Invisible Inequalities: The Status of Subei People in Contemporary Shanghai

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
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.

This publication has 1 reference indexed in Scilit: