of Yu Luojin's life, the author discusses and examines this debate